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Podcast: Why Is Obeying God So Simple and Yet So Incredibly Hard? (David Gibson)

October 10, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Be Doers of the Word and Not Hearers Only

In today’s episode, David Gibson talks about our struggle with obeying God’s word and what that reveals about our sinful hearts, our theology, and our understanding of the Christian life.

Radically Whole

Radically Whole

David Gibson

David Gibson’s expository study on the book of James analyzes its painful but essential message on double-mindedness, helping readers experience healing and wholeness in their relationship with God and others.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:52 - Fault Lines That Betray Our Divided Hearts

Matt Tully
Well, David, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

David Gibson
Real pleasure. It’s lovely to have the chance to talk to you, Matt.

Matt Tully
For those who can already tell by your accent, where do you live?

David Gibson
I’m speaking to you from Aberdeen in the Northeast of Scotland. I’m not native to Scotland, not native to Aberdeen; I was actually born in your neck of the woods, at least in a general sense—I was born in Tennessee. My parents were trained to be missionaries.

Matt Tully
This is probably so surprising to everybody. When we think of Tennessee, we think of a certain accent.

David Gibson
Not this one.

Matt Tully
Now we’re hearing you.

David Gibson
I’ve never been there apart from being born there. I’ve no memory of life in Tennessee at all. We left soon after I was born. My parents had been training with MAF (Missionary Aviation Fellowship) and they took us, and it took me, initially to Ethiopia for about a year, and then Tanzania in east Africa was where I was on and off until I was eight, and then Northern Ireland after that. My mom’s English, my dad’s from Northern Ireland. So the accent is a little bit Northern Irish and a little bit Scottish, although not very Scottish. I’ve been here in Aberdeen, Scotland for 18 years.

Matt Tully
So, your parents were pilots?

David Gibson
No, my dad is an aircraft engineer, so he worked on the ground staff and got the planes flying. Mission Aviation Fellowship, they fly light aircraft into remote situations and do amazing work. Dad makes sure they stay up when they’re meant to and come down when they’re meant to.

Matt Tully
That’s amazing. It kind of gets to this classic idea of the missionary going into these remote places in this small plane. It’s so amazing to talk with someone who’s kind of been in that world.

David Gibson
Yeah, it was quite magical growing up, in a way. As two brothers, we grew up in east Africa, in and out of airport hangars and watching planes be painted and engines being worked on. Even as a child you really had a sense that you were part of doing something quite special, really, as a team. So, yeah, it was wonderful.

Matt Tully
Let’s move on to your new book here with Crossway. It’s a fascinating book. It’s called Radically Whole. You open your book with a quote from a man named Douglas Copeland. I wonder if you could read that quote for us and then unpack why you started with it.

David Gibson
Sure. So the quote is this,

Truth be told . . . the one thing in this world I want more than anything else is a great big crowbar, to jimmy myself open and take whatever creature that’s sitting inside and shake it clean like a rug and then rinse it in a cold, clear lake . . . and then I want to put it under the sun to let it heal and dry and grow and sit and come to consciousness again with a clear and quiet mind.

When I read that Douglas Copeland quote, I thought that he manages to nail what being whole feels like. It’s those moments you get on holiday: you dive into a clear ocean, you come up, and everything just clicks together. You feel a complete person. We don’t have that feeling all the time, do we? We get it on these special moments where just everything kind of comes together. And Douglas Copeland, I think in that quote, just manages to nail that idea that when all parts of who we are click together, we feel clean, we feel complete, we feel like we’re breathing the right kind of air physically, practically, spiritually—everything.

Matt Tully
I was struck by the quote because it is such a visceral picture that he paints of something in us being ripped out of us and plunged into this cleaning, cool water, and then the experience of basking in that sunlight and the warmth and the healing.

David Gibson
You’re right about it being so strikingly visceral. The other thing that you probably pass over quickly in the quote is that he said, “The one thing I want more than anything is a great, big crowbar to pry myself open”—it’s like the pain he’s willing to inflict on himself to get that wholeness. I think the letter of James is that crowbar. Often the Bible is like that; God’s word is like that. Hebrews literally says it is a sword. James is a surprisingly crowbar type of letter. It’s what God is doing to pry us open, to pull out that doubleness and to make it whole.

