Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Unity and Wisdom
## James 3:13-4:12
### Reformation Covenant Church
### Pastor Dennis R. Tuuri | November 3, 2013

That is an amazing psalm with some amazing truths found in it. Can you hear me? Okay. No. Let’s try this. I haven’t done anything yet. Is that better? Better. Yes. Way to go, sound guys. Oh, now it’s better. Had nothing to do with that. Let’s try it down here again. Is an experiment to see how muffling my beard is. How does it sound now? Good. Okay, great. Okay, good. Now, if I keep letting it grow gnome-like till December, we’ll see how it works.

Okay, we are going to talk today on unity and evangelism again, and we’re going to talk about James chapter 3. So the sermon text—what I’m going to do is I’ll cover actually a little more than this in the sermon, but the text we’ll actually read and kind of focus more on is in James chapter 3 beginning at verse 13. James 3 beginning at verse 13. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

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.

Let’s pray. Almighty God, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you, Father, for the forgiveness of sins that comes through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we thank you that we indeed, as in Psalm 8, are called now to be men and women who exercise an incredible amount of beauty and glory and light in our deeds and in our conduct in this world. We know that left to ourselves, we have that wisdom that is not from above that creates struggles and trials, disunities, divisions, fights in the church.

And we know that this is absolutely deadly to the hope of evangelizing and discipling the nations. We pray that you would bless us today with an increased commitment to unity in the context of the church and to exercise these characteristics of the wisdom from above given to us graciously through the work of our Savior. In his name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated. So what we’re going to do today is first of all go back over very quickly the observations we made from John 17 last week, and then secondly we’ll talk about some of those implications that we didn’t get to from last week, and then third we’ll move on to wisdom and unity and focus on James 3:17, but put it in its context. We’re doing this because, like every church, we are pursuing particular focuses. But where our particular focus this year is evangelism and discipleship both amongst the church and also bringing in other disciples.

And the scriptures make it quite clear that we can learn the best of evangelistic methods. But evangelism—the good news is that people are being brought into the body of Christ. So within the body of Christ, the local church particularly, although the extended church more broadly, but within the local church, if there’s not the kind of pleasantness and unity that is supposed to exist there, that’s deadly for evangelism. And if there is good relationships and a winsome spirit and all that stuff going on, that’s very effective for evangelism. In fact, John 17 says that’s the key—that unity is indeed the key.

So looking first, then, reviewing about that prayer that we found in John 17—and on your outlines you can see this—first of all, it’s a prayer for our unity. This is what we’re focusing in on. As he goes through the prayer, he prays for himself, then he prays for his disciples, his immediate disciples, and he prays for those who will believe through his word, and that’s us. And what he prays specifically—the one thing he prays for us—is for our unity, and this is found in verses 21-23 of John 17.

So he asks for unity, meaning that God will of course answer his prayer. It’s a gift, first and foremost. This unity images the intertrinitarian unity, and I keep promising this, but next week we will finally get more directly to a discussion of the dance of life, so to speak, amongst the Trinity and how that models our relationships here within the church.

So you know what Jesus prays for is a unity that is like, or essentially one with, the unity of the Father and Spirit—and by implication the Father and Son, rather—by implication the Spirit. So there’s the model, and next week we’ll try to look more directly at that model to see how our relationships are supposed to exist. We’ll focus next week on, you know, relationships where you’ve got a dad and a son, or a husband and a wife, or elders and congregants, and all that sort of relationships and what the intertrinitarian unity that Christ discusses here—how that informs us and keeps us out of two ditches. We’ll talk about that next week at some length.

Third, in John 17, we had this: unity is declared as evangelistically effective. He says the world will see. Then, based upon seeing this unity, and then fourth, this unity comes from the gift of glory. So what we can immediately infer from Jesus’s prayer is it’s got to do with glory. We focused really on effectiveness for evangelism, and then secondly, if we want to do that, how do we obtain it here at RCC? We minister glory to each other—that seems to be the beginning place. You know, if you want to get to rejoicing life and a life that has more and more people participating in it, glory and knowledge is the way to get to life. Worship trains us that way. So glory is kind of the beginning point that increases shared knowledge amongst each other. Then we have rejoicing life together as we bring our gifts to each other through those discussions and through knowledge. But they can’t—you can’t bring gifts to people if you don’t give them glory, and vice versa.

This unity visibly manifests the love of God. That’s what the prayer concluded by saying. And so, you know, unity and glory are the deal, but ultimately that’s a manifestation of love—the very character of God. And Jesus ended his prayer with an oath that he would continue to manifest the Father’s word to us. So we have the promise of Jesus that while this seems so incredible and difficult to do, indeed it will happen because Jesus has given us his word at the end of that prayer that he’ll continue to manifest his truth to us and the truth of the Father, so that this unity will occur.

