James 1:5-8

Take your Bibles with me and turn again in the book of James. Last week I started this series on James and we talked about the purpose of problems and we learned a little bit about this man James. James was Jesus’ brother, he was a leader in the early church at Jerusalem and He was very, very Jewish in his outlook.

The big problem facing James was trouble and trials in the church. Imagine if God sent a great persecution to our town, and people in our church started going to jail for their faith. Daddies were being separated from their kids. People were disappearing into gulags in the middle of the night. That kind of thing has happened all over the world for two thousand years.

Imagine if it happened here though. What would likely happen is you would run for the hills. (And living in Illinois, you’d have to run really, really far.) You’d scatter.

And that’s what happened to the church in Jerusalem. They ran for the hills. They scattered. They were facing this terrible trouble and so James wrote this book to teach them and the first thing he was concerned about was trouble and how to handle it.

And his lesson was that if you handle trouble right, God will use it to make you mature and complete. You’ll be ”perfect and entire, wanting nothing.”.

That’s what I preached on last Sunday Night. Now look at our text tonight. Verse 5 starts with these words:

”But if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God...”

That’s a tie in. James is saying - as you face trials, as you endure hardships, as you grow in maturity, there is one thing you are going to need and it is wisdom.

So last week we talked about trials, tonight we are going to talk about wisdom.

Let’s read the whole text, verses 5-8:

”James 1:5-8 (KJV) 5 If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all [men] liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. 6 But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. 7 For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord. 8 A double minded man [is] unstable in all his ways.”

On Wednesday this week, you are going to meet someone who is really special to me. Pastor Mark Carpenter is going to be in the service. Pastor Carpenter was my youth pastor when I was a teenager and now he pastors in Columbus, Ohio. He called and asked if he could come and take me out to supper on Wednesday and just be a part of the service. I’m really excited about it.

One thing Pastor Carpenter did for us was make us sing a lot of scripture songs. He had all of these scriptures put to music which we would sing in Youth Group and one of them was these verses.

(Sing) If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, which giveth to all men, liberally, and upbraideth not and it shall be given him. If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God.

Why don’t you try that with me? (Sing again)

So what does this passage teach? I’m going to break it down into three points:

• The thing we need
• The source of it
• The prerequisite

So lets start with number 1...

1. The thing we need: wisdom

The passage says ”If any of you lack wisdom let him ask of God.” So the thing we need as we go through the ups and downs of life is wisdom.

Wisdom is one of the most used words in the Bible and it means a couple different things:

Sometimes wisdom just means knowledge. Moses was learned in the “wisdom of the egyptians” Jesus grew “in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man” and later people marveled at Jesus’ wisdom and asked where He learned it. In

Sometimes wisdom means the ability to do certain things. Jesus talked about a “mouth of wisdom” that would be given to us when people ask of us. Stephen had wisdom to minister in the early church.

But most of the time, Christian wisdom is the ability to use the knowledge of God in our day to day life. The operative word is USE. Wisdom is more than knowledge, it is skill to make the right decision moment by moment. It is skill for living rightly. It is knowledge with work gloves on.

The truth is, we need wisdom. We need help making decisions day to day:

• Wisdom in how to spend our time.
• Wisdom in how to respond to people at work.
• Wisdom in how we raise our children and discipline them.
• Wisdom in how we relate to our spouse.
• Wisdom in what we choose to do in our free time.
• Wisdom in how we minister for the Lord at church.

And we could go on and on and on. We are faced constantly with all of these choices we have to make. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. And we have to learn to use wisdom.

And it’s a skill. It almost becomes a habit.

It’s hard for most of us to remember this, but if you could rewind to your first time behind the wheel of a car, you were probably terrified. You had to think about every step. Step on the gas. Step on the brake. Pull back the shifter. Move it to Drive. Step on the gas. Slow down for the car ahead of you. Put on the blinker. I’m stressed out just thinking about it.

But now, you get in the car and you are playing on your phone and eating an ice cream cone from McDonald’s while changing lanes and thinking about what you are going to have for dinner. You aren’t thinking about driving at all. Those thoughts turned into a skill and into a habit. You are making those thousands of decisions on auto-pilot.

And the same thing is true about wisdom. When you learn to make wise decisions, those decisions just become part of your auto-pilot and you don’t have to make them anymore. They are like functions in software. Scripts you apply to different situations. You just do them without thinking.

