09.20.2024 - Humble Wisdom

Humble Wisdom

Scripture

James 3:13–18 NIV

13 Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. 14 But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. 15 Such “wisdom” does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. 16 For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice. 17 But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. 18 Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.

James 4:1–10 NIV

1 What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. 3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. 4 You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5 Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us? 6 But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.” 7 Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

Songs

(From Our Great Redeemer’s Praise Hymnal)

557 — Jesus Paid it All.

558 — Marvelous Grace of Our Loving Lord

560 — Living Hope

572 — Amazing Grace

380 — His Eye is on the Sparrow

Opening Prayer

Wisdom

For thousands of years, people all over the world have looked to wisdom as a way to make good decisions. We seek wisdom to help us make ethical choices, especially when there are no easy answers or when dealing with crisis situations. Most of the wisdom we have gathered over the years focuses on helping us live wisely daily so we don’t have to deal with as many crises. Prevention is the best form of medicine, and it is also one of those wise teachings passed down to us over the ages.

The Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible, has several books devoted to teaching wisdom. Like many religions, the ancient Israelites had wisdom for future generations. Most of these scriptures are not too surprising compared to the writings of other cultures. What is surprising is how little the New Testament addresses wisdom. We have a few scattered teachings of Jesus throughout the gospels, and Paul addresses wisdom in his letters. But even there, Paul usually points out the limitation of human wisdom, teaching us that without the spirit of God, we will never attain true wisdom.

However, one letter in the New Testament stands apart from the others in its focus on wisdom and practical teaching about following Jesus daily, no matter who or where we are. It is the letter from the apostle James, the younger brother of Jesus. In this letter that he wrote to the churches, he references the teaching of Jesus from the sermon on the mount and other places more than any other letter in this work, which preachers and teachers have used in the church for nearly 2000 years. Our scripture passage for today comes from that letter, and it is one of the best teachings about wisdom in the Bible. In these verses, James shows us that we are called to follow Jesus with godly wisdom.

...is Humble and Trusting

Humble

James tells us to follow Jesus humbly. We are not to be led by our ambition or selfish desires. We are not supposed to assume that we know better than everyone else arrogantly. God upholds a humble spirit. Pride leading to a fall is not something God discovered about creation. It is the way He made it to be.

James tells us:

James 3:17 NIV

17 But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere.

Trusting in God

Some people like lists. You and James would get along quite well if you are one of those people. Here, he lists the characteristics of godly wisdom, or wisdom from heaven, as he put it. Pure. Peace-loving. Considerate. Submissive. Full of mercy and good fruit. Impartial. And last but not least, sincere.

I am not good with lists. I can remember one or two things. On a good day, I might remember three. But once a fourth item shows up on the list, I’ve forgotten the first thing. Going grocery shopping with me can be quite an adventure. I usually come back with only half the things I needed and a few things I found that I didn’t need.

There are a few tricks you can do to help remember things on a list, and sometimes they work well. Repeating them over and over is one trick. It usually sticks if I can get it three or four times in a row. Another trick is to make it into a song. Can you imagine meeting the preacher at Walmart and hearing him singing about milk, eggs, bread, and peanut butter? You’d probably think I was crazy. And what’s worse is that I might remember the tune but forget the words to the song, which wouldn’t help, after all.

When all that fails, what can you do? If you’re like me, the details get jumbled together in your head like mixed-up pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and you can look for connections between them and focus on the common theme. James tells us that godly wisdom is humble, and all of those other details come from my faith that trusts God even more than we trust ourselves. So, if we come up with a notion of wisdom that does not reflect trust in God, it might not be wisdom from heaven.

...does not seek it’s own desires or understanding

Desires

James says that one of the things that tries to pull us away from godly wisdom is our desires. We want what we want and don’t want what we don’t want. If that desire is strong enough, it doesn’t matter who tells us otherwise or how sound their reasoning is. The heart will always win. One of the biggest parts of growing up as a person and maturing in your faith spiritually is learning how to live a life and make choices that are not dictated by our desires. If we are to live godly lives with godly wisdom, we have to master our desires rather than let them rule over us.

Understanding

Sometimes, our foolish and deceitful hearts play tricks on us and recruit our heads to work against us as well. When we want something bad enough, we become experts at making excuses for why we should have it. We can use all of our God-given reasoning to turn against him, putting ourselves in charge of our own lives and leaving God and his word in the dust behind us.

Maybe that’s why James considered submissiveness one of the qualities of godly wisdom. We must be willing to submit our understanding and follow the counsel of those wiser than us. And there is always someone whiter than us. Even King Solomon, who is celebrated as one of the wisest people in the history of the world, did foolish things. He was at his best, and we are at our best when we recognize that God is always wiser than us, and we submit our choices to him, trusting and obeying what he tells us to do.

Seek True Wisdom

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So how do we do that? How do we submit our desires and understanding to God and follow him?

First, we need to recognize the places already leading us astray. James tells us to be on the lookout for envy and jealousy. When we think of the 10 Commandments, murder and adultery are usually high on the list of sins we try to avoid. It’s easy for us to forget the last commandments. That is where God tells us not to covet or desire anything our neighbor has that we do not. We are familiar with that feeling, and while it sometimes feels like such a small sin to want something that is not ours to have, it cuts off gratitude in our lives and is the seedbed for every other sin.

If you’re like me and are not good at remembering lists, I will only give you one other thing that James asked us to do. He doesn’t tell us to go out and do good works in Jesus’ name. Well, later on, he does, but not to help us attain this godly wisdom. No, after recognizing where desire and pride in their own understanding have taken an unholy hold of our lives, James tells us to grieve.

Sometimes, that means grieving our sins. It is hard to truly repent of sin if we aren’t really sorry we did it. When sin takes hold of our lives, it wins us, and we cannot heal ourselves. So go ahead, weep and wail, and mourn that loss, that beautiful child of God that he created us to be, and that is broken by sin.

Often, we are led to sin because of other grief. Most of the people in my family drink alcohol occasionally, but I have rarely seen them drunk. I do remember one Christmas season almost 20 years ago, which was the first and only time I ever saw my dad drunk. His father was in a coma and had been in the hospital since Thanksgiving, and he was not getting better. We were all dealing with some real grief about the situation. Rather than turning to God, asking others for help, or even just weeping and wailing, as James suggests, Dad turned to alcohol instead. It wasn’t a sin that he needed to grieve. It was the fact that he was losing his father. But being unable or refusing to grieve started leading him down a path full of sin and foolishness.

If you have sin in your life, grieve it. If you’ve suffered a loss or are suffering a loss and it hurts, grieve it. It may feel foolish now, but being willing to take that to the Lord will open you up to his wisdom, which you will never find on your own. If you can trust God with your hurt, you can trust him with anything.

Closing Prayer

Lord, we thank you for your wisdom. We thank you that you share it with us even when it’s hard for us to understand. We know that when we don’t know what to do, we can always come and ask You. You allow us to follow You by faith, even if we don’t understand. We need you to lead us even more than we need to understand all that we face in our lives. Please help us follow you with the faith of a child, trusting that you will give us understanding as we grow and mature in our ability to receive it. In Jesus’ name. Amen.