This is gospel. It elicits a gospel response from us. And on your outline I’ve got “Clearing out the Little Gray Cells” so that they can work effectively. Sleep, so I’m told by the latest scientific studies, washes out certain chemicals or substances that if not washed out jam up the processing of thought. And so you can think of this as disunity, divisions in the church, problems in the church, personal relationships that aren’t good—these things kind of clog up the functioning of the body of Jesus Christ and so it can’t effectively do its work in terms of evangelism.

You know, I was going to—you can apply this song to the method we looked at—Paul in Acts 17—or you can apply it to what we’re talking about now. There’s an old song that I’ve liked a long time, written by Johnny Mercer in the ’40s, called “Accentuate the Positive.” You got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, and don’t mess with Mr. In Between. Now, a lot of evangelism is going for Mr. In Between these days. And what we want to do is help people eliminate the negative in their life, build a new foundation in a new house based upon their commitment to be a disciple of Christ in every area of life.

So, you know, our apologetic method, if you want to call it that, is accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative and, you know, don’t mess with Mr. In Between. Well, I’d say that’s also maybe not a bad song to think about in terms of relationships within the local church, right? You want to accent the positive with each other. Give each other glory for what you’re doing. You know, these sound guys—they, you know, we got an old building and we got stuff we haven’t put a lot of money into. They’re messing with this sound system all the time. And so they deserve our, you know, respect, glory, and honor for what they do, even as they struggle to do it better.

I know you can get irritated. I can get irritated. It’s the wrong attitude. We want to accentuate the positive and figure out ways to make it easier for them to do their work, as an example. So that’s what we want. We want to have good attitudes toward each other, you know, thanking people for their work and then working on the problems from that perspective, not antagonistically. So we want to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.

You might have bad thoughts toward people, you know, sins you’ve committed against them. You got to get rid of that stuff. And the way to get rid of it is through repentance, confession, forgiveness. And you don’t—and this is the big thing—you don’t want to mess with Mr. In Between. Everybody knows those first two. But don’t mess with Mr. In Between, you know. Don’t be satisfied with a relationship between you and other people at church that is just sort of okay. I mean, sometimes that’s the way it’s going to be for a while. You’re not best buds with everybody, but in general, we should want to have not just middling relationships with each other.

You know, we had people in the past that would call each other brother—”Brother Dennis.” You know, that’s a good thing to do. It’s a good thing to remember we’re brothers and sisters in this family. And that we want to build those kind of positive relationships. So that’s, you know, kind of what we’re doing. We’re talking about that.

And today in James, we’re going to talk about, you know, why problems happen. James has this whole section of his epistle. He’s writing probably to a divided church. And he’s telling them why they’re divided and then what they can do to become more unified. And so I didn’t pick this because I think this is a huge problem here, but I think it is a problem. And it’s a problem that is directly tied to our effectiveness in evangelism.

All right. Implications from John 17. Unity and our evangelistic vision, practical and pastoral links. What I mean by that is, you know, if you got a church where people aren’t all that—well, let’s put it this way. To the extent that people in a local congregation love and accept each other and the diversity and the unity of the churches are both expressed, right?—if you’ve got that kind of affirmation visibly going on, then God in John 17 says people are going to see that and like it. They’re drawn to it like a moth to light. You don’t see that much outside of the church. So, you know, if they don’t see that—if they see instead people that are bickering with each other all the time or just cold to each other or not friendly—practically, who wants to be around that? It’s the last place you want to be, right?

So number one: there’s an obvious practical benefit to having a community that really gets along well together. Secondly, and this is more important—that first one is kind of obvious and pretty important, but think of this one. Who is going to bless a church with growth? God and God alone. God is growing his kingdom. People are coming to faith. And what God’s got to figure out—it’s not hard for him to figure it out—he has to decide where he’s going to send people, right? Where’s he going to put them to be best discipled?

And if he sees a church that’s not really taking care of the people that are there all that well, why would he send more people into that, particularly more newborns in the faith, right? Why would he do that? Well, of course, the answer is obvious, isn’t it? He’s not doing that. So, you know, John 17 tells us something that’s true. And if we think about it, it’s practically obvious. And it’s pastorally—the great Pastor, God, knows how to pastor his sheep. And pastorally, it’s quite obvious as well, once you stop and think about it, that God isn’t going to send newborns into a church in which they can’t see love, unity, glory, knowledge, and life happening.

Okay. Secondly, unity in the word. This is quite important. So, you could take what I talked about last week—and a lot of people do take these verses from John and develop some kind of ecumenism that brings in everybody. Well, this unity is directly related to the word throughout John 17.

Look at verse—well, don’t look, listen: In John 17:6, in this prayer he says, “I manifested your name to the men whom you gave me out of the world. They are yours. You gave them to me, and they have kept your word.” Your word—see, there’s an emphasis on word. Verse 8, “I have given to them the words which you have given to me.” They’ve received these words. You see, word is vital. Verse 14, “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them.” So again, he’s given them the word of God. Verse 17, “Sanctify them by your truth. Your word is truth.”

