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Thanks, Jay. Good morning. My name is Ben Llewelyn, and I’m a member here, and I get to lead us on the next leg of this relay race, which is us preaching through the book of James this summer.
Now, in our study of the epistles so far, you may be recognizing a pattern. James presents us with a series of tests: Is our faith in Jesus Christ genuine? And if it is genuine, is it healthy?
So, in chapter one, when you face trials, do you respond with joy? When you read the Bible or hear it taught, do you actually obey? In chapter two, do you avoid showing partiality and favoritism? Do you allow your faith to show through your actions? In chapter three last week, Zeke let us consider: Do we keep our tongues under control? All helping us to see: Is our faith real, and is it healthy?
Now, this is why the book of James makes me nervous. It should make me nervous. I think it should make you nervous. He’s intentionally hacking away at some of the most sensitive parts of our lives. You know, there’s a man named Eusebius who was a historian in the early church in the late 200s and early 300s AD. At that time, some people were wondering, “Hey, is James really a part of the Bible?” And he wrote, responding to that question, saying that at no point did the church ever reject this book from being part of scripture. But he observed that what made people wonder, “Hey, is this really part of the Bible?” is that the other early church fathers seemed to write a lot about almost all the other books in the New Testament.
So, what do we make of that? My hypothesis is this book made the early church fathers nervous. They believed it was real, but it made them nervous. So, what’s so unsettling about this epistle? It’s that there’s this underlying assumption here: It’s that people can look like Christians, act like Christians, even feel like Christians, and think they are Christians but not be Christians. And that people who profess to be Christians but look like unbelievers, act like unbelievers, think like unbelievers, if they persisted, may ultimately prove themselves to have always been unbelievers.
The hope of James is, of course, that the real Christians who may have unhealthy faith will sober up to their reality, make difficult changes, and show that indeed they are persevering as children of God. Now, James doesn’t really allow for this third path. Either your conduct ultimately proves your faith to be false, or it will prove it to be genuine.
In the ultimate sense, true faith does not coexist with a pattern of persistently unfaithful conduct. Now, granted, different Christians are going to have different fruit that they are able to see in this world, but ultimately, there is going to be fruit there.
Now, also, it’s easy for us to pat ourselves on the back and tell ourselves that we’re just doing the best we can. But the tests that James presents here are potent. They cut through a lot of the self-deception that we have. And even if we assess ourselves to be in the faith, we almost always find in this epistle that there’s difficult work in our hearts yet to be done.
Now, this morning at the end of chapter three, in getting at the subject of wisdom that drives us, he gets down to the kernel of our being. He’s taken this investigation of our life in these externally observable facets, and he’s going down to the root: what drives our decision-making.
So, let’s get after it. We’re in James chapter three, verses 13 through 18. And please follow along as I read:
“Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct, let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.”
Pray with me.
Lord, in ministering this word to us today, we ask that you would open our minds to aspects of our thinking that need correction. Also, help us to be reminded that you are gracious and merciful, and that we come to texts like this and the difficulty of them, not because you enjoy seeing us writhe in the agony of it, but because you love us and you want to see us change. Help us to see that this morning and help us to have joy knowing that you walk through this with us. Amen.
James here describes two different kinds of wisdom. On the one hand, you’ve got earthly wisdom. On the other hand, you’ve got godly wisdom, the wisdom that comes from above. One type of wisdom is to be avoided, and the other is to be desired.
Now, interestingly, what this means is that not all wisdom is good. Are you with me there? I don’t know if you’ve given that much thought, but there exists in this world an abundance of wisdom—good wisdom. It’s not godly wisdom. And perhaps most of the wisdom we’ve been exposed to is that type of wisdom.
Now, to understand how this can be, let’s consider: What is wisdom? We’ll start by comparing it to knowledge, right? So, knowledge is easier to comprehend. It’s the collection or possession of facts. That’s like an axiomatic thing, right? You want to become knowledgeable about something—anything. Then all you really need to do is look it up, start reading, and you’re knowledgeable. You can read it on your phone, and you’re starting to accumulate knowledge as long as you’re not going to bad sources. And there are plenty of those.
