Wisdom from Heaven
Series: Kinetic Righteousness
September 5, 2021 - Ryan Romeo
If you're new in the last few months, or maybe even this is your first week, you're probably like, “Who is this guy?” I am not the lead pastor. My name is Ryan Romeo. I am one of the pastors here. And I'm a bit deer-in-the-headlights today because it is my first Sunday back after three months of sabbatical. And it really feels so good to be back. But some people are like, “Does it feel like you never left?”
I'm like, “No, it it feels like I left.” I came back and I'm like, “What is going on?” And David and I were talking. I was going, you know, it'll be nice to just kind of ease back in. It'll be nice to just kind of like show up, hang out in the background a little bit, you know. And then on Friday, he called me. He’s like, “Hey, I was exposed to Covid. So why don't you preach on your first day back?”
And I was like, "OK, well, so much for easing in. I'm diving into the deep end.”
But as I'm coming back, the feeling that I'm feeling more than anything else is I am just so thankful and grateful to be a part of this community. I really am. And getting a little bit of space, getting a little distance really gives you that perspective. But I'm thankful for our elder team. They lead us really, really well. They value rest — even long term rest. That's so countercultural. Our culture is so addicted to the artificial and superficial busyness that we just wrap around ourselves to feel important. And our elder team really stands behind the staff and says, “No, we think every, you know, six years you need to get out, spend a little bit of time with your family, spend a little time with the Lord. Get reset.”
And that's what my family and I just went through. And it was so, so good. I'm so thankful for David Stockton, who really leads us well. He imparted this and he lives out this rhythm of rest in our life. It's just so important.
But it's funny. When I was getting ready to go on sabbatical, I really wouldn't have gone if David hadn't pushed me. I'm an Enneagram three. If you love Enneagram, I'm an Enneagram three. I'm a workaholic. Really. I love working. It's like, you know, people like, “What do you do for fun?” I'm like, “Well, I work. It's fun.” Like, I love being at the church. I love pushing the team. I love working with the team. I love all of that.
And so David's like, “OK, we're serious. This summer you need to go take a sabbatical.”
I was like, “OK,” you know, and the lead up to going, people were asking me, like, “Are you so excited about going on sabbatical?”
And I said, “Yeah,” you know, and on the outside, I probably smiled. And if you asked me that, I was probably very polite to you. And I said, “Yeah, I'm excited.” On the inside I was going I'm excited about sabbatical like you're excited to go to the doctor and get a physical. I knew I needed to do it. I knew that it was something that I had to do, and I'd be glad that I did it. But there'd be some really uncomfortable moments in there. And that happens in a in a physical. And it happened on sabbatical.
There were some some moments just for me, like the artificial, superficial busyness that we get into, whether we're aware of it or not. We really do that as a self-protection, especially in America. We love to do that. We wear it as a badge of honor. “How are you doing today?" “Oh, my goodness. I'm so busy,” you know. I mean, I'm sure you might have even said that today.
Chances are on the way in here, if somebody is like, “How are you?” You’re like, “Oh, I'm so busy.”
I do the same thing. We just kind of wear it as a badge of honor.
But pushing against that entropy, pushing against that gravity in the world to pull us down into that is difficult because it exposes you. Being busy numbs you, you know. If you don't know how to deal with what's going on with you and the Lord, or you and your family, or you and your spouse. It numbs you. It distracts you. And so every day you're moving. And if you stop moving, you start to feel a little bit of pain and you go, “I got to keep moving,” you know. And sabbatical was like that for me.
Blake, my wife, and, when we first started talking about sabbatical, we knew we wanted to really get out of our day-to-day. And we have some friends that run a ministry down in Peru. They're amazing. They just got a hold of some land that they used to have. They lost it and they got it back. And so they're dreaming about what they could be doing down there.
