Two Kinds of Wisdom
Dr. James Smith
James 3:13-18
30 April 2006
Listen to this sermon.
It’s funny how God seems to know exactly when we need encouragement and when we most need to know that He is there and that He loves us.
At district conference this week, the vice president of International Ministries, Rev. Robert Fetherlin, preached a message about envy to a group of 100 Alliance pastors from Illinois and Indiana.
Envy is an ugly vice that so many pastors succumb to at various points in their ministries, while some never really are able to get beyond it.
It is common, that when pastors get together, they ask each other two questions.
First, “how’s it going?” which of course is common for anyone to ask another person.
Second, “how many people are you running on Sundays?”
The subtle (or not so subtle) implication is that numbers indicate the level of God’s blessing on any particular ministry. Over the years, more rarely, have I heard pastors ask about one another’s devotional life or personal spiritual growth.
And over the years, my answer to the Sunday numbers question has been more or less the same; 40, 50 or 60.
Sometimes when a well-meaning person says, “well don’t you want the church to grow?” I’ll say . . . “no, I’m happy the way that it is.” This usually shocks them and they leave me shaking their heads.
“. . . . do you want the church to grow? . . . of course I do.” I want it to grow in spiritual health and intimacy with God and with one another. If it’s simply about the numbers game, then forget it.
I’d rather have a healthy church of 50 instead of an unhealthy collection of 100 individuals any day of the week.
And so Bob Fetherlin addressed the pastors from this very passage before us as a church this morning: James 3:13-18.
James, like the Greco-Roman philosophers and moralists of the ancient world, warns their listeners of the deadly perils of bitter envy and selfish ambition, because as James says, such things lead to disorder and wickedness of every kind.
But to this, James would add that these kinds of things that the world so often counts as “wisdom” are also characterized as being earthly, unspiritual and demonic. James says such worldly wisdom is good for nothing.
Or as the old story has been told that on a rainy night, a boy was playing in the apartment and being very, very bad. His mother in exasperation said, “Willie, can’t you please be good?” To this Willie replied, that he would be good for a dollar.
And in frustration and the deep bitterness of her soul, she replied, “Willie . . . why not be like your daddy and be . . . good for nothing.”
The wisdom of the world . . . it is bitter and it is good for nothing.
As James reminds us in this passage and continues on with in chapter 4, its envy’s nasty little habit to “desire to acquire.” And the green monster of envy has so many shapes and sizes that we could do a whole sermon series and only touch of a few of its manifestations.
Whether it be the pastor’s desire for the biggest congregation in town or the man who wants to make the most money or the woman who plays the whole “mirror, mirror on the wall” game, envy has to be one of the most changeable and slippery of all the vices.
And James stands in good company with other ancient moralists of his day, such as Socrates who rightly defined envy as an “ulcer of the soul.”
Medical doctors will tell us today that an ulcer is a serious condition that caused by the erosion of the stomach lining. They can also be stress induced.
Spiritual ulcers erode our sense of godly contentment and spiritual well being and create a gnawing pain and well as sorrow because someone has something that we do not.
And as we all know through experience, there will always be someone bigger, better, stronger, richer, prettier and smarter than you and I, while we live.
Envy is a sickness and it feeds on the stuff of everyday life and it derives its existence on this very dangerous idea that our identity and self worth come from what we possess. And that in this world to have less is to be less . . . less real, less worthy or less important.
And of course, if this were not bad enough, those who have been infected by the disease of envy also (sometimes unwittingly) believe that they must compete for limited resources.
Or in other words, that in order for someone to have more, another must have less. And of course, envy can potentially strike each of us at any moment.
This week at DePaul, I had a student talk to me and ask for some counsel on his current job-hunting situation.
He spoke to me about a sales position (which I think that he would be quite good at) that starts at about $40,000 + commission and would eventually cap out at $90,000. He said that he didn’t think that he would take it if they offered it to him.
All I could say to him was that $90,000 wasn’t anything to “sneeze at.” But to myself, I thought, “How can this possibly be? . . . this guy is single and doesn’t have a third of my education or experience!”
And that’s when I remembered the old hymn to “count my blessings and to name them one by one” and that helped me to do battle against the green monster of envy.
Again, James calls all of this “worldly, unspiritual and demonic” because if envy is calling the shots in our lives, then in order to become more in this world, one must possess more . . . and someone else then, must possess less.
And as New Testament scholar and Christian, Luke Timothy Johnson says, “The logic of envy moves toward competition for scarce resources.”
Unlike today, people like James in the ancient world, were “hard hitting” and quite precise in calling out and dissecting vices like envy.
For James and the ancients, living a virtuous and spiritual life was the road to health while submitting to vice was the sure path to disease and sickness of the soul.
This is why James frequently uses spatial imagery and contrasts in his letter, such as that which we can see in 3:13-18.
You will notice that this passage begins with a discussion of wisdom “from above” in verse 13, while the central portion of verses 14-16 are concerned with wisdom “from below.” James then returns to wisdom “from above” in verses 17-18.
And so, the idea of rising up, putting down and rising up again is a framework that James uses to treat the vices of envy and jealousy.
And he will then extend the discussion in chapter 4 to talk about the results of envy and jealousy in the form of social upheaval, unrest, battles and wars . . . and that is where we will pick up again next week.
Let’s Pray