But knowledge is also self-contained. So you can collect knowledge, facts, write it down in a book, put it on a shelf, and that knowledge will keep, right? It doesn’t have a shelf life. It will last for years, centuries even, and it’s still identifiable as knowledge throughout that whole time.
Wisdom is different. Wisdom requires knowledge, of course, but actually requires a couple of other elements in order for it to be recognizable as wisdom. First, wisdom has an underlying purpose. There’s always some motivation driving wisdom. There’s some intent. It’s not aimless.
Next, wisdom is observable. It’s observable in behavior. You’ve got to be doing something with your knowledge in order for it to be wisdom. It’s not recognizable as such until you do let it affect your decisions, your attitudes, and your actions. So, in order for wisdom to be wisdom, you need to be using knowledge to affect your behavior—your attitudes, decisions, actions—in order to achieve or align with a purpose.
Wisdom is the purposeful use of knowledge to direct behavior. Now, this is really important to grasp here because in our passage, James isn’t focusing on the knowledge component of wisdom at all. James is concerned about our behavior, and even more so, he is concerned about that underlying motivation that is driving that behavior.
Now, you might say, “Now wait a minute, Ben, what about all the wisdom in scripture? Are you saying that’s not wisdom unless we’re actually using what’s there?”
I think there are two answers to that. You’ve got the wisdom books, right? And all of scripture is wisdom. But you have the wisdom books—Psalms, Proverbs. Scripture is unique in that God uniquely uses this knowledge for a purpose, even when we don’t, right? So the scripture of wisdom actually has this unique peculiarity to it in that it’s wise even when no one’s doing anything with it.
But second, I would say, let’s use a human argument. If you were to memorize the whole book of Proverbs—most of the wisdomist books in the wisdom literature, the whole book of Proverbs—and you were to let none of that affect any of your actions or behaviors, are you walking wisely?
You’d say no, right? That’s pretty foolish, right? However, in a worldly sense, you might say you’re also acting wisely by worldly standards because what’s going on is that foolishness is the word used in scripture to describe human wisdom. So maybe you read that knowledge in the book of Proverbs, you rejected it, you’re not letting it affect your actions. And that’s actually a form of wisdom that is contrary to godly wisdom, and that it’s a bit nuanced then, right?
And that poses a problem for us because it means that if we are walking in human wisdom, it is hard for us to self-diagnose that, right? It’s hard for us in our moments of foolishness to self-diagnose our foolishness. And so we need help in that diagnosis. We need something to help us understand when what we think is wisdom is wisdom. But it’s the wrong kind of wisdom.
And that is exactly what James is trying to do for us. In this passage, he lays out a series of checks that we ought to be revisiting often if we want to live fruitful lives in godly wisdom. Now, some of the checks are negative warnings indicating the presence of foolishness, and then others are positive indicators that we are operating in godly wisdom. But positive or negative, all of these checks are self-assessments.
Right? They are getting at things that maybe you can observe a little bit in somebody else, but you can’t really. But this is something where you can detect this in your own heart. And if you want this to be profitable this morning for you, you really have to think, “Okay, I know one heart really well. That’s the heart that I’m going to examine as we’re looking through this.”
So, our test of wisdom begins in verse 13, where James says, “Who is wise and understanding among you?” It’s very direct, right? He’s immediately calling us to check whatever confidence we have in our wisdom. And then he says, “By his good conduct, let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom.”
In other words, if you think you’re a wise person, you’d better look at the pattern of conduct in your life. Godly wisdom does not exist apart from a pattern of obedience to God. And that looks like fruitful living in a spirit of meekness.
Now, we’ve been talking about that so far. Wisdom isn’t observable unless it’s applied. You have to take action on knowledge in order for it to become wisdom, and you have to do so consistently to be a wise person. Now, what you’re also going to have is this aroma about you called meekness.
Right? So, meekness—it’s not weakness, right? Meekness—it’s strength, but it’s strength that is deliberately kept under control. It’s not like the picture of a poor, shivering little greasy kitten stuck up a drain spout that you need to go and rescue, right? That’s weakness. No, this is the picture of a big, healthy lioness who’s playing with her cubs. She’s able to push her cubs around in playful, edifying ways, keeping them in check when they nip back at her.