We dropped everything. We went down to Peru and we spent one month in the Amazon jungle. And it was good. It was so good. It was like the first the first two weeks, there was no Wi-Fi in the house the first two weeks. And they're like, “Oh, yeah, you know, it's coming at some point.” And we're going, “Oh, OK.” And we’re side-eyeing each other going, here we are, our kids, you know, are like, “What are we going to do today? What are we going to do?”
And I'm like, “You could play a board game. You could read a book like.”
“Other than that, what can we do?”
And I'm like, “You could play outside or, you know…” and it was it was good. You know, it's one of those things that, even as an adult, when you're under that sort of like pressure, you revert back to that five-year-old version of yourself.
There were a few times, I'm like, I'm loving it. It's really great. But then five-year-old Ryan came out a few times and, you know, it only happened one or two dozen times on sabbatical. But it was really just, it was a detox in so many ways — a detox of the busyness. And we had a great time. My son Toby was fishing. He caught piranhas and all sorts of crazy stuff. He was riding dirt bikes. Our kids after like day three, they were running around with the other kids just barefoot in the jungle. And it was just so amazing.
We took a road trip in the middle of the Amazon with our friends to the Andes to go rappelling down waterfalls in like a Third World, little, little town down the Andes. And it was incredibly dangerous. It was like so dangerous and so amazing. My wife and I were looking at each other like, “Are we cool with this? This doesn't seem, you know, it's not up to OCEA standards.”
But it was just so good. It was so good for our family. We had so many stories. We got to see my family on the East Coast and spend some time in D.C. I love U.S. history. And so we got to go walk around the monuments and all that stuff. And we had great stories, great things that happened.
But it's funny. It's like, have you ever gone on a vacation and you come back and people ask you like, “Hey, how was your vacation?” What is it that you say afterward? "I need a vacation from my vacation.” You come back and you're like, “It was restful, but you know, I didn't quite get out of it what I thought.”
And ultimately, it's just kind of this phrase that it is funny, but it points to something a little bit more in our heart that we imagined, we had an expectation that taking a vacation would solve all of our problems. We'd feel great. We'd be ready to work when we get back. And when that didn't happen, we're kind of bitterly going, “Well, we could use a vacation from the vacation.”
And it's funny, coming back from a sabbatical, it feels a little bit like that. Not that I need a vacation. It's not what it is. It's when you take time off and you realize that time off doesn't equal rest, necessarily. And when you take some time off and the Lord starts working on things, there's a lot of feelings in me like this is just the beginning of what God's working out in me.
Last week as we are gearing to come back into work, I was asking the Lord, “OK, God, we've had some amazing times with our family and everything else, but what else have I gained?” And I had this like sinking suspicion, like I didn't gain I didn't get everything out of sabbatical that I wanted to get out.
And the Lord kind of lovingly, just like after some time of me getting frustrated and going, “OK, I'm getting ready to go back in and I'm getting like angsty."
And God goes, "You know what, Ryan? What I gave you was perspective.”
And as I took a step back, it's like, you know, the boiling frog analogy. It works in the inverse, too. And it was like the Lord did little things in my life all along the way. And I look back and I go, “OK, there's a lot that's changed.”
But one of the main things I have is a shift in perspective. And when I started praying, I was like, “OK, Lord, what do you say about Living Streams?” Because I've been kind of putting Living Streams off to the side. I’m like, “I need a break from all of that. I just I need to, you know, focus on family, work and…” But that last week of sabbatical is gone. “OK, Lord, I'm ready. Tell me about Living Streams.”
And honestly, I felt like the Lord just gave me such an overwhelming feeling of love for this community, an overwhelming feeling of gratitude for this community. But more than anything, I felt like the Lord was saying this community — Living Streams — is poised to make big impact for the kingdom in Phoenix and beyond. And I started to feel that deep down in me going, I know that God has something special for us.
There are things that I love about this church. I love that Mark Buckley — who started our church — had the humility to hand it off to David. I think that was so foundational to so much breakthrough that we've experienced here. I love David. I love when he preaches, how he preaches, I love all of that.