So the only way to get to this unity is via the word. And the word has to be at the heart or center of what this is all about. Verse 20, “I don’t pray for those only, but also for those who believe in me through their word.” So if you don’t believe in Jesus, right?, then we’re not going to be at unity with you. Jesus doesn’t pray that we be one, you know, with Mormons who don’t—who have not come to an obedience to who Jesus is. Now, some of them probably have. There are probably Christians in the Mormon church, but their basic doctrine does not teach the Jesus of the scriptures.

So Jesus is praying for unity amongst those who believe in him and believe in him as revealed in the word of God. Okay. So, number one: I’m not talking about unity with non-Christians. But even within Christianity, right?—so now we’ve got all kinds of different expressions of Christianity. How to relate to them? Well, Jesus says there is unity, but he also says there’s a process of sanctification going on based on his word. So, outside of Christ, we don’t strive for unity. Inside the body of Christ—all kinds of expressions of it—we do strive for unity. But it’s not a unity that has nothing to do with the Bible. It’s a unity that will grow as we minister the word to them and as they minister the word to us—their perspectives.

It’s like here: people all are different and we all have different knowledge of the word. You got things to teach me from the Bible, and I got things to teach you. And so to the extent that we let that happen, the unity grows. So for people outside of the faith—forget unity. Inside the faith, strive for unity, but don’t see it as detached from the word. It’s related to the word.

Now, if you have differences with another group—dispensationalist, charismatics, whatever it is—in terms of your understanding of the word, how do you handle those things? Well, that’s what we’re going to look at in James. We’re going to handle them with wisdom, and we’re going to have characteristics to how we interact with them in our speech that’ll be demonstrated to us in James—that you know how it’s going to be. And it’s not going to be censorious.

Sinners need rebuking. People with different doctrinal positions usually don’t. What they need is grace. You know, we’re going to look in a few weeks—we’ve already seen Paul addressing synagogues respectfully and graciously, addressing complete pagans respectfully. And when they come to—when the Jews try to kill him, he’s going to call them “men and brothers” because they’re within the household, so to speak, of faith. He’s calling them to obedience, but he’s doing it with respect.

So, I’m not big on, you know, conferences or talks where we hammer this and hammer that. You know, I appreciate the desire to see people grow in their understanding of how the Spirit of God works, for instance. But I don’t think the way to give a gift to somebody is to tie it to a brick and throw it at their head or to wrap the gift in, you know, a dirty diaper. And it seems like there’s a lot of that these days in Christendom. And I just—I think we’ll see in James that’s not the way to do it.

So the word is central to this. Okay, the word is absolutely central. In fact, the beginning and end of this account: in John 17:1, Jesus says, “Jesus spoke these words. Then lifted up his eyes to heaven and prayed.” So it’s related to his word. And then at the end of this, in 18:1, we read that when Jesus had spoken these words, he went out. So the word of Jesus is central to this teaching and very important for it.

This is why our community groups stress word and prayer. You know, the relationship of this to our community groups is: first of all, the stress on word and prayer. But then it’s also very important—now you can have in a church, okay, I think it’s wrong to market a church to a particular demographic because we see all over the place that different people have different gifts. They come together and they gift each other because of their differences. So if we try to handpick who’s going to be in a local church, that’s just not God’s way. God’s way is to bring somebody quite unlike you along to help you, to help grow you and balance you and give you gifts. And within the context of the body, there is diversity. And a diversity that’s not going away. Diversity isn’t bad. We’ll see that next week more.

But the diversity is good. So that’s the way a church is. Everybody knows it. Now, a church can have little groups of people that get together who like chess or, you know, whatever, football, whatever it is. And they can have groups like that. And in those groups, it’s good to pray a little bit, read a Bible verse or something. But that’s okay to do. But that’s not what we’re doing with our community groups.

Our community groups are intended to be a subset of the culture of the church. And that’s why they’re geographically based, you know, as opposed to just what you like or if you get along with people—because they’re supposed to be many representations where what we’re talking about in these three sermons on unity gets played out, you see? So that’s why they’re done that way, right? That’s why we’re doing them that way is because of this idea that the church’s unity and diversity.

And you know, the people you might least like in your group might be the best people for you. Maybe not, but you know, frequently they are. And so it has to do with this very truth that we’re talking about. There is a richness of giftedness that a diverse community brings together. God does it this way—not just because, you know, for some arcane reason. He does this for our well-being. We don’t know who’s good for us. He puts us in a body, and that body has a lot of different people, and they act a lot of different ways. And I’m not talking about their sins. I’m talking about how they manifest righteousness. And the end result of that is beautiful. It is a highly enriching experience to be part of a church with unity and glory, knowledge, and life flowing because the diversity is something you would never do outside of the church.

Okay. So that and that’s the idea behind our geographic community groups as well. And I wanted to just mention real quickly: unity and kook points. So we’re talking about bringing new people into the church, and this is a hard area. This “kook point” phrase I first learned from Mark Horn, and he said some things about churches like ours at one point that I found quite offensive. But the longer I’ve pastored, the more I’ve kind of understood what he said.