She’s got claws, but she keeps them retracted. One swipe and she could end their lives; she doesn’t do it. Her strength is in check.
Now, have you ever had moments where you feel that kind of control over what’s going on in your life? Right? That moment where you feel that calm, you’re fully able to respond well to the challenges. You’re fully equipped with an abundance of strength from the Lord, but you also have the good sense to only use the fraction of that strength that you really need for that situation. And that is the pattern we get then for godly wisdom. And that’s a foretaste of what’s coming.
Now, we need to get there by acknowledging this reality of foolishness that’s very often operating in our hearts. James identifies human wisdom for us in the next three verses, and we’re actually going to skip right down to verse 15. There, he gives three primary sources of human wisdom: it’s earthly, it’s unspiritual, and it’s demonic.
We’re actually going to look at the second source first, okay? The unspiritualness. Now, this word for unspiritual, in the Greek, it’s a word called “sarkikos.” You don’t have to memorize that, but it comes from a word which means flesh or body. Okay, so we’re talking about fleshy wisdom.
All the kids are like, “That sounds gross.” Yeah, and it really comes from pleasing the desires of the body. It’s our base instincts, our base wants. Now, if you are saved, then when you are saved, we are told in the book of Jeremiah that God put a new heart in you. He took away the heart of stone and gave you a living heart.
However, that heart exists in a dead flesh, and that dead flesh evidently still has desires and instincts. There’s this belly there that is still in the flesh communicating things to you and wanting you to do things. We might refer to this fleshly wisdom as like a belly wisdom.
Philippians chapter three gets at this idea in describing those who don’t know Christ. So, Paul is talking about some unbelievers in the church who are causing trouble, and he says that their God is what? Their God is their belly. Their belly is their commander and tells them what to do.
Now, when we’re not self-possessed, our belly tells us what to do. If our belly says it wants a car or a bag of chips or a spouse—three very different things, right?—coming from the same source of wants, though. And this is actually where the business of diagnosing foolishness remains tricky because a lot of what your dead flesh, your belly, will want for you—maybe even most of the things it wants—could actually be things that under the right circumstances are very, very good for you.
You got that? So your belly isn’t necessarily like wanting evil for you; it’s actually like there are good things in there. And so, all right, well, then what’s the trouble? The concern here isn’t listening to your belly. The concern here is allowing your belly to take control of your decision-making, allowing it to be your chief, your commander, your captain.
Now, we’ve got some kids in here. It’s the summer. I love that. Kids, I have a question for you: Do you ever do anything wrong? Yes? No? I heard a head shake. No? Mom and dad, this is amazing. Did you know? Okay, so for the kids, those of you who answered yes, all right, I—now, next question. Have you done something wrong? Have you had your mom and dad ask you, “Why did you do that?”
Okay. All right, so parents will ask that. Have you ever then replied to your parents saying, “I don’t know”? Okay, and you’re not lying; you literally don’t know why you did that, right? Well, next time you do something wrong, when your parents ask you, “Why did you do that?” and you don’t know, you can tell them it was belly wisdom.
And luckily for you, all of these sermons are recorded and put on our website, so when you do that, your mom and dad can help you out by sitting you down and for your edification, having you listen to the sermon all over again, and you’ll be reminded that you shouldn’t let your belly be your brain.
Now, adults, we’re not off the hook, and I include college students in the splash zone over here. You’re adults too. If no one ever told you that, I’m sorry. And the power invested in me as a son of Adam, I now bequeath you adultness. Congratulations. And I’m sorry. We do this too. We allow the wants of our belly to subvert our good sense, or even worse, sometimes to bypass our good sense entirely, don’t we?
Right? We allow the things we want to turn from a want into an action before we’ve had time to let it be processed through any sense of actually, is this the right thing? So that’s belly wisdom for you. And it can be all sorts of things that we want—things high, things low—but that’s what it looks like.
