LIVE Join our service streaming live right now! Click here to watch.
We want God’s wisdom, yet often what we really want is an advantage—something that makes us look right, strong, and worthy of respect. In James 3:13–17, wisdom from above takes a startlingly different shape: meek conduct, mercy, gentleness, and a willingness to be taught. What does that wisdom ask of us as we wait for Jesus to return?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
James says true wisdom is “open to reason” and teachable. Where do you find it hardest to remain teachable—especially on topics where you feel confident you already understand Scripture well?
James 3:13–17 distinguishes godly wisdom from worldly wisdom through qualities like meekness, mercy, and gentleness. Which of those qualities challenges you most personally, and why?
The sermon describes how biblical knowledge can become a source of pride or division rather than humble service. Can you think of a time when theological certainty became a barrier to grace—either in someone else or in yourself?
The preacher uses the image of wildfire smoke spreading thousands of miles to describe how our words—especially online—can cause far more damage than we intend. How does that image change the way you think about the reach of your words, particularly on social media?
If God’s wisdom looks like meekness, mercy, and a willingness to learn rather than authority and control, how does that reshape the way you think about spiritual leadership, mentoring, or correcting a fellow believer?
The sermon challenges us to ask “Do you know Jesus?” before getting caught up in fine theological distinctions. What is the difference between standing firmly on biblical principle and becoming so focused on winning an argument that you forget the person in front of you?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, we do have a packed, packed day here. It’s amazing to see God working in different ways, and here’s the thing that strikes me as I think about that. We’ve begun a series on wisdom throughout the Bible, rambling with wisdom, and as you think about what we’re doing today, as we think about Brian going off to his new job, as we think about those of you who are going to take part in joining as members in a little while, as we think about these different things, as we think about what we do every single day as we go to work, as we go to school, we ramble about a lot, or at least I feel it. I think that’s a good term for how I feel like I’m doing it because oftentimes I’m really not quite sure where I’m going. I’m just kind of bouncing along. I think I have a plan, and then thankfully, sometimes at least there’s some padded walls. Well, maybe I shouldn’t have said that because I just bounce off of things. We need God’s wisdom, don’t we? And that’s what we’re thinking about, and here’s the thing, and I love that we introduced the song Same God here to our church family tonight because as we think about God’s wisdom, God’s wisdom doesn’t change. God’s wisdom is always the same. And that’s why we can preach from his word today, and we should be preaching about the same things that our spiritual ancestors were preaching about at the very first gatherings of the church because God’s wisdom is the same.
Yes, there are some circumstances that are a little different. Like if you went back even 50 years and said, well, what do you do when you’re trying to have God’s wisdom in the middle of a COVID-19 pandemic? You’d say, I don’t know, what’s that, right? Because it didn’t exist, but the way that we deal with whatever’s thrown at us, that doesn’t change. We need God’s wisdom. We needed God’s wisdom as the people of God before Jesus even came. That’s why we find in the Old Testament over and over again a call to seek after God’s wisdom because where does God’s wisdom lead us? For those who came before Jesus, it was leading them to look forward to the day that Jesus would come. For those of us who come after Jesus, it constantly turns our gaze right back to the rock of our church. Not this little church, but the church, the body of Christ around the globe. It doesn’t go anywhere without God’s wisdom. It doesn’t go anywhere without Jesus.
And so as we continue, we’re going to turn to the book of James tonight. Yes, we are going backwards in scripture if you are paying attention. Last week we were able to gather in person, but we began this series in Revelation. And we’re going to keep rewinding back until at the end of the month we’ll be all the way back at the beginning. And as we do that, and Jim will take us there to the beginning, as we do that, what we’re doing is seeing, well, we know where we are going. We know that Jesus is victorious. We know that God’s wisdom ties into understanding that. Now we need to ask the question, but we’re not there yet, so what do we do? What do we do right now? Jesus isn’t returning yet. Now, wouldn’t it be great, wouldn’t it be lovely if Jesus returned this very night? He returns. We don’t have to answer the question, what do we need to do in the meantime? Because he’s here. We’re in his presence. Everything’s made right. He wipes away every tear from our eyes. We never have to send anyone off and say even a physical goodbye, because we’re just all together, the body of Christ, forevermore in God’s presence. Wouldn’t that be nice?
