How To Be Blessed In What You Do

How To Be Blessed In What You Do

Pastor E. Keith Hassell

James 1:21-25 (CEV) “You must stop doing anything immoral or evil. Instead be humble and accept the message that is planted in you to save you. Obey God's message! Don't fool yourselves by just listening to it. If you hear the message and don't obey it, you are like people who stare at themselves in a mirror and forget what they look like as soon as they leave. But you must never stop looking at the perfect law that sets you free. God will bless you in everything you do, if you listen and obey, and don't just hear and forget.”

I.                   Stop doing what is wrong!

A.               God cannot bless you if you persist in your evil ways

B.                Repenting of your sin removes hindrances to God’s blessings

II.                Make room for God’s Word in your heart and life

A.               Ceasing an old lifestyle will not bring blessing unless we replace it with a new lifestyle

B.                Making room for God’s word will allow new attitudes, outlooks, and choices to form in your life

III.             Obey the Word you have heard

A.               It’s not what you hear that makes the difference. It is what you hear and do that brings about change.

B.                We can sit in a financial seminar and gain all kinds of knowledge about how to get ahead in life. We can complete the course and hang up our diploma, but we can still live like a poor man if we never put into practice what we have heard.

C.               Don’t say the word doesn’t work when you are not committed to putting it into practice!

IV.            Warning! Don’t fool yourself!

A.               Anyone can listen to sermons and read the Bible and yet never benefit from what they see and hear.

B.                Those who only listen and read but never put into practice what they’ve heard are self-deceived

V.               Parable of the Mirror

A.               The mirror is God’s Word

B.                A mirror gives us an accurate reflection of the person we are

C.               A mirror will show us things that are good but it will also show us blemishes, faults, imperfections, and defects

D.               We cannot look into the mirror to find someone else’s defects without discovering our own

E.                Story of the Mirror:  An old mountain couple had never been exposed to the modern things of life. When their son got older, he decided to go off and make a life of his own in the bigger world. One day the son decided to send his mother something for her birthday that she had never had—a mirror.  He sent it by a friend to his dad for safekeeping until that day. When the dad looked into the mirror for the first time he saw what looked like a picture of his son. As the father was reflecting upon this picture of his son, the mother came into the house and saw him holding something. Quickly the man put the mirror in a closet hoping she had not seen it.  Later the suspicious wife waited for her husband to leave the house and went to the closet, pulled out the mirror, and looked into it. She exclaimed, “Ah ha! So that’s the old hag he’s been hanging around with!”

F.                The mirror is not meant to condemn us but to help us. Women don’t throw away mirrors because they tell them the truth about the way they look in the morning. No, they are thankful for an honest and private evaluation of their situation!

G.               The purpose of the mirror is to help us order our lives in a better way.

H.               The mirror doesn’t lie!  Anyone who lives with a false preconceived image of themselves and then looks into mirror may reject what they see. Though they reject what they see, no one else is fooled. Only the one who rejects what the mirror presents is deceived!

I.                   Avoid the trap of condemnation!  Through shame and condemnation some only see their flaws when they look into God’s word. A woman struggling with anorexia looks into the mirror and sees herself as overweight no matter how weak and frail her body has become.

J.                  We need to stay in front of the mirror and allow it to speak into our lives until our lives are completely in order with the Lord.

VI.            Those who are not forgetful hearers but obey and practice what they hear will be blessed in what they do

A.               The blessing of God does not come in knowing His will but in doing His will

B.                John 13:17, “If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.”