Matt Tully
I think the quote does a great job of expressing that longing, the desire that we have for this kind of wholeness and healing that we sense we need. What has that longing looked like in your life, or how has that been expressed in your life?

David Gibson
I’ve personally felt the longing in different ways. There are parts of the Bible that when you read them, the description of the whole heart is so beautiful that it’s what you long to have. In 1 Kings 8:61, Solomon says to the people, “Let your heart, therefore, be wholly true to the Lord our God, walking in his statutes, keeping his commandments as at this day.” Psalm 25: “May integrity and uprightness preserve me.” Psalm 119, “Blessed are those who keep his testimony, who seek him with their whole heart.” You get the same idea and other psalms, don’t you? “One thing I seek, this is the one thing I want, that I might dwell in the house of the Lord all the days in my life.” There’s a kind of poetic beauty to the idea of a single love and a single faithfulness and a complete and total obedience. You can kind of taste it when you read the psalms and other parts of the Bible. So, in a sense, I’ve had that I think all through my Christian life—those pictures of the way the world is meant to be are beautiful. But I think if I’m really honest, I see it as well in the flip side. I see the beauty of the wholeness when I see the ugliness of the division. And if we’re all honest, I think we see the ugliness of the division more. We see it just as often as we see the longing. So, why is it that in our house we can sit and do family devotions around the breakfast table, and sometimes it’s a car crash, but you can have those mornings where it’s just amazing. Everybody’s listening, the dog is not being sick, we’re all being friendly to each other, the devotion’s gone well, we’ve had a really good discussion. And five minutes later, we’re at each other’s throats before we go out to school or out to work. Why is that possible? And that creates a different kind of longing for wholeness when you realize that you are capable of, with the same mouth, blessing God and cursing your brother or sister. And you take a step back like, Wow. I did both of those things. The ugliness increases the longing for the wholeness, but in a different way. I don’t know if that quite scratches the itch of your question, but that’s something that comes to mind immediately.

Matt Tully
As you described that, I can think of examples—even specific moments in my life—where I have maybe come face to face with that dynamic. As you call them, fault lines, the fault lines that run within us that do testify to this dividedness that’s in us. Are there any kinds of examples or other moments in your life that kind of stand out to you as particularly powerful moments where you recognized these fault lines?

David Gibson
I have particular graphic examples of family car crashes, for instance. In the book I talk about one instance of one of the worst arguments my wife and I had during lockdown. One of the arguments was during our home online church service—not after it, not before it, but during it. Someone made a comment about something and someone else responded and before we knew it, we were engaged in an argument that we felt so strongly about. We had to finish it off later on in my study. That’s a really good example of James’s thing about the same mouth doing cursing and blessing all at the same time. We started arguing straight after our confession of sin in the online service. It was a truly horrifying experience for us both right in front of our kids.

Matt Tully
I’m sure no one else listening can resonate with any of that.

David Gibson
No one else has ever done anything like that, I’m sure.

Matt Tully
That gets at one of the core things that we feel when we recognize something like that has just happened. Just five minutes before, we’ve been praising God, worshiping God, praying to God, perhaps, in fellowship with our spouse, and then five minutes later we’ve done something that we look back on with shame and with regret. We’re like, How could we have done this?

David Gibson
I guess the simple answer is we should expect to have these kind of experiences, but it doesn’t make them right. It would’ve been wrong for my wife and I to say, Oh, well. We’re works in progress. Sorry, kids. We’re not perfect yet until Christ returns and when we get glorified bodies in the new creation. Stuff happens. Sorry, kids. James says, “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.” It’s why James is a crowbar; it’s why the word is a sword. The constant message of the Christian life is you need to put to death the sinful nature and the deeds of the flesh. The Pauline imperative of put to death the deeds of the flesh and crucify the sinful nature, James’s version of that is, These things ought not to be so. Stop doing these things. In the book at a couple of points, I’ve got a couple of C. S. Lewis illustrations that have become very precious to me and to our family over the years. One is C. S. Lewis’s image of what God is doing with people is like building a brand new mansion. We think when God comes, Christ takes up residence in our heart and comes to live in us. We think what God is doing is simply adding on a little. C. S. Lewis says you think he’s just going to do a bit of internal decoration and add on a wing here and there—a wing of the house and do a bit of that. He’s actually completely remaking the entire thing; he’s transforming the cottage into a palace. And that is incredibly painful.