In the meantime, though, as we await Jesus’ return, what do we do? That’s what we’re going to be thinking about tonight. And as we think about that, let’s go ahead and come before our God and ask for his guidance. Let’s pray.
Lord, we come before you as those who want to be wise, and oftentimes in our own minds can feel quite wise. We have it all down. We know exactly where we need to be, what we need to do, but in reality, we don’t. In reality, we’re stumbling. In reality, we’re trying to grab onto something, to understand something, but we don’t understand. Lord, would you help us to keep our eyes on the only true source of wisdom, and we turn again and again and again to our Savior, Jesus. We pray in his precious name, amen.
So as thinking about wisdom and power this week, James is going to call our attention to that, and we think of wisdom and power as being closely associated to one another. I remember a few years ago, I saw a bumper sticker. I love this bumper sticker. I mean, it’s terrible, but I love this bumper sticker. It says, knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Learn lots. Be evil. Yeah. That sounds like a good strategy, a great pep talk at the beginning of the school year. I know some of you are even starting a new curriculum of study over the summer, and if you’re doing that, doesn’t that sound like a great plan? Learn, be corrupted, become evil, right? That’s exactly what you should be told at church, right? Yeah. No, no, no. Maybe not quite. We might want to refine that, but it gets to the point that it only makes sense at all because we tend to think that, yes, indeed, knowledge is power. It brings us power. If we have more information than someone else, we can do more than someone else, and I tend to think that’s part of the problem that led to one of the most interesting, I think, changes in a book title that I’m aware of at any point in time, and that’s the title of the very first Harry Potter book.
What’s the name of the first Harry Potter book? I’m sorry? The Sorcerer’s Stone. If you’re in the United States. Yeah. The Philosopher’s Stone. Oh, you get double brownie points, Ellie. Yes. It’s the Philosopher’s Stone if you’re across the pond over in England. If you’re here in the United States, it’s the Sorcerer’s Stone. Why is that? Well, it really comes down to the fact that when they were thinking about marketing it in the United States, they thought people would see a book about the Philosopher’s Stone and they’d think, philosophy? That’s boring and dull. I don’t want to read a book about philosophy and rocks. It wouldn’t sell. They said, now, if we rename it and we call it the Sorcerer’s Stone, and it’s about someone who gains great power by this stone, now, that sounds like a book that people will buy. And so they renamed it. As I understand it, it’s really as simple as that, because there’s a whole history of people searching for this Philosopher’s Stone that would bring great power. But since we’re more interested in the power side of ideas as opposed to the ideas themselves, we, as Americans, kind of would have looked at that and thought, eh. So they renamed it.
I think sometimes we fall into the same trap as Christians, because we hear about God’s wisdom and there’s basically the question, well, is it going to give me an advantage? Because that’s what we ask about everything, right? We don’t want to say that. We don’t really want to do that, but we do. We think, well, how’s this going to benefit me? What’s this going to do for me? And we think about wisdom, and we think, well, okay, so I’m going to acquire wisdom. It’s going to allow people to see that I am great and wise. People come to me for advice. And we forget that wisdom is, indeed, tied to action, but not the sort of action that we think of. It’s not about learning lots so we can become corrupt and evil. Sorry if that got anyone excited. It’s about learning lots so we become humble and servants. Very different thing.
Let’s go ahead and take a look at James chapter 3, verse 13, to get us started. It says, “Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct, let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom.” But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable. This is verse 17. Then gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.
If you said to someone, would you like something that gives you great power over all those who would oppose you, all those who disagree with you, all those who annoy you, or would you like to gain a sort of wisdom that causes you to be merciful, that causes you to be willing to learn from others, that causes you to serve others, what would most people pick? That hasn’t really changed. James is writing to people in the first century, and the problem is that you have people in the church who are saying, I’m going to acquire great wisdom about God so people will praise me, so people will put me in positions of authority, so people will respect me and honor me and give me the position that I need, that I want. God’s wisdom doesn’t work that way.
