Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – James 3:1-4:12

Is primarily James 3:17, but I want to read it in context. So, we’re going to begin reading at James 3:1 and read through verse 12 of chapter 4. So, 3:1-4:12. Please stand for the reading of God’s word from James beginning at the third chapter.

My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment. For we all stumble in many things. If anyone does not stumble in word, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle the whole body.

Indeed, we put bits in horses’ mouths that they may obey us, and we turn their whole body. Look also at ships, although they are so large and are driven by fierce winds, they are turned by a very small rudder, wherever the pilot desires. Even so, the tongue is a little member and boasts great things. See how great a forest a little fire kindles. And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. The tongue is so set among our members that it defiles the whole body and sets on fire the course of nature.

And it is set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird of reptile and creature of the sea is tamed and has been tamed by mankind. But no man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men who have been made in the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be so.

Does a spring send forth fresh water and bitter from the same opening? Can a fig tree, my brethren, bear olives, or a grape vine bear figs? Thus no spring yields both salt water and fresh.

Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show by good conduct that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth.

This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual, demonic. For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. Now the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.

Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? You lust and do not have, you murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war, yet you do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive because you ask amiss that you may spend it on your pleasures. Adulterers and adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, the spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously? But he gives more grace. Therefore, he says, “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Therefore, submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep.

Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he will lift you up. Do not speak evil of one another, brethren. He who speaks evil of a brother and judges his brother speaks evil of the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge. There is one lawgiver who is able to save and to destroy. Who are you to judge another?

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the new creation brought about by the work of our Savior and his word. And we pray that you would transform our words to reflect him and the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit as we minister grace in the context of the world that you are bringing about newness in—in Christ’s name we ask this. Amen. Please be seated.

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In the middle of two sermons last week and next week on Nicodemus and what Jesus says to Nicodemus in the book of John, the third chapter. Turn there for a minute if you would.

Last week during the discussion after the sermon, the question and answer time, comments came up from several of the men about John chapter 3 in the context of this Nicodemus discourse. Verse 11 of John chapter 3, you remember the context. What we said was that really what’s being emphasized in this particular portion of John’s gospel is who is the true teacher.

Nicodemus is the teacher of Israel. Jesus addresses him as such. He comes to Jesus representing really the rabbinic community. In the opening verse he talks about, “we know that you’re from God.” So it’s not just him. He’s a representative of a group of teachers. And in this dialogue back and forth, Jesus then tells him in verse 11, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, we speak that we do know and testify that we have seen, and ye receive not our witness.”

And so some of the men last week talked about this idea that what’s central to this text is the new creation and the effect of the Spirit in men’s lives, that those who are born of God are dispensers, as it were, of words that minister grace. And so our speech is quite important in terms of the new creation that’s being described in John’s gospel. And here our Savior changes his statements from “I say this” or “I do this” to “we do this.” And some of the men in the discussions wondered if perhaps this was what this meant—why this changed from “I do this” to “we plural.”

And the best commentators I have read—Bengel, Lange, Westcott, and others—think that what Jesus is talking about here is his disciples. And that’s what some men posited in the question and answer time last week, and I did some more research on it. And again, the primary reason is this nature of the dialogue that’s happening. Nicodemus, kind of representing “we” and so now Jesus says, “Well, we testify what we know of and we’re right and you don’t understand us.”

So Jesus—Nicodemus represents his followers or his group and Jesus is talking about his disciples. That’s the easiest rendering of the text. And it’s particularly reinforced because it’s not obvious in the translation, but when he says in verse 11, he says, “I say unto you,” singular Nicodemus, “we plural speak that we do know and testify that we have seen and you,” and now he switches to the plural again. So he’s not talking to just Nicodemus now—you and your teachers, in other words, receive not our witness.

So this contrast is between Nicodemus and the teachers of Israel who were not born again, had not become part of the new creation, and Jesus’s disciples who already had, of course, seen and testified what they have seen. Remember, we have this extended situation at the end of chapter 1 where we see the calling of these five disciples, representative of the twelve, and they see things and they make declarations about who Jesus is.

So they’re part of that “we” that Jesus is discussing. And another indicator that John 3 and the dialogue with Nicodemus really stresses quite a bit is the speech of those who are part of this new creation who have been born not of the flesh nor the will of man but of the will of God. This new creation—you know, Nicodemus is waiting for Messiah. They’re waiting for all things to be made new. But Jesus says they’ve already begun.