Now, back in verse 14, let’s consider then this idea of earthly wisdom—the earthly source of wisdom. And this is highly related to belly wisdom. All right? What happens is that on this planet, we’ve got billions of bellies right now, and we’ve had lots of bellies for lots of years. Collectively, these bellies function as an echo chamber, and they harmonize and amplify and encourage the bellies around them to likewise be using this belly wisdom—this sense of, “I want to fulfill my own desires.”
Now, the world doesn’t just do that. The world takes this and takes it one step further. The world wants to make everyone’s belly wisdom seem sophisticated, scholastic, wise, true, and noble. And we see this: what became like a base desire gets turned into whole systems of ethics, philosophy, religion even, so that we can all feel really, really good about taking care of ourselves and really, really not that bad about ignoring and deprioritizing those around us.
Okay? That is a lot of where the world is heading, and it does it in subtle, tricky ways. But that’s where we’re going. These things work together. Our own belly has this amplifier in the world, and it’s this system, this machine that keeps going.
So, by the time you get to the third source of earthly wisdom in this passage, the demonic, what you have is demons feeding this system. It’s like they can’t keep it running. You know, if something comes into the system to disrupt it, maybe like a faithful church, demons are like, “All right, got to take care of that.” We’re going to throw some darts that direction, and we’re going to keep this running because this is pleasing to fallen angels for the world to be operating like this.
And a sign of a healthy church often is that you have evident, sometimes strange and weird spiritual attack going on when that church has proven to be faithful and loving each other and prioritizing that. But think about this: If a church then is already self-consumed—so the individuals in the church don’t have that as a priority—I don’t think that the demons are going to waste their ammo, right? Like to quote some famous old human wisdom, “Never interrupt an enemy while they are making a mistake.”
So, what you see then is that the demonic is involved, and it’s alarming to us that they’re pleased with the state of things. But even without the demonic, we’ve got trouble, right? We don’t really get to go and blame all of our belly wisdom on demons, right? We can also be sure that persisting in the state then breaks God’s heart.
Now, evidently, this is why James is putting so much emphasis in this passage on the need to discern between foolishness and godly wisdom. Now, back up now to verse 14. We see two indicators that we are being foolish: bitter jealousy and selfish ambition. These are indicators that we must watch for in ourselves, in our own hearts.
First, we look for the presence of bitter jealousy. Now, when we think of jealousy, we tend to think of it as another word for envy, right? It’s like, “Okay, well, so and so has that thing. I want it. I’m mad that I don’t have it.” I think it includes that, but biblical jealousy is different.
We’re going to think about that difference by thinking about how God is said to be jealous and how that’s actually a good thing. Remember the story of the golden calf in the Book of Exodus? Remember how God has just brought the Israelites out of Egypt through the Red Sea? He parted it, and they go, and then they go into the desert. Moses goes up the mountain, and the story says, quite literally, the Israelites, out of boredom, of all things, say, “Let’s create a golden calf.” They do. And they say, “This is the golden calf; this golden calf we just created, it’s the God that brought us out of Egypt.”
Long story short, that’s the closest the people of Israel ever came to total annihilation because God was telling Moses up the mountain, “Hey, I’m just going to wipe all these people out. We’re going to make a nation of you. We’ve got to start over.” It’s only Moses pleading that causes God to relent, which I think is part of God’s overall design.
But this is what causes the Israelites to stick around. The point here is that God protects what is His. He won’t suffer His works to be attributed to somebody else. And this is a very good thing. We look around us all the time. We see good in the world around us, don’t we? There is an abundance of good things, like food. This morning, most of you probably had breakfast, right? It is a 71-degree day outside. Who’s responsible for that? That’s God. God did that. If He wasn’t jealous, we wouldn’t know who did it.
Similarly, jealousy can actually be a good thing in humans, and I’m going to use husbands and wives as an example of this. I think that there is a structure in marriage whereby some jealousy is a good thing. I’m not advocating for weird controllingness that you kind of see lampooned in sitcoms or whatever. What I’m talking about is when you’re married—whether you realize it or not, for those of you who are married, kids, you’re not—that’s good. When you got married, those of you who got married, you made a pledge. You didn’t realize it, maybe, but you made a pledge that, among other things, you would not cross an emotional boundary with another person who is not your new spouse, right?