Matt Tully
Picking up on that metaphor of the house, I think we hear that illustration from Lewis, and it sounds so good. It does sound painful. It sounds dramatic, and maybe more dramatic than we think. But it also could maybe testify to the experience that we have of how we think God is supposed to be remaking us as a house, and yet twenty years on after my conversion, there are still those squeaky floorboards. The question we might wrestle with is, Why hasn’t God replaced those yet? Why are those still there? Why can’t I seem to get past those? What would you say to that? How do we think about the slowness of the “renovation” that we experience in our lives?

David Gibson
If I’m really honest, the short answer is I don’t know. God doesn’t seem to be in the kind of hurry we are often in on so many levels. James 5 says, “Be patient, therefore, brothers until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth.” It’s not exactly the issue you’re talking about, but you get the next verse: “You also be patient. Establish your hearts for the coming of the Lord is at hand.” There is something about the slowness of God’s work in our lives that we find frustrating, but which, nevertheless, one day somehow will be part of the glory of what he’s doing in our lives. I do think it’s particularly difficult for us as moderns. We are technological people, not organic people. In our world you click a button, you fix things, you send emails, you make things happen. I’ve been in America just recently visiting some folks for a few days, and the difference between British and American context is really striking. You really are the people of you make things happen. You just get things done. There’s a can-do attitude that—not completely, but generally—is stronger than in the UK that’s more reserved and cautious and very British. But it’s not that we’re any better theologically or spiritually. Over here we still want things done. We’re less good at getting them done, but we want things done quickly. The organic language in the Bible of farmers and sewing and the kingdom growing slowly and God’s work in our life being slow is very hard for our modern culture. Why God has chosen to do it that way, I’d probably need to reflect to come up with a better answer than I’m not really sure, but there’s going to be fruit from it somehow that way.

13:22 - Learning to Be Patient with Ourselves

Matt Tully
It gets at some of those basic questions that we do wonder about God’s plan and his sovereignty. You mentioned this idea of being patient, and that is something that is hard for us. Do you think there’s anything to what we sometimes hear from people when it comes to our own struggles, and even our own sins, that some of us might need to learn how to be more patient with ourselves even? That maybe that is part of the way that we are meant to respond to these fault lines that we see in ourselves and the slow progress that we make. Is that a wise way to think about our own struggle with this double mindedness?

David Gibson
Yes, I think so. I think pastorally that’s often the answer with a lot of things. It’s not a way of excusing your sin, but it is a way of saying sometimes we’re harder on ourselves than God is. Sometimes I see this in pastoral ministry with the issue of forgiveness: the one person that people can’t forgive is themselves, when actually God isn’t like that. I think with the fault lines in our lives, in James with the fault lines of a double heart and a double mind, what God wants from us when we see that is not immediate perfection. Perfection is exactly what he wants from us, but he doesn’t expect it instantaneously. What he wants from us to get to the place of perfection is humility. So, humility is James’s main heart setting for handling your own fault line. James 4:6: “He gives more grace. Therefore, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Submit yourselves, therefore, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” The person who sees their own fault line and comes to God with it, and sees their own dividedness and comes to God with it, God never turns his back on that person and says, Look, you’ve done it again. There are your family devotions that have blown up again. What we need to do as a family when that happens is do what James says and submit ourselves to God and draw near to him again, and he will draw near to us. So, humility is the key response to what you see about yourself.

15:32 - Marriage as a Picture of an Undivided Heart

Matt Tully
In the book you point to marriage and the faithfulness and the intimacy that is supposed to be evident there, that it’s kind of baked into that institution. You really argue that that’s foundational for how the Bible talks about what it means to be right and whole in our relationship with God. I wonder if you could unpack that for us. Where do we see marriage as this picture of what it means to have a fully faithful, undivided heart when it comes to God?