And I have followers around me who are part of “we” who speak forth this word as they have become part of that new creation. They’re like that wind that has an effect on the world around us. And the new creation has begun and we speak things and then we’ll get to next week the last half of this discourse where he says the condemnation has come because you don’t receive this witness. So from now on all the shaking will occur in the context of what the disciples and followers of the Lord Jesus Christ and historically his church—their speech testifying to the truth of the Lord Jesus Christ and the power of the Spirit as part of the new creation.

So we have this declaration and literally in verse 11 it’s almost chant-like. It’s almost Hebraic in the way the Greek reads. So there’s a note of kind of joy and song to it, almost, that now this new creation has begun and Jesus’s disciples are described by him as having this knowledge and having this effect in opposition to the teachers of Israel who really had rejected the truth and loved the darkness.

So our words are very important is the point of all that. And so I wanted to take this divergence off into the book of James that speaks so much about the tongue and the origins of proper tongue use is this wisdom of the new creation that we want to speak about. Jesus and Nicodemus were both teachers. Jesus and Nicodemus represented two different groups. And we are part of the group of Jesus’s followers and disciples.

And so we want to see very importantly the proper use of our tongues.

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So going back to James 3 now in the context for verse 17. Verse 17 describes the wisdom of the new creation. What is that new creation wisdom like? It’s the wisdom from above. You remember that this is a section in John’s gospel where the water comes down from above and baptizes people. New creation is happening—heavenly water. So this wisdom from above is manifested or worked out in the speech of Jesus’s followers who have been brought into this new creation.

And the context for wisdom from above in James 3:17 is this extended context that I read to you with speech at the beginning and speech at the end. So we want to do a brief overview of James 3:1-4:3. The proper and careful use of the tongue is the context then for this description of new creation wisdom which will involve a sevenfold description in verse 17 of James chapter 3.

It begins in chapter 3:1: “Not many of you, my brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment.” And then there’s a discussion of the tongue. And of course, you know, this fits very nicely with what we’ve been talking about from John 3—Nicodemus and Jesus, teachers and the proper use of the tongue.

Really, this entire section that I read as the sermon text is very important. And you know, as I’m working up—we’re working up an elder training set of documents and revising the old elder qualification list we produced years ago from 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1—well, James 3 and 4 fits right in with that. And this is really about the danger of people becoming teachers who shouldn’t be teachers. And by way of implication, it tells people that are in positions of authority in the church in terms of being elders and teachers some very important things about the proper use of our tongues and the need for this wisdom from above.

So this is what’s going on in James chapter 3, and beginning at verse 2. Then after he says, “Don’t let many of you be teachers,” he talks about tongue troubles. “We all stumble in many things. If anyone doesn’t stumble in a word, he is a perfect man.” This is a very difficult part of our life to get a hold of. It takes a lot of work. It takes wisdom from above. It takes the control of the Holy Spirit. And it certainly takes being born anew from above.

So there are these descriptions then of what the tongue is like and how the tongue is misused by men. And what he talks about of course is that with your tongue you have this hypocrisy going on. And he’ll say that wisdom from above has no hypocrisy—it’s pure. But with your tongue so frequently we bless God and then we curse our brothers with the same tongue. And so the danger of our speech is emphasized in the context of this leading up to the description of wisdom from above.

Jesus’s disciples are to show in their speech the wisdom of the new creation. Their tongues are central to this discussion of what wisdom is and how wisdom manifests itself. James is talking to those who would be teachers at the beginning of chapter 3 and then leading into this wisdom from above.

Jesus describes the tongue in various ways. He refers to it as the rudder of a ship. Big ship, big winds, lots of stuff going on, but it’s all turned by a very small thing, a little rudder in the hand of a pilot. So if you think about it again, it’s Jesus talking about this new creation and how the world is changed through the tongues of his disciples. What we speak, what we know—and the whole world is changed then in direction and our worlds are determined, as it were, by our speech, by the speech of the Holy Spirit working through us.

