Fifth I.B.S.

James 3:13-17

“Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? Let him show out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter envying and a strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth. This wisdom descends not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. For the where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.”

When in a conversation, a wise man will be known by the humbleness of his wisdom. This the kind of wisdom that is from heaven. From personal experience, not to call any of my friends out, but I know a good handful of people who are super smart with facts and statistics and scholastics. I know this because every time I have a conversation with them, they make me feel like the dumbest person in the room. While that might be true, it still stands that these earthly wise people seem to have this pride issue in that they think because they have earthly wisdom they need to brag about all they know to make themselves feel better than others. While I believe it is good to have earthly wisdom, you have to use and control it properly. If you look at the people who I know with earthly wisdom and those who I know with Biblical wisdom, there is honestly a huge humility difference in those with Biblical wisdom.  Honestly I believe it’s because that if you truly have Biblical wisdom, it’s because you read the Bible and if you read the Bible then you not supposed to be bragging about your knowledge and wisdom. These verses say that the wisdom from above is pure then peaceful, gentle, submissive, merciful, full of good fruit, and without partiality or hypocrisy. This might be just me, but I love it when the Bible gives us signs when we are doing something right, as in if we have heavenly wisdom, then people should be seeing these things mentioned through it. What stood out to me in this listing of characteristics is that heavenly wisdom should be willing to yield or submissive. It seems like a lot of the times in the Bible we see this common theme of the highest in position taking on the lowest of positions, just how Jesus was Christ the Lord and also a servant to those who persecuted Him. Those who are true leaders, should be also the ones who are willing to submit to other leaders. Clearly this is not the case with the people I know who have all this earthly wisdom. Honestly I don’t have a lot of earthly wisdom to brag about but the little I do know about I find myself using to exalt myself over the few who might not know as much. As a Christian we called to be better than that, for that type of knowledge is “Devilish.”

I will try to be the best light that I can be by keeping in good conversation, and being gentle and peaceable with those who I converse with. I will add to my prayer in the mornings that I the Lord would bless my conversations throughout the day, and that he would keep me from speaking these “devilish” things.