You must understand this, my beloved brothers and sisters: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, for human anger does not produce God’s righteousness. Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.
But be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.
If any think they are religious and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
We in Jesus are not present just to take care of ourselves, or our families, or each other. That’s where we have to start, and that should be a given, and if we don’t do that, what else we do is at least not nearly as good, if good at all. But there’s no question that while we’re to have an activist faith in caring for ourselves, our family, each other, as well as others in the world, particularly the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed, we have to make sure that our faith is intact.
Oil and water do not mix. Yet with “small droplets” of oil into water, it can. There’s absolutely no question that the directions for faith that we read of in Scripture do not ordinarily mix with our lives, in other words are not easily lived out. It’s like the head/mind and heart comparison. We might have something in our heads, but it’s completely another thing to have it in our hearts and worked out into our lives.
God wants the oil and water with reference to God’s word and our lives to mix. The directives from Scripture, and through that, God’s word to us in Christ is to more and more become a part of who we are, of our lives, worked out into the fabric of our being, so that our thoughts, attitudes, words and actions are all affected. So that we’re in an ongoing change growing deeper together into the likeness of Jesus. In and through him.