Here’s the thing from a marketing standpoint. You think about renaming the first book of the Harry Potter series. Well, imagine what we have to go market as Christians to the world and the world’s wisdom. We don’t just say, well, here’s some archaic name to this thing, the Philosopher’s Stone, and people say, well, I haven’t studied the history of alchemy, I have no idea what a Philosopher’s Stone is. It’s not just that. We have to say, the kind of wisdom we have to offer you, world, is the kind of wisdom that does the exact opposite of what you usually want. You want an advantage, it’s going to let people take advantage of you. You want to put people in their place and have them look up to you, it’s going to cause people to look down upon you. You want wisdom that’s going to make life easy for you, this wisdom’s going to make it hard on you.
Why would we want that? Well, some of the teachers rising up in the early church said, well, we don’t want that. We want something better. If we look at the Pharisees, they often arranged wisdom to their advantage, and very little difference when we look in the early church. There were certainly people that wanted it for their advantage.
Now, James here may have in mind leaders and teachers he’d been addressing at the beginning of chapter three, that not many should aspire to be teachers, he says, because of the responsibility. But really here, as he’s speaking, he’s speaking to people that might be wondering if they should grasp at wisdom. And so he’s saying, and this is, I believe, to everyone in the church, so you think you are wise. Because in our human sinful nature, what do we do? We think we’re wise. Maybe you’re aspiring to be wise in a way that you actually teach others. Maybe you’re just wanting to kind of keep it all inside, but you know that somehow you have that stone of wisdom in your pocket that can provide great power. He says, if that’s what you’re thinking, if that’s what you’re hoping to get out of wisdom, let me tell you what God’s wisdom really looks like, and it doesn’t look like that.
Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct, let him show his works in meekness of wisdom. You really think you’re wise, he says, then act humble. You really think you’re wise, then don’t grasp for selfish ambition and power. That didn’t really probably go over to his original audience much better than it goes over in our world today.
We can talk a good game as Christians. We can say that, but we still grasp after power. We still grasp after honor for ourselves because when it really comes down to it, no matter how much we know we shouldn’t, we want that. We want it. But what does true wisdom look like? True wisdom looks like humility, looks like Jesus, looks like what Jesus did when he came to this earth. He didn’t use all of his power to get as much attention as possible in ways that would bring the focus onto his true status, and he had that status. He deserved the honor, but he didn’t just say, okay, I’m going to make a golden road that goes to this gold building. No one else in the world can afford that, but I can because I’m God. I’m going to have a gold building, and I’m going to have 10,000 trumpeters outside of it trumpeting for me as I come in. He could have done that, but he didn’t.
We say, but he’s Jesus. How am I supposed to actually have godly wisdom and not grasp after power, not grasp after status? I’m a human being. I’m only human. Well, that’s why we turn to the Holy Spirit, and we ask him for his help. We’re just saying, come Holy Spirit. Do we mean that? Do we really want the Holy Spirit to work in our lives? Because here’s what happens when we do. What happens when we do want him to be in our lives, when we do watch him work in our lives, when we say, Holy Spirit, do more in my life. I want you to transform me. What does he do? Well, it’s exactly what we’ve been looking at on Thursdays on This Week at Little Hills, the fruit of the Spirit, Galatians 5, 22 and 23, that he’s going to bring out the fruit of the Spirit in our lives, and it’s not going to look like ambition. It’s not going to look like power. It’s not going to look like worldly success. It’s going to look like Jesus.
Of course, we’re not Jesus yet, and so here’s the interesting thing about godly wisdom. Godly wisdom is teachable. And this really struck me as I was thinking about this today, what James says here, verse 17. He says, but the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.
