The Point 149: Who is wise in understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from heaven, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where you have envy and selfless ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice. But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure, then peace-loving, consider. Submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness. This is the word of God. You may be seated. Good morning, church. Yeah. Wide awake. Love that. I wanna take you back a little bit. I want you to think about when you were a kid. did you have something in your life that like when you grow up you knew you wanted to be? Like right now in our household, Lena has decided that she will be a princess when she grows up. It's cute. Here's where it gets even more funny, is she wants me to be the jester in her kingdom. Yeah. Don't really know where she learned that, but That's what she wants. And then her Paul can be the king, Mimi, they're the queen. And then mom's also a princess, but yet dad is a jester. So that's where we're at. But when I was a kid, I was obsessed with space. I believed that I was going to go out into the universe, like in the universe. Like I was gonna explore. My mom took me to Boonshaft, and I always go in the planetarium, be like, yeah, that's gonna be me one day, right? So I I loved learning about NASA and everything that happened. But there's a story I wanted to start with today. It's a story from 1999, where NASA lost a hundred and twenty-five dollar million dollar spacecraft. And when I say lost it, I don't mean somebody misplaced like a little piece of the equipment on there. I meant the whole entire thing. Okay, they built this spacecraft for years. They launched it into outer space and then they flew it millions and millions of miles towards Mars and lost the entire thing. And now I I don't know about you, but if I lose $5 or 20, I'm like, hey Megan, where'd you put my money? And she's like, you lost it. And then usually it's in my special place that I put things and I find it. But these people lost $125 million spacecraft somewhere around Mars. craziest part is, is the spacecraft had worked perfectly. Okay, it launched successfully in December of 1998, and it traveled through space, get this, for nine months. And it was designed to study Mars, and it was gonna serve as a communication relay for all the other missions that were to come. And NASA had spent so many years preparing for this. But When that spacecraft finally approached Mars in September of 1999, something went terribly wrong. It entered into its intended orbit. It traveled far closer than the than they had planned, and NASA lost contact with it, and that was it. Years of preparation. Nine months traveling through space, millions of dollars gone. So why am telling you this? Well, na naturally, NASA launched a pretty evasive investigation. Okay? What what were some of the problems? Was there a problem with Mars? Was there something that had gone on with the instruments? But the investigation uncovered something really incredible and unbelievable and to me funny. There was two teams that were working on its orb entering orbit, okay? One team was using English measurement units. The other metric units. The information was never properly converted. And because of that error, the spacecraft's trajectory was calculated incorrectly. Think about that. How simple that is. Some of the smartest engineers in the world have built a machine capable of traveling millions and millions of miles through space. They understood physics, they understood mathematics, they understood technology that most of us can't even begin to explain. But an error involving something as simple as measurement units contributed to the loss of the entire mission. See, what I find fascinating. Is that this wasn't simply a story about somebody being a little bad at math and end off. No, NASA investigation identified failures of communication, oversight, and the process for recognizing and correcting errors. They had over 20 times they found that they could have solved this problem. But it wasn't. And see, I think there's something very important about that. Because having knowledge and using knowledge wisely are not necessarily the same thing. You can know an unbelievable amount about something and still fail to recognize what's happening right in front of you. Right? You can have all the information in the world. Everyone has it in their right pocket, right? But yet we still make a terrible decision in the next breath. And see, while most of us will never be responsible for a spacecraft, at least I hope I'm not, I wonder how often we experience something similar in our own lives. A similar thing. Right? We can know exactly what the Bible says, exactly what this says right here. We can know exactly what it says about loving our neighbor, but yet still treat them so terribly. We can know what Scripture teaches about forgiveness, but yet hold a grudge for years upon years. We can understand what Jesus says about humility, but still become furious when someone tries to correct us. We can know the right answer and respond in the completely wrong way. And that raises the question that I want us to think about this morning: What actually makes somebody wise? Because we tend, at least I do, tend to associate wisdom with intelligence. We think of someone who knows a lot, somebody who has an answer for every question that we ask, somebody who's read the book, studied the subject, and understands how these things work. And hear me, there's nothing wrong with knowledge. I love learning things. I love learning history. And