Friday,
July 28, 2023
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 3:17-18
You know some people James describes. Remember them right now…faces that evoke good
memories, calm moments, full of reason and safety. You know the things they’ve done for you, or someone
else who didn’t deserve mercy. You
understand the strength of someone who doesn’t show favoritism, always to be
counted upon for sincerity and truth.
You know a peacemaker or two…several if you’re favored with eyes to see.
James issues this descriptive love affair with wisdom,
drawing on sweet memories of his older half-brother, Jesus. James didn’t always recognize it, this
wisdom. Along with his siblings and
mother he thought Jesus was a little crazy, what with all this radical
preaching about new wine, loving your enemies, and camels squeezing through the
eye of a needle. But there were those
other telltale signs of pure wisdom…good deeds, mercy, and gentleness. Later, after the cross, burial, and
resurrection, James began to understand what he’d witnessed. The way his brother submitted to the powers
that be, the nails, the spear in a lifeless side (which James couldn’t
understand), these were all revealed to be the seeds of peace. It was only when the great harvest of
Pentecost appeared that James understood what his brother was doing; he finally
saw wisdom in its holy purity.
I knew a man who walked like that, filled with wisdom
that was gentle and led to peacemaking.
It was at a church I served as pastor many years ago. He arrived at the church a few years after I
got there. I liked him the moment I saw
him. There was a gentleness about BobbyMac’s
way of talking with a genuine unpretentious.
You felt calm next to him. It
wasn’t just me; others saw it too.
I can be deceived…easily. I tend to trust people until they prove
otherwise. Some people come into your
life for a reason. Why Bobby Mac’s path
crossed with mine became evident a few years after we met. His gift of “peacemaking” in a church with a
long history of contentiousness (particularly with firing preachers), was a
welcome fresh breath of pure air. The
church was grateful for his presence and he was in leadership roles in no
time. Shortly after that his spiritual
gift of sowing peace became necessary.
Some decisions I’d made as pastor stirred some memories of what former
pastors had done, and a group within the church decided it was time to stir the
pot of “pastor-change”. It didn’t seem
to matter what way I tried to reach out, to meet folks half-way….minds were
made up, set in stone. Enter the
peacemaker…Bobby Mac. Some of the words
he used were exact duplicates of some of the things I’d said to try to fix the
relationship of pastor and people. But
Bobby Mac said them differently; he sowed mercy with gentleness, and sincerely
trusted the truth to plow through any favoritism from either the pastor-change group
or my stubbornness.
I cannot adequately describe just how Bobby did what he
did without writing several books, but this one thing I can say: God was all over that! I felt like the Roman soldier who was staring
at the way Jesus died on the cross:
“This man
truly was the Son of God!” Mark 15:39b
For You Today
Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all
he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which
exceeds anything we can understand. His
peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:6-7
Pray for peace that way…and you’ll bump into pure
wisdom from above as gently and favorably as Bobby Mac.
You chew on that as you
hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!
There are about 2,600 devotional
posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.
Title Image:
via Pixabay.com Images without citation are in
public domain. Unless noted, Scripture
quoted from NLT©
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