David Gibson
Yeah, thank you. That’s a great question. This has been for me one of the greatest insights in the book of James that’s really helped me, and this is not unique to me. I thank a man called Andy Gemmill at the start of the book who’s a wonderful pastor and Bible teacher here in Glasgow, Scotland. Andy’s helped me a lot over the years in the book of James. One of the things I came to realize in different ways is that this idea of double mindedness—and here’s what I mean by what I said earlier about it being more than an intellectual thing—this idea of double mindedness, another word for it is adultery. That’s what you get in chapter four. James says, “You adulterous people. Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with with God?” So, you see the division, the doubleness—friendship with the world and enmity with God. As I saw that in the book of James and realized that adultery is the lived out illustration of what double mindedness means, in a way all of a sudden the whole book of James clicks into the whole Bible story from the beginning of time when God creates Adam and Eve. You get the famous words from Genesis, “A man shall leave his father and mother, hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” That picture of male/female relationship very quickly in the Old Testament becomes a picture of God’s love for his people, so that when his people deviate from God, the language that God used (particularly in the Prophets, like Ezekiel and other places) is the language of spiritual adultery. By the time you get to the New Testament, and the apostle Paul and the letter to the Ephesians, it’s just really clear, isn’t it? That marital relationship between man and woman is the picture that God has given to say to his people, This is how close I am to you. The language in Ephesians 5is astonishing. Ephesians 5:27 says, “Christ presented the church to himself in splendor, without spotter wrinkle, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.” What an amazing thing in marriage. Self-care is other-care. You cannot be a married man and look after yourself without looking after your wife. You might be in the gym, you might have done everything, you might be on top of the world mentally, intellectually, physically and in every way possible, but if your wife is not cared for, you are not the man you think you are. You have self-harmed in some way. “He who loves his wife, loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.” The Lord Jesus is as close to me as a husband and wife are in sexual union. It’s just an astonishing thing. Union with Christ is not a sexual image, but the closest thing you can find to explain what that means is sexual union of husband and wife as one flesh. So, you put James in the context of the whole Bible—the idea that God is that close to us in Christ, he loves us that much, and we are meant to love him in return—the picture that James has of the way the world should be is the way the world should be a permanent wedding. That’s what the Garden of Eden was meant to be. It was meant to be a permanent celebration of heaven on earth, man and woman together, God, with mankind. And if you want to understand what we have done to God and to ourselves and to the world by being divided, then it’s the marriage picture you look at to see the effect. A husband cheating on his wife is what we do by choosing sin over loving God.

Matt Tully
It’s so amazing when you do start to see that central importance of marriage and the meaning that marriage has in the Bible, the meaning that goes so far beyond the human-to-human relationship. It actually is almost more foundationally—would you say this is true—more importantly, marriage is about teaching us something about God and our relationship with him. Is that a fair way to state that?

David Gibson
Yeah, absolutely. That’s what you get next in Ephesians 5, isn’t it? “No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.” Next verse: “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” So, every single time I marry a couple, every single marriage that you see, the whole point of it is that it is meant to illustrate how God has loved us. In the way that God has loved us in Jesus, you see the perfect marriage. It becomes the model and example for how we should treat each other and how we should love one another. I don’t think we really do get that very much. We understand how a wife and a husband are close to each other, but we don’t really think Jesus is that close to us. I think he’s out there somewhere—in my heart or he loves me and I love him. But to think I’m actually united to him in that same way is astonishing.

21:16 - The Importance of Honesty

Matt Tully
Yeah, and it seems like it cuts both ways. If we truly understood the significance of what human marriage is telling us about our spiritual marriage, so to speak, to God through Christ, we would both appreciate how close he is to us, and that would be such a thrilling understanding to fully grasp how much he loves us and the intimacy that is there. But on the flip side, it would help us better understand and appreciate the betrayal of this divided heart that we so often not just have, but maybe give a pass to. We don’t worry so much about it as we maybe should. On that front, as we think about our divided hearts and the challenge that we face there, you write something interesting in the book. You say, “The first thing to learn as we walk the road of becoming whole is that it involves him telling and our accepting him being God. It involves him telling and our accepting the truth about ourselves.” I wonder if you could speak a little bit to the importance of that honesty, the willingness to tell the truth about ourselves, and how that fits in with this whole conversation.

