Two Kinds of Wisdom

SERMON: 2006-02-26--js0615--two-kinds-of-wisdom SOURCE DURATION: 00:45:31.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The recording begins with the theological exposition of James and continues through pastoral application, narrative illustration (Hatfield and McCoy), and concludes with a clear benediction, all constituting the main sermon material. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:43:24.080-00:45:31.060 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Wisdom, we saw some months ago when we looked at the first chapter of James, is looking at life from God's perspective. Wisdom is looking at life from God's perspective. And when you look at life from God's perspective, you may recall there are three things that happen. The first thing that happens is that we develop an eternal perspective, that is to say we learn to look at the here and now from the point of view of eternity. A hundred years from now, most of the things that you and I are busy with today and that occupy our time and our attention really won't matter very much. Whether we were rich or whether we were poor, whether we were healthy or whether we were sick, whether we were happy or whether we were unhappy, it'll all be reasonably irrelevant in a hundred years' time. There's only one thing that's going to matter then. Are we saved, yes or no? Do we have a relationship with God the Father through faith in Jesus, yes or no? If we do, the future is bright indeed. If we don't, no matter what we will have had in this life, it will all be lost. We develop an eternal perspective not only, but developing an eternal perspective helps prepare us or helps us to understand how the present prepares us for the future. If according to scripture, God's destiny for each one of us as his children is that we should rule and reign with Christ over a new creation, whatever that all entails, and if it is true that this life is a preparation for that life, then your perspective on what happens today changes as you begin to understand how both the good things that happen to us and the bad things that happen to us, God is going to use so that we can become more like Jesus and he can entrust us with eternal riches for all eternity. Wisdom means we have an eternal perspective. It helps us to understand how the present prepares us for the future, and once we understand how the present prepares us for the future, then we develop a whole new attitude towards hardship. Once you understand that God uses even the difficult experiences of life to bring us to where we need to be, well, you're still not going to run around and just wildly embrace suffering, but there is a new joy that comes with it because you understand that this becomes the evidence of God's special love and special favor. That's why James says then in James 1, "Consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking in anything." I mean, I see Franklin and Diana here, Paul and Jennifer. You know something of the stories they've gone through in their own lives? Stories that they wouldn't want to wish probably on their worst enemy. And yet, having come through it, being on this side of it together, we can celebrate that in the wisdom of God, even things that seem difficult and troublesome at the time can be turned around for common good. Wisdom means looking at life from God's perspective. So having established that in James chapter 1 and then having worked out the practical realities of how you live that out in chapter 2, now in the latter part of chapter 3, he comes back once again to the subject of wisdom and he wants to show us that in fact there are two things that could be called wisdom. The one wisdom from above and the other wisdom from below. Listen again to how he describes it, verses 14 and 15, this is wisdom from below. "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 and spiritual of the devil." Remember now, wisdom here is how you do life and how you think life works. And James says there is something that passes as wisdom, but it comes from down below. We'll talk more about that in a few moments. But then he says there is a wisdom that comes from heaven or wisdom that comes from above. And he says it is pure, peace loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. In the time that we have this morning, what I want to do with you is try to compare these two kinds of wisdom. Because whether you realize it or not, everything we do in life, from how we worship God, to how we relate to our families, to how we connect to the world, all is founded on one or the other. And as I mentioned earlier in the prayer, part of one and part of the other. And so it's very important for us to understand what the differences are between these two kinds of wisdom so that we can put off the one and learn to put on the other. So let's begin then with the wisdom that comes from above. The wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure, peace loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Now as we look at that verse, there are two things I want us to note. The first is fairly self-evident, the second is not. First thing I want us to note is that he lists seven qualities as being descriptive adjectives of wisdom that comes from above. He says it is first of all pure. Now pure is one of these words we use a lot, but seldom defined. The opposite of pure is impure, but what is the difference? Well purity means the absence of mixture. When you go to the shore and buy a bag of pure sugar, it means just that. It's sugar, not half salt, not half flour, not half sand, sugar. And purity before God is a single-minded devotion to God and a determination to live the way that God wants you to live. Blessed are the pure in heart, said Jesus, for they shall see God. He goes on to say the wisdom that comes from heaven is peace loving. That is to say it tries to avoid conflict, it tries to minimize differences it's not given to pushing its own agenda forward. It's considerate, that is