That open to reason part. Now, what does he mean by that? Well, a lot of times I think what we think we need to do as Christians is we study the Bible, good. We study people who understand the Bible, good. Then we get incredibly fixed on our understanding of the Bible, and we smack other people over the head with it. Good? No? Is it because I don’t have a big enough Bible, I need to get a bigger one? This one, you know, I need one that’s twice as big, right? One of those big, big study Bibles up here. That would do the trick. No, we don’t want to do that. We want to be teachable, because all of us are going to fall short of truly understanding God’s Word. All of us are going to fall short of understanding how to apply it to the lives of ourselves, much less others.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have something to share. As we have membership vows in a little bit, what are we going to do? We’re going to commit to keeping each other accountable. We’re going to commit to helping each other. But we do so humbly, ready to learn, ready to realize that we’ve gotten it wrong. Not that we’ve gotten it wrong about who Jesus is, but how we apply Jesus in a certain situation of life. Not what’s good and true. There are very clear-cut laws in God’s Word. There are very clear-cut moral standards in God’s Word, and we should seek for those. We shouldn’t blur them and say, well, we can’t really know anything. We should be humble when we get something wrong. And too often in the church, we’re not good at that part. We’re good at the part of learning, but if we want to hold on to it at all, we get to that point and we can’t learn any more, because anything that challenges us, anything that causes us to wrestle with God’s Word and maybe learn that we didn’t get it quite right, just makes us angry.
James says that true wisdom isn’t the sort of wisdom that says, I know this, I’m going to shout you down if you don’t agree with me. It’s wisdom that says, I know who God is, and I want fellow believers to speak into my life so that we can keep refining each other, and we can keep being closer to whom it is that God has called us to be.
Am I teachable? Am I gentle? The fruit of the Spirit shows gentleness, it doesn’t show rage. The fruit of the Spirit is humility, it doesn’t show pride. And so, James, you could variously translate the word that maybe translates humility or something along those lines in your Bible, it could be translated also meek. Where else do we read about meekness? Well, we actually looked at a while back here at Little Hills, Sermon on the Mount. This was very early in our meeting in person, we looked at the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Notice something really, really bizarre about how God’s wisdom works. Our world says if you want to have something, certainly if you want to inherit the things that are of value in this world, what are you going to do? You’re going to assert what you should have, you’re going to demand it, but we’re told that the meek shall inherit the earth.
And here’s the ironic thing, when we quit trying to get power and honor and glory, when we quit trying to grab onto the things that we think we want in this world, what do we inherit? We inherit what God actually intends for us to inherit. We experience a true inheritance. Just like the prodigal son, he goes off thinking he can take his part of the inheritance and buy the things of the world and he’s going to be happy and he finds out that what he really wants is to be in his father’s presence.
This affects when we realize this, how we talk to other people. Even when they’re wrong and we actually do have the right understanding of God’s Word.
I was really struck by this this week, I was having a conversation with a friend who knows two mutual friends that are very passionate about the Bible. All three of them are, and I am as well. I mean, I love the Bible, I love knowing about what God’s Word has to say, so we all share that passion, but we have very different styles about it.
And what really struck me, this friend needed to talk because he was really struggling. He’d seen these two other friends of ours that care about the Bible and both have studied it far more than he has, although he doesn’t give himself enough credit, but they have deeply, deeply studied it and they’ve studied the theologians that have studied the Bible and they have all the terms and all this and they were arguing and the one in particular can get very, very dogmatic, very, very strong. This is exactly how you need to understand it. And if you’re not, then you need to be corrected and he’s very, very black and white about it.
What really struck me in holding this conversation with my friend is that while all three of my friends really deeply care about the Bible and what they want to do is encourage each other in passion for God’s Word, in being so confident for the one gentleman that he knows exactly how to interpret these different theological constructs that we learn from Scripture, he’d actually taken this other friend and shaken him like, maybe I can’t really know the Bible. Because if these two, if these two who both understand God’s Word so clearly can argue like this, what am I going to do? And so in seeking to try to assert wisdom, they were actually maybe doing the opposite.
Now, have I ever done this? Yes, I have. There are times I’ll get so fixed on something, I just want people to understand this is what the Bible teaches, come on. You need to ask the question, one, am I teachable? Am I ready to learn something new? And two, even as I’m not, am I gentle? My goal isn’t to knock people over the head with the Bible. My goal is to share the hope of Jesus.
