Sermon preached at The Bridge Church- July 28, 2024
Intro
Before I get into the text, let me give you a quick rundown about where our family was the last couple of weeks. It’s actually the same for the Thiessens every year on the third and fourth weeks of July, so some of you have heard this before. The first week was a vacation week with Carolyn’s whole family at a place called Lakeside Resort in Oliver, a town in the southern Okanagan. “Resort,” as I’ve said before, is a very charitable description. I watched a poorly produced and awkward promotional video for Lakeside where the owner shows all of the “resort’s” incredibly underwhelming amenities. Toward the end of the video he proclaims, “there are fancy folks who want fancy” and then there’s about a five second silence where he struggles to articulate what he wants to say. Finally, he concludes, “we don’t provide that.” Great, great promotional video. Really just sums the place up.
The second week we were in the Okanagan was with about 40 other people from The Bridge, coming from 11 different family units, serving at the Okanagan Gleaners. I talked about this a few weeks ago and a bunch of other times in the last couple of years, but the Gleaners is a Christian ministry that takes produce that can’t be sold in stores. Volunteers like us chop it up and dry it so that it can become soup mix and be sent around the world to feed the hungry. It’s phenomenal work, and a great, great week for a segment of our church family. We get to serve together, go to beaches in the afternoon together, worship and grow in the evenings, and just live life together while we camp out on the Gleaners’ front lawn. We just came back yesterday and I’m excited to get back to normal life for a bit.
We’ve been going through the New Testament letter of James this summer at The Bridge. Jaylene led you through the first half of James 3 last week, which is all about the power of the tongue. Today we’ll pick it up in 3:13.
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 3:13-18
1. Wisdom
Let’s begin our breakdown of this passage with what looks like a major theme: wisdom. James uses that word 4 times in these 6 verses. How would you define wisdom? You could say that it is having an understanding that aligns with reality, reality being as God defines it and reveals it. You could say that it is the appropriate application of knowledge. You could say that it is the ability to make good judgments. All of those are pretty similar, and honestly, all of it sounds pretty good. It’s something we all want, isn’t it?
I realize we have people coming from all over the place today. We probably have people who have been doing this church thing all their lives. They’ve been following Jesus for decades. We also probably have people who don’t know the difference between Joseph the Prince of Egypt and Joseph the soon to no longer be prince of the United States. You see what I did there, quick current events tie-in. We’ve got young and old, we’ve got people whose lives are comparatively together and others who feel like their lives are being held together by duct tape. However, I’m pretty sure that every single one of you desires wisdom. Regardless of your background, you want understanding. You want to make good decisions that produce good fruit in your life. You want to be able to see clearly what’s going on in the world and in your life and to live well in response. World events cry out for wisdom, don’t they? When you open your news feed and there’s a continual stream of political turmoil and natural disasters and social tension, and that’s in addition to all the chaos in your individual life, isn’t wisdom what your heart cries out for? I know that’s true for me! I think it’s safe to say that most of us recognize a need for more wisdom.
James knows that. That’s why he begins by inquiring, who is really wise and understanding among you? At the Gleaners, we put on a little worship and devotional every night, and we always tried to make it accessible to the many kids that were part of our group. We’d have a lot of interaction and lots of questions. Some kids would be raising their hand every time, even if it became quickly obvious they had no idea what the answer was or what they were going to say when called on. James knows there are those who will immediately step forward and raise their hands. Oooh pick me! I’m wise! I have understanding! What’s my award? But James instructs us to wait a second. There are a couple of different kinds of wisdom. He lets us know that there’s such a thing as earthly wisdom. He actually says it’s worse than that. Earthly wisdom is unspiritual. He even names it as demonic. On the other hand, there’s the good stuff: heavenly wisdom.
Let’s clear up a possible misconception here. When James uses terms like earthly and heavenly, he’s not talking about physical vs. non-physical. He’s not even talking about this life vs. the afterlife. That’s what some people imagine when they hear the contrast between earthly and spiritual. There’s a phrase I’ve heard occasionally: people accuse Christians of being so heavenly-minded that they’re of no earthly good. The idea is that this believer is so focused on what happens after they die that they make no impact on life before they die. Fair enough. That can probably happen. But that’s completely opposite of what James is saying. The wisdom he favors absolutely makes an impact on day to day reality. After all, what’s it all about according to James? It’s about life! Therefore, earthly vs. heavenly wisdom isn’t about physicality or about temporality. It’s about two completely different approaches, two completely different foundations for wisdom. One comes from God and is oriented around truth, the other comes from humans and is driven by ulterior motives. One is the real deal, the other disguises itself as wisdom but ends up being anything but. It’s like some of the vegetables we dealt with this past week at the Gleaners. Let’s say you get a cart of potatoes to prep. Some of these potatoes might look pretty good on the outside. But you cut it in half, and it’s just black, rotting, worm infested potato flesh on the inside. You’re welcome for the wonderful image to meditate on. It looked good, but turned out to be inedible.
