Book Preview #6: James 3:13-18 – Galvanizing Your Life with Wisdom
As many of you know, I will be publishing James, a book on the letter of James, in early 2016. In anticipation of that, I will be posting snippets of the book for all of you to enjoy. Here is the first sneak preview:
Exhortation to Godly Wisdom
Whenever I shop for food, I try to get the most for my money as I can while still filling my shopping cart with healthy things. Most of my time is spent comparing the price per pound of one item to the next to maximize my money’s value. Occasionally I’ve caught myself spending far too much time doing this, but I’m steadily finding a good balance. What does “price per pound” mean anyways? How can I be sure that I’m actually getting a pound? Who determines how much a pound weighs? Recently, I read an article on Wikipedia about how they keep the standard kilogram from changing. Somewhere on this planet, there is an airtight box that contains the universal standard kilogram. The conditions that it is in are designed to limit the amount of change occurring to the standard as much as possible. This is essential because if the standard changed even a little bit, there would be no way of ensuring that anything was weighed properly. In a perfect world, the standard would never change and could always be used to test if derivative standards were inaccurate.
In this section, James flings the doors open to a room that holds one of the most important universal standards: True wisdom. James brought us to the doorway to wisdom in James 1:5-8 and showed us how to knock. Now we get a chance to meet wisdom and discover the sharp juxtaposition of Godly wisdom and worldly wisdom. As James rips through the fog and grabs hold of the truth, you’ll see that there is no ambiguity between the two.
In my mind, chapter 3 has been where the letter really picks up momentum. The various topics that have been shared over the last few chapters start to become intimately intertwined. This is where James weaves them together even more tightly. Here, we see him intertwining wisdom, works, impartiality and tongue taming into a glorious display of right living based on right believing. Verse 13 is an amalgamation of several challenges that Jesus has revealed to us thus far: “Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom” (James 3:13).
Dangerous “Wisdom”
God’s true wisdom is absolute and has no rival. Many have tried to substitute this wisdom for their own cunning and cleverness. As we see in the Bible and in our own lives, that approach never ends well, in this life or in eternity. “For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25).
The life-giving river of Godly wisdom is flowing right through the center of humanity, but many people have tried creating artificial irrigation canals to try to separate the goodness of wisdom from its creator. They want the benefits of wisdom without having to be close to God. As humans, we desire to live well and yet live in sin. We read self-help books without also coming to God to heal us. We obsess over financial magazines without putting God first. We create new ways to have “safe sex” while keeping God’s plan for marriage out of the picture. The resulting polluted take on wisdom has poisoned many hearts and distorted views of what a healthy life looks like. In the end, if we take God out of the picture, we are left with a wisdom that is “earthly, unspiritual, demonic” (James 3:15).
To put it another way, humanity has tried to genetically modify the truth to bring about a better harvest for ourselves. Countless hours are spent on finding ways to eliminate God from the soil of our hearts and grow spiritual sustenance on our own. It may appear to work for some people, but I know that each time I’ve done that, my soul eventually chokes on what I had intended to nourish me. We think that we can tear away bits of God’s wisdom and superglue them onto our own desires and have something beautiful grow. Instead, we end up nurturing a spiritual chimera that will turn on us.
Is it possible that pursuing a godly life is difficult primarily because we have removed ourselves so far from the standard of truth that we don’t know how much our own souls weigh? Is it possible that there is something unspiritual lurking within our daily habits because we have not fully accepted the wisdom from God? James promises that jealousy and self-centered motivations breed chaos and revolting sin.
In this way, people everywhere are gaining knowledge in order to improve their lives, but knowledge is not the same as wisdom. While they are certainly intertwined, they are far from being equal. Jesus dealt harshly with wisdom-less knowledge when he saw it in the Pharisees, who were the religious leaders of the time: “Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.’ You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred? And you say, ‘If anyone swears by the altar, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath.’ You blind men! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred?” (Matthew 23:16-19).
The Pharisees had warped their perspective and completely missed the eminence of the temple over the gold in the temple. They had gotten so far into the intellectual weeds that they couldn’t tell what was really important. Information and knowledge will never be as important as wisdom. Knowledge is like a collection of notes; wisdom is what tells us how to play them. Our lives will either end up being a symphony or a cacophony. The deciding factor will always be whether or not we are living from the wisdom that God gives us.
For more information on James, click here.