But there's something beyond personality when you show up in a church — and there should be something beyond personality. There’s something deeper that's happening. We are part of the Church, the bride of Christ. We know the end of the story. We are on the winning team. And those things seem really uncertain right now. And we're going to be talking about that. We will be talking about finding wisdom in kind of uncertain times.
And those things seem uncertain. We have a storm that hit us in 2020. And a lot of us are getting really tired because we thought 2021 would be a lot better and it's proving to be kind of better, but kind of not. And and it's wearing us down.
And as the Church, though, we need to know that the end of the story in Revelation is the church is there ‘til the end. Jesus does come back. He does set everything right. We're on the winning team. And for those of us who keep showing up at the church, there’s something really special for those that endure.
In 2020, Barna said that a third of practicing Christians stopped practicing in America. And it's not just that 30 percent started watching online and stopped coming to in-person. No, it's much worse than that. It's that 30 percent of them just stopped practicing. And though that might seem like bad news, again, the perspective that I'm feeling from the Lord as I'm coming back and I'm fresh — and you may not get this version of Ryan again — as I'm coming back. This is the thing that I'm sensing more than ever, is that God has something so special for those of us that are persevering, that are pushing through this season, that seek after his wisdom, not worldly wisdom.
For those of us who keep coming to the table, no matter what our emotions are doing, there is a special blessing in that. And to remind us that we are on the winning team. And if you come here, great, and if you sink your roots in, I think you're going to look back a year from now — not because we have great preaching and personality and worship — and all that stuff is great, but it's the tip of the iceberg. If you come and you engage, I think you're going to look back — like I felt over sabbatical — and you're going to go, “God did a lot in my life in this last year, showing up to the people of God, showing up in the House of God, expecting him to do something.”
And that is what I'm feeling more than ever. And we need the wisdom of God, right? We need the wisdom of God in this season. If you're like me, you feel a little bit like you're grasping at straws. You feel a little bit like you don't know what to trust. And today, we are going to dive into the word of God and we're going to dive into what God says about wisdom.
We're going to be talking out of James 3, which James is like the proverbs of the New Testament. James is incredibly practical. James is the half-brother of Jesus. He is very intense, like his half brother. There's a few things Jesus said. I'm like, “Oh, man, I wish you had said that lighter,” you know. James is the same way. It's like, “Oh, do you have to say that that way?”
James just says it like it is. More than half the verses in James are imperatives. So James is going, "You have to do this. We got to do this,” you know. And so there's something very, very practical about the book of James. It's one of the only epistles that doesn't really talk about the gospel, though he says he is a servant of Jesus Christ, who was his brother. And so should speak volumes to to the impact that Jesus made on James's life. I would never say that I'm the servant of my brother. So there's something really special about this.
But he is coming from this assumption that we know about grace. We know about salvation. We understand the free gift of God. We know that works don't have this sort of like salvation aspect to it. It is simply an outpouring of what is happening on the interior of our life, built on the foundation of the gospel. Does that make sense?
Before we left for for for summer, we were wrestling a lot with this. But ultimately, good works are just an outflowing of relationship with Jesus. It's the fruit of relationship with Jesus, but doesn't earn you anything. It's just what we do as Christians.
But James 3, this is where I want to hone in on. He talks a lot about wisdom. And we're in this stage where we're going, “God, where do I find wisdom?” You know, where can we find wisdom?
Right now, a poll in America — and I actually think this is probably even a little inflated — a recent poll in America, said that nine percent of Americans trust the media. And I feel like that may be even exaggerated a little bit.
Another poll that said 12 percent of Americans trust Congress to do what's right and what's in the Americans’ best interests.
So when we start looking at the things around us, more and more we're going, “Uh, I don’t trust what you have to say. It doesn't make any sense.”
