Before I head off to work in the morning, I always like to take some time to listen to the Lord for a scripture to read, usually one chapter somewhere. The #1 chapter He has directed me to in the last couple years, is James 3, and especially verses 13 thru 18. So I’ve started my day with those scriptures dozens of times, and read them over and over. I try to keep those words on my mind every time I write something on Facebook, or consider sharing something in church or in a personal conversation.
Here is what it says: “13 Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? let him shew out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom.
14 But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth.
15 This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish.
16 For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work.
17 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.
18 And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace.”
As we’ve all experienced, you can read a scripture a hundred times, and then God can show you something you didn’t notice before. That happened to me this morning, when He pointed me to this place again, and I was about to breeze through it, thinking it was so familiar.
This time, two words jumped out… “First” and “Then”. Verse 17: “The wisdom from above is FIRST pure, THEN peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.” I realized that sometimes, in our desire to ‘make peace’ (vs.18), we’ll give up some of the ‘purity’ of God’s wisdom. That can put ‘peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated’ first, before ‘pure’.
It’s not like you can have ‘pure’ that isn’t also peaceable and gentle, and all of the rest… but it’s saying something about closeness to the original source. It’s more than just being ‘right’… with no error. It’s about getting right to the source, like water trickling from the melting of the whitest snow on the highest mountain… that kind of pure. The farther downstream it goes, it starts picking up little things… not always what we would call contaminated… just not ‘pure’. Yet, depending on the course of that stream, and the input along the way, that water could be totally polluted and unhealthy by the time it reaches the ocean.
I feel the Lord pleading with us all to come to Him, into His very presence, for the purest wisdom in all the world. We really CAN get it from the source! High in God’s secret place. Direct from His heart melting into ours. Wisdom that has never passed through any rusty pipes, or been passed from bucket to bucket… from man to man.
Yes, of course God uses human vessels to get His wisdom to the people of this earth. That’s the only way most people would ever get a drink of His wisdom. But every one of those vessels is called to show the way to the Source, whenever they give someone a drink. To the One above… for the pure wisdom from ABOVE.
The cry of Jesus is still, “…If any man thirst, let him come unto ME, and drink.” [John 7:37]
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