I also love learning things in scriptures that I've read a million times, but then all of a sudden it just pops out as something new. But I've also met people who know an unbelievable amount, more than I maybe could ever learn, about the Bible, but yet struggle to treat people with the simplest of kindness. And I've met people who may not have an impressive education or a good past. But when life gets complicated, they're the first person that I want to call. Right, because those type of people sometimes they they know when to speak and they know when to listen and then they can disagree without humiliating somebody. Right, and and there's something different about people like that. And James is going to help us understand what that is this morning. Last week, Pastor Sam walked us through James 3, verses 1 through 12, where James talks about the tongue. Right? He compares it to a bit in a horse's mouth, a a rudder in a ship, and so on. And and his his point is that something incredibly small can have an extraordinary influence around us. Our words can encourage people, but they can also cause enormous destruction. But when we reach verse 13, James 3, James does something interesting. And if you have your Bibles, I invite you to open it because I'm gonna, it's short, but it's a lot to unpack. So he does something interesting here. He doesn't simply move on to an unrelated subject. He goes underneath the words, which Pastor Sam talked a little bit about. Because if our words can do that much damage to the world around us, we ought to ask what's producing them, right? What's happening in the heart of the person speaking? What kind of wisdom is guiding the way they live? And so James begins with a question Who is wise and understanding among you? So I want you to imagine James right here asking that question in this room. Who's wise? Who's got understanding? Right, I imagine being in church, we'd immediately start thinking about the people who know the most scripture, that can recite the most. The person who's been following Jesus for 40 years and has been following all the things that he does, the person who can answer difficult theological questions at the drop of a hat. But look at what James says next. He tells the wise person to demonstrate wisdom through a good life, through deeds done in humility. That's interesting. Because James doesn't ask somebody to prove how much they know, he asks them to show how they live. And specifically, he points to humility. And I think that's where this passage can really start to challenge us. Because we tend to assume the person who knows the most, at least for me, must be the wisest. But James says wisdom is something you should be able to recognize in the way that somebody is living. And I want you to notice something. This sounds remarkably similar to what James said in chapter 2, right? Last time I preached, we looked at James 2, verses 14 through 26, where James asks, What good is it for somebody to claim they have faith that that faith never produces anything? And he tells us that living faith becomes visible. And so now he's applying that same idea, but to wisdom. It's not enough to claim you're wise. What does your life reveal? Right, you can know something true and still handle that truth foolishly. You can recognize somebody else's mistake and become so proud of yourself for noticing their mistake. Right? You can defend a biblical position right there while treating that person across from you as if they have no dignity or a child of God. You can know exactly what needs to be said and have absolutely no wisdom about it, about how or when to say it. And sometimes, hear this, we excuse all of that because technically we were right. But James isn't impressed simply because somebody has the correct answer. He's interested in what kind of person their knowledge is producing. Because hear this: you can win an argument and still lose the wisdom. And I think that matters enormously in the Capital C church. Because hear this, the church ought to be a place where we care deeply about truth. We should study scripture every single day. We should ask difficult questions a lot. We should know what we believe and why we believe it, and we should be able to defend it at the drop of a hat. But if all that knowledge is making us arrogant, impatient, impossible to correct, then something has gone terribly wrong. And James gives us a word that helps explain it. Humility. See, the Greek word behind that expression carries the sense of gentleness and meekness. And meekness is one of those biblical words that we don't always understand correctly. Okay? We hear meekness and we think weakness, because they sound pretty similar, at least in my mind, right? Somebody in meekness we think of somebody who never disagrees, someone who lets everyone just walk all over them, someone who's afraid to stand for anything in their life. But Hear this, biblical meekness isn't the absence of conviction. It's strength that has learned restraint. I want you to think about Jesus. Go to Matthew 11. Jesus describes himself as gentle and humble in heart. And yet nobody, nobody reading the gospels could reasonably conclude that Jesus lacked courage. Right? He confronted religious hypocrisy. He challenged some of the most powerful people. He spoke truth even when it cost him. Jesus wasn't gentle because he was afraid to speak. He was gentle because he didn't need to use his authority to make himself important. And that's a completely different kind of strength, at least to me. Sometimes the loudest person in the room isn't the wisest. Sometimes the person who refuses to change their mind