So we are really hungry to know what wisdom is. Luckily, James lays it out really clear. So part of our reverence for the word of God, let's stand up. Let's just all stand up for the word of God. I know it's old school of me. I'm just feeling feeling like this is what we need to do. But I'm going to read starting in James 3:13 (ESV).
Who is wise and understanding among you? Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.
It's the word of the Lord. Go ahead and have a seat.
I think I think if you're like me, we all kind of remember the first time we heard of the phrase quarantine or shut down. This was not something that was in our vocabulary. 2019 Ryan had no idea what that meant. I was blissfully unaware of what any of that meant. And I remember my wife and I, we were at our friends’ house and and we were just having like a dinner party, hanging out. And we were sitting out in the backyard. All the kids were playing. Everything seemed normal. We were just having conversation and talking about church, talking about whatever.
Then my wife got a text from one of her friends and the text said, “Hey, I have a friend that works in the government and he just said that we might go into a nationwide quarantine next week.” And so we were looking at it going, “OK,” you know, and you start rationalizing and you start running into your head. I was like, “I have no idea what that means.” I don't know what compartment to put that in emotionally. And all of us at the table were like, “Wow, sounds like a bit of a conspiracy.” We don't really know. It's like a friend of a friend says that the government is saying we're going to go into some sort of shutdown. “Let's just continue with our dinner,” as if nothing happened. Which is exactly what we did. Kept talking, kept saying it out and everything was lighthearted.
Then all of a sudden, somebody else in the dinner got a text too. And that text said, “Hey, I have a friend that works in the CDC and they say that they think a nationwide quarantine is about to happen.” And as soon as they read that to us, we were all like, “OK, well, what does that mean?” And we started looking at each other.
I'm sure you guys probably remember that moment too. Everyone's looking at each other going, “Is this real? Is this for real? Is this actually happening?”
And the more we are talking about it, the more the angst started building, the more the questions started coming up. I mean, I had like zombie apocalypse, like, bunny suits in mine. I'm like, “Quarantine? Like we're going to have, you know, like we're going to have to wear suits everywhere.” And it wasn't actually all that much better than that. But I just had nowhere to put that in my mind.
From that point on, this weird thing started creeping into my life, this feeling like I'm making the wrong decision. This feeling like like all the decisions I have to make are really, really consequential. And I remember, all of our wives were there. We were talking and they were like, “Maybe we should go grocery shopping.” And this is like nine o'clock at night. We are getting ready to take our kids home and all of us were like, “Yeah, maybe that's a good idea.”
And they went out and they got groceries. And in hindsight, they probably should have gotten a lot more toilet paper. But it was this first inkling of like, “Oh, man, this is consequential. There's something really serious happening.”
We've lived in a couple of generations of relative peace and relaxation. We don't have anybody from like 1918 going, “Oh, you guys, yeah, we went through this in the Spanish flu. This what you do.”
You know, we really didn't have that. And we were looking for wisdom. And, I'll never forget, we sat as a direction team, the leaders, we kind of oversee different areas of the church. We all sat down. We sat down with Mark Buckley, who's been doing ministry for a very, very long time. We all sat there and were like, “OK, I guess we need to shut the church down. We don't really know.” Everything seemed really confusing. All of a sudden, we're canceling all of our plans and we're on a church leadership level going, “Lord, what do we do with this? How do we get wisdom? How do we know the right thing to do?”
Because we started to merge all these voices going, “Don't give in to fear and shut down.” And then other people go, “You don't care about other people if you don't shut down.”
Things started to get real divisive real quick. And we all turned to Mark because, you know, Mark's there, he’s been through it all. He knows what's going on. And we're like, “Mark, what do we do here? How do we lead through this?”
And I will never forget Mark kind of looking at all of us, and he goes. “I don't know. I've never been through anything like this.”
