Wisdom, Purity and Peace (Part A)

When you're born again, you come to life and it's life in Christ. With it are feelings, sensation of His presence. There's nothing like it.

It's unmatched in the human experience. In verse 14, he continues to build upon this. Again, in verse 13, he says, who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show by good conduct that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom.

Good conduct, he says. This is Cross Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of James.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. And now here's Pastor Rick as he continues through James chapter three and begins his message. Wisdom, purity and peace. Who is wise and understanding among you?

Let him show by good conduct that his works are done in meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth. This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual, demonic.

For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits without partiality and without hypocrisy. The fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. One of my favorite passages of scripture, those are always, at least to me, the most difficult to teach from. And I suppose it's because when you read it by yourself, the Holy Spirit is the teacher and who can top that?

But he has also ordained that his servants stand before his servants who happen to be sitting and go over these things, analyze them, discuss them, get them into us. This letter of James, the flesh meets it with reluctance, doesn't like it. It's a bumpy road the whole time through. Our carnal nature, that part of us that exists without the touch of God.

The spiritual man, on the other hand, embraces every word, loves it, wants more of it. And this battle of what we're all faced with in this life must go on. There's no escaping it.

You can escape it, but the consequences aren't worth it. So it's the wisdom, the purity, and the peace from God that make it work, that make it happen in spite of ourselves. God does not look at us and say, what a train wreck, and walk away. It works to make us work, to make us serve him, and we do willfully. We're delighted to serve God. I hope that is the case with every believer. To go through this life as a believer and not to have served the Lord.

I would not want that, and I hope you don't either. Well, these are the steps to peace and service, wisdom and purity and peace, but there are things that are going to come against these things. And to effectively deal with human hurt in this world, human sorrow, it requires that we attack it.

We do that in a number of ways. Misguided behavior of human beings is the cause of so much sorrow and pain in this life. And the scripture looks to address these very things, misguided behavior, wrong thinking that leads to this sort of behavior. Misguided by unseen, but very real forces.

Forces from within, forces from without, forces from underneath. God wants us to prevail against it nonetheless. So we look now at verse 13, and here James asks this question, Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show by good conduct that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom. He starts off, who is wise and understanding?

Well, if you have any wisdom and any understanding, you will not raise your hand when this question is asked. Now in the classical Greek, which helps the translators understand just how the words in the Greek are supposed to be used, and for those of you who might not know, our New Testament was originally penned in Greek, and it is translated into various languages. Well, this word here for wise, it's only found here, used by James, and it's used in classical Greek of a skillful person, for someone who is skilled in a particular art or craft. That leads us to believe that he's linking what he is saying with the first verse of James chapter 3, if you would look there with me quickly. My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment. And so he's going back and he's addressing those who want to be teachers, the wise ones, skilled in the Scripture, skilled in the Word of God, at least in their own head, anyone who is an expert on any subject.

We all tend to feel at some point we're an expert on something. And so he has this eye on the Christian teacher, but it doesn't stop there, of course. It's just one eye is on the Christian teacher. It's any Christian who is going to take up the work of God, needs to heed these lessons. That is his intention. If you were to say to James, are you just talking to the teachers now? He would say, of course not.

This is for all believers, but I've got my eye on them because they can be a problem. And he wants to address that in the church. Knowledge is not enough to make it through life. It's not enough that a teacher teaches.

Life's too big for that. Knowledge gives us the ability to do things. Well, all right, that's good, got to have it. But wisdom gives us the ability to do them well, to make judgment, proper judgment calls, distinction between this or that. The timing, which is so critical for so many things. A person can be bilingual, speak two languages, but what if what they have to say is no good? So knowledge of the language is not enough. How to use it for the king, for God, that is what is essential. So who is wise and understanding among you? He's speaking to Christians. All of this is for us, the believer. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, it is my prayer that you are not yet a believer and you'll be one before you leave here.

Or maybe you're listening online and you don't believe. Perhaps God will grant you repentance as you are exposed to his word. He says to these believers, let him show by good conduct that his works are done, that his deeds, that is, let him show by good conduct that his works are done. Now he's going to go on to say in meekness and wisdom, but before we get there, he is simply saying, action, we all know this, speaks louder than words. John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim's Progress, says the soul of religion is the practical part. The real part of a person's faith is what they get done because of the faith.

Otherwise, it's just philosophy, theological philosophy, which without works is really not very helpful to the host or anyone else. But this meekness in meekness and wisdom, meekness does not come easily to us. We want to assert ourselves. We want to use the strength that we have in whatever situation we find ourselves in.

Give the other person a piece of our mind, usually the piece we need the most, we give it away. Meekness in Christ, the right use of power, the right use of what God has given to you. That starts with being humble, of being submitted to him. You know, who does not want to experience God as a believer? Well, that's not good and it's not enough to want to experience God. Many are disqualified from experiencing him, many churchgoers, because they refuse to obey him.