If you find yourself in a situation where your spouse crosses that emotional boundary with somebody else, it’s right for you to feel disappointed. It’s right for you to feel betrayed, right? And I’ll take it one step further. It’s even prudent and beneficial for married couples to take reasonable, sanctified steps to prevent that from ever happening, right?
To sum it up, jealousy is simply protecting what’s yours. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Jealousy is protecting what’s yours—or supposedly what’s yours. And that’s where jealousy goes a little bad because we can allow that self-protectiveness, that self-preservation tendency to become a core motivation.
And that’s how we get into situations where we turn bitter. We get hypersensitive, defensive, and unfairly suspicious of others, don’t we? Have you ever been there? We’ve become disappointed when we don’t get the things that we feel are owed to us or promised to us. This can also manifest as trying to guard against people disrupting your life.
“I was going to have my afternoon off. I was going to do this. You came and interrupted me. I don’t have that anymore. You took that away from me.” That’s bitter jealousy, and it’s not good for us to allow that to become our controller.
Now, the second indication that James gives of foolishness here is selfish ambition. Ambition refers to the desire for things that we want but do not yet have. Quite like jealousy, that can be good. You can want things that you don’t have that are good for you to have. Kids, you might want a specific toy that you don’t have. That toy is not evil, probably, I’m hoping. But when you get older, you’re going to want all sorts of things that sound weird to you now, like getting married, having a healthy body—like you’re all that. It just happens. Or having a healthy 401k.
But like adults, you grow up, and these are things that start to become important, you know? Like, by and large, these are good things again. But that’s, again, where the danger is. You see, you take a good thing you want, you make that a core motivation that displaces other purposes in your heart. And now you’re operating from a frame of selfish ambition, and that is a marker of foolishness.
You start to see how we can be very easily deceived into thinking we’re acting wisely when we’re really acting very, very foolishly. And it’s not that we’re trying to get bad things; it’s that in wanting those good things as our main thing, we’ve proven our wisdom to be foolish.
So then, in verse 14, James goes on to tell us not to boast about our wisdom and so prove to be false to the truth. He’s basically telling us, “Be very careful; don’t delude yourself.” It’s possible James had very specific people in mind who were actually like out loud bragging about how wise they are, but I don’t think that’s what he’s mainly getting at.
I think rather he’s going after that inner reassurance we tend to give ourselves by which we stroke our own egos and reassure ourselves that we are doing good, you know, because what we want is good; we’re doing good. And that’s the essence of human wisdom right there. Then we tell ourselves what we want is good, and that because what we want is good, what we’re doing is good. And I’m here to tell you that’s bad.
All right, now, us trying to tell ourselves then how wise we are to be pursuing these things, especially when we’re starting to see it’s disrupting other core motivations that should be there. As Christians, this should be a big blaring alarm going off in our hearts every time it’s happening. It’s proof positive that we have crossed that line.
I was trying to decide how to explain this and give this the right level of weight. I was thinking about the lights, the indicator lights you have in your dashboard. But the problem is that the lights in today’s cars, they’re too gentle. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this. So you’re driving your car and a little light pops up that says, “Service engine soon.” What exactly does that mean? Like, in the next 500 miles or so, can I push it? What soon? And then when I get it serviced, what’s the service that’s going to happen? Is it that the car is going to fall apart? Probably not.
Maybe we get it serviced so that, in theory, something bad might not happen to it later. That’s gentle and fluffy. A lot of the alarms we think about in our lives, we tend to treat them like that. And that’s not the kind of alert that James has given us here. He’s not giving us a service engine soon alarm.
Now, you’ve got to understand me on this. When I was a kid, our family car was a late 1960s Volkswagen bus camper conversion. That’s the double slug bug. For kids who still play that game, you probably don’t, but it was a cool family car, and I was totally embarrassed to drive around with my parents in that car. As you can imagine, we took a lot of trips with this car, and one time we had gone up to visit my grandparents in northern California. It was a ten-hour drive to get up there.
We had our visit, we left early in the morning to come back down. What happens is, two hours down the road, it’s still dark outside. I hear my dad in the front seat—he’s driving—he says, “Uh oh,” and he’s very understated. What had happened was there was this red, ugly check engine light that had gone off on the dashboard.
