The Letter of James can easily be seen as a tool by which shock therapy is performed just to make sure we are paying attention to what God is saying to us. We read in 4.8-10: Come near to God and he will come near to you. What a tremendous promise from our Father in heaven. If we will seek to draw near to him he will, in direct response to that move, come into our presence in power. Who would not want that?

Then comes the shaking: Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. When we come into the presence of God we open the door to have our Lord bring about in us his very real truth about who we are in life. Our Lord will never come to us with a ‘there, there, poor baby’ attitude as if everything was going to be okay. When we come to him—and he to us—there must be self-examination.

We are to make sure that God will not be offended by our double-mindedness. If we seek the Lord and his influence in our lives we must deal honestly with our own sinfulness—not that we can make it all better, but that we throw it over in favor of God’s power over us: Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. We will be shaken into seriousness when it comes to self-examination.

If we are willing to look at ourselves through the eyes of our Lord Christ from the position of humility he will then allow us to receive his powerful presence in our lives: Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. This shaking is not only vital to us, for if we will not allow this evaluation by Father God we will never be able to stand his presence. We must get real with God and ourselves as he gets real with us.