So they forfeit a richer experience. Paul writes to Timothy, he says, and again for those of you who are not quoting Paul, I'm quoting me right now, the cross references, they give us, they continue the authority to the points that are being made. They are critical to scriptural understanding. We love to quote Tozier, it takes the whole Bible to make a whole Christian, or you could say to make the Christian whole. Writing to Timothy in the second letter to him, he says, A servant of the Lord must not quarrel, but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient in humility, correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth. So when James says, In the meekness of wisdom, Paul says, A servant of the Lord must not quarrel, but be gentle.

See, when we have the truth, we know we're right. It does not give us the right to be brutes, to be overbearing, over the top in our presentation of these truths, but to remember how our Lord was. And one thing that stood out with all the apostles and their writings about Jesus Christ was His gentleness. If anyone had the right to not be gentle, it is God, the holy God that we worship, who is offended by sinners.

And yet, He is so gentle. Isn't it so easy to be impatient with someone who's irritating you? They could be whistling a tune. Most people can't whistle.

The ones that can are in cowboy movies. The rest really don't get it. But what do you do if a person is happy and whistling a tune?

Where are you going? You kill that happiness. You can't whistle. It's vile. Stop it. Of course, if it were just limited to that, it wouldn't be too much of a problem.

But it shows up in so many other areas of our relationship. So may we be careful with wisdom, the right use of knowledge, and meekness, the right use of strength. And all of us have strength in Christ. Is there anyone here that has come to Christ and did not feel stronger because of it?

Well, I can't speak for you, but I can speak for me. When I came to Jesus Christ, I felt like Superman. I mean, everything was just now fresh. Everything I saw and looked at and understood. Everything had Christ in it and over it. And what I did not understand and know, I was comfortable enough that He understands, and He knows, and that He is my Lord, and therefore I am good with all of this. So wisdom's not obnoxious. This knowledge of Christ that He imparts to us does not give us license to be obnoxious with it.

God's people, incidentally, are characterized as sheep, not sharks. 1 Corinthians 13, that love chapter, or the chapter on love is a better way to say it. Love does not behave rudely. We should tell Christians this.

We should tell this to churchgoers because I don't think they've heard this, some of them. Love does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil. That's going to take everything you've got in the Spirit to achieve this. In meekness of wisdom. Now, we talked about that wisdom in the first chapter of James. We're not talking about God making all of His people a bunch of sages that are just wise people, you know, sitting down waiting for someone to ask for counsel. He is speaking about the knowledge and application of God's will in righteousness.

This is the wisdom that He is talking about here. To be skilled at serving God because of the Holy Spirit's touch upon your life. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ and you've not experienced the Holy Spirit, I don't mean certainly not limiting that to some sign or some wonder, but a robust sense of His love and His presence unlike anything else in your life. If you've not ever had that experience as a believer, you must come up at the end of the service to the passage and say, please pray that I receive the Holy Spirit. When you're born again, you come to life and it's life in Christ and it is with it our feelings. Sensation of His presence is nothing like it.

It is unmatched in the human experience. In verse 14, He continues to build upon this. Again, in verse 13, He says, who is wise and understanding among you, let him show by good conduct that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom.

Good conduct, He says. Verse 14, but if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth. Well, when He starts off verse 14 with, but if you. That singles out all of us.

Anyone who can hear what He is saying, that's who He is speaking to. And so now comes the outcome of behavior. When the wisdom of Christ is missing in the flock, we have problems and this is what He is talking about. And so He has already said, let him show by good conduct that his works are done in meekness of wisdom, that imparted knowledge of Christ. But if you have envy and self-seeking in your hearts, don't go boasting and become a liar against the things that are so, that are from God. And so when we are driven by rights of self, my right, my self-right, and not led by the Lord, here's where we're going to land.

As a flock, as an individual, in a home, wherever you find, a group of believers, if they are not working at rowing in the direction God has sent them, then bitter envy is waiting for them. Satan had that bitter envy when he wanted that throne that God sat on and sits on. So he says, bitter envy. This is a passion that is poisonous in the context that this is bitter envy. Bitter envy is extreme.

It will become extreme if not checked. In 1 Kings, chapter 26, you'll know this story. This is when Solomon's wisdom was made clear to everyone in the kingdom. But it also brings to us two characters, a mother who loved her child and a bitter, envious woman, who by mistake rolled over and caused the death of her child. We read, pick it up in 1 Kings 3.26, Then the woman whose son was living spoke to the king, for she yearned with compassion for her son. Because Solomon, bluffing, of course, saying, well, we can't figure out who the child belongs to, so let's cut the child in half, give each piece.

It's kind of, well, that's grotesque. And so the mother, the true mother, yearned with compassion for her son. And she said, oh my Lord, give her the living child and by no means kill him. But the other said, let him be neither mine nor yours, but divide him. That bitterness.

Satanically driven bitterness. What kind of person thinks like this? I always read that section and I wonder, what happens when they all went home?

Where did that lady go? I would have put my house for sale. I wouldn't want to live next to a neighbor like that. Well, be careful because bitter envy can lead.