Here’s basically what he says: You’re evangelizing people. You’re bringing new people to Jesus Christ, and you’re bringing them to a sovereign God, right? Jesus is a big enough hurdle for people. And you don’t want to pile on a bunch of other things that he would call “kook points”—distinctive things, no matter how well thought out they might be in your life. An example from one of my own kook points: Christian education. Hugely committed to it, right? But when I’m evangelizing somebody, I don’t start with that. And when they’re becoming part of a church and coming to faith in Christ, if they’ve got kids in public school, I think of a plan, and I want to help them get to the place where they see the implications of being a disciple of Jesus for how their kids are trained, particularly in this culture where the public schools are so antichrist.

And don’t—if you don’t agree with that, that’s okay. But that’s how I see it right now. I don’t think it’s always been that way, but that’s how it is for the most part right now. But I don’t start with that. We don’t put up a sign at the door saying if you’ve got public school kids, you’re not welcome here. That would be wrong because the gospel—it’s a distinction between root and fruit. The root of all the fruit that we develop is the gospel of Jesus Christ. We’re calling people to become disciples of Jesus. As they become disciples, they will eventually develop fruit, right, like private education, Christian education—explicitly Christian education. They’ll understand the Lord’s Day. As they grow in discipleship, they’ll understand why—at least we don’t think it’s good to buy and sell, for instance. They’ll understand all kinds of things that are good fruit of the basic idea of the gospel, of discipleship in Christ.

But it’s not the root. Those things are the fruit from the root. And if you place a bunch of those barriers up at the door of the church, you’re going to not accomplish the sort of unity we really want to have. And you’re going to, you know, bar people from the gate—not because they’re rejecting the gospel, but because they’re rejecting some implication of it that you find good and proper.

Courting, you know, if a church is heavy into courting rather than dating, whatever that means—you know, maybe a good inference from raising children in Christ. But if you’re always talking about it and everybody knows about it, you know, you don’t want to push that when people are first coming through the door as disciples of Jesus for the first time.

I could talk about other things that maybe not are not even implications of the gospel. They might be fruit. We may disagree whether they’re fruit or not, right? No tattoos, for instance, right? Homemade bread, right? You know, particular kinds of dieting today. I mean, there’s all kinds of stuff, and all of it might be good and proper for you and maybe good and proper for all of us as we mature in Christ. But I think we need to make a distinction between those things.

And if some wearing a suit and tie—how’s that for a kook point, right? It sort of is these days, you know, suit and tie in church. That—I went to a mega-church once. I don’t know, 600, 700 people there. I was literally the only guy with a suit on. That was kooky. And even if it wasn’t kooky, it’s not the gospel that you got to dress a particular way when you come here, right? And we can talk after people become disciples of Jesus—what’s the best way to honor him in worship? And maybe it’s resting in who you are in worship and not—if some people put on a suit and tie, they’re doing it feeling like they’re hypocrites because it’s not who they are.

Anyway, you get the basic point, right? I think that part of the implications of this relationship of the local body and unity and evangelism is being careful to distinguish root and fruit. And then our personal choices we might make—from we don’t want to have them identified as the gospel.

All right. So now we’ll get to James, finally, to wisdom and unity. And so this text, as I said, that I just read from the Epistle of James, it has a bigger context, and that context is why I wanted to talk about it. So, you know, maybe you could open your Bibles to James chapter 3 and let’s just walk through this quickly. And then we’ll talk about the specific text.

So where does he start? With verse one, he’s talking about teachers. So he leads up to this “wisdom from above” stuff with a discussion first of all of teachers. It’s almost like a pastoral epistle because now he’s saying who should be teachers in the church, and he says not many. From that, he goes to talk about the tongue and how difficult the tongue is to tame, right? As you drop down a couple of verses, in verse 5, he says it’s like a fire—a little fire that kindles a huge forest fire. So the tongue has some big problems associated with it.

And then he says in verse 6, at the end of that verse, “This tongue rather is set on fire by hell.” That’s pretty strong language. He talks also in the context of this about deadly poison. So he says, you know, don’t many be teachers because the tongue is a real difficult thing to control, and it can do tremendous damage. It’s like deadly poison. It can kill people. It’s like a fire that burns people up, right?

And so when we get around then to talking about wisdom, he set us up by talking about how we use our speech. And now, you know, you’re going to feel guilty about how you use your speech as we read through the characteristics of wisdom from above. But understand: your speech is very difficult to control. And that’s kind of the lead-up to this. And our speech—what if we don’t control it? What does it do? It doesn’t create unity, or maybe a unity of death—a forest fire burned over.

But the tongue which isn’t governed by the wisdom from above destroys the unity of the local church, which means it destroys our evangelistic successfulness, our ability to do evangelism correctly. Because John 17 says that’s critical. So you know, your speech one to the other can have the effect of—complete—you may know the best Calvinian presuppositional apologetic method. You may be a great guy and get out and talk to lots of people. But God isn’t bringing those people here if the church is broken up, destroyed, burned over through sins of the tongue.