Now, what you need to understand is that the check engine light in those old Volkswagen vans was not a gentle warning. All right? When that little stinker turned on, what it meant is that something catastrophically had gone wrong with your engine. And you better pull over now because you probably lost power half a mile back. You didn’t realize it. You gotta stop so you don’t kill anybody, right? So, sure enough, my dad, being a prudent man, pulls us over to the side of the road on Interstate 5, and he gets his flashlight. He walks around to the back of the car where the engine is, takes a few minutes, and he comes, opens up the door, lets us come out and take a look.
I’ll never forget the whole back of the car—this isn’t the inside of the case; this is like the back of the actual car itself—has this thick, yellow, greasy gloss all over it. What had happened is the engine had failed so catastrophically that oil was blowing out through the casing in the engine, and it was even getting into the pistons and spraying out through the exhaust pipe.
Now, long story short, we didn’t get home that day. That car—we had to go back up to my grandparents. We actually turned and took a different car home, and the car came home weeks later after it had been repaired. It had to be totally rebuilt.
Now, what’s the point? The alert that James is trying to raise on our dashboard here when we catch ourselves boasting about this—this isn’t the check engine soon light on your 2024 Toyota Prius, okay? This is that doomsday check engine light on your 1969 Volkswagen. And if you find yourself pursuing selfish motives and reassuring yourself about how wise you are to do so, that should be an indication to you of some catastrophic internal spiritual failure.
In a worldly sense, you might be able to accomplish a whole lot, but in a spiritual sense, you are going nowhere. You are not going an inch further down that road. So, what we find then is that that internal motivation behind our decisions and our actions, it matters. It has spiritual weight to it.
And it matters so much that when you have it wrong, you’re utterly incapable of doing anything of benefit for the kingdom of God. And that’s tricky because sometimes human wisdom will tell you to do this thing, and earthly and godly wisdom will tell you to do that exact same thing as an action.
But because your motivation is crossed, the human wisdom answer is dead wrong, and the godly wisdom answer to do that same exact thing, arriving there to the same conclusion. After all, the internal calculus we do is dead right. And there’s fruitfulness there. That’s wild.
This is what James is getting at then down in verse 16, where he talks about every vile practice is going to be present where you’ve got this wisdom operating. Do you know what the word vile means? Actually, that’s a great word in English. Talk a lot about the Greek, but that’s a great English word. It means gross, yucky, repulsive. It’s a good word for your kids to learn.
In the Greek, it carries this additional sense of total uselessness, like this vile thing. It’s not going to be good for anything. You can’t use that for anything. At best, it’s useless; at worst, it’s harmful. Now, the other word used to describe this state of affairs in verse 16 is disorder, right? This speaks to unproductive chaos arising out of unproductive chaos.
So, not only does this failure of human wisdom lead to no fruit whatsoever, nothing good is going to come of it. It creates an environment whereby it is harder for other good fruit to ever exist there as well. Okay, see that?
Now, I want to do a quick aside here because people here work in the secular world. I do too. Human wisdom has accomplished a lot. Human wisdom has done a lot for medicine, art, and architecture. So, in a human sense, there’s a lot of good that’s happened. What we’re talking about here is spiritual benefit—what’s going to last after we’re six feet under.
Now, fortunately, James doesn’t leave us there. We go on then, now, and in verse 17 and 18, we get some positive signs to look for as we seek to live with godly wisdom. In verse 18, we get an immediate contrast to that uselessness that came from foolishness. What we have here is a harvest of righteousness sown in peace by those who make peace. Isn’t that refreshing?
Yeah, I love that. I want that. Don’t you want that? So we’ve got to be making peace. Sign me up for that. My middle name is Make Peace. And then it really is Make Peace.
Verse 17, we then get several positive indicators of what it looks like to be making those decisions from a place of peace. First, we need to have pure intentions. So, not that bitter jealousy, right? Not that selfish ambition, right? So, what do you replace it with? Real question. You all can shout out: What is your core motivation in your heart?