And we were like, “What? Are you kidding?” The younger leaders were like, we could do this, you know, we could solve this ourselves. But every now and then, we get real desperate, and like, “Mark, what do we do? How do we tackle this?” And even on that low level of us going, “We have no idea,” Mark is going, “Hey, I'm actually right there with you guys. I don't know.”
We really needed to seek the Lord. We really needed to understand wisdom. We really needed to pursue what God was saying to us. And it started to get more and more heated. And again, we would kind of bitterly joke at that time, we’re like, “If we do all the things just right and we try to walk that line just perfect, we're going to make everyone mad at us.” That was how we were feeling in 2020.
But in me, it wasn't just in work life. It started to happen in my home life, too. And maybe this started happening to you. You started hearing about things like cryptocurrency, you know, like, “Hmm, maybe I should invest in that.” You know? You’re going. “Is my job going to be around? Is this the right career path for me? Should we move? Should I go buy some land in the middle of nowhere and start living off the grid?” Like these are questions — and maybe I'm alone in asking these questions — but I started asking myself some weird questions in 2020 that I didn't ask myself in 2019.
I think as a culture, this is where we're at. We are hungry for wisdom. We are actually desperate for wisdom. We know we can't get it from social media. We know we can't get it from mainstream media. We know we can't get it from our political leaders. And we are flailing. Am I “off” in saying that we're flailing a little bit right now? Like we are still, in 2021, going, “How do I find wisdom?”
And even those of us that are following Jesus, we have this sort of sinking suspicion that we're making the wrong choice.
My wife and I were having a birthday lunch for my wife and we were hanging out and a friend popped in and we started talking to her a little bit. And and we'd been just dealing with our kids, with having to quarantine and send the kids home. And we're going, “Oh, my goodness, this is so hard.”
And and they were like, “Did you hear so-and-so had to go home? And half of this class is at home.”
And we started, like even in the conversation, like within a five-minute conversation of bumping into somebody at a pizza shop, you know, like all of a sudden we're getting deep and we're getting frustrated and we're getting angsty and we're going, "Should we pull our kids out? What do we need to do? Do we need to change schools? But even if we change schools, are we going to have the same problem over here?”
There's just this constant background noise in our life of going, “We need to know the wisdom of God.”
But the good news is that those of us who follow Jesus, we have wisdom at our grasp. Yes, we have wisdom. Yes, thank you, Lord. Wisdom is that thing James says, “Are you lacking wisdom? Ask the Lord for it. He will give it to you. He does not give with partiality.” He doesn't go, “Oh, well, now you want wisdom?” That's not how God's posture is. He will give you wisdom if you ask for it.
So all of us in this time, we need to be asking for wisdom. We need it now more than ever. We are off kilter and some of us are not making it. And we're thinking we're going to make it by leaving the House of God. But let me tell you, it is a cold, hard world outside of fellowship with people who love Jesus. It really is. And it may seem good for a season, but being in the church is the lifeline. This is a life raft that we have being in this room together right now or even watching online, connecting with believers. This is what keeps us going.
So, James, when he starts talking about wisdom, he starts to talk about the fruit of wisdom. And I love in Proverbs, you know, we kind of talk about wisdom as personified as a woman. And in Proverbs, it says that wisdom is known by her children. So by the fruit is how we know wisdom is around. And luckily, we have James, who's incredibly down to the point. He just says it like it is. And he lays out what we need to be paying attention to when it comes to wisdom.
But let me just say off the bat, wisdom is not necessarily years lived on earth. Yes, wisdom can be be gained by experience and failure and getting back up and all of that. There's something very, very valuable in that. But I've met a lot of people who have — how do I say it nicely? — maybe a generous amount of years under their belt. and still were not operating in wisdom. There was still this different sort of worldly wisdom that they had fully given themselves over to that was not the wisdom of God. And so wisdom is not necessarily gained through years. Yes, it can be. And yes, we should honor people who have gone through a lot of things like that. But wisdom, especially in this season, is really gained by understanding the source of wisdom, and that is Jesus. Jesus gives us the source of wisdom. It's anchoring ourselves to something that's not real popular these days. But the Bible, I know that, even in this room, there might be some people going, “Mmm, I don't know.” But no, no, no. As a church, this is one of the things that we consistently choose at Living Streams — to keep coming back to the foundation of the Bible and going, look, no matter what is going on in the world, no matter how we're feeling about things, this is the foundation of wisdom that we need to come back to time and time again.