So what he’s getting to here is helping us to see how we can work on combating the things that destroy unity and how, on the contrary, wise, we can build up the unity of the church through a proper understanding of wisdom. And he says in verse 9 that this tongue, we use this tongue to curse men. So he brings it right down into our horizontal relationships of the tongue.

And so this is sort of the setup for the verses that we read. And then in chapter 4, if you look down in chapter 4, verse 11: “Do not speak evil of one another. 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?”

So from one perspective, kind of the bookends of this discussion of wisdom is our tongues and the difficulty of our tongues, and specifically our tongues used to create division and disunity within the body of Christ. So that’s kind of the big picture, the bigger context for our focusing in then on the section that deals directly with wisdom.

Now the section that deals directly with wisdom has a header in it in verse 13. “Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show by good conduct that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom.” Now, conduct’s a general term, but since it’s bridged by “speak” and “teach,” our conduct certainly refers not just to how we walk and what we do, but what we say is a big part of our conduct. And so he’s saying that true wisdom, the wisdom that comes from above, is evidenced by conduct. And in the context here, the conduct of our speech one to the other—that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom.

So he gives us a summary statement. He’s going to describe wisdom with seven characteristics, but he first gives us the summary statement that there is a meekness to wisdom. So it’s important we say a few words about meekness. Now, meekness is not weakness. We tend to think that way. It’s not. The particular Greek term used was used of breaking wild horses—not to remove their strength but to bring all of their strength under the control of the rider. So a meek horse was not a weak, namby-pamby trodder or something. He was a strong warhorse, but he was a warrior who was responsive to his owner, to his rider.

Meekness in the scriptures means that we’re broken to harness—God’s harness—that we are willingly submitting to him, not getting rid of our strength, but utilizing all of our strength for the master, okay? For the Lord Jesus Christ. And so that’s what meekness means. Jesus himself describes himself as meek and lowly. Humility—understanding who we are—is part of it. Jesus is meek. And the evidence of it is all over, particularly in the gospel of John. “I’ve come to do the Father’s will. I do what the Father tells me to do. If you hear my words, you hear the Father’s words.” He’s meek. He does what the Father wants.

Now, he’s fully God, but still he describes himself as meek. And as a result of his meekness, he can bring us rest. That’s what he says in the gospels. So meekness is directly correlated to wisdom. Wisdom doesn’t mean—in worldly wisdom, you know, you can show off and intimidate people with your knowledge and all that stuff, right? But this is not that. The wisdom that James is going to say that’s effective for creating unity in the church and keeping away from disunity—this sort of wisdom is meek. It’s under control. It’s powerful, but it’s powerful for God.

Jesus said, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart—meek and lowly in heart—and you will find rest for your souls.”

2 Corinthians 10, verse 1: “Paul says, ‘Now I, Paul myself, am pleading with you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ, who in presence am lowly among you but being absent am bold toward you—toward you—toward you—in his work.’ In other words, so what do we learn? Our meekness is the meekness of Christ. And it results in actually boldness to challenge Christians who are actually in very sinful states. So the way Paul deals with the Corinthians is actually a demonstration of the sort of meekness and brokenness to harness that Paul has, and that he says is essentially the meekness and gentleness of Christ.

So he doesn’t just rip them, you know, but he is bold in talking to them about their difficulties at times.

Okay. So meekness isn’t weakness. It is a strength to it that comes from true wisdom. And then he gives us the opposite of this kind of meekness in verses 14 to 16.

“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.”

And actually, it might be better translated: “This is not the wisdom that comes from above.” He doesn’t even call it worldly wisdom. He won’t give it the title of wisdom. But that’s how the world sees wisdom. The opposition to the wisdom he’s talking about is what? Envy, which is bitter, and self-seeking, you know. So envy is, you know, you’re jealous about what somebody else has. You can’t have it. You tear it down. You destroy the unity of the church. Self-seeking is: I want X. Nobody will give me X. And I’m going to do whatever I got to do to get X, or destroy the people that won’t give me X.

Now, that’s the essence of the opposition to wisdom from above: self-seeking and envious toward others, right? So self-promotion, and then the result of that or related to that, is this bitter envying. You know, this is something, and we’ll talk more about this next week, but you know, husbands and wives can feel this way about each other, right? They can—”Why is that guy in charge of the family? I’m smarter. I’m more spiritual.” And a lot of times both those things really are true. So you got to work that out. And we’ll talk more about that next week. But understand that’s frequently what happens.

You know, this can happen with congregants in the church. We only had one church split in the history of RCC, and “church split’s” probably too strong a word. We did lose eight or nine families. And the thing that really led to all of that was the decision to not make a particular person an elder. And now he wanted to be an elder real bad. And it was really funny because after the decision was made that he wasn’t really qualified at this point, he then decided—nearly immediately—that our government was unbiblical and we weren’t a true church. So, see, if you can’t have what you’re after, then you’re going to try to destroy the people that occupy that position. And that’s exactly what that guy did.