And part of what we learn is that a lot of these things that divide us as Christians aren’t even that important. They may matter, but we need to keep in mind where they fit. And that’s something I love here. I know amongst our church family here, we have a diversity of opinions on all kinds of things. We have lots of opinions, and if we started to sit down and we went through like a really detailed statement of faith and we said, let’s all give our opinion on this thumbs up or thumbs down, we’d come out in different places on some things.
But what I also know, what I also know as I look at all of you and as I go online afterwards and I look at our chat from our online church family, here’s what I know. I know that all of you love Jesus. I know that you care deeply about God’s word and what it teaches. And that’s a great starting point. Can we teach each other? Can we learn? Hopefully we aren’t staying static. Hopefully we’re moving, but it has to start with humility, otherwise one of us is simply knocking someone else over the head.
And then you have conversations like that one I had this week where someone was left deeply hurting, not even because he was directly in the argument, but because it looks like I can’t even approach God’s word because apparently you need to know all these theologians and then even once you do, you can’t figure it out.
What’s the real question? Do you know Jesus? Have you trusted in Him as your Lord and Savior? Do you understand what that means? Do you understand that He has redeemed you? Do you understand that He loves you? Do you understand how He called us to treat other people?
Philippians 2 verse 4, let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Paul goes on there to describe the incarnation, to describe Jesus coming into the world and what He did.
That’s what He did. Think about what Jesus did. That didn’t serve His interests, to come into the world, to be insulted, to be rejected, to have His best friends not even get what He was trying to do, and then to be put to death. That didn’t serve His interests. Why did He do it? He did it out of love. Are we doing what we do out of love? And sometimes I think our first answer is yes, but the secondary answer that’s driving that is because if I seem loving and I get people to see things the way that I do, they’re going to respect me. May we truly be driven by love like Jesus is.
That’s not how the world thinks. That’s not how the world works.
What do we often do as we soak in the world? Well, we do exactly what James describes in verse 14. He says, 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 and spiritual demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice.
And here is the thing that we see with wisdom that is tied to action. It’s not about wisdom being tied to power, it’s wisdom being tied to humble action.
It’s not enough simply to know the Bible. It’s not enough to simply be able to pass a theological orthodoxy test. I know lots of people who could nail those exams better than anyone else we can imagine who are just absolutely vile to the people around them. And if our understanding of the truth at a knowledge standpoint hasn’t translated into our knowledge of the truth in a treating our neighbors as Jesus does standpoint, there’s not actually wisdom. It might be knowledge, but it’s not wisdom.
How do we avoid that? Well, the real challenge I think oftentimes is that when we think that we’re right, when we’re focused on that I’m right and the other person’s wrong, and I’m here to serve the other person by showing them how they’re wrong and I’m right, oftentimes what it really comes down to is we’re thinking about what we’re doing on our own. Look at me. I’ve studied this more. And I wish I could say I never think this, but sometimes when people disagree with me on theology in my head, I may not utter this. As far as I know, I’ve never uttered this in such a conversation, but I do think it at times. Well, but I’ve studied this more than you have. I know this better than you do. Have you translated the Greek? Have you read the theologians?
What an ugly, ugly thought. It’s not because that stuff is worthless. Should we have people that study the original languages? Yes. Should we have people that read other theologians? Yes. Is there value to that? But it doesn’t make someone an infallible authority. And no matter how much we’ve studied or how little we’ve studied, where’s the real source of wisdom? It’s not from all that. God’s going to use that, but notice God’s going to use that because God is the source of wisdom.
And here’s the thing. When we think we’re doing it on our own, that we have all these things, that we have titles and diplomas and impressive bookshelves, we start thinking about what we’re doing on our own rather than how God is using whatever opportunities that we have.