James lays this out, he goes, “OK, well, you know, wisdom really is…” — one of the phrases I love is skills in the art of living is really what wisdom is. It's like the skill in the art of living. And we gain that through Holy Spirit interaction. We gain that through properly setting our perspective. We gain that through the word of God.
The word of God teaches us what is the fruit of the wisdom that we're up against. So when you're looking at things politically, you're looking at things that are coming against you, if you're going, “Man, maybe I should buy some land in northern Arizona,” — or maybe you already have, I don't know — like you're looking through all this framework — before you start beating yourself up and going, “I'm making the wrong choice, I'm doing the wrong thing, I'm behind the times. Should have put money in Bitcoin,” — though you probably should have and I should have too. You look at the things in your life and you go, “No, no. God has equipped me to understand the right choices I need to make right now.” He has equipped you to make the right choices that you need right now.
So what does that look like? I love this. Just pause a minute and let the word of God wash over you. The more I read this list, the more I was going, “Ah, OK, I am getting a vision of godly wisdom.” This is what James says: “But the wisdom from above is, first, pure. Then peaceable. Gentle. Open to reason.” How rare is that right now? “Open to reason. Full of mercy.” It's full of mercy and grace. It's not that you made the wrong choice and you've screwed up the rest of your life. No, there is mercy and grace and the wisdom of God. “It is full of good fruits,” Love. Joy. Peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control, all of the good fruits of the spirit. It is impartial. It's impartial, it didn't come to the table with a decision already made, wisdom is impartial. And it is sincere. It's genuine. It's sincere. It's one of those things that there's no hidden motive behind it. You know, no, no, no. This is sincerely what wisdom is telling me. It's sincere.
And sometimes, guys, it's so simple, I mean, I've had to remind myself of this time and time again this year, that this is the fruit of good wisdom. This is the fruit of godly wisdom. This is what wisdom looks like.
When Jesus was sharing wisdom with his disciples, it didn't always look like what they thought in the natural. It was something a little bit different. When Jesus goes, “Hey, it's better that I leave here and the helper comes than if I stay,” I'm sure if I was the disciples, I'd be like, “Are you sure? I feel like it might be better if you stayed around, Jesus.” But godly wisdom doesn't always look like that. That's that's not what it always looks like.
There’s something so other than the way that the world gives us wisdom. The world gives us a different sort of wisdom. And when I look at that, honestly, this was the thing in this passage that woke me up. Because I think deep down we know the fruit of good wisdom. We really understand like, hey, in this season, this is what it should look like.
I remember there was somebody that was talking to me recently saying, “You know, I feel like I'm called into missions.” They're like, “I want to do mission. I feel like I'm called to, but I'm getting a little bit like angsty. I don't know where God's calling me to. I don't know what country God's calling me to.”
And I had this moment, again, a perspective on the outside of somebody else's life. I just said, "You know, this may sound really stupid and really simple, but if you don't know what country God is sending you to, you don't know what country God’s sending you to. So don't worry about it. Just rest. God will make it clear when it's supposed to be clear.” You know?
And how many times do we need to hear that? It's like, you don't know? That's OK, because God hasn't made it clear to you yet. Just rest. Just take a deep breath. It's OK. You're not messing everything up. If you're you're following Jesus, you're close to him.
There's so much mercy in the wisdom of God. There's so much grace in the wisdom of God. There's so much more heart behind the wisdom of God than we think. It's not just cold, and telling you like it is, and making you feel terrible. Now, there is this softness to the wisdom of God.
