God’s Word Is a Mirror

In the last four weeks we have examined seven practical effects God’s Word produces in us as, with faith and obedience, we receive and apply its teaching. These seven effects are:

1. Faith
2. The new birth
3. Complete spiritual nourishment
4. Healing and health for our physical bodies
5. Mental illumination and understanding
6. Victory over sin and Satan
7. Cleansing and sanctification

Now let us examine two further ways in which the Bible, as God’s Word, works in the believer.

The first of these is that the Bible provides us with a mirror of spiritual revelation. This operation of God’s Word is described in James 1:23-25. In the two preceding verses James has already warned that for God’s Word to produce its proper effects in us, there are two basic conditions:

1. We must “receive [it] with meekness” (v. 21) – that is, with the proper attitude of heart and mind;
2. We must be “doers of the word, and not hearers only” (v. 22) – that is, we must immediately apply it in a practical way in our daily lives.

If we fail to do this, James warns that we shall be deceiving ourselves; we may be calling ourselves Christians or disciples or Bible students, but we will not be experiencing any of the practical blessings and benefits of which the Bible speaks. We might sum this up by saying that the Bible works practically in those who apply it practically.

After this warning, James continues in the next three verses as follows.

“For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the word, this one will be blessed in what he does.” (James 1:23-25)

James likens God’s Word to a mirror. The only difference is that a normal mirror shows us only what James calls our “natural face” – our external, physical features and appearance. The mirror of God’s Word, as we look into it, reveals not our external, physical features, but our inward spiritual nature and condition. It reveals to us those things about ourselves which no material mirror and no work of human wisdom can reveal – things which we can never come to know in any other way.