And now it wasn’t just our church. He’s gone through several churches and done this same thing. It’s just astonishing. And yet every new church that hosts him think, “Oh, well, we’ll work with them.” You know, anyway—it’s a—but it’s a great example.

So the opposite of what is to bring unity to the church is ambitiousness, self-seeking, promotion of oneself, and associated with that, bitter envy against other people. And so this is sort of the description in verse 14. “And this is not wisdom that comes from above. It is earthly, sensual.” And he actually calls it demonic. I mean, that’s a strong word, right? I mean, we think, and we all have these experiences where we want to be like somebody else. We want their popularity. We want this. We want that. We may be tempted, you know, to try to hurt them—at least in our own minds. We all tend to do that.

But understand that when that’s happening—when that kind of lack of unity is going on between you and your brother or sister in Christ—Paul says that’s demonic. It’s not just a little problem. It’s demonic. It’s demonic. It tears apart at the very fabric of the church, which is the basis for our bringing in people into the kingdom of Jesus Christ. You see how bad it is? It’s demonic. And as I said, this sort of speech Paul refers to as deadly poison, and James refers to—I think James also refers to it as poison, and he refers to it as a consuming fire that burns up the church.

Takes the beautiful plantings of God, burns it down. See, so this is big deal. This is big stuff, and that’s why I wanted to talk about it. It’s very significant to the evangelistic effort. And so he talks about that. Then he says in verse 16, “Where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion in every evil thing are there.”

So he repeats it: envy and self-seeking. This is the problem. This is the root problem that prevents churches from being unified. Envy and self-seeking. And he says it’s manifested by confusion and every evil thing. Okay? So you don’t know what’s going on. You’re confused because things are being done that are confusing to the body. So this is, you know, so when you see a church that’s in disarray, and there is confusion and bad things happening—more often than not, I think what these verses are telling us is there’s not wisdom from above. And instead, there are people—men or women—who are self-seeking and who are envious in that self-seeking.

So, you know, this is very practical pastoral stuff that James is giving to us. But he doesn’t leave us with eliminating the negative. He brings us to accentuating the positive as well in the next few verses. So he goes on to talk then at some length about this wisdom from above and defines it, and then after that he talks about quarrels and fights, as I said before.

So the bookends are the bad stuff we’re trying to get rid of, and at the middle of that is this sevenfold description of wisdom from above. Okay? And this is actually on your handout, the specific verse and the way I’ve kind of laid it out. Do you see it there?

“The wisdom that is from above is pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.”

Now, that’s a sevenfold list. And it’s not always true, but frequently a sevenfold list will be chiastic. It’ll be—things will match up. Calvin talked about the bookends here of purity at the top and without hypocrisy at the bottom. It says, well, you know, these are matching things. And so if we look at this the way I’ve laid it out for you, they kind of match up, right?

So purity, right? Means total integration—you know, not some kind of mixture of bad things. Hypocrisy are people that affirm one thing with their appearance but actually are something else. They wear a mask. That’s what the word means in the Greek for hypocrisy—somebody that wears a mask in a play, for instance. And so you can see where that’s the opposite of purity, right? So purity and hypocrisy sort of match up.

And then “peaceable” and “partiality.” Purity I think has to do primarily with our relationship to God. And it’s like the word “chaste”—dedicated to someone. And when we’re dedicated to God, we’re pure. We purify ourselves. We are sanctified. And then how that works out in terms of our horizontal relationships comes next. Peace—yes, there’s peace with God, but peace is God’s order in the world. Okay? And so the wisdom begins with relationship to God. And then it attains God’s order, unity, lack of division in the world.

Peacefulness, right? And that matches up with partiality. The opposite of peacemaking in the body is partiality making—party spirit, teams, little clicks. As I said before, groups of friends are good and proper. By that, that’s what we mean by click. It’s a good thing. But it’s not a good thing if it’s a click—usually means you got that group and that group, and you actually you sort of make fun of people outside of that group. That’s click. And so that is bad. That’s partiality. That’s like liking these people and not liking these people and kind of having your horizontal relationships defined that way. And as we said, what God wants is unity in a church, right? Everybody.

So those kind of things kind of match up. And then you’ve got gentleness and “full of mercy and good fruits.” And I think those kind of match up. Gentleness toward people—again, it’s horizontal. And now it speaks about our words particularly. And then the other side of that is being merciful and actually doing good deeds for people. And they kind of match up, you know, being gentle toward people in our speech and also being merciful toward them, being compassionate to them, sympathetic for what they’re going through, and doing things to actually help them, right?

They kind of match up too. And that leaves us in the middle with “willing to yield.” Now, when you get these sevenfold patterns that seem to be matches, little bookends, you can also think of them in terms of the creation days. Now, a lot of times they don’t match up, but it seems to me that’s a useful meditation on these verses. How does purity match up with day one? Think about it. The light shines—the pure light of God’s word, right?

