Hear and Do

Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 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 work, this one will be blessed in what he does. If anyone among you thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this one’s religion is useless. Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

James 1:21-27

People do better when they are given something to do with what they've learned. 

You can learn about how ants and flies spread bacteria and how weeds choke your plants, but until you begin to do something about it, such knowledge is useless. You need a way to use the knowledge you’ve gained in a practical real-life setting. God designed you to integrate learning and doing in a seamless pattern. You don’t have segmented learning and doing life where you learn for a bit then do for a bit then learn… Learning and doing happen simultaneously, so that learning drives you into doing, and doing solidifies the learning into your life as you refine your learning by adjusting your doing.

If you see weeds, go pull them.

The perfect law of liberty shows you the laws and principles of pulling weeds. You still have to put those principles into practice and decide to live by the laws. You can try to kill weeds by suffocating them with fertilizer, but if that is not how the perfect law instructs you to kill weeds, you will most likely make the problem worse. You have to both know what the perfect law of liberty tells you to do and utilize your liberty of free will to get off the couch and go pull the weeds. Of course, you have to know how to pull weeds before you go out and pull them, and an effective life plan with include both learning about pulling weeds and going out and pulling them.

If you fight the ants you will lose; you have to find and eliminate the queen. 

Sometimes we pursue doing something with what we’ve learned before listening to see if it is the right thing to do. We waste our time squishing the ants and don’t get to the solution of killing the queen. Seeing a swarm of ants drives you into action, but your action has to be integrated with learning. As you start squishing ants, you will learn that they just keep coming. As you move into action, you will learn as you go, and as you learn, you will continually adjust your course of action. Look into the law of liberty and become a hearer and doer of what it says.