to say it thinks of other people and other people's needs, doesn't just plow ahead like a bull in a china shop, it is submissive. That is to say it's under authority, recognizes not only God's authority, but all other authority that God has instituted, it recognizes that rebellion often touted in North American society particularly as a virtue, you know think of the one person who stands up against everybody else in the movies and in the literature, rebellion has its roots in the evil one because wisdom from above lives in harmony with the created order in the structure that God has made, full of mercy and good fruit. Anybody who has experienced mercy will be able to extend mercy to other people you can never just hold up a legalistic nose to the grindstone concept when you know how much God has forgiven you. God are the merciful, says scripture, for they shall be called the sons of God, impartial. To be impartial means that you're neutral, you don't favor the one over the other because he's a family member or you know you like the look of the eyes better than you like the look of the other guy's eyes. Impartial means that you're committed to truth regardless of relationship, regardless of personal benefit and then of course sincere, beautiful English word comes from a Latin word that literally means without wax and it has its origin in the pottery trade. If you were a dishonest salesman and you were trying to peddle second class pottery that had cracks in it, then you would take wax, you would color it and fill the cracks with it so that it looked like the pot was in better condition than what it really was. You put a mask on it for economic gain. And the word sincere means without wax, that is to say without pretense, without a mask, without pretending to be something other than what you really are. These are the qualities, says James, that are evidence of wisdom that comes from above. Why? Because it is the way of faith. It flows out of a relationship with God that produces harmony. And that's the second thing to note in this particular passage and you won't note it in the English language because it covers up what the Greek really says. What James does here is he does a play on words. He uses the technique of alliteration, that is to say he does a play on words. Of these seven descriptive terms, three of them begin with the letter A and four of them begin with the letter E. And it's almost, and I think that's probably what he had in mind, what he's trying to communicate here is harmony, a smooth sound of alliteration. He makes the language sing to communicate what is the fruit of life in God's kingdom. That is to say if you have men and women who are in a living relationship with God and who live by faith and who walk by faith and who demonstrate that in the way they relate to each other, then what you have is harmony, the harmony of God's kingdom. And diagrammatically, of course, we can show it this way, a picture you've seen many times. Wisdom from above. God's truth says God exists eternally. Everything that exists, exists because God made it. God promises to meet all the needs of his creation out of the abundance of his love, expects two things from us in return, gratitude and obedience. As gratitude and obedience characterizes our lives and we know that God is more than enough to meet every need of our lives, we have enough for each other. And in a world where everybody has enough not only for themselves but they care about each other, what do you get? You get harmony and you get peace. This is how God has created the world to operate before the fall. And so James, when he sums it all up in verse 18, he puts it this way. He says, "Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness." That is to say, if you and I make it our business to live by wisdom that is from above, that is to say we kneel before God, we learn to trust him, we learn to obey him with all of our heart and we learn to walk in his ways, then the qualities of the kingdom, all things being equal will spread to our children and to our grandchildren and to our great grandchildren and to as many generations as the Lord sees fit to bless. And wherever the kingdom goes, there are those advantages of the kingdom that sometimes span many generations. In my book Olive Shoots Around Your Table, I tell the story of Bill and Gloria Gaither and how they came into possession of the property where they now live. Bill and Gloria, of course, as most of you I'm sure know, are world famous Christian songwriters and recording artists. Their homecoming series of videos has been phenomenally successful, featured many times on secular television. And Bill and Gloria, getting along in years now, are just a mighty music publishing empire in their own right. If Sean and Amy do as well in the years that are to come, then they will do very well indeed. But here's the story about this piece of property. Bill felt led to it, felt that the Lord wanted him to have it, was told that it was owned by a grouchy old man who had no intention of selling it to anybody. Well, Bill was not to be put off, so he approached him anyway and sure enough, the answer was the same as always, no. And it didn't matter what he said, what he offered, how he bargained, the man simply wasn't going to sell because he had no interest in so doing. Nothing worked, that is, until the old man discovered that Bill's grandfather had been an acquaintance of his years earlier. That immediately changed the picture because apparently Bill's grandfather had done the old man a good turn many years before, which he had never forgotten. As a result, the old man relented and eventually sold the property to Bill and Gloria. And when he did, this is what he said, "I want you to know," I can just picture this, "I want you to know I'm not doing this for you. And I'm not doing this for your father, I'm doing this for your grandfather." And as Bill observes, "I reap the harvest of seed sown in the ground by my grandfather." And as you've