If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing well. –James 2:8
It’s seems that, once a person has been a follower of Christ for any significant amount of time, there’s a phrase that begins popping up in his or her vernacular: “I want to go deep.” But what is “deep,” exactly? It’s easy to understand with swimming pools, but I’m not sure it’s easy to understand with faith. For some it means studying the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament. To them it means having the Bible taught to them in a systematic way from the pulpit in a verse-by-verse format through books of the Bible. It means understanding the mores of the times and knowing details down to the minutiae of Scripture. Sometimes, however, it also means a greater desire to gain knowledge than to live out knowledge – to apply it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, then you probably see how much I believe in strong, Biblical application. From my perspective, God’s Truth is of little value to us if we are not going to apply it. And sadly, there is a temptation to buy into the belief that we’re “going deep” simply because we’re filling our heads with knowledge. Such a notion is a
farce. You are only as deep as your application takes you. That’s why James made the comment in this verse that when you fulfill the royal law according to Scripture (loving your neighbor as yourself) then you are doing well. Don’t buy into the lie that it’s enough to know a lot about the Bible. Satan would love to have a group of top-heavy Christians who go around like walking candy apples and who never allow information to lead to transformation. When your information begins leading to transformation, then you have finally arrived in the real deep end.
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