And so really the ship is the whole world in a sense and the whole world is directed by our speech. It has this idea. So this one illustration that James uses is that the tongue is like a rudder of a ship. The tongue is like fire. It can set ablaze things. You know, nothing can destroy a church so quickly as improper use of the tongue. And the tongue—that tongue sin, fire—moves quickly like fire.

You know, we had to paint the ceiling of the fellowship hall because it had this FertileTex ceiling tile. And when the fire marshal was first here, he told me that you cannot run the speed at which fire moves through FertileTex tiles. So if you’re in the kitchen, fire gets started in the ceiling, hits that ceiling tile—boom. I mean, it just basically explodes across the top of that fellowship hall. You can’t run fast enough to get away from it. It can run faster than you can.

Well, so we had to paint it with fire retardant paint. And that’s a good thing. Good thing we knew about that. And it’s good that we had that instruction. Well, here, you know, James says the tongue is like that fire, and the fire that it starts consumes whole forests. And it certainly can consume the planting of the Lord. That’s who we are, right? We’re trees. The planting of the Lord. And our forest, our church, can be destroyed with improper use of the tongue. Boom.

So it’s a picture to us—the fellowship hall—it’s a picture of remembering to put restraint in the context of our lives with wisdom from above to prevent the kind of fire that we’re trying to prevent in the fellowship hall as well. So the tongue is like a fire and the tongue is described as poison. So we have these tongue troubles that are going on leading up to this discussion of wisdom.

And specifically then the first specific thing that James says the tongue does improperly is to curse—to curse men while we’re blessing God. And I would just, you know, by way of application here, strongly exhort you—know our young people, our young children growing up and our teens—you know, you are in the context of a world in which you hear some very bad speech. Speech that when we grew up we almost never heard except maybe in the back alleys or in the restrooms or something.

But now this is the common speech, the parliament of our culture. Then you’re going to have to work twice as hard to put, you know, fire retardant stuff in your mind to resist the temptation to speak like the world around you. And I would strongly exhort you young people to exhort one another to proper speech. Don’t let your speech get out of control in your discussions together. Don’t allow swearing to go on, words that get close to swearing and proper use of the tongue in the context of our young people.

Work hard at getting rid of it. We want to strive for personal holiness here as the wisdom from above demands. And you know, our tongues are so important. This is what this whole text is saying. So please, you know, young people, exhort one another. Parents, let’s not let the standards of our children slip as the culture around us has slipped so terribly.

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Well, so he describes this speech and then he talks about where this wisdom is all about. And in verse 13 he says, “Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show by good conduct”—and he’s talking about speech. So it has application to our speech. Let him show by his good speech and what he does that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom.

So there we have a summary phrase. We have a description in verse 17. But here he gives us a summary phrase of what wisdom is. He calls it the meekness of wisdom. Remember, meekness is not the same as weakness. And our Savior uses the word meek to describe himself and his disciples.

The word is a charger, a horse that has been trained to obey its master. It hasn’t been weakened. It hasn’t been hamstrung. Hasn’t been cut so it can’t run. It’s as strong as it ever was. But now that strength is directed toward the purpose of the rider. That’s meekness. Meekness is having a being under submission to the Spirit of God and to the Lord Jesus Christ. And wisdom is described as its very essence as being meek. There is this meekness of wisdom.

Not only must our conduct be governed by wisdom, but our wisdom must be in the context of meekness, being broken to harness is a good phrase for meekness. That’s the term of the Greek word that’s used. In opposition to this meekness of wisdom, we see a double description of what the wisdom from below is like, which he’ll describe a little bit more in a couple of verses.

But in verse 14, if you don’t have the meekness of wisdom, what do you have? “If you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth.” So over here we have the meekness of wisdom. And over here we have envy and self-seeking. And specifically, it’s referred to as bitter envy.

You know, envy sort of says, “I want what that guy has. But there’s only x amount of that thing that he has to go around. So if I want that thing that he has—influence, possessions, whatever it is—I have to take it from him. I can’t, you know, in other words, have it like he has it. So I want to take it from him.” So envy is bitter. Envy seeks to tear down other people to build us up. Envy wants what somebody has, can’t attain to it, or thinks it’s a closed system—there’s only x amount of it to go around—and tears it down.

