James 1:19-21 (msg) Post this at all the intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue, and let anger straggle along in the rear. God’s righteousness doesn’t grow from human anger. So throw all spoiled virtue and cancerous evil in the garbage. In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life. 

Let us throw out the spoiled virtue! Spoiled virtue meaning virtue (moral excellence, goodness, righteousness) defined by human principle instead of God’s principles and God’s purity… guess what!?! Our virtue doesn’t even come close to His. We live and die by man-made virtue that is in reality part of the ‘cancerous evil’ that is killing us. This sounds horribly dark and it actually is terribly sad to see how we humans can mix up something as Good and Perfect as a sovereign God who Loves beyond anything we can fathom and twist it into such selfish ambition and darkness. 

My point is maybe we should heed James’ advice and remind each other to lead with our ears, with our ears pointed to Who is TRULY good – so we CAN discard the ‘spoiled virtue’ in our lives: 

James 1:16-18 (msg) So, my very dear friends, don’t get thrown off course. Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light. There is nothing deceitful in God, nothing two-faced, nothing fickle. He brought us to life using the true Word, showing us off as the crown of all his creatures.

I haven’t said it in a couple weeks, but here we are, back to our sweet abiding through the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the only way we will ever be able to identify what is truly Good. My experience tells me that this is often challenging, but it doesn’t make God any less True and His purity any less Perfect. And, I have also discovered, it is more than worth the challenge, as He works even the challenges for our True Good. “In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life.”