Had a wonderful conversation the other day with someone that Kathy introduced me to, a lady who is almost 102 years old, Maxine. What a neat lady. And what was really striking to me about her story is she was telling about the different opportunities she had to study and accomplish things, and she wasn’t telling it so that you would think that she was really wise or really important. She was telling it because as she was piecing it together, she saw how God had created sometimes utterly bizarre circumstances to enable her to learn those things so that she could do whatever God wanted her to do. That’s the attitude that we should have. And maybe, I hope I’m that wise when I’m 102. If I ever get to be 102, who knows? I was stumbling over so many things today, I may not make it. If I do, I’d like to be like her.
And maybe we all have that attitude that we think, if I’ve had the chance to study something more than someone else, then praise God for that. God, use that knowledge I have. Help me to understand that. But if someone else comes who hasn’t studied it as much, but actually the Holy Spirit is speaking to that person, may I be just as teachable as anybody else to be corrected.
1 Corinthians 3:18-20, Paul writes, let no one deceive himself if anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age. Let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, he catches the wise in their craftiness. And again, the Lord knows the thoughts of the wise that they are futile.
The wise of this world think that they’re gaining power, that they can keep stacking up stuff just like in that bumper sticker, and if you’ll acquire enough power, and yes, you’ll be evil, but you’ll have power. Isn’t that great? Who cares if I’m evil? I’m in charge. I’m the king of the world. Things are going so well. We’re just thinking. We think we know. We think we’re under control, but we’re not.
Here’s the truth about that kind of wisdom, that kind of insight from the world. James doesn’t mince words here. He doesn’t say, that’s kind of a stupid thing. He doesn’t even go, I mean, Paul’s pretty strong, he says, that’s foolishness. No, James says it’s demonic, and that’s exactly what it is.
When Satan and his forces use the very knowledge of God to turn Christians against one another, when Satan uses the gifts that God has given us so that we can be divisive and proud and build ourselves up rather than each other, you know that he is just so delighted to know that he is taking the very things of God to do that with.
What happens when we say, I don’t want a part in that? I want to be teachable. I want to be humble. I want to realize that I still have an awful lot to learn, and that’s something else that struck me in talking with Maxine the other day. Again, I want to be like her when I grow up, because at 102, she was talking about the things that she’s learning and figuring out right now. How wonderful is that? How often do I talk about that, and I’m nowhere near there yet. We all want to learn.
But Satan says, well, you know enough. You’ve even studied God’s Word. You might think, well, he’d say that’s a bad thing, but no, he says that’s a great thing as long as you think that makes you important. As long as you think it makes you the authority, you the center of attention and not God.
In what ways are both the sorts of wisdom I’ve acquired and the sense of wisdom that I may apply to myself, in what way are those things dividing rather than uniting the body of Christ? In what ways are those things causing people to be torn down, to be shaken rather than strengthened in Christ?
Again, it doesn’t mean that we don’t stand on principle. It doesn’t mean that we don’t at times even come to a brother or sister in Christ and say, I think you need to reconsider what you’re doing here. You’re not acting in a God-pleasing way. May we be equally willing to receive that ourselves, and may we be ever so careful not to think that we know it all, but that God is the one who knows. Because oftentimes we just see that one moment, that one spot that doesn’t seem quite right in someone else’s life, that speck as Jesus says, and we miss the log, right?
I was thinking this week as we all found ourselves, I think everyone I talked to spending time outside found themselves a little bit miserable this week. And we have it pretty well. It’s not nearly as bad as it could be. If you look at pictures, like, did anyone see the picture of Yankee Stadium earlier this week? So there’s these wildfires in Canada, right? And so most of us have probably heard about this, these wildfires that are, so many acres are burning that we’re in the midst of the smoke here.
Take a look at this map. See those gray spots there? All the way over into Europe, and over most of the United States, down into Mexico, down to our south campus, even. As you look at this, Brian, west campus is going to be in good shape, it looks like. You’re kind of out of it, but east campus, not so much.
This map shows just how wide those wildfires have spread from western Canada where they’re originating. Take a look at the air quality, especially if you look to the east and the midwest, I feel like a meteorologist all of a sudden here, but if you look at that, just how much influence those fires are having. And you can kind of see the red dots where the actual fires are, but look at the spread there.