heard me say so often, how many of us here cannot similarly look back over our lives and say, "We have reaped the harvest of righteousness sown in peace by those who have gone before." What an incredible motivating factor for us to seek to live by biblical wisdom, the wisdom of God, as opposed to the wisdom from below. Unfortunately, as you know, we don't always live by wisdom from above, and certainly the rest of the world doesn't. We live by wisdom from below. And wisdom from below, 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 and spiritual of the devil. Notice here, two distinguishing characteristics of wisdom from below. First of all, it has bitter envy. Envy means jealousy. It means not being satisfied with who you are, what you have. You look around you, somebody else has got more money, a better car, a nicer house, a better job, you know, more beautiful wife, more handsome husband, nicer children. And you say to yourself, "I wish I had what they have," and you allow it to stew and it becomes bitter envy. That's an indication that you're not rooted in God and living by faith, but that in that area of your life you are operating by what the Bible calls the wisdom from below. Envy has its origins with Satan, because Satan wanted what God was and has and is, mounted a palace rebellion in heaven to try to get what was not his, was thrown out in his ear, and he has been green with envy ever since. And if he can get you and me green with envy, he'll do that too. It goes on to say then, selfish ambition. Ambition is the drive that pushes you forward. And ambition can be a good thing because it can, when it's yielded to the Lord Jesus Christ, give us the determination to be faithful to Him and to fulfill our calling. It becomes wrong when it's twisted and becomes selfish ambition. And selfish ambition is when you and I stand at the center and when all our time, talent, and treasure is focused on getting what we want because, you see, we're not walking and living by faith. We don't believe there is a God or if he is, he isn't going to care for us. We're tired of waiting for him. We take matters into our own hands and we plow ahead trying to get our own kingdom to come. And if we're religious people, then we'll even cast that in a religious cloak so that everybody thinks we're doing it for God. Selfish ambition. And I notice that bitter envy and selfish ambition are fueled by three sources which are the classic enemy of the Christian soul. The first is earthly. That's the world, the whole world around you that is life organized in a rebellion against God lives by wisdom from below and will do everything it can to stir up bitter envy and selfish ambition. It is unspiritual. Unspiritual in scripture is the natural man. You and I don't need help from the rest of the world or even from the devil to be full of envy or full of selfish ambition. Because by nature, separated from God, all we can think about is building our own kingdom and establishing our own satisfaction, unspiritual. And the devil, as I said earlier, he's the great enemy of God. And so here you have the three classic enemies of the Christian faith, the devil, the world and the flesh, and they're constantly prodding you and me. Constantly telling us, "God, well, if he's there, does he really care about you?" Constantly reminding you that his laws are limited. Don't you have much more fun taking matters into your own hands? Constantly telling us we can sin with impunity and not have to face the consequences. And so the result is always chaos and confusion. And you see that picture diagrammatically then in this diagram, the wisdom from below. Notice again, God's outside the picture because God and man are alienated on account of sin. Satan is inside the circle now because Adam and Eve and we as their children have let him in and so he is constantly feeding us the wisdom from below. Constantly telling us where God has failed us. Constantly telling us where other people have failed us. Constantly reminding us that God's not out to do his good. Constantly reminding us that we ought to just try eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because then you can be like God. You've got first hand experience of sin. After all, you don't want to be naive. Everybody's got to have a little bit of fun. And the bottom line is live for yourself. Make everybody serve you because if God's not there, God doesn't care for you and there's only limited resources to go around, then it's everybody for himself. But what happens when it's everybody for himself? Well you get chaos and confusion which is what this line represents. You get, in the words of James, where you have envy and selfish ambition. Where you will find disorder in every evil practice. Show me anywhere where people live by worldly wisdom. Show me any place where the pressure is on and there isn't enough to go around and people don't have faith in God and I will show you people whose lives dissolve into disorder and every evil practice. And I want to take a few minutes and tell you a story from history that is a powerful illustration of how that can work out through family feuds from generation to generation. Perhaps you've heard of the Hatfield McCoy Feud. Anybody? You've certainly heard the term the real McCoy. Well it comes from these two families. And these two families in the late 1800s lived across the Tug River. One in the state of West Virginia and the other in the state of Kentucky. One family lived on this side of the river here is the border. Here's Kentucky and here is West Virginia. The Hatfields lived over here and the McCoys lived over here. Both of these families were strong clans and they were headed up by the two people you see there. One was called Devil N.C. Hatfield. His real name was William Anderson but he got the nickname because he got caught up in a bear fight that took three days and he won it and afterwards he bragged that he could take on the devil himself and so the name stuck. The other guy was