Maybe not that far, but it doesn't have to go that far to bring destruction and satanic activity in a church goer's life. He says, but if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, that means it's got in there and that's what's driving the ship. We all, at some point, sense envy or jealousy. We want something that another person has or we're overly protected of what we believe to be ours.

But when it starts getting out of control, there's a big problem. This word for self-seeking in the Greek really is strife, contention, belligerence. So this bitter envy leads to strife, to belligerence, to confrontation.

Have you ever tried to be nice to someone who refuses to let you be nice to them? They're belligerent. They're looking for a fight.

They're looking for trouble and jealousy. It makes one bitter not better. Verse 11, look up at verse 11 of James 3 if you have your Bibles open. Otherwise, you'll have to depend on my reading of it. Does a spring send forth fresh water and bitter from the same opening?

No, it does not. It shouldn't be this way. At spring, if you pour fresh water into salt water, you have poisoned the water. If you put good fruit with bad fruit, you will rot the good fruit. We've got to be mindful of these things that are bitter and destroy. And self-seeking is it, and it's an accurate translation. That Greek word, again, it does mean contention and strife, but it also carries the meaning of asserting oneself, seeking what you want at the cost of everybody else around you.

I want what I want. We may not say it that way, but you know when you get into that zone, you're going to force your will on the other person if you can. Make them sorry for standing in your way. Paul had this problem with the church at Corinth. And what problem did he not have with the church at Corinth? And there are many churches of Corinth in existence where they go and they sing and they're in the spirit because he said to that church, you lack no spiritual gift. God truly blessed them. They sing, they hold their hands up, nothing wrong with that.

In fact, I encourage it, as long as you're not sticking your hands in the face of the person next to you. Worship the Lord with your heart, soul, mind, and strength, all of it. But that's all they had, many of them.

That was it. They failed when it came to obedience. They were churchgoers for themselves. They were self-seekers, so he writes, and he says, you are still carnal, you're still like unbelievers.

That's what that means. Like you've never been born again. You think just because you stand and sing, you've been born again. So he says you are still carnal for where there are envy, strife, divisions among you, are you not carnal and behaving like mere men. And James is talking about the same thing. James wrote earlier, this letter from James precedes the letters of Paul. More than once, the pastor will step into a pulpit and address a passage of scripture that deals with these behaviors, only to discover it sometimes, trampled by a churchgoer who is sitting in the sermon soon after the sermon.

What happens here? Well, the will to do good is with me, but to pull it off when someone pushes my buttons. Incidentally, that won't excuse you before Christ. To stand before him, well, I pushed my buttons. This was Moses' case when he struck the rock. We have two million people here nagging me. And God didn't say, oh, yeah, that's pretty bad.

I mean, one person pushing your button is bad, but they have two million of them. No, God did not give him a pass. What a lesson. I get so much from the life of Moses, because I see my own life on a much smaller scale, of course, because I side with Moses. I think those people are irritating Moses.

You should have hit them with the stick, not the rock. But we have to submit, because always in the presence of God, when we disagree, he is right. We are automatically wrong. When I mention churchgoers can hear a sermon, points addressing the very behavior they're going to violate after the service, and then this is the worst part. They won't repent. They're clearly wrong, but their pride has welled up, and days later, months later, they won't repent. Usually they'll leave, so they don't have to repent in their own thinking.

I hope this is none of us, and if it's been you before, may it not be again. Do not boast, he says. Why do Christians even have to be told these things? Don't go around bragging, you who are self-seeking in your heart.

This evidently was also going on in the churches, otherwise the Holy Spirit would not address it through James. To boast is to exalt oneself. Now, of course, you're sitting around the table playing Monopoly, having fun with each other, and you boast that you've got all the money. That's a game.

It's fun. But when it shows up in real life, it's a problem. To puff oneself up is to parade oneself before everybody else is being more important than they are. 1 Corinthians 13, love does not envy.

That's something to contemplate. Love does not parade itself. It's not puffed up. Knowledge will puff up if it has not the wisdom from above. It won't grow up.

It'll puff up. Do not boast and lie against the truth. It's sort of a paradox there, to lie against the truth. That's what all lies do. But Jesus said, I am the truth.

We must not lose sight of that. This is serious business. This is not just a little filler in here. He's trying to get to the next point.

This is the point. To lie against the truth is to be left blind to the truth, and therefore to open oneself up for the consequences. Jesus was dealing with a bunch of religious folks, not righteous religious folks. Thanks for joining us today as we took a deeper look into the book of James, here on Cross Reference Radio. Cross Reference Radio is the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston, of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. We're blessed to bring you God's word with each broadcast. If you'd like more information or want to listen to additional teachings from Pastor Rick, please visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com. If you've been blessed by this program, we'd love to hear from you. When you visit the website, simply click on the contact us link at the top of the page and leave us a message. That website again is crossreferenceradio.com. Please join us again next time as we continue our study through the book of James, right here on Cross Reference Radio.