David Gibson
I think it’s simply the idea that you go to the doctor and the doctor says at some point in the visit, This is going to hurt. And you accept it because you know he’s not a sadist. He’s not laughing, he’s not doing it just for his own pleasure and he’s gonna hurt you and you’re going to leave more broken than you came in. This is going to hurt because the pain of the heart is going to lead to your healing. I just think that’s the letter of James in a nutshell. It says, Do not be double minded, you adulterous people. Stop this betrayal of the Lord Jesus, your true husband. We think, Okay, yeah, I’ll do that. I like the idea of wholeness. I want to be perfect. I want that King David, Psalms, wholehearted devotion. That’s me. I want to sign up for that. And James says, Okay, if you want that, take a seat. This is going to hurt. There is going to be pain. You’re going to need to learn a few things about yourself. You’re going to need to learn what you’re really like. You’re going to need to learn what you need to stop doing. You’re going to need to learn what you need to start doing. You’re going to see where wholeness grows from. And telling the truth about yourself and about how wholeness comes about, that’s what I mean by that phrase that we all like the idea of perfection, but the truth of how you get there is painful. We all love the idea of going to the gym. We all love the idea of the perfect body, and the people who have the perfect body, when they tell you what it cost them to get it, we’re like, Yeah, not so much.

23:59 - Don’t Forget What You Look Like

Matt Tully
Probably one of the most famous verses in the book of James would have to be James 1:22–23: “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 who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror but then forgets it and goes away like he was.” I wonder if you could help us understand what James is getting at with these couple of verses.

David Gibson
You’re entirely right. They are the sort of standout verses and some of the most well-known verses. In the book I give the example of years and years ago I met a man for breakfast one morning—a name and a place that shall remain nameless in case he’s ever listening to this—and I’d never met him. I didn’t know him and had ever met him before, but as I met him for the very first time I had to say to him, Look, your jumper (your sweater, as you guys would say) is on inside out and back to front.

Matt Tully
So, his sweater, what he was wearing?

David Gibson
His sweater. Yeah, it was inside out. And not just inside out, but back to front. He really quickly just said, Oh, right, okay. Yeah. Sorry. He was really apologetic and embarrassed and took it off, turned it around, and we carried on awkwardly together. James says imagine the type of person who you say that to and he looks down and says, Oh yeah, so it is and just carries on. Off he goes into the day. He has coffee with you and off he goes, and you’re sort of shouting after him, No, hang on! I told it’s inside out. And he says, Yeah, yeah, I know it is. He just ignores it, and off he goes. It’s a kind of picture of what we do. So, we’ve just finished Ephesians, for instance, in church. We were working through Ephesians 4 and 5. Ephesians 4:25 says, “Therefore, put away falsehood. Let each one of you speak the truth with this neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry, and do not sin.” And we all nod along. We all agree that’s what the word says to do, and we don’t always do it. It’s as simple as that. We are always very good at hearing. By the time we’re angry again, that night or two days later, we’re like the man with a sweater on who’s just heard and off he goes. I think, and I argue in the book a little bit, that part of James’ brilliance is the simplicity of saying just do what the Bible says. If you literally stop lying to one another, and if you stop being angry, and if you do what the Bible says of when you’re angry, don’t sin and don’t let the sun go down. If you actually say with my spouse, I will not let the sun go down while we’re still angry and you actually do that, you will progress towards being whole. It’s as simple as that, and as hard as that.

26:46 - How Can We Be Doers of the Word?

Matt Tully
As you say it like that, and as James says it—”Be doers of the word”—it is simple, but it’s so hard. We think about being in an argument with your spouse, or resisting some kind of attraction to sin in some way, and it’s sometimes incredibly hard and we don’t know how to do it. So, what would James’ answer be to that when we say, Okay, I want to be a doer of the word, but how?