And so you have thousands of miles of space, for example, between those fires and Yankee Stadium. And I saw that picture, you should go online and look it up, it’s copyrighted, I can’t put it up on our stream. But you should go look at that picture.
Because here’s the thing that struck me with the smoke coming from these wildfires. If you see that picture and you put it in a sci-fi movie where somehow the earth had become uninhabitable and humans had decided to establish a colony on Mars, and Yankee Stadium, they built a new one to make everyone feel at home because there’s still baseball. It would look like that picture of Yankee Stadium, it’s that orange there in New York. Bizarre looking. That’s from fires that are a long way away.
And if you’re near the fires, what you’re probably thinking is, I need to extinguish this fire, not a bad thought. But you’re probably not thinking about what’s happening to Yankee Stadium. I wonder if they may have problems there. They had to cancel games this week, and of course that’s nothing compared to what’s happening to a lot of people. But look at the influence.
And likewise, when we see sometimes even a fire in someone else’s life and we want to extinguish it, what we’re not thinking about is, am I going to show such humility and grace and mercy in the way that I help that person, that I’m going to help extinguish that fire and not create a bigger fire with smoke that’s billowing thousands of miles away?
This is even more true in our internet age, because how often do we maybe try to nudge someone, we decide we’re going to nudge someone by arguing with them on social media, right? They post something, we think, that’s such a stupid thing, they need to know how stupid it is. And so we let them know how stupid it is. It’s just stupid.
And what about all the other people who are watching, especially when we invoke the name of Jesus? We literally could be casting smoke thousands of miles from where we are as someone else reads that, casting that where they see this orange, otherworldly, maybe even hellish glow rather than the light of Jesus.
Might be just an immediate little fire in the moment, but do we see the extent of what our own actions are doing? Do we think about that? James is encouraging us as we think about wisdom. True wisdom is thinking about these things. True wisdom cares about where the smoke is going. True wisdom cares about uniting and not dividing. It doesn’t mean we don’t stand, but that we’re careful.
Because look at Jesus’s life. Yes, there were the moments, and people love to point these out, he did overturn the tables, he did criticize the Pharisees when the Pharisees were really off and hurting other people. Sometimes you have to stand, sometimes you’ll even need to take a public stand. But wisdom is having the humility that we don’t always think that we’re right. Wisdom is being able to learn, and wisdom is seeking to provide healing.
Just like we talked about a few weeks ago, Jesus didn’t go and blast the disciples and make them look like idiots, even though they were. He built them back up. He drew them in. He didn’t list out all the sins of the thief on the cross, he offered him grace. He knew where he was and what he needed was grace.
Wisdom means looking like Jesus, and may all of us, may all of us look like Jesus. That should be our individual prayer, and it should be the prayer for our church, that as we are used by God, as we do ministry, whether it’s music ministry, whether it’s online ministry, encouraging people during the service, whether it’s preaching and teaching, whether it’s prayer ministry, whether it’s sharing insights during Bible studies, whatever it might be, answering the prayer line, whatever it might be, we look like Jesus as we do it. Because that’s what true wisdom looks like, and that’s what James is calling us to. That’s what God is calling us to over and over again, the same God from beginning to end.
Let’s pray that he would help us to have that wisdom today.
Lord, this is a hard subject because it’s really often easy to see where other people seem to lack wisdom. It’s often very hard to see where we lack wisdom in ourselves. But Lord, would you redirect our thoughts where we have latched on to things that aren’t important? Would you redirect our actions where we even know what is right, but we’re showing the path in a very ungodly way? We’re taking it and we’re putting so much smoke in the way the person can’t even see where he or she should go.
Lord, would you help us to start this by simply trusting in you? Whether tonight is the first time or the thousandth time we’ve called on you, would you help us to trust in you, to hold on to you? Would you make us our light? Make us your lights, rather. Would you help us not to put smoke up, instead to shine your light into this world that desperately needs it? To show your love in this world that is hurting, to show your wisdom in this world that’s constantly being pulled away by the evil one.
Lord, we pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Start the Conversation