How does peace match up with day two? Day two, God starts to divide things, right? And God’s order doesn’t want that division in terms of humanity and people. Division is not bad in of itself, but not the kind of breaking apart of people. Sin broke people apart. The second feast, you know, was about the division—the Passover—breaking apart of God’s people and the Gentiles. So, I think that kind of works with day two.

And you know, gentleness on day three. Day four in the scriptures is the ruling day—sun, moon, and stars. It’s ruler stuff. I’ve said this many times here. It’s one of the easiest things to spot. And if that’s right, what it means is the best way to be a ruler—your family, your business, at church, with whatever group of people you’re with—is having the humility to be willing to yield to somebody as they bring concerns about you or ideas that you didn’t have. A willingness to yield, being easily entreated, is the mark of biblical leadership. And again, this is wisdom from above. The earthly wisdom that’s sensual and demonic—the key to ruling is power, right? I mean, brute power, forcing people, blah blah blah. And the opposite of being willing to yield.

On the fifth day, there was a filling of portions of the earth. And the fifth thing here is being full of mercy and good fruits, resulting from that gentleness. On day three, are—in the third slot—without partiality. Well, day six, of course, was filled with partiality, right? Adam and the woman become, you know, divided. The snake, everything gets partial right away. And then finally, without hypocrisy—well, that’s what it’s intended to be at the seventh day. But of course, you know, sin brings us into those things.

So those are just some meditations into these sevenfold aspects here. Let’s talk about them in a little bit more detail, and we can do this very quickly.

So, first of all, purity: A synonym for this would be “chaste”—dedicated to one person. You know, the purification offering removes defilements, right? So having an integrity of life that results from a commitment—in the context of this—to Jesus Christ. We’re pure in our basic motivations and intentions to follow him. And when we don’t, we want to get rid of those, right, through the application of his blood and purification.

You know, if I had—my mower wouldn’t run for a while this year. I left gas in it from the winter, and things happened to the gas. But if you get a little bit of dirt, and there was some dirt in my mower, in the gas can, little pieces of stuff, and they clog up the works, and your motor doesn’t run at all—or if it does, it kind of comes in spurts and draws. Maybe sometime your car has done that. You’ve gotten some flakes of something in your gas tank or whatever it is, and the thing just doesn’t run smooth.

Well, a lot of times in our lives, when they’re not running smoothly—when you’re jerking and you don’t know what’s happening—you know, purity may be the basic problem. You know, you want to get rid of things that you know are not a result of being pure in your commitment to follow the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, he doesn’t show us all those things at once in his grace, but as he continues to manifest to you, “Oh, here’s some stuff in your tank that’s getting in your way. Now, get rid of that stuff, right?” Filter it out. This is what purity, I think, is about.

1 John 3: “Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be. 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 if we stay focused on the Lord Jesus Christ—he is pure. He is totally committed to do the Father’s will. He doesn’t have any sin. And as we stay focused on him, the result should be that we purify ourselves. And this is the beginning of the wisdom that comes from above.

2 Corinthians 7:11: “For 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 yourself to be clear, pure in this matter.”

Now he’s talking about, you know, even when we sin and we apply ourselves to repentance and confession, we’re doing it so that we might purify ourselves. So purity is the beginning. And purity in relationship to God produces God’s order, peacefulness in our relationship with men. And that’s the second one. We start with God, and the wisdom from above moves us then in our horizontal relationships.

“Blessed are the pure in heart” in the Beatitudes. And then the next one is “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Okay? This relationship between purity and peacemaking. And so those are the Beatitudes, and they match up with what’s happening here.

Hebrews 12:14 says, “Pursue peace with all people and holiness—that’s what we just talked about, purity—is holiness, without which no one will see the Lord.”

So the true wisdom from above creates a purifying relationship, a holiness with God, which becomes then a peaceable effect in the context of our vertical relationships as well.

One commentator says this: “The true wisdom produces right relationships. There is a kind of clever and arrogant wisdom which separates man from man and which makes a man look with superior contempt on his fellows.” You ever felt that wisdom directed toward you? Yeah. He says, “There’s a kind of cruel wisdom which takes a delight in hurting others with clever but cutting words. And there is 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 to God. The wisdom from above is what creates the unity that provides the basis for Christian mission and evangelism in the world.”

Gentle: Synonyms would be patience, forbearance, persuasiveness, meekness. It’s often paired with meekness, weakness. And so this is kind of the way we go about doing relationships with people. And as we just said with Paul, he was meek and he was gentle. Even though at times he had to speak strongly to the Corinthians about their particular sin. So gentleness doesn’t mean you never address sin in the other person. It means the way you go about doing it—you’re trying to win your brother. You’re trying to win your brother or your sister.

In 2 Timothy 2:24: “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.”

