Look In . . . Be Clean
Look In . . . Be Clean
You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not grumble against one another, brethren, lest you be condemned. Behold, the Judge is standing at the door!
—James 5:8–9
When we find ourselves in a holding pattern—in this case, waiting for the Lord to return—it’s easy to become irritated and frustrated, to hold grudges and to “grumble against one another.” There is potential within each of us to be bitter and resentful. Thus James turned our attention from looking up to looking in: “Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.” Since Christ could return any day and at any time, then we should keep our hearts clean, and be ready to meet Him at any moment.
“Establishing your heart” is something only you can do. No one can do it for you. As the voice and tense of this phrase indicate, the subject has to take action. It is not my brother or my sister or anyone else. I am responsible for me. Until the Lord returns, therefore, we should not just look up to Him and be calm. We should also look in and be clean. We should establish our hearts.
James called upon us to cease grumbling against one another. This refers to resentment buried deep within our hearts that manifests itself in negative and sometimes harsh words. James essentially said, “Stop grumbling! Don’t do it.” Why? Because “the Judge is standing at the door.” Jesus used this same imagery: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me” (Revelation 3:20). Jesus stands at the door of our hearts. We may be fooling others with our hypocrisy, but we are not fooling this righteous Judge who keeps watch at the door of our hearts. And this Judge knows the secrets of every heart.
In this chapter James emphasized the Lord’s coming, but is there any hard evidence that truly points to this event? The Bible foretells that certain things will happen before Jesus’ coming, and perhaps the two most significant of those happenings have taken place in my own lifetime. The first of these has to do with a particular place, specifically a small sliver of real estate between the Jordan River to the east and the Mediterranean Sea to the west, about the size of the tiny state of New Jersey. Today we know it as the nation of Israel. God promised that, before Christ returns, Israel would be reestablished as a nation and become a major player on the world scene. God said, “I will bring back the captives of My people Israel; they shall build the waste cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink wine from them; they shall also make gardens and eat fruit from them. I will plant them in their land, and no longer shall they be pulled up from the land I have given them” (Amos 9:14–15). My generation has seen both the miraculous rebirth of the state of Israel and its remarkable rise to prominence as a world power. For the first time since the Babylonian captivity (586–538 BC), the Jews are ruling their own country from their capital city of Jerusalem. After twenty-five hundred years in exile, the Jews are back in their Holy Land and in their Holy City. And many of us have witnessed this development with our own eyes.
This particular place of Israel is the site of another significant sign of Jesus’ return, and that sign is a peculiar people, with peculiar meaning “belonging to someone”; in this case, belonging to God. After the forty years of wilderness wanderings, Moses stood at Nebo and preached a prophetic message before his people crossed the Jordan and journeyed into the promised land. Moses said, “The LORD will scatter you among the peoples, and you will be left few in number among the nations where the LORD will drive you” (Deuteronomy 4:27). But Ezekiel talked to the Jews about a day when God would “take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land” (Ezekiel 36:24). From all over the world, these peculiar people have returned to their ancient homeland, revived the Hebrew language, and reestablished their Hebrew state—all in fulfillment of Bible prophecy.
Clearly, such ample evidence of the last days should motivate us not only to look up to God and be calm as we await Jesus’ return, but also to look in and make sure we are clean and ready to meet Him on that day. Nearly two thousand years have elapsed since James penned these words, and the Judge who is at the door has not stepped across the threshold—yet. However, we must remember that God is not operating on Central Standard Time. He is on His own schedule, and He will be absolutely right on time, not a minute early and not a minute late. Until then, it is imperative that we believers “establish our hearts”—that we look in and are clean.
Just Do It! So how do we keep our hearts clean? First John 1:7 says, “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.” Note sin is in the singular here: it refers to our inherent sin nature that we deal with when we recognize ourselves as sinners, acknowledge Jesus as God’s Son, and welcome Him as our Savior and Lord. At this point of being born again, Christ’s shed blood “cleanses us from all sin.”
First John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Note sins is plural here, indicating that just because we come to Christ doesn’t mean we cease sinning. It means that we are able to go to Him, confess our sins daily, and receive His forgiveness. Although our sin was covered and paid for by Jesus’ body on the cross, and we received forgiveness and salvation by trusting in Christ, we need to daily confess and forsake our personal daily sins in daily prayer. When we confess our sins, we establish our hearts.
Look in—and be clean—until the coming of the Lord.
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