But there's another kind of wisdom. And James says it a lot like his half brother again. It's like, James, did you have to say it that intense? He says, “Where there is bitter jealousy, selfish ambition, this is the foundation of a wisdom that comes not from above.”
So there's a different kind of wisdom. “There's a wisdom that does not come from above, but is earthly.” OK, I could wrap my head around that. OK, “It's earthly. It's unspiritual.” So it's completely secular in nature. “It's unspiritual and it's demonic.” I thought, yikes! James, are you sure? Do we have to go to that, like like horns and red-, like do we have to go down that direction with it? But yes. No, there is a demonic force of wisdom that is at play in the world right now. And we have to know it. We have to be wary of it.
I love that he says these two things, and you can really look at life and go, OK, these are two really major problems in our world today. If we're being honest, it's something wrong inside of us, too.
“But if you have bitter jealousy.” So you're looking at somebody else going, “Why do they have that?” You know, like what? “Why does Ryan get to stand up there and say stuff? I have stuff to say.” You know, like there's this bitter jealousy that rises up. You go, “Why does why does that person have that successful business?" Or, “How did that guy make that right investment I've been working for years for that.” These little seeds of jealousy start to make their way into our heart. Social media is a hotbed of that, you know.
Then the other thing he says is “selfish ambition.” Bitter jealousy and selfish ambition. This word ambition in the Greek really is to gain more followers through gifting. Gaining followers before, you know, Instagram made it official. It was still something that people wanted to wrap around themselves. They want people to think that they're awesome. To think that they've got everything together. They want to pull their little group together and go, "Let's celebrate me for a little while.”
And if you have those two things in your heart, what's going to come out is really, really bad. What's going to come out is this wisdom — and this is what we're seeing all over the world — there is this wisdom that is coming out. And I have to say it just the way that James said it, it is demonic. It does not have your best interests at heart. It really does not. The enemy has come to steal, kill and destroy.
I started to think through this as I was reading it since Friday — because that's when I heard from David. I thought, “OK, Lord, what what do you want to say here?” And I started to look at this list of qualities of fruit of God, that wisdom. I really wish that James had laid out a list of the fruit of the demonic wisdom. I wish he had laid all that stuff out for me. I'm sure I can infer it from other passages, you know. And I felt like the Lord is like, “Well, just take the list. That's good and say the opposite.” That's the list that we need to be looking at. That's the thing that we need to be wary of when we see it in the world.
So here is the fruit of the wisdom. And when we're hearing it around us and we're hearing it in politics or your friends or whatever, like we can run it through this list and go, “OK, is this right wisdom for me?” So if godly wisdom is pure, peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere — the seven characteristics — demonic wisdom is impure. It's got an agenda, there's something behind it that just doesn't taste right, it's impure. It's not peaceable, it's looking for a fight. It's looking to separate you. It's looking to get you fighting with one another. It's harsh, it's not gentle, it's really harsh. It's saying things that are impugning you. Deep down, they're calling you names and making you feel like you you'll never make it or you made the wrong choice or that you're worthless. It is harsh, harsh words against you. It's not willing to listen to reason.
Isn't that happening everywhere? I'm sorry. Any time I look at any news or anything, I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is like we are separating into people that just will not talk to each other, not willing to listen to reason. It is merciless. The enemy is merciless. He will not let you off the hook. He will continue to beat you up over the things that you did, the choices you're going to make, the choices that you already made, the things that you should have done. The enemy is merciless on you. It's biased and it's insincere.
People of God, we have to get this. I have to get this. We all have to get this. Part of what the Lord has given me is that this storm that we experienced in 2020 is is not over. And I know that sounds like bad news, but it's not in the kingdom of God. That's good news.
I was on sabbatical. I started writing again. I've written a couple of books and I started writing a third book that I don't know if it'll ever make the the light of day because it was based on is totally different than any book I've ever written. It was based on a prophetic dream I had in Peru. And if you want to learn more about that, I'll tell you, I won't take it down that rabbit trail.