So we have this self-seeking bitter envy that is contrasted to the meekness of wisdom. And remember, James is, you know, warning us here—not many should become teachers. This stuff is all too common in the context of our lives and it must be strongly resisted. This wisdom that is of bitter envy and self-seeking that doesn’t descend from above but is earthly, sensual, demonic.

“For where envy and self-seeking exist,” he repeats it twice—bitter envy, envy, self-seeking, self-seeking—”confusion and every evil thing are there.” So we have the meekness of wisdom over here. Bitter envy and self-seeking over there. Over here this produces peace in the context of the church and the world. It produces this order that Jesus Christ is all about inaugurating with his coming and dying on the cross for sinners and raising up. It brings about the new creation. And over there, bitter envy and self-seeking brings about confusion and dissension and contention and all that stuff.

When you see contention and confusion in the midst of men, James says, well, that comes normatively from envy and self-seeking. It comes from the promotion of oneself and the attempt to tear down somebody else. And that’s where all these wars come from. Wisdom has to show itself in conduct, but wisdom shows itself specifically in the meekness of that conduct as opposed to this bitter envy of those who really are working on wisdom from below, the old creation, the Adamic wisdom.

I read from a commentary here on verse 13. “The all-pervading characteristic of this good life is meekness. A meekness that is not only wholly consistent with true wisdom, but the essential accompaniment of it. Any contentiousness or arrogance, any tendency to self-assertion, any desire to glory over others is an infallible sign that the essential qualifications for a teacher are in fact lacking. For there is no meekness of wisdom.”

So the essential quality that James says you’ve got to have to be a teacher is meekness of wisdom. It’s surely most significant, this commentator says, that when Jesus, the greatest of all teachers, called men to him as disciples, he made them see that he possessed the hallmark of the genuine teacher precisely because he was meek and lowly in heart. Matthew 11:29. And scarcely less significant is Paul’s appeal to the meekness of Christ when he wished to assert his authority in no uncertain manner and vindicate his behavior as a Christian teacher and missionary in 2 Corinthians 10:1.

So he’s going to address some problems that need to be addressed, but he tells them he’s coming in the meekness of the Lord Jesus Christ. So his teaching has this hallmark characteristic to it—that it’s in the context of the meekness of his wisdom. The would-be teacher should therefore look into his own heart. Verse 14 talks about, you know, the heart of this situation. What do you really have going on in the context of the center of your being? What are you doing or not doing?

The teacher should look into his own heart and see whether it is free from those two evils in particular which are most certain to vitiate his works, to take down his works, to make them less effective in ministering—bitter envying. And as I said, strife—or self-seeking. The vice of a leader of a party, Hort in his commentary speaking on this self-seeking word in the Greek, says that it refers to the vice of a leader of a party created for his own pride. It is partly ambition and partly rivalry.

See, it’s an exertion of himself and it’s rivalry against someone else. And so creates a party, a group of people to follow him in this wisdom from below. The teacher should refrain from embarking upon his work if he sees that his life is characterized in this way. And it’s interesting because what this tells us is, you know, we think of instruction as being sort of morally neutral.

You know, if you have knowledge, it’s like algebra. You can just teach kids the basics of algebra. And so if you’re a teacher, well, what’s in your heart might affect your work. But here we’re told specifically that in this new creation that God has brought to pass, knowledge is not morally neutral. Knowledge is directly related to the heart—attitude, to whether a man has this meekness of wisdom or whether he’s operating in the context of envy and self-seeking.

You know, if he’s rivalry-driven and self-ambitious, it’s going to affect his teaching. So don’t do it. He’s saying, if this is what’s in your heart, hold back until you attain to this meekness of wisdom. The mere possession of truth is no security for true utterance of it. All utterance is so colored by the moral and spiritual state of the speaker that truth issues as falsehood from his lips in proportion as he himself is not in a right state.

The correct language which he utters may carry a message of falsehood and evil in virtue of the bitterness and self-seeking which accompanies his speaking. So you know, this is what teachers are to aspire to. This is what we’re all to aspire to as part of being the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ who affect the world with our speech. We’ve got to see that speech has as its origins either the meekness of wisdom or it’s going to reflect this self-seeking and bitter envy.

So what two things are the opposite of the meekness of wisdom? Bitter envy and self-seeking. And then we come to verse 17, which is the description of wisdom which we’ll return to in just a minute. But then in verse 18 through chapter 4:10, we have the peaceable fruit of wisdom being described as opposed to murder of those who don’t have this wisdom at the center of their beings.