The question is, when it comes to wisdom, how do you know what’s real and what’s not? How do you know what is heavenly wisdom and what is the earthly parody of it? According to James in this section, it all comes down to relationships. It all comes down to how we relate to other people. Wisdom is made manifest in our relationships with other people. Let’s dig a bit deeper into the proverbial potato to see what I mean. Let’s examine earthly wisdom.
2. The fruit of earthly wisdom
What does James say is the driving force behind earthly wisdom? He says it’s bitter envy and selfish ambition in the heart. These are clearly very relational terms. They have to do with how you think about and treat other people. Specifically, these terms indicate that earthly wisdom causes you to see other people primarily as competitors who might take what you want unless you get them out of your way.
Now, this is a bit challenging because a lot of us have ambition, a lot of us are competitive, and we would generally say this isn’t a bad thing. In fact, we celebrate it. It’s why we love watching sports, like the Olympics which have just begun. Most of us don’t watch these sports, ever, but suddenly the Olympics roll around and everyone becomes an expert in the decathlon or breakdancing. And why? Because a gold medal is on the line for our country, and we want to see our country come out on top! Competition drives us to accomplish all kinds of feats.
Earlier this year, our family made a significant fitness investment and bought a rowing machine. But it’s not just any rowing machine. This rowing machine has a large touch screen with a bunch of video games that you play by rowing. The game I love is a fishing game, where your bait rises in the water as you row, and when you time it right and catch a fish, you have to row like crazy to haul it into your boat. I’ll do this for 30 minutes, I’m sweating like crazy, and I’ve had fun the whole time. It doesn’t even feel like I’ve worked out. But the other part of what drives me with this rowing machine is the leaderboard. I want to get the highest score. I want to climb those ranks and reach number one for the week or for the month. I want to be the top rower in my division. I might finish a workout, look at the leaderboard, and see that if I row hard for 5 more minutes, I might climb a few more spots. So despite being dog tired, I’ll hop on to another workout and push myself harder. Competition makes me fitter. It builds my endurance.
Again, those seem like good things. Is James saying that this is earthly wisdom, that it’s demonic, that this kind of ambition and competition produces disorder and every evil practice? Again, I think the key here is the impact ambition has on your relational posture. You see some athletes in the Olympics who are poor losers. They pout because things didn’t go their way. They scorn the competitors who did win. And then you see others who seem to genuinely congratulate others on their victory. They embrace the one who bested them. They gave it their all, competition brought the best in them, and even if it wasn’t enough to make it to the top of the podium, they accept the loss with gratitude. Both involve competition, but the relational fruit is very different. Do you see what I mean?
Let me show you what this looks like in the New Testament. The apostle Paul wasn’t afraid of using metaphors that evoked competition. He penned a couple of letters to the Christians in Corinth, where one of the most prestigious athletic games in the ancient world was held on a regular basis. In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul teaches the believers there to run the race of the Christian life so as to get the prize and to exercise self-discipline so that they can win the fight. That sounds ambitious! He even reminded the Corinthians that even though, as a former persecutor of the church, he was the least of all the apostles, he worked harder than all of them- though he is quick to add it wasn’t him, but the grace of God that was with him. Paul was driven. He was ambitious. But here’s the key: his ambition was for the Gospel to be made known, and he embraced the work that others did to make that happen. He wasn’t envious of them. He didn’t resent them for their success. In other words, it wasn’t selfish ambition. In Corinth, some of the Christians were becoming competitive regarding their leaders. Some favored Paul, others favored a guy named Apollos. Paul rebukes them for this. He even says there’s nothing wise about their mindset, and that both he and Apollos are only servants of Christ who are doing the work assigned to them.