But in the future, in the things that are coming up, the people of God are going to have to be very quick at discerning what is true and what is not true. We're going to have to be people that are so close to Jesus, so close to each other, and so rooted in the word of God that we know when we hear something, we go, “Oh, that's not right. That's not for me.” Because this wisdom is the foundation of something really beautiful.
And this is what James finishes with. After he finishes listing all the good things going, “This is what godly wisdom looks like. It's pure, it's peaceable, it's impartial, it's sincere,” he finishes with this verse, “and a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.”
If you're like me, you're scratching your head a little bit. That's OK. I read over this thing over and over, read every different translation of it. I was going, “OK, I'm getting it now.” When you are operating out of godly wisdom, you will be at peace with all the decisions of your life. Whether you went to the right college or not, all those things, the things that wake you up in the middle of the night, going, “Maybe I made a huge mistake with my career.” “Maybe I married the wrong person.” "Maybe I'm never going to get married.”
These questions that come into your mind, this is the enemy trying to take you down. And the people of God that are at peace, that have wisdom from God and go, “No, no, no. That's the the wisdom of the of the world. That's the wisdom of the enemy. I'm not going to listen to that.” You will be harbingers of peace. You will carry peace everywhere you go.
At the end of James chapter three, he said, “You will reap righteousness.”
This interior living, this interior following of Jesus will start to spill out on the outside. And people will see you and go, “Why are you so at peace? Don't you know the world is falling apart?” And you get to say, “Well, maybe it is politically, but I am just fine today. I'm in the kingdom of God. I'm doing OK. I'm doing great,” you know?
And it's it's not shallow optimism. I'm not saying that you can't lament what's going on in our country. You can. And it's OK and it's acceptable. But we're not called to wallow in it. We are not called to walk in that wisdom that tells us you should be depressed all the time and beat down all the time. No, there is a better wisdom for the people of God that leads to peace. And it is a display of righteousness to the world.
Let’s all bow our hearts just for a minute. When I was getting ready, I was really sensing that there's a few people in this room that were just overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with the fear of making a wrong decision. Overwhelmed with the regret of saying, “I made a wrong decision in the past and I'll never get over it.”
This morning, I felt like there are people that didn't sleep last night because of this, that they were just so afraid of what's going on.
And this morning, the Lord is speaking peace over you. The Lord is speaking his peace over you. He's going, “That is not the fruit of my peace that's keeping you up at night. That is not the fruit of the wisdom that I'm trying to give you.”
And there are some other people in here that I really felt like you're feeling like you're doing OK, but the numbness and the busyness that's keeping you distracted from from interacting with the interior of your heart. God is saying, “You're missing something, you're skipping over something. Though it may be painful, I'm offering you my peace in the area where you don't even know you need my peace.”
And some of us have this background noise of pressure and stress in our life and the Lord's going, “I want to release you from it, even if you're not aware of it.”
So right now, Jesus, we surrender to you. We joyfully surrender to you, God. We open our hands. We give you everything that we've got, the mistakes we've made, the bad choices we've made, the bad choices we've yet to make.
And Lord, we want your peace that comes from godly wisdom. We need it now more than ever. God, there's not a book that we could read other than the Bible. There's not a book that we could read that will give it to us. There is not a podcast out there that's going to solve all the questions that we have in our mind — whether its investments or changing jobs or picking the right college or whatever it is.
God, right now we confess that we need you above anything else. And as a people of God, as just a group of family in this room, we collectively lay down the burdens that we have. And Jesus, we choose right now to build our life on the foundation of your love, on the foundation of your word, on the foundation of the peace that you give us.
God, I’m reminded of the very first time you appeared to the disciples, you walked in and what did you say to everybody? “Peace. Peace.” And Lord, we need it right now more than ever. We love you, Jesus.
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