Verse 18: “the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.” So the end result of this meekness of wisdom that we’ll talk about in a minute and its component elements is peace. And the end result of bitter envying and self-seeking is what follows here: wars, fights. They come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members. So all this stuff comes from these improper approaches to wisdom—a demonic wisdom from below as opposed to the wisdom from above.

And then he calls for repentance on the part of people because we recognize that we have these elements of sinful speech in the context of our lives, and he calls us to repent of those things. And then in verse 11 of chapter 4, he goes to another tongue trouble: “Do not speak evil of one another, brethren. He who speaks evil of a brother and judges his brother speaks evil of the law and judges the law.”

So he concludes or we can wrap off this section or context with another reference to a specific tongue sin—and that is slandering another brother. To speak evil of others is the other common thing we do with our speech that we have to resist by having this heart that has this meekness of wisdom which we’re going to talk about in just a minute.

So we have these two sins of speech. Cursing on the one end—cursing men—slandering men at the other end—speaking evil of others. And in the midst of this, the answer to the proper use of the tongue is this meekness of wisdom which he’s going to describe in a sevenfold pattern. And all of this is said in the larger context of, you know, don’t have a lot of people being teachers because it’s really difficult to control the tongue.

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Okay, so we have a general context. Now let’s look specifically at what this wisdom from above is like. And it is a seven-fold designation. New creation wisdom. What is it like?

Well, first of all, the wisdom from above is first pure. And so we have this first designation. You know, when I think of Hagia Sophia, I think of when Anna F. had a chance to see it when she was in Europe last year. This is the great, beautiful church. Hagia means holy, and this word here for pure is derived from the same word and it has this idea of purity—cleansing from defilement. And actually this specific Greek word was used at the time to describe the purification necessary to visit the temples of pagan gods.

So you know, it really was kind of a perversion of what is the proper sense of purification that we’ve stressed in our worship for many years now—that we come forward to the worship place and the first offering that we see, represented by the Old Testament offering system fulfilled in Christ, is the purification offering. Remember the Old Testament—you got together before you could do the whole burnt offering, the ascension offering, you had to purify the worship environment.

So you had to apply the blood of the purification offering first to cleanse everything. And the temple represents the people. So that whenever you sin during the week, inadvertently, whatever it is, you’ve got defilement. And so we got to come forward and confess our sins at the beginning of the worship service. Not big honking sins—you’re supposed to do that before you get here—but the normal sort of sins that occur, we need to purify the worship environment. We got to cleanse our hearts. Jesus has to wash our feet when we first get here.

And that’s what this is like in the pagan sense. There was the purification required as you went to give worship at a pagan hall. So this is the beginning of the whole process. Wisdom is first pure.

And getting back to this idea of the speech of our young people and the cultural influences that we put in the context of them, wanting to engage our culture from a Christian perspective—you know, we never want to lose sight of the fact that if we want our children to be teachers to this world, if we want them to have this influence of making manifest the new creation of Christ, if we want them to be like that wind that blows that Jesus talked about to Nicodemus—the beginning of all of that is a sense of purity, a holiness, and a consecration to Christ and to God that removes defilements from our midst.

My mom—I went down to visit my mom over the weekend. And when my dad was having his heart troubles before he died last month, she was driving the car and all of a sudden it starts to lurch, you know? And she’s coming home from the hospital with him and the car is lurching. Well, turns out it was bad gas, I think from the bottom of a tank or something. No problem since then. But you can get a load of gas and it’s got some impurities in there, and those impurities hit the system and the car can’t quite get proper fuel going and combustion going, and it starts to lurch.

Well, you know, in your Christian life you’re going to lurch if you’ve got these impurities that you’ve not dealt with through confession of sin and a desire to glorify God. And it’s going to slow down the work you do for the Savior. And some of you young people are lurching quite a bit these days, and some are lurching only a little bit. And you know, some of us adults are lurching quite a bit.

You’ve got to be thinking first that the kind of speech we need stems from a hard attitude—a desire to be clean and pure before God. Now David talked in Psalm 51:7 and 10: “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.”

