The Harvest of Wisdom

Friday, February 3, 2023

If you are wise and understand God’s ways, prove it by living an honorable life, doing good works with the humility that comes from wisdom.  But if you are bitterly jealous and there is selfish ambition in your heart, don’t cover up the truth with boasting and lying.  For jealousy and selfishness are not God’s kind of wisdom.  Such things are earthly, unspiritual, and demonic.  For wherever there is jealousy and selfish ambition, there you will find disorder and evil of every kind.  But the wisdom from above is first of all pure.  It is also peace loving, gentle at all times, and willing to yield to others.  It is full of mercy and the fruit of good deeds.  It shows no favoritism and is always sincere.  And those who are peacemakers will plant seeds of peace and reap a harvest of righteousness.  James 3:13-18

The words of Apostle James flow as if a peaceful, cold stream of welcome water, refreshing a thirsty man trudging through the desert.  He presents a word picture of Godly wisdom (from above) that is healing and strength for anyone who would influence his generation for peace.  A true poet, James holds up the fruit of good deeds as an agricultural image of the holy grail of wisdom, resulting in a harvest of righteousness.  It’s a verbal feast of wholesome nourishment for any soul that longs for Godliness.

Quiet, gentle, and humble are words mostly evaporated in 21st century culture.  Sometimes it seems our Gross National Product is only measured in Loud, Irritating, and Bragging. 

Apostle James is lost on a culture preferring an elephant stampede over a quiet contemplation next to a peaceful stream in the valley.  For all the shrewd intellect creating mind-bending technological toys, released each year with much fanfare by Apple and its imitators, we have unhinged the consequence of our progress from the process.  We dabble with artificial intelligence, not intentionally planting seeds of righteousness in human children, to point the machines in peaceful directions.  We have six-year-olds, enamored by heroes of violence on their screens, bringing a gun to school to shoot their teachers.  They don’t have a clue that momentary act of selfish impulse will extinguish any peace their future could possibly hold.  In foolishness, like Esau, we forfeit the legacy of birthright to satisfy the craving for a pottage of the next half-second’s thrill of power. 

So, what’s to be done?  Is there a possibility of ever reclaiming something of a harvest of righteousness in the present caustic soil of selfishness and anger?  Are we doomed to starve for the lack of goodness?  Is there no peace whatsoever in our future?  I believe the answer to each of those questions is an unqualified YES, unless we are willing to return to planting wise seeds of purity, gentleness, kindness, mercy, hope, and worship of God in Christ Jesus.  If there will ever be a crop of righteousness, preparing the soil comes first.

For You Today  

The best grapes come from cultivated vines.  Those vines were planted long ago, and cared-for.  As the lineage of God’s people, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph recalled the mistakes of their forbears, and culled the weeds from their lives, all the while making new mistakes for the following generations to unravel, we must choose each day to plant new vines for a righteous harvest.  What seed do you hold in your hand right now?

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

The Marriage of Belief and Behavior  and  Humility 

This is an updated version of “So Much Anger” published on Rocky Road Devotions January 16, 2014

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Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©