isn't demonstrating conviction either. Hear this: they're demonstrating pride. Sometimes the person who can say, I hadn't thought about that, is showing more wisdom than a person who has an answer for every single thing you've said. Because then James moves into verses 14 through 16. This is where things can get uncomfortable. James says. That if we harb harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in our hearts, then we shouldn't boast about it or deny the truth. Notice what he doesn't say here. He doesn't say if you lack education, he doesn't say if you don't know enough scripture. No, he and he identifies envy and selfish ambition. Those are matters of the heart. And that means that you can be extraordinarily intelligent in books or on the streets and still be deeply foolish. You can know the Bible and still be motivated by jealousy. And you can serve in a ministry and quietly resent someone else's success because they did it first. You can have tremendous influence and still be driven by the need for more and more and more. And hear this. I think this is especially important for pastors and leaders. I do. Because it's it's possible to want people to know Jesus, and it's possible for people for wanting people to recognize how much you know about Jesus. See, from the outside, those two things can look very, very similar. Both can can involve preaching, both can involve teaching, both can involve spending hours and hours studying scripture, but the motives are completely different. One is directed towards Christ and the good of others. The other is directed towards ourselves. And one of the most dangerous things about selfish ambition is how easily that we can disguise it as something spiritual. All right, we can tell ourselves that we're defending truth when we're really defending our reputation. We can tell ourselves that we're concerned about the church. When we're actually concerned about our influence inside the church. We can convince ourselves that we're upset because something is wrong. When part of the reason we're upset is that somebody else received recognition we want it. And James says these things can exist in our very hearts, which means that other people might not even recognize what's happening. We might not even recognize it ourselves. But then James describes something in verse 15 with three words. Earthly, unspiritual, and demonic. That's strong language. You know, I don't think that we should soften it simply because it can make us feel uncomfortable, right? With that demonic word. But James is saying there is a way of thinking that may look clever, it may look strategic or impressive to everyone else, but has nothing to do with the wisdom of God. It operates according to the priorities of a fallen world. It's driven by selfish desires rather than the spirit, and it reflects the destructive purposes of evil rather than the very character of Christ. And so now hear this though. James isn't saying that every person who has ever felt jealous is possessed by a demon. I gotta clear that up. No, he's exposing the nature of wisdom that is opposed to God. And look at what he what happens in verse 16. James says, envy and selfish ambition produces what? Disorder and evil practices. They don't remain private. Right? Eventually, what's happening inside us begins affecting the people around us. think about a family, okay? Where everyone is primarily concerned with getting their own way. Or maybe a workplace where people are constantly in competition and competing for recognition from the higher-ups. Maybe a church where influence becomes more important than serving your neighbors on the streets. Eventually, relationships suffer. Trust begins disappearing. People become suspicious of one another, and the entire community feels the consequences. James is telling us that wisdom has consequences beyond the individual. The kind of wisdom we live by eventually produces something in the people around us. See, earthly wisdom asks, How do I get ahead? But heavenly wisdom asks, What honors God? And now we reach verse 15 or 17. See, this is where the passage to me becomes especially beautiful, okay? James describes wisdom that comes from heaven and heaven alone, okay? And before we look at that description, I want you to remember something that James has said earlier in this letter. It's found in James 1, verse 5, where he tells us that if we lack wisdom, if if we're lacking on wisdom, that we should go and ask God, who gives generously. Okay, that's important. Because James isn't handing us like a little personality test and telling us to become better people through sheer determination. No. He's describing something that solely, solely comes from God. Something that we receive from Him and learn to live out through His grace. And now look at the order of those words in that. James says, heavenly wisdom is first pure, then peace-loving. That order matters because peace without purity can become compromise. And purity without a love for peace can become harshness. Some people hear this are so desperate to avoid conflict that they'll refuse to confront anything wrong, even if it's plain. But then on the other side, they're so determined to defend what's right that they'll destroy every relationship they have in the process. James doesn't allow either extreme. God's wisdom is committed to truth and to peace. And that combination is much harder than it's than it sounds, because it requires us to care about what is right without being indifferent to the people that are involved in the role. Then James says wisdom is considerate. Right? That's a word I wish our world knew a little bit