What we see is there is a kind of ambition or drive or competitiveness that can be good and healthy and shows respect and love for others. However, Paul experienced divisiveness and envy from the Corinthians, and he experienced it in other places too. In Acts 13, we meet Paul and Barnabas in a city called Pisidian Antioch. They entered the synagogue and shared about how Jesus was the fulfillment of the Scriptures and thus, the hopes of the Jewish people. The Jews who heard them were intrigued and invited them to return the following Sabbath day. By then, word had spread beyond the Jews in Antioch. Many Gentiles had caught wind of the message and understood it was good news for them too. On the following Sabbath, the synagogue was packed to the rafters including with many Gentiles. This is what we read in Acts 13:45: “when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy.” That word “jealousy” is the same word as what James uses in James 3:14. They didn’t rejoice because others were sharing in this good news that was for them as well. They wanted to keep it to themselves. They thought they were losing if the Gospel became too accessible to others. So they heaped abuse on Paul and Barnabas and hardened their hearts against Jesus.
It’s the same deal earlier in Acts. In Acts 5, the apostles are healing all kinds of people. More and more are putting their trust in Jesus. People are joyfully coming together in Jesus’ name. However, instead of celebrating this renewal of faith, we read in verse 17 that “the high priest and all his associates…were filled with jealousy.” Same word. As a result, they arrested the apostles and threw them in prison. They couldn’t see the good thing that was happening. Instead, they saw the Jesus movement as a threat to them and so their jealousy drove them to arrest men who were doing nothing but speaking Jesus and bringing healing.
See, this is what earthly wisdom looks like. It pits you against everyone else and declares that nobody else can share your glory. It says that nobody else can have more praise than you. It teaches you that it’s you against the world, that there’s a zero sum game out there and if you don’t take advantage, others will take advantage of you. Worldly wisdom says if you’re not first, you’re last. It gives you strategies for getting ahead. This is where the apparent wisdom is- it tells you how to win, no matter what the cost, even if it means illegally flying a drone over your opponent’s practice- another current events tie in for you there. How about us polite Canadians? Big-time cheaters! Worldly wisdom gives you advice about how to take down your opponents. You’ll find worldly wisdom in best-selling books on business and politics, you’ll hear it in podcasts, you’ll hear it from some coaches. Worldly wisdom is about your name, your glory, your status. Earthly wisdom is all about advancing and leaving others in your wake.
Beware this kind of supposed wisdom, which is everywhere in our world. It is straight from the pit of hell and has nothing to do with God. The fruit of it is broken relationships, it’s disorder and every evil practice.
3. The fruit of God’s wisdom
That’s earthly wisdom. What’s wisdom that comes from above? James gives us a series of descriptions to describe the evidence of heavenly wisdom. Again, when we’re talking about wisdom from above, it’s not airy-fairy, disconnected, “spiritual” musings. We’re talking about real life, and once again, it’s all relational. James writes that God’s wisdom is pure, peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere.
Let’s make a few comments about these and then focus on a couple in particular. Being a lover of peace and a maker of peace displays wisdom. James himself lived this out. If you don’t know, in the aftermath of persecution and the dispersion of some of the disciples, James became the leader of the early church in Jerusalem. There were a couple of situations that significantly raised the temperature in relationships between believers. It actually had to do with the same thing that sparked the bitter jealousy in Pisidian Antioch we referred to earlier. As more and more Gentiles heard the good news about Jesus and believed, some of the Jewish Christians grew resentful. They thought the Gentiles believers should have to jump through more hoops to get in. There was real tension here. But in Acts 15, James hears all the arguments and refuses to side entirely with one group or the other. Instead, he proposes a way forward that would limit the requirements on Gentiles while also respecting the sensitivities of the Jewish believers in Jesus. He made peace. That wise decision caused people on all sides to rejoice. It was a decision that allowed the Gospel to continue going forward and the church to remain united. It was wise because it brought peace.
James says wisdom is displayed through a considerate and submissive spirit. When you hear the word “submissive,” let’s be clear on what this means. It doesn’t mean being a doormat, especially when it comes to important matters involving deep convictions. One commentary says it’s a willing deference to others when big theological or moral principles are not involved. It’s saying to someone, “you can decide, I’ll go with what you want.” It’s not needing to call all the shots. It’s being ok with others taking center stage. Very often, this is wisdom.
Wisdom is shown through mercy. Mercy is deciding not to pay back what someone really deserves. Worldly wisdom tells us to make our enemies pay. My understanding is that a significant driving force behind the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of World War II was the lack of mercy shown to Germany after the conclusion of World War I. The victorious countries demanded that the losing countries, especially Germany, pay financially for the cost of the war. That caused inflation, widespread poverty, and national humiliation, all of which Hitler used to his advantage. In retrospect, I think we can say it would have been wise of the victorious nations to display more mercy.