That’s what Paul did. So the opposite of gentleness, right, according to this verse, is quarreling—being argumentative—throwing in a bunch of emotionally charged pejorative terms into the thing, as opposed to just talking about what happened, for instance. That’s not gentleness. That’s like ratcheting speech up like crazy, and it becomes a kind of quarrelsomeness and a quarreling that is the opposite of the sort of gentleness that the scriptures commend to us.

First Thessalonians 2:7: “We were gentle among you just as a nursing mother cherishes her own children.”

You’ll be gentle toward people that you cherish. And if you don’t think much about the person in the church, you’re probably not going to be very gentle toward them. So we have to ask God to give us a cherishing of each other that will produce the sort of gentleness that is commanded here. And it works the opposite way too, by the way. If we force our speech to be gentle with people, I think we’re going to cherish them more.

You know, Job said he made a covenant with his eyes. Now, my guess is that the longer Job went on not having looked at maidens, the easier his problems of lust became. If we always wait for the interior before we do something about the exterior—”I can’t be gentle to you. I just don’t have regard for you”—no, it works the other way around as well. In fact, maybe even primarily, God changes us on the inside because of the way we change our external actions. Making covenants with our eyes, making a covenant with our tongue—to not be quarrelsome with people we’re at odds with, but gentle, not failing to address difficulties that exist, but to do it in a gentle manner that shows how you’re coming to a place of cherishing the other person.

Titus 3 says this: “Remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities, to obey, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to be peaceable, gentle, showing all humility to all men.”

Peaceable, gentle, showing humility—that’s exactly the order of 2, 3, and 4 in James’s list, right? You start with purity and devotion to follow Christ. You become peaceable in your relationships. You do it through gentleness in your speech. And you do it through humility that’s willing to yield. So that verse says these three aspects: peaceable, gentle, showing all humility to all men.

“Soft answer turns away wrath,” right? The kindness of God, the gentleness of God is what brings us to repentance. And that’s what we’re to use even when we’re trying to encourage people to come to repentance.

And then finally: willing to yield. This is the center. This is the center. Do you want to rule in the world? Do you want to be a ruler of men? Are you a ruler of men now? Do you want to be improved as a leader? Community group leaders—this is one of the gigs. Team leaders, project leaders here, dads, moms—you’re both leaders to your kids, right?

What’s the key that demonstrates to us the wisdom to lead properly and well? The key, I think, in the fourth slot—the ruling slot of the seven—the hinge that produces everything or is in relationship to everything else—is being willing to yield, being humble enough to say, “I’m not going to just, you know, cite my authority relative to you. I’m not going to think of you as an idiot. You may be smarter than me. You may have a lot better idea than I have about something. And you know what? I may be wrong about what I did.”

Leaders have to be willing to yield, willing to, you know, see things from the other person’s perspective, willing to give up a position held if it’s not being helpful for whatever endeavor you’re trying to do or if it’s causing difficulty in terms of relationships.

A willingness to yield. Easily entreated. This is another phrase found in the Bible. You’re to be easily entreated. Now, there’s an entreatment that goes on, right? I mean, people that are coming to you as a leader have to respect that. We’ve seen that in a couple of verses we’ve already read. They’re not giving you demands. They’re intreating you. But you got to be—you got to be easily entreated. You have to demonstrate yourself to be a person who wants to hear problems, concerns, objections, and don’t just bang back against everything, right?

Don’t push back every time somebody tries to entreat you about a matter. Now, the only way to accomplish that—the only way—is to recognize what a goofball you are in some ways, right? I mean, we’re all, you know, one of the big problems in Christianity is we take ourselves so seriously, right? But we’re all like hobbits. I mean, we are—we’re kind of goofy in some ways and silly, and we can. And now, I know Psalm 8 tells us about our majesty, but part of attaining to that majesty is the humility that, you know, we’re supposed to have based on who we are—a recognition that we’re not going to get everything right and that we’re not going to have all the ideas.

That’s not what being a leader guy is. Being a leader guy is developing good lines of communication so that you can be easily entreated, willing to yield to someone else, you know, if it’s for the well-being of the church or the project, whatever it is you got going on. Humility before God is part of that purity thing that produces peace in the context of our world and these other five good works, good fruit that flows out of this, right?

Not being partial, divisive in the church, not being hypocritical, having all those positive things going on. This is the wisdom from above that will—if fully applied and worked with—create increasing unity and drive out division in the local church. And it will have the effect then of being the sweetness of life in the Lord Jesus Christ and in his kingdom, in his body, with his people that will make our evangelistic efforts successful and blessed by God.

This is the wisdom we’re to attain to. The end result of this is verse 18. “A harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.” A multiplication—the peace we’re sowing creates more peace than in the world and in other people becoming part of that kingdom that’s sown in righteousness.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for this wonderful text. Help us to meditate upon it this week. Help us to think about some of the discussion questions in our groups or in our families or small group settings as well. Bless us, Father, with increasing unity based upon an increasing purity and a commitment to peacefulness. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen. Amen.