Proclaimer Blog
It’s in the text
It's amazing how often we, as preachers, don't look in the text.
In our preaching groups at Cornhill, the students have been preaching through James. That's not an easy book to preach and, for the most part, guys in my group have been doing a pretty good job. We even managed to avoid the trap of misrepresenting the mirror in James 1.19-27.
This is the way it normally goes. Preachers see the word "mirror" and think to themselves. Oh yes, I know how this works. A mirror shows you what you look like. This passage is all about the word and the point of the picture is that the word of God shows us what we are like (and what we must do to change). Not untrue, of course. But not the point of the mirror here.
The answer is in the text.
For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in the mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once he forgets what he is like.
The point of the mirror illustration here is not to make a case for how the word works, but the stupidity of hearing it and not doing it. In other words, the right reaction to the illustration is to say, "Yeah, stupid man." That sets us up for the punch of the next verses.
And it was all in the text all along.