But sometimes we have bad habits and bad software. I’ve told a few of you this, but one of the bad things in my life I am working on now is my relationship to my phone. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve come to realize that I am really, really addicted to Social Media and to my phone and it’s not good. It’s a little thing that can ruin my relationship with my wife and my kids and ruin my ability to pastor. So I’m working on stopping that. I’m off all social media. I’ve removed anything I would want to check on my phone. I’m checking email only at certain times a day. Because I need to do something drastic to rewrite those bad habits.

So wisdom is how we apply what we know to make good decisions, and eventually those decisions become our “auto-pilot” and we make a lot of decisions without even thinking about them consciously.

The Bible has a lot to say about our common small decisions. Read the book of proverbs and you’ll find a lot about things like:

• Time management
• How we approach work and rest
• How we approach money
• How we discipline our kids
• How we treat and talk to each other
• How we respond to leadership
• Who we choose to be our friends

And then the Bible has a lot to say about things that are even smaller than this. Things that happen inside our mind like worry and doubt and fear and lust. And a big part of wisdom is just kind of installing these truths about how we see the world and make decisions as our auto-pilot software and just letting it make decisions for us.

But even with that auto-pilot, sometimes we have to be deliberate about our decisions. Something big comes up, we are faced with some crisis and we don’t know what to do and we know “I am way out of my league here, I need some special guidance and wisdom.”

So what are we supposed to do in those situations? Ask of God.

Which brings us to number 2. Number one was “what we are after: wisdom” number two is...

2. The source of wisdom: the Giving God

It says ”If any of you lack wisdom, let Him ask of God that giveth”

The words “God that giveth” actually go together. “That giveth” is a participle. In English it would be an “ing” word. Literally, James is calling God “the giving God.”

James is saying “When you don’t know what to do and you need wisdom, go to the giving God that gives to all men liberally.”

How many of you have ever heard the expression “He’d give the shirt off of his back”? That’s the way we describe people who are extremely generous.

What James is saying here is that God is generous as a part of His character. Just like God is love and God is Holy and God is good. God is giving. He is a giver. He is generous.

And so if you go to God and you ask for wisdom that you need to live the Christian life, He’s going to give it to you. He’s not going to withold any good thing from you if you ask in faith.

It’s like what Jesus said in

”22 And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.”

And in Matthew 6:

”Ask and it shall be given, seek and ye shall find, knock and the door shall be opened unto you.”

God is a giver. That’s a part of God’s character. He is “the giving God.” If you ask for it, and it’s good for you, He’s going to give it.

And it says “and upbraideth not” - I think that means God isn’t going to chastise you for asking.

My daughter Audrey asks me for a snack 1,000 times a day. I mean, the girl can really, really eat. If she hasn’t eaten in the last 20 minutes she’s starving! So sometimes, she asks for a snack and it’s annoying and I might upbraid her for asking.

But God isn’t ever going to upbraid us for asking for wisdom. We aren’t getting on His nerves. He wants to give us wisdom and He wants us to ask.

In fact, He says to us: ”Ye have not because ye ask not”. God wants us to bring our requests to Him in prayer, especially when we ask for wisdom and He wants to grant those requests. We aren’t ticking Him off when we ask. We aren’t wasting His time.

He’s the giving God.

So we’ve seen what we need: wisdom. And we’ve seen where we get it: the Giving God. There is one more thing this passage teaches...

Verses 6 through 8 say:

”But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering, for he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord. A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.”

We need wisdom and God wants us to ask for it and give it but there is one prerequisite:

3. The one prerequisite: wholeheartedness

God wants us to “ask in faith, nothing wavering.” Put another way, He wants us to be “all in.” He wants us to be totally committed to following Him.

We can’t ask God for wisdom and then go get a second opinion. That’s not how it works.

Some people go to the doctor and they get a diagnosis. But they don’t like the diagnosis and so they keep going doctor to doctor till someone tells them what they want to hear.

God doesn’t work that way. When you seek God’s help you have to be all in, totally committed. You can’t sit on the fence and ask God’s help.

You can’t be wishy-washy. That’s literally what James is saying here: “he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.” Wishy-washy.

Wishy-washy Christians don’t get their prayers answered. God doesn’t want to be option one of fifty-five. He wants to be it. Period. All or nothing.

They are what Vance Havner used to call “middle-of-the-roaders.” He used to say:

The middle of the road is a poor place to walk. It is a poor place to drive. It is a poor place to live.

If you aren’t committed to Christ and wholeheartedly wanting to follow His wisdom, He’s just straight up not going to give it to you.