Randolph McCoy. They had a lot of similarities. They both are said to have had 13 children each. They both were busy running illegal liquor, fought with the South in the American Civil War and were busily engaged in the expanding timber and coal mining area as that part of the country got opened up towards the latter part of the 1800s. For many years they lived side by side and seemed to be doing okay until the year 1878 when Randolph McCoy was visiting Floyd Hatfield, the cousin of Devil N.C. and spotted, he said, his pig among his pigs and he said, "You stole my pig." Now you watch how small an incident can blow up and bear bad fruit. Now Mr. McCoy was a man who was given to law and so he took it to court. In the subsequent court case in order to keep things fair they had a jury of 12 people, six Hatfields and six McCoys. Fair enough. The testimony was going along pretty well until a fellow by the name of Bill Staten who was related to both families testified that he believed the pig belonged not to Mr. McCoy but to Mr. Hatfield. And when the jury went to deliberate one of the McCoys who had a bee in his bonnet about the McCoy family sided with the Hatfields. And so Mr. McCoy, are you with me on this, Mr. McCoy lost his case and was very angry about that and that's when it began because in June of 1880 Staten, Bill Staten, the guy whose testimony made him lose the case was murdered by Sam and Paris McCoy, two sons of Randolph. Those two sons went to trial and they got acquitted and they got acquitted on the basis of self-defense. Mr. McCoy was not a happy man. His unhappiness was soon to increase because he had a beautiful daughter called Roseanne. And Roseanne had the misfortune of falling in love with devil Ancy's son Johncy. And they snuck back and forth and they brought disgrace upon both families because she was afraid to go back home and so she moved in with the Hatfield family. Well, the Hatfield family didn't want her, the Hatfield family didn't want her marrying their son and so they fought against it. And to make a long story short and it has all the hallmark of Greek tragedy, she got pregnant by Johncy who then abandoned her, sent her back home and to rub salt into the wound married her cousin Nancy in 1881. Roseanne never really recovered. She went from bad to worse, died at the early age of 30. The feud is now well on its way and bad blood demands more bad blood. And so what happens, two years later, 1882, a Hatfield by the name of Ellison was set upon by three of Roseanne's brothers. They stabbed him 26 times and then for good measure, they shot him in the back. He didn't die immediately, took a couple of days, but in the meantime, the three brothers were apprehended and when the Hatfields found that Ellison had died, they summarily took the boys to the woods and they shot him. And so on August the 10th, there were funerals on both sides of the Tug River for both families. The feud is now escalating. Between 1880 and 1891, murders and slaughters back and forth culminated in 1888 when Devil Annecy himself decides it's time to finish this off. He stays home because he is pleading illness, but he sends 20 or 30 of his relatives to go over the river to the McCoy side and to kill the whole McCoy clan. So they surround their cabin and they're trying to shoot them through the walls of the cabin, but the bullets don't go through, so they decide to set the cabin on fire. Everybody inside. So one of McCoy's daughters by the name of Alifair comes running out the door under the presupposition that by the Appalachian Code of Conduct, they will not shoot a woman in cold blood. She was very wrong. They killed her on the spot. Her mother comes to her assistance and they beat the snot out of her. One of the boys serves as a decoy to try to detract the raiders. He gets shot and killed, Randolph and some of the other family members manage to sneak off into the woods. The feud is now out of control. The governors of both states become involved. The National Guard has to be called out. What happens next is that bounty hunters capture eight of the Hatfields, but there is a lot of quarreling about jurisdiction. It goes all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. Newspapers all over the country are publicizing this story now. Eventually they get that settled, a trial is held, seven of them get sentenced to prison terms and the eighth, who was a feeble-minded lad by the name of Ellison Mount, who made the mistake of pleading guilty, was hanged. Hanging had already been outlawed. The public wasn't supposed to watch it. They built a big fence around the gallows, but then they built the gallows underneath or at the bottom of a big hill. So 5,000 people on this hill are watching this execution take place. It is now 1890-1891 and finally the blood feud dies. Interestingly enough, both the principals, Randolph and De Valenci, both survive. Later next week, Lord willing, I'm going to come back to that story and tell you the outcome of that because some very fascinating things happen as the years go by, but I share that story with you this morning, not to sensationalize it or anything, but to help us to try to understand that once you plant a bad seed, once you operate out of wisdom from below, if God's grace does not intervene and step into that picture, it bears bad fruit that goes from generation to generation. And that's why James, then, is so concerned here. Why his emphasis? Let me show you this picture a minute. I don't know if you can see that, but this is the Hatfield family back in those days. And you'll have trouble seeing it, but here's a rifle. Here's a gun. Here's a gun, and there's a few more in that picture here, there, and everywhere. These people knew how to stand up for themselves and defend themselves, but it cost everything. You know, Randolph McCoy in the latter years of his life would wander the streets of Pikeville telling everybody who would listen, but the tragedy that had befallen him, he lost six of his children to this