more. Consideration means recognizing that another person has a life and a perspective beyond our own. They may be carrying something that we know nothing about. They may have experiences that we haven't had. They may be wrong about something without being our enemy. They may need correction but still deserve dignity. Right? And then we come to a word that I think may be the most challenging in this entire passage passage. Submissive. Now I know that's not a not necessarily everyone's favorite word here, but the Greek word, this is interesting. The Greek word that James uses here carries the idea of being willing to listen, open to persuasion, and willing to yield. It does not mean abandoning biblical truth. It doesn't mean believing whatever the last person had told you. It means that you're not so committed to your own opinions from your own mind that nobody can teach you anything. that got me thinking. This question I asked myself and it challenged myself, but I'm gonna ask you, when was the last time that somebody has changed your mind about something big? The last time. And it wasn't because they manipulated you, not because you just gave up and gave in, but because they showed you something you hadn't considered before. Maybe you misunderstood a situation. Maybe you didn't have all the information. Maybe you assumed somebody's motives. Maybe you were certain you remembered the conversation correctly and discovered that you didn't. Okay. But the question arises, what happened when you realize that you were wrong? Did you feel grateful that you hadn't learned something? Or did you feel defeated and kind of ashamed? Because I think our answer reveals something. About how we understand wisdom. Somewhere along the what along the line, we've we started treating the ability to admit that we're that we are wrong as weakness. But think, truly think about how strange that is, okay? If I believe something incorrect yesterday or today, and then Pastor Sam comes to me and tells me the truth, then I'm better off that day. Right? Easy. I've I've learned something. Why would that be embarrassing? Well, could be embarrassing if my real concern wasn't understanding the truth. Unless my real concern was protecting my image and not being wrong. And that's where this can get personal. Because there is a difference between holding firmly, holding firmly to Jesus and holding stubbornly to every opinion that we've ever formed. I don't need to reconsider whether Jesus rose from the dead. I know that one. But I don't need to reconsider every time somebody disagrees with me. But I might need to reconsider whether I correctly understood what my wife was saying to me last night. I might need to reconsider whether I know why somebody acted the way they did. I might need to reconsider whether my approach to a problem is actually the best one to put my best foot forward. And sometimes, see, the wisest words, I'll drop this on you, because I had to learn it. the wisest words are four words that you can say. I could be. Right. I think a lot I think there are a lot of marriages that would be healthier if those words were spoken. Yeah, exactly. I think there are a lot of friendships that we have just totally abandoned that could be restored. I think there are church disagreements that go back sixty years that wouldn't become nearly as destructive. And maybe some churches c still could be standing. Because the moment that we acknowledge that we could be wrong, we become capable of listening again. And that's a remarkable thing. You cannot learn from somebody you're determined to defeat. See, the wisdom of heaven is this: it's pure, it's peace-loving, it's considerate, it's submissive, it's merciful, it's fruitful, it's impartial, and it's sincere. James continues by saying: heavenly wisdom is full of Of mercy and good fruit. And mercy isn't needed when everyone, everybody's getting everything right, right? No, mercy becomes necessary when somebody fails, when they disappoint us, or needs compassion that they haven't learned in our standards, right? And and but that's where we see Jesus. Think about Peter. He denies Jesus three times. Yet after the resurrection, Jesus restores him. But hear this, he doesn't pretend that. Peter never failed. He addresses what happened, but he refused to define Peter forever by his worst moment. See, that's mercy joined with truth. That, friends, is wisdom. James also says heavenly wisdom is impartial and sincere. It doesn't change depending on who's watching or what somebody else can offer. And look at what James has described. Not somebody who wins every argument or has the most impressive education on the streets or in the school, but somebody whose life reflects the character of God Himself. See, maybe the wisest person in the church isn't the one who knows the most scripture. But the one who has allowed Scripture to change them from the inside out. See, then James ends with verse 18 peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness. And it's interesting that he ends with farming because you cannot plant one thing and expect to harvest another. You cannot plant corn and get angry when tomatoes don't grow, right? Harvest reflects the seed. So the question arises: what are you planting in people around you? Right? If we continually plant resentment, jealousy, competition, right, eventually those things grow. If every disagreement that you have with someone becomes a battle, then eventually our relationships are just battlefields all over the place and you don't know where to go. Right? But what happens when we plant mercy? When we plant patience, forgiveness, forgiveness. Truth