If you have pure motivations as a believer, I put you on the spot. I think you all know. I think it’s hard to say it, but I hope you’re thinking things like, “Love God with your heart and soul and mind.” I hope we’re thinking things like, “Seek first the kingdom of God.” Right? When you read scripture, you don’t really need to know when you’re off, but you know it when you got it right.
It’s interesting to me that James doesn’t actually give the direct counterpoint to here. He just says your intention is pure, and you should know what that is. So if you don’t, come find me afterward and we can talk. But I think a lot of you know what that is right now.
James next says that you’ve got to be peaceable. Right? When we are persistent in godly wisdom, there’s going to be this peaceableness, which is closely related to purity. What that means is we are inclined toward making peace with those around us and how we are resolving decisions in our life, which means that sometimes a decision we make is going to go contrary to what our belly is telling us we want.
Right next, godly wisdom is gentle. So remember that meekness we talked about earlier? That lioness who is controlled in the strength that she has—she could maim those cubs; she doesn’t. We need to have a similar sort of gentleness when we’re operating in this world as believers. Overreaction is an epidemic in the church right now. It’s an epidemic in our culture.
What would it look like if the church was actually responding with right measured force to the things that came up rather than some of the overreactions? That’s something we got to keep in mind in our personal lives as well. How do you discipline your children? Are you overreacting also? How do you share the gospel? Are you overstating the force? Or are you allowing the Holy Spirit some room to work?
Next, godly wisdom is going to be open to reason. Now, this is an interesting term. It actually refers to the idea of a soldier who is willing to accept not just the orders of his commander but also the rationale behind the orders. You see that?
So we’re not talking about being begrudgingly obedient to God. Rather, we’re careful to understand God: “Why do you want me to do these things?” And when God gives us an answer—which He very often does in scripture, not always, but very often—we humbly then accept that answer.
Now, I’ve seen where people tend to reject the answer that God gives to, “Why does this thing happen? How do these things go?” They do that by asking that same question, “Why? Why? Why?” again and again and again. What’s happening is they’re not getting the answer they want, so they keep asking the question. It seems kind of wise on the surface, but really what’s going on there is this insidious form of stubbornness.
So, be very, very careful when you find yourself in the why loop, okay? Now, full of mercy is the next marker. We’re going to be quick to forgive and willing to give to those in need who aren’t going to be able to repay us. This is a reflection of the heart and character of our Lord Himself, isn’t it?
Right. So this is a place where our interacting with godly wisdom actually makes it so that the God we worship and are indebted to is starting to show through what we’re doing. Your wisdom is also going to be full of good fruit. We want that, right? That’s a big contrast to the vileness we were talking about before that comes with human wisdom.
Then finally, the last two, we get to impartiality, which we heard about a few weeks ago. We’re not making decisions with this idea of, “I like this person, so I’m going to decide in their favor,” or “I’m going to favor this person because I’ll get something in return for it,” right? It’s not this tricky way to set our belly up for future satisfaction and gratification, right? We’re not doing that.
Finally, we get to sincerity. Ultimately, the question of sincerity gets back to the heart of what makes us all hard to begin with, right? Like, are we being honest with ourselves when we’re telling ourselves this is the wise course of action, or are we deluding ourselves? Which is exactly what James says: don’t do that.
Now, there’s a lot here to meditate on. I could spend a very, very long time taking a lot of minutes today going through that list. But I think the better thing for you all is going to be to consider if you’ve got a hard decision this week or you want to think through the decisions you have been making, take this list in verse 17 with you and kind of go through and think, “Okay, God, prayerfully, help me put some light on these situations. Help me understand my decision-making here; clear up some of this murkiness because I feel like I’ve let things get out of hand.”
Now, James’ primary objective in this passage has been to expose foolishness and identify godly wisdom. But before we wrap up today, I’d like to talk about what it takes to make that flip from operating in foolishness over to operating in godly wisdom. Because James doesn’t actually give us a prescription for that here, right? You see that?