He knew the new creation was about a clean heart. Now you can’t get to a clean heart—the application of the blood of Christ—if you don’t care about it. So if you don’t have this motivation, a love for the Lord Jesus Christ, a love for God, a desire to please him in what you do, you won’t ever get to the beginning point of the wisdom from above.

God says that he’s made you a new creation in Christ. Somewhere in the midst of your being you have this desire, as David did, to have a clean heart before God. And God says the way you get that clean heart is by pleading the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s what that Old Testament purification was all about. We know that Jesus Christ has died once for all to purify us from sin. And the beginning point of speech then is a desire for and a commitment to confession of sin as it begins to manifest itself in our hearts.

And if we have this speech to our brothers and sisters, to our friends, to our parents that reflects envy or self-seeking or wanting to tear other people down—then that’s sin. It’s a defilement and it means the car is lurching along and may come to a complete stop. So the beginning of wisdom we’re told here is a desire for purity.

And once more, you know, if this is what speech is so connected to our tongues and we’re trying to say how our tongues make manifest and move along the new creation in Christ—children, if you start in your speech to utter curse words or make fun of each other, whatever it is, if you don’t try to be beneficial in your speech, you failed at this beginning point. You’ve got that defilement of speech going on. And you really aren’t going to be able to move much ahead from this because this is the first thing.

Wisdom from above is first pure. 1 John 3: “Behold, now we are children of God. See, we’re part of this new creation from above. We’re from that prologue of John’s gospel that he wrote about. You know, we’re the children of God, born not of the will of man, born of the will of God. Behold, now we are the children of God, and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be. You know, we’re not there yet, but we know that when he is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

And everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure.” So we focus—we know now we’re being revealed to be like Jesus. And as we focus on the person of Jesus and his purity, we have our hope set in the fact that’s what God is doing with us. And the end result of that focus on Christ is a purification of who we are. So we have this hope and we end up being purified. He who has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure.

2 Corinthians 7:11, Paul wrote about the repentance going on there and he says, “Observe this very thing—that you sorrowed in a godly manner. What diligence it produced in you, what clearing of yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what vehement desire, what zeal, what vindication. In all things you proved yourselves to be clear in this matter.” They prove themselves—this is the same word—they prove themselves to be pure in this matter through proper repentance of the sin that they discovered in the context of who they were.

Paul said that he was jealous over them with the jealousy that he might deliver them as a chaste virgin to Christ. And this word “chaste” is the same word “pure”—chastity. Purity of character is what’s being spoken here. And that is the beginning of wisdom. This desire for it, a manifestation of purity. And it starts again making itself manifest in our speech. In our speech, what purifies us? Not our own efforts. It’s the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus’s blood produces this purity, and then secondly, going on from that purity, the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable.

Irene. You know, if you ever hear anybody named Irene—”Good Night, Irene,” an old song. Irene comes from the same word. We have a modern word “Eric.” Well, the Greek word here is irene. The word “ironic,” I-R-E-N-I-C, means peaceful. So if a person is irenic, they create peace in the context of their life as opposed to contention and confusion. And that’s what this is. This is harmony as opposed to the discord that we saw described in chapter 4 of James’s gospel—the contentions, the wars, and the strivings.

So right away, this purity toward God reflects itself in a peaceable attitude in our speech and conduct toward our fellow man. So we’re pure toward God, and then it works itself out in terms of peaceable speech toward one another. We don’t try to rile things up. We don’t try to throw hand grenades into the midst. We try to bring about the peace of God’s world.

Now, peace according to the Scriptures is God’s order. God’s order. You know, if you’re a young child and you’re being taught to keep your room clean, you know, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Well, you know, this is what you’re doing. You’re bringing about God’s order in the context of your bedroom and you’re being a peacemaker. Now your bedroom, your house represents people. That’s what houses represent in the Scriptures. “This is the house of God,” this is the temple. The literal structure isn’t the people of God, but we are called together as the church. The temple represented the people.

That’s why it had to be purified because it had defilement on it as a result of the people’s sins prior to coming with their sacrifices. So it’s important you recognize as a young person the need to produce orderliness in your environment. And then it’s important as you grow up to see that reflected in a desire to produce orderliness and right relationships with men, with the greater house of God in the context of your life.