Wisdom is being impartial and sincere. Impartial here goes back to what James says in chapter 2 about not showing favoritism to the rich. Worldly wisdom says you should treat the rich and well-connected better, because they can get you places. They might take you on fancy vacations so you don’t have to stay at the Lakeside Resort. God’s wisdom tells us to look at the heart and show no favoritism, since all of us are frail human beings accountable to God. Of course, sincerity means you don’t put on a show before others, but that your life is genuine. That, as well, is evidence of real, heavenly wisdom.
Notice again that all of this is relational. However, there’s a word James uses in verse 13 I want to focus on. He talks about the humility that comes from wisdom. He refers to humility as primary evidence of wisdom. Of all the words here, I wonder if humility is the least understood. It was probably the least understood in the first century. Humility was not something people in the ancient world desired. They believed it meant you were weak. They were convinced it was an indication of low social status. Why would anybody pursue humility if that’s the case?
In our day, some people treat humility like it’s a show, as if it’s a public display of how not stuck up we are. Someone might compliment me on how great of a cook I am and I might say, aw shucks, I’m terrible at cooking, I’m just the worst, you’re too kind really. I even had this temptation run through my mind at the Gleaners this past week. Here I am, the lead pastor of this church, and I’m cutting up cauliflower, scraping dried vegetables off of trays, and cleaning showers. I wonder if people are looking at me and noticing my humility? Do they see how virtuous I am? Are they in awe at how much of a servant leader I am? “Look at my humility everyone!” I didn’t dwell on that thought, but I experienced the temptation of that mindset.
I think you know intuitively that once that thought is believed, humility is out the window. There are a couple of quotes ascribed to the famous 20th century author C.S. Lewis about humility that I want to share with you. Here’s the first:
“Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call “humble” nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.”
C.S. Lewis
He will not be thinking about humility, he will not be thinking about himself at all. That’s what humility is.
Here’s another quote that I think gets at it even more, and speaks directly to that whole selfish ambition idea we were discussing before. This is from Lewis’ book, The Screwtape Letters, which is written from the perspective of a demon teaching a junior demon how to do his work:
“The Enemy (this is referring to God, since it’s from a demon’s perspective) wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favor that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor’s talents.”
C.S. Lewis
Again, that is humility. It’s the ability to rejoice in another’s talents and accomplishments just as much as your own, because you’re rejoicing in the gift rather than the owner of that gift. Even more, you’re rejoicing in the ultimate giver of all good gifts. This kind of attitude, which is so contrary to earthly wisdom, is the epitome and the fruit of wisdom.
4. How to get wisdom
There’s a big question that most of us will possess at this point. If that’s what heavenly wisdom as opposed to earthly wisdom is, how do I get it? I want wisdom. We’ve talked about the good fruit of it, but how do I access it? To put it simply, if these two kinds of wisdom are evidenced by two different kinds of relationships with others, then it makes sense that the wisdom you grow in depends on who you’re in relationship with.
This is what the Old Testament book of Proverbs says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” (9:10). Wisdom comes from relationship with God, because He is wisdom. As you know Him more and more personally, you will in turn become more like Him. In the New Testament, we see that wisdom comes particularly from a relationship with God through Christ Jesus, who Paul describes in 1 Corinthians as the wisdom of God.
See, when you take that description of earthly versus heavenly wisdom in James and you line it up with Jesus, I think the evidence is overwhelming that Jesus embodies true heavenly wisdom. Listen to Philippians 2 with our passage from James in mind:
“5 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; 7 rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death- even death on a cross!”
Philippians 2:5-8
Jesus did not think about his own glory but laid it aside. He embraced lowliness not because others would look at him and exclaim, “wow, how humble.” He endured all the way to the cross because he wasn’t thinking about himself but about us. He did it in order to reconcile us to God. He did it to restore the relationship with God we had ruined by embracing worldly wisdom in the first place!
There’s one other word James uses to describe God’s wisdom: he says it is pure. That could also be translated as holy. That’s Jesus. The apostle John, in his letter, says that those who fix their hopes on Jesus become pure, because He is pure. My friends, you long for wisdom, right? You want understanding, you want to make good choices, you want to live rightly, yes? Make your relationship with God first and foremost. Put your hope in Jesus. Devote yourself to growing in relationship with Christ, because he gave everything for relationship with you. He is wise. We see it in his posture towards us. Wisdom is relational, and you’ll get it through relationship with the one who is wisdom.