He’s basically saying the big problem is identifying it. I think that’s true. I think once we identify it, there’s a lot we can do about it, but most of the time, we don’t get that opportunity because we’re ignoring it. If you find yourself identifying that you’re not operating from a frame of godly wisdom, well, first of all, if you’re here and you don’t have that new heart that Jeremiah writes about, that means that you haven’t pledged your life to Christ, nor have you come to trust in His sacrifice on the cross to secure your forgiveness for your sins.
Then there’s not a whole lot I’m going to say to you other than this: You’ve got to bend the knee. You’ve got to bend the knee to Christ because you may hate the fact that you’re operating with this belly wisdom, but only with the Holy Spirit in your heart—which Christ gives you when you make Him your Lord—only with that in your heart are you able to do anything about this.
So, I encourage you, ask God to give you trust and faith right now. Even for those of us who have placed our trust in Christ and who have that new heart, but we also see those markers of foolishness. What do we do?
The first and best pathway in godly wisdom is going to be the fear of God. All right? Remember that? What’s the beginning of wisdom? The fear of the Lord. Okay. That was true when you first became a believer. You may not have recognized it as such, but there’s this trembling that comes with it.
Remember that story in Luke’s gospel where you have Peter fishing? He’s been fishing all day; he hasn’t caught anything. Then Jesus comes and says, “Okay, let down your net.” Peter’s like, “Well, I’ve been fishing all day; I haven’t caught anything. I’ll do it anyway.” All right, and then what happens? Do you remember what happens? He catches a whole bunch of fish—so much fish that what? The net begins to break? That’s right.
Then Peter’s reaction, right? He’s like, “That’s great. Cool, right?” What does he do? It’s not that he trembles; he’s like, “Whoa, who are you?” He experiences this existential fear, realizing that, like, “I can’t control this. Like, this really is the God of the universe. He can look into my soul.” There’s a sense in which, like, words can’t even, like, describe what’s going on.
I think that as Christians, we need to be cultivating an ongoing sense of the existential fear of the Lord—not because we’re afraid of hell; that’s not our fear anymore. But I tell you what, there’s a whole lot of fear about God besides the fear of hell. And I’ll tell you what else: that fear is clean, right? That is the fear that casts out all other fears.
If you’re worried about not achieving your ambitions, if you’re worried about something that might be taken away from you or is being taken away from you, the fear of the Lord can cast all that garbage out of your heart. I encourage you to find passages and scriptures that you return to often that highlight that fear of the Lord. My go-to is Isaiah 40. I also go to the end of Job a lot where God is, like, rebuking Job and explaining to Job, like, who He really is.
Those are great passages. The whole scripture, though, is capable of being edifying. But, like, go to scripture and in that moment, find those passages that are going to remind you that we don’t worship some distant, anemic deity, right? Like, our God is incalculably, like, present and strong, and that’s probably going to make us tremble when we get that right.
My last suggestion is, if you need it, talk to a brother or sister who you know is sensitized to the fear of the Lord. If you’re struggling with this stuff, all right, you can go and talk to someone you trust and say, “Hey, look, I’m struggling with a decision.” Depending on how much you trust them, tell them what’s going on and say, “I’m trying to reason through my own motivations here. Can you help me to do that?”
I’d also say that it’d be great if we as a church body become sensitized to the fear of the Lord because we are increasingly able to be that person for our brothers and sisters.
Now, whatever you do, don’t stay put in foolishness in your lives, all right? Big foolishness, little foolishness, whatever it is, if there’s foolishness you’ve got, don’t let that stay there. Nothing good is going to come of it. And remember that in dealing with it, we stand to reap a harvest of righteousness. That’s amazing.
Pray with me.
Heavenly Father, we are so often caught up in the system of our own wants and the resonance of those wants back to us and the world around us. Lord, we acknowledge this morning that nothing good is going to come out of operating like that. But we also acknowledge that we need your help. Help us have your wisdom—godly wisdom. Help us to have that burning desire in our hearts to do what is right, to seek first the kingdom and to see your glory. And yes, Lord, help us put in perspective all of what’s going on by having that right fear of you—that fear of you that is unlike other fears, the fear of you that makes us healthy and strong and bold. We know that only you can give that, and we are so grateful that you call us your children and you guide us to deal with this in our hearts.
We pray this in Jesus Christ’s name. Amen.