So peaceable here reflects this orderliness of relationships that Jesus Christ has come to produce. The old Adamic wisdom produced contention. And the new world being born in Christ, being brought about by Christ from this heavenly spirit water from above, is a world that is peaceable as opposed to contentious and being driven by strife.

These all relate to the Beatitudes. “Blessed are the pure in heart, so the wisdom is first pure. They shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers. They shall be called sons of God.” See the centrality of peacemaking. It manifests our being the children of God as part of this new creation. We are peacemakers.

Hebrews 12, beginning at verse 11: “No chastening seems to be joyful for the present but painful. Nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Therefore, strengthen the hands which hang down and the feeble knees. Make straight paths for your feet so that what is lame may not be dislocated but rather be healed. Pursue peace with all people and holiness without which no one will see the Lord.”

So these two elements—purity, holiness required to see God, and then the pursuit of peace with our fellow man. This is what our speech should be all about. Getting rid of slander and evil speaking and cursing and bad speech—defilements of speech—and putting on speech that produces right relationships with men and produces peace in the context of the church and the family.

“Looking carefully lest anyone fall short of the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness springing up cause trouble and by this many become defiled, lest there be any fornicator or profane person like Esau.” So see again there—what will stop us from manifesting holiness and peacefulness among men is this bitterness and envy and self-seeking that Esau really represented in the context of the patriarchs.

So we have this peace. True wisdom produces right relationships. Godly speech reflecting true wisdom produces right relationships. Reading from another commentator, “There’s a kind of clever and arrogant wisdom which separates man from man, which makes a man look with superior contempt on his fellows. There is a kind of cruel wisdom which takes a delight in hurting others with clever but cutting words. There’s a kind of depraved wisdom which seduces men away from their loyalty to God. But the true wisdom at all times brings men closer to one another and closer to God.”

So we, in our speech, should seek after and see reflected in what we do peace. Peacefulness.

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Well, how do we do this? How do we move from purity and peacefulness? What is it actually? What are some more specifics? Well, the third characteristic is that this wisdom from above is gentle. It’s a difficult word, only used a few times in the context of the New Testament. It has the meaning as I put in your outline of patience, forbearance, persuasiveness.

I put a regular man, Lord, make a regular man out of me. That old poem that I love to read occasionally. You know, you sort of become just a good guy, gentle in your speech, reasonable, patient, persuasive, meek—again is another synonym for this. Equitable, seemly, fitting, fair, moderate, forbearing, courteous, considerate. Gentle is the summation of all this. Not insisting on rights, no. As one commentator put it, “immoderate austerity, which allows nothing in our brother.”

Gentle with one another. You know, Proverbs say that in the mother’s mouth should be the law of kindness. Gentleness, persuasiveness. Matthew Arnold, a poet and religious commentator of the 19th century, said that the best way to translate this Greek word is having a “sweet reasonableness” to yourself. Sweet reasonableness. You see how opposed that is to all this stuff that James says comes from envy and self-seeking.

At the core of our speeches should be gentleness in our speech to one another, reflecting this gentleness, this wisdom of the new creation in recognizing how gentle God has been to us, how forgiving God has been to us, and then desiring to have that kind of gentleness with one another—a sweet reasonableness.

Beatitudes again: “Blessed are the meek, they shall inherit the earth.” Blessed are those, in other words, with this sweet reasonableness. “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men revile and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so persecuted they the prophets who were before you.”

We can afford to be gentle because we know the Lord God is overseeing everything for our well-being. We don’t have to stick up for our rights every time because God is going to take care of that for us. So we can have a gentleness. In 1 Timothy 3:3, the same word “gentle” is a requirement of the elders of the church. And again in 2 Timothy 2:24-25, listen: “a servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient in humility, correcting those who are in opposition if God perhaps will show them repentance so that they may know the truth.”

So again here James seems to be giving us these lists of qualifications in different words from the qualifications for the elders of the church. James is in part then kind of a pastoral epistle saying what pastors should be like, teachers should be like in the context of the church. And in all these lists we see this requirement of gentleness and a forbearance of moderation in our actions to one another. In other words, the opposite would be a harshness of speech and insisting on rights.

We read that in Titus 3:1: “Put them in mind to be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates, to be ready to every good work, to speak evil of no man, to be no brawlers, but gentle.” So the opposition there is brawling as opposed to gentleness.