PURE

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 

If you want the kind of wisdom that is pure, gentle, unbiased, peace-filled, and generating a harvest of peace-making, it’s available from the same One who is the Author of the peace that passes understanding:

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!

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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^©   

 

Taking the Measure of Wisdom

 

Monday, July 27, 2020

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.  James 3:13-16

Trying to define, or measure something like wisdom is much like the tale of three blind men who were describing an elephant.  Their “eyes” were, of course, their hands.  One of the men stood at the front of the elephant feeling the trunk; he exclaimed, it’s like a tree, round and reaching upwards.  The second man stood at the side of the elephant with his hands exploring the animal’s rib cage; he said, what do you mean, tree…this beast is a wall.  The third man stood at the rear side holding the elephant’s tail.  He concluded, well, whatever this is, it’s tied up with a rope.  Three men seeing the same animal and giving three different opinions…and all three of them right.  Sounds like a board meeting at church, doesn’t it?

I used to have a somewhat different opinion than I do now of wisdom.  I used to think wisdom was common sense that made sense.  It was like Ossie and Bobby McDuffie.  One was highly educated, the other barely so.  But, when either spoke, their common sense just seemed to cut through any difficult situation and set a standard you could count on.  I still think they were among the most clear-headed and Godly men I ever met. 

But, my understanding of how you define true wisdom, especially of the Godly sort, has matured past that point.  It’s like the three men describing an elephant…their analysis of what they’d felt was correct; it just wasn’t complete. 

James, the half-brother to Jesus, gives us a more complete, no-nonsense description of true, or Godly wisdom.  The measure of true wisdom is not taken by merely looking at a person’s words; rather it is the person’s actions.  If you want to measure whether someone is wise, check the life, and the way others are treated.  Do their actions match up with their words?  Is there a sense of honor, that a person would never lie to you?  James warns that evil and disorder is to be found in selfish ambition, boasting, and lying.  It is the polar-opposite of honor, which lives in truth-telling.

There are times I’m tempted to lie.  I don’t like being in situations where I must tell someone a hard truth, and if there is a lie, small, white, somewhat “harmless”, that would make the uncomfortable moment fade away with nobody getting shamed or angry, the temptation causes me real internal conflict.  It’s a genuine temptation, because my desire to not hurt another person is pressing my mind to search for a way out of the possibility of causing harm.  But the honorable, wise person, recognizes where that suggestion comes from, because it smells like smoke, right out of the pit of hell.  It eases into the back of your mind with a smoothness that got Eve’s attention in the garden. 

If a person is a practiced, skilled liar, there comes a time when lying becomes, for them, the only truth they know.  They go past the point of even being able to recognize truth.  But the opposite is also true; the person who lives in truth, being honrable, always speaks truth, because nothing less will let them sleep. 

I served as pastor at a church once that was falling apart.  A power stuggle had erupted into a full-on congregational split.  The music director had moral issues and had to be fired, and we were in dire need of a music program.  News like that gets around, and one Sunday a couple showed up at church.  After worship the man asked if I’d come to visit them; they were interested in becoming part of the church.  When I visited with them the next night, he and his wife showed me into their den.  On the wall were at least 10 certificates…all extolling the merits of the man’s muscial talent.  He elaborated on each one, boasting how he’d taken terrible music programs and brought his gift of music to each one.  Then he got to the agenda; he and his wife had just left another church that, in his opionion, had no spirit at all.  He had taken six other families with him, and they were just waiting to find out where he was going so they could follow him.  He then laid out the offer:  If you’ll make me your new music director, you’ll get those other six families; I just have to give them the word. 

Frankly any definition of honorable, or wise, does not include that!

Let’s Pray Together:

Father, we would be wise; help us to know it is always found in truth.

For You Today

The next time temptation to bend, twist, or re-invent the truth comes along, don’t!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road today.  Have a blessed day!

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Title Image:  Pixabay.com  Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

For other posts on Wisdom, James 3:  The Marriage of Belief and Behavior and Humility