David Gibson
I think he would say it is all about your personal stance, whether you are proud or humble. Everything comes back to that middle bit of the book, James 4, about pride and humility. The humble person will, yes, of course, this side of glory still not always do what the word says, but the more that person seeks God’s grace humbly. And for each time they’re angry with their spouse when they shouldn’t be and they go to bed and the sun has gone down and they’ve sinned in their anger and so on, every time you retain humility with that and come back to God for grace and repentance—it’s hard to explain—in those moments godliness grows.The people who keep short accounts with God and with each other slowly, over time, do end up being angry with each other less. To give you an example again, a C. S. Lewis one that I used in the book, and this to me has become a really beautiful picture. I think you see it in lots of ways in the Christian life and through the Bible. C.S. Lewis has an essay called “Let’s Pretend.” I think it appears in Mere Christianity and he put it in there as a chapter. It was originally a radio address, “Let’s Pretend.” He said there are good ways and bad ways of pretending. There’s pretending when you put your hand out to someone to shake their hand, but you’re actually reaching around their back to pick their pocket. The handshake is a pretense that is not real. But he said there’s another way of pretending, which is what children do when they put on mom’s makeup and mom’s high heels and mom’s clothes and walk across the living room, pretending to be grownups. Or, they put on the football kit of their superstar, they wear their mom’s doctor’s uniform, their dad’s work coat, all of these things. The child is pretending to be what they are not yet, but what they will one day become. They are growing up into adult life. C. S. Lewis says all the things that the Bible tells us to do—to clothe ourselves in humility, to be gentle, to be compassionate, to not be angry—if you dress yourselves in those things, even though they are not yet organically true of you, you will grow up into them. Paul says in Galatians, “When you were baptized, you were clothed in Christ.” And I think the imperative of the Christian life is if you were baptized into Christ and you’re wearing Christ, then every single day, put Christ on. Get dressed with Christ. Wear what he wears, and over time you grow up into those things. Progress in godliness is possible. There are people in their eighties and nineties who used to sin in their anger all the time. And they would now say they’re still like that, because I think the more godly you are and the more you grow in holiness, the more acutely aware of your sin you become. But they will see their own sin and their own anger, but actually, as you look at their lifespan, we would say, Oh, you’re a lot less angry now than you used to be. That kind of growth in character is possible if you wear those things in advance. Does that make sense?

30:50 - God Gives More Grace

Matt Tully
Yeah, and it’s such an encouraging thing to be reminded of. I think we pay lip service to knowing that the growth can be slow and painful at times, but it happens. But I think it’s often only in looking back over a longer period of time that we can see that growth that God has worked within us. And as you said said before, we kind of settle into being that patient endurance as we continue to walk forward. Maybe as a last question, David, I wonder if you could speak to the person who is listening to us today and does feel a sense of discouragement, a sense of maybe exhaustion at their own double mindedness, at the fault lines that they see in their own heart that just don’t seem to want to close up. What would you say to them?

David Gibson
That’s a lovely question because many of us are like that, and I’ve been there at certain points. I think we’re all there at different times, aren’t we? I would want to say, as you feel James’ crowbar, can you see where his arm is? So, in other words, what does he say all along? Brothers, children. James has his arm around you as he’s saying to you, Look, I can see a problem here. I can see there’s a fault line or there’s an aspect of division. James is not above you, looking down on you. He is gentle and patient. He comes alongside. Although the medicine that James gives us is sharp and is difficult, it is a medicine of grace. He just keeps saying, God gives more grace. He is gracious. Come close to him. Keep coming back to him. And James is never like, Alright, you’ve really blown it now. Not again. You’re finished. If you are humble with the very thing that is upsetting you and discouraging you, and you come back to God again, God will welcome you. It’s the amazing, beautiful picture of, and I talk about this in the book as well, James’ connection to the parable of the two lost sons. There’s the elder son who stays at home in Jesus’ teaching. He stays at home and is hardhearted, and the younger son who blows everything and is welcomed back with open arms. To both types of sons the welcome was the same at the party. It was, Come in. You can be forgiven. All I have is yours. Many people feel we are that prodigal son. We just keep blowing it again and again, and we keep forgetting that God is that gracious, forgiving, welcoming father.

Matt Tully
Well, David, thank you so much for taking the time today to help us understand this dividedness in our own hearts that we so often sense and can feel dissatisfied with and sometimes don’t honestly know what to do with. Thanks for leading us through what the book of James can help us with on that front.

David Gibson
It’s a real pleasure. I’ve loved talking to you. Thanks very much, Matt.

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