spoken with love. Those seeds may take time, and you may never see them. But James says they produce a harvest of righteousness. And church, this matters because we're supposed to be a community. Here this where people encounter Jesus. Not simply to come here and just write a little note about him and learn information about him. Right? What good is it if we if we know every day. doctrine in this world and we're cleaned up and tight but cannot show mercy. What good is defending the truth, the truth, truth about Jesus if our lives make him impossible to be recognized to those on the outside? See, we don't misunderstand this. Christianity isn't about becoming just a nicer person. It's about becoming more and more each and every day like Christ or striving to. Paul calls Jesus the wisdom of God. And just look at the cross. Look at the cross. The world sees power through domination, right? Through wars and taking over things, but Jesus demonstrates power through sacrifice. The world seeks revenge if someone wrongs us. Jesus prays for his enemies, even on the cross. The world sees a crucified Messiah and declares defeat. But three days later, God raises him from the dead. That's God's wisdom. And we need that wisdom because we've all been envious. We've all been envious. We've all defended our pride at one point or another. We've cared more about proving our point than loving somebody in a moment. See, we don't need a list of good behaviors to improve on. We need Jesus to change our hearts each and every day. Brothers and sisters, that's sanctifying grace. God doesn't simply forgive us and then leave us unchanged to keep doing whatever we were doing. His spirit, if you let him in, continues transforming us into Christ's likeness. And sometimes that transformation begins when we're willing to recognize that we might be wrong. Because knowledge alone doesn't make us wise. We need the humility to recognize what we don't know and grace to change when God shows us the truth. Because he is the only truth. I started this morning telling you about a spacecraft. Right? That was a loss because critical information wasn't properly understood and corrected. Right? Some extraordinarily intelligent people were working on the mission, but intelligence alone wasn't enough. And how often do we make a similar mistake in our own lives? We become so focused on proving our point that we lose sight of the person that we are talking to. We become so determined to win. We forget what we're supposed to be building, his kingdom. We become so certain of our own perspective that we stop listening to the people God may be using to help us see more clearly. And James says there's another way. A wisdom that comes from heaven and heaven alone. A wisdom that's strong enough to remain humble, committed enough to truth that it doesn't need to become cruel, secure enough in God. That it doesn't need to compete with everyone else. And merciful enough to recognize that people around us need the same grace that we do each and every day. That's the wisdom that we should desire. And it's not so people can go walk around and think, the point church is full of very wise people, right? No. But it's so the people who encounter us when we leave this building and we go on mission in our everyday lives. That when they encounter us, they will experience something of Jesus that the Jesus that we're following. And we cannot produce that kind of wisdom apart from him. It has to be him alone. And so we ask him for it. Not just today, but tomorrow and the next and the next. And in every conversation where we have the opportunity to choose between practicing our own very pride or reflecting his character. See, because maybe one of the greatest signs that we're growing in wisdom isn't that we were becoming better at proving how wise we are, but it's that we're becoming more like Jesus. And so as I invite the band to come up and play softly, and as I as they do, I want us to take a moment with the Lord. I don't want you thinking about somebody else, what somebody else needs to hear today from this sermon, but what God might be saying to you. Maybe there's something that we need to surrender. Maybe somebody that you need to forgive in your heart. Maybe a conversation that you have to have. Or maybe we simply need the humility to admit that we've been wrong. If something comes to your mind, I encourage you to pray about it. I encourage you to write it down if you need to. I just don't want you to rush past this with God and what He might be showing you. Because before we leave this morning I want us to sit with this final question. The question is this Is the way we're living making it easier for people to see Jesus or just to see us? And we don't have to answer that question out loud. But we do need to be willing to answer it before God. Whatever he reveals to us this morning, remember that his grace is sufficient to change us. So let's bring those things before him as we pray. Heavenly Father, we come before you knowing that we don't always get it right. Sometimes, Lord, our our pride gets in the way. Sometimes we speak when we should listen. And Lord, sometimes we're more concerned with being right than reflecting your son, and we forget it all along. Lord, we come humbly before you. And we pray that you give us wisdom that comes from heaven and heaven alone. Lord, give us humble hearts. Teach us to show mercy and help us. Recognize the things in our lives that need to change. And above everything else, Lord, may the people who encounter us in our everyday lives see more of Jesus, less of ourselves. We pray this in your heavenly gracious name. Amen.