conflict. So why does James put so much emphasis, then, on living by wisdom from above as opposed to wisdom from below? Well, very quickly, two reasons. Number one, he wants us to live by wisdom from above. Who is wise in understanding among you? Let him show it by his good life, by deeds done in humility that comes from wisdom. Faith, without works, we saw last week in chapter two, is not faith at all. If you truly have faith, if you believe in God with saving faith, and you know that in Christ he has become your father, and that every creature that ever lives is going to stand before him in judgment, including you, that's going to alter who you are and how you behave. It won't mean that you're perfect, but it does mean that when you see your imperfection, when you see your sin, you repent of it, you want to put wisdom from below as far away from you as you can, and you want to learn to walk by wisdom that is from above. And so James is writing to people who have gone through hard times, people who were tempted to go back to the old ways and to pick up old feuds because they are so unhappy and in such pain, and he says, "Don't you dare. I want you to learn to walk by wisdom from above. Let your life shine so that all men will know in the words of Jesus that you are my disciples." And then, of course, closely related to that, a second reason is he's concerned about backsliding. 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 as earthly and spiritual of the devil. Just because we've become the children of God, just because by faith we have become citizens of God's kingdom, that doesn't mean automatically that all the old ways are abandoned. As a matter of fact, for all of us, the nature of temptation, the nature of trial is to try to wean us away from trust and faith and confidence in God and take matters into your own hands. See, for all of us, when things go well, our families are happy, we get money in the bank, our business is prospering, our relationships are good, we love God, we love going to church, we love worshiping Him, we love serving Him, nothing to it. But it doesn't prove a lot because Jesus says that even the sons of men, even Gentiles, unbelievers know how to do good to those who do good to them. The real test in your life and in my life is when the rug gets pulled out from underneath. The real test is when we pray and we don't seem to get answers to prayer. The real test is I've been waiting God to bring a husband or a wife into my life and no immediate prospect appears. The real test is I have been praying about a struggle or a sin or an area in my life. There's a dream, there's an ambition, there's a longing that I have and I've been crying out to God for God to meet me there and the heavens remain like brass and God's wisdom doesn't seem to work. That's when we face temptation and temptation says if God's not going to look after me, I better look after myself. So we take things back into our audience, we go back to the world, we go back to comforting our own flesh. Some people even go so far and they make alliances with the devil because if God will not deliver, then maybe the devil will. And the outcome is always bad fruit in the long run because where you have envy and selfish ambition there you will find disorder in every evil practice. And James says to people who have lost everything, who are living in an economic climate where the rich are oppressing the poor, people who get on each other's nerves because they're filled with envy and with selfish ambition and everything is in chaos and everything is in turmoil and he says you want to prove that you're wise, then you live by wisdom that is from above. Expose your faith in how you treat God and how you treat each other even in the difficult circumstances of life and he says resist the temptation to get into bitter envy and the selfish ambition because once you do that, if it gets a foothold in your life it's going to take you down and when it takes you down you're going to leave a trail of disaster because you will have sown bad fruit. Now Lord willing when we come back to this we're going to look at four stages that James says backsliders go through, so if you want to learn how to backslide or you want to teach somebody else how to backslide be sure you're here next week because we're going to show you how to do it and obviously the purpose in doing that is not to help us backslide but to be warned about the process so that we can be protected from it and then Lord willing I'm going to tell you the rest of the story about the Hatfield and McCoy conflict [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:43:24.080; remove through 00:45:31.000] because it has a fascinating ending. , I'm going to tell you the rest of the story about the Hatfield and McCoy conflict. I'm going to tell you the rest of the story about the Hatfield and McCoy conflict. I'm going to tell you the rest of the story about the Hatfield and McCoy conflict. I'm going to tell you the rest of the story about the Hatfield and McCoy conflict. I'm going to tell you the rest of the story about the Hatfield and McCoy conflict. I'm going to tell you the rest of the story about the Hatfield and McCoy conflict. I'm going to tell you the rest of the story about the Hatfield and McCoy conflict. I'm going to tell you the rest of the story about the Hatfield and McCoy conflict. I'm going to tell you the rest of the story about the Hatfield and McCoy conflict. I'm going to tell you the rest of the story about the Hatfield and McCoy conflict. I'm going to tell you the rest of the story about the Hatfield and McCoy conflict. I'm going to tell you the rest of the story about the Hatfield and McCoy conflict. I'm going to tell you the rest of the story about the Hatfield and McCoy conflict. Blessings will come down as the prayers go up. Blessings will come down as the prayers go up. So build your house on the Lord. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:45:31.000; resume after this marked segment]