James: Wisdom Works

My son just finished a degree from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. After four years and a summer, he is now officially equipped for the real world. He is an expert in the field of business, and everyone should hire him and pay him a large sum of money. And, if you believe this, I have some swamp land to sell you! Or to put it another way, would you allow a doctor to operate on you if you saw his diploma and knew he had graduated from medical school a month ago and had not completed any residencies or internships? Hardly! Why not? Well, it is simple—knowledge and information are overrated. What we really need in life is wisdom. And, quite frankly, the only way to get wisdom is through life experience. Let’s define wisdom, for simplicity’s sake, as “skills and competencies in dealing with all the complexities of life."When I got out of seminary and was sitting in my office pondering the church plant I had landed myself into, I admit that, just two months in, I was wondering why they had hired me and what in the world I was going to do! While I did have an internship under my belt, I quickly saw that leading a church was much different from books and lectures. I knew nothing about planting a church. I had no wisdom about planting a church. So, what I did was read a bunch of books and go to visit a church in Atlanta that was a church plant. However, while this was encouraging, I still didn’t know how to plant a church. Wisdom only came from experience––life experience, trial and error, failure, and learning from mistakes.The Bible says what we really need in our life is wisdom. So, for the next couple of months, we are going to talk about wisdom from the book of James. James is to the New Testament what Proverbs is to the Old Testament. Don’t be fooled by people who want to cast Paul and James against each other. James is not a book defining justification by faith, but a book that assumes the Gospel is true, and says—now, how do we live with wisdom in the complexities of life, in our dealings with the poor, widows, orphans, our tongue, suffering, etc.So, join us this week as we see just who this James is that wrote this book on wisdom. I must tell you, it will be shocking, as we dive right in to the need for wisdom in suffering. Hope to see you Sunday.Blessings,Jim