Incomplete Obedience

“Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”

If you remember the context of today’s quote, the “right thing” James is writing about means prefacing our public declarations about plans for the future with the words “if the Lord wills”. Anything else is presumption.

“Do the right thing,” he says. “The future is not ours to boast about.”

Rationalizing Inertia

That acknowledged, the saying he coined in his letter is a great way to express a more generally-applicable biblical principle: presented with any choice between right and wrong, there’s only one truly Christian position to take. A right way untaken is a sin of omission. Incomplete obedience is, well ... disobedience. “I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God,” says the one who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. Immediate action is required.

Inertia can be a powerful evil, in that we can easily rationalize it away, and it therefore persists in situations where clear, self-evident departures from the word of God would be swiftly rooted out. The things you and I don’t do generally leave little evidence behind to remind us of our error.

A wrong choice acted upon is manifestly evil. Nobody can reasonably dispute that it occurred. “You sinned,” we say. “I saw you.” Such departures from the will of God are fixed in time and place. There may be cellphone cameras pointed. There are probably witnesses, and there are definitely consequences. The accused recoils to hear about it, usually because he remembers it too. The act troubled his conscience and left a mark he’d prefer were erased.

Sins of Omission

Not so with sins of omission. “Thanks for bringing that up. I was just about to get to that. Really. It’s not on my calendar, but I truly meant to make that phone call right after lunch.” Rarely do we tell ourselves the truth: it would never have happened. There’s something difficult or unpleasant about that Christian duty that makes it easy to assign it second-last place on my daily To-Do list, down there with the other things not quite urgent enough to prioritize.

Asking the question “What am I currently doing that might displease the Lord?” is an important spiritual exercise. It needs to happen from time to time. The answer to it is also readily evident to any mature believer confronting it. Ezra went up to Jerusalem from Babylonia some time after its reestablishment with a second wave of a few thousand returned exiles and within two chapters of his return discovered that even the priests and Levites in Jerusalem and Judea had been marrying foreign women. The remedy described in the final chapter of Ezra involved a period of national mourning and some very painful changes in the lives of those men named in the chapter, but both the problem and the solution were patently obvious. No godly person observing Israelite society could possibly have missed them or justified them. All it took was the troubled conscience of one righteous man to tip the scales in the other direction and turn the nation around, at least for a while.

Doing and Not Doing

The question “What am I currently not doing that I have been putting off for far too long?” is much easier to ignore, but the answer may be just as sinful and just as dishonoring to the Lord. Let’s give some thought to the “right things” in each of our lives.