What do you want to accomplish in your conversations, in your relationships? What do you want to accomplish when there is a disagreement? When the peace is broken? When someone opposes you? When someone outshines you? When someone is not honoring you? When someone is failing you? What do you want to accomplish?

There is always an answer to this question. Always. Even if you are not mindful of the answer yourself, the answer is always there, being unveiled in each sentence you speak and each moment of silence you keep. We are always engaging people in order to accomplish something, whether that something is selfish or noble, known or unknown. What we really want is always disclosed. 

And be sure of this, says the apostle James, what you want to accomplish is not inconsequential. James argues throughout chapter 3 of his epistle that the tongue can set on fire the entire course of life, or it can bring peace where there had been war. Right there, says James, found in your everyday speech, you can discover how rich you are in the wisdom of Christ or how enslaved you are to the wisdom of demons.

In James 3 the apostle is not tiptoeing around the truth about our nature or its most dangerous public instrument, the tongue. By the time he gets to verses 13–18, he is ready to show what we too often want to accomplish is quite simply, quite darkly, the exaltation of Self: I want to make myself larger. I want people to know I am smarter or better than they are or better than others are. I want people to know I am right, or clever, or amazing, or interesting, or important.

A Platform for Whom?

It is very easy for us all to use relationships to build a platform on which we promote ourselves instead of Jesus Christ. James asks, “Who is wise and understanding among you?” (v. 13). He knows my sinful heart is attracted to this question. I want to raise my hand. The exalted Self is happy someone is finally looking for it and needs its wisdom, giving opportunity for it to be noticed and heard. James’s question makes me salivate.

James, however, is being shrewd. He knows how easily we think that if people just had more of us, they would be better off. We are quick with answers. We are sharp with our tongue. We are skilled at finding holes in people’s logic. We are effective with zingers that put people in their place.

The question is really meant to capture us, not recruit us. James is getting our attention to teach us to look at ourselves quite differently. We once thought the wise and understanding among us were those who talked the most, or those with a clever tongue in criticizing opponents, or those with a bold tongue in tearing down authority. But James comes to make us thoroughly re-evaluate ourselves by a new standard. He adds: “By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom” (v. 13). Boom.

James wants the wise to show up. He wants the wise to stand out. But he wants us to understand this: Wisdom is not exclusively found in words you speak; it is found in the peace you leave behind. This is what he means by “works done in the meekness of wisdom” (v. 13). Such works are identical to the work described later in verse 18: “sowing in peace to make peace.” So James is saying, “Don’t just let your words before men show you are wise. Let your good conduct among men show it—especially your meekness.” Meekness proves the presence of true wisdom.

Madness or Meekness

What is meekness? Meekness is gentleness with a purpose in the midst of provocation. Or as Matthew Henry put it: “They are the meek who are rarely and hardly provoked, but quickly and easily pacified.”

Meekness is being careful with the troubled hearts of others in order to sow the seed of peace. Meekness cautiously makes space for people to turn to Christ and hope in Christ and rest in Christ and not so much turn to me and hope in me and rest in me. In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. It is for me to clear the path to him.

Paul once said to Timothy:

The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with meekness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth. (2 Tim. 2:24–25)

Meekness is the best climate for someone who is hard toward God to become soft. God, of course, remains free to grant the soft heart or not to grant it, but the relational climate he requires from his wise servants is one of meekness.

Those filled with wisdom from above know it is their job to become less and less heavy in all conflicts and confrontations. Why? So the truth of God becomes the issue. So righteousness becomes the issue. So goodness and the cross of Christ become the issue. Which means I must not become the issue.

Unfortunately, this does not always happen. James says, “But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth” (v. 14).

There are two things that pull people away from God toward me. Two things that make me the issue: “jealousy and selfish ambition.”

Think about jealousy for a minute. Jealousy is an angry lament for the Self. Your spirit becomes fixated on what you are not getting from other people. Jealousy whispers in your heart, “You should be getting that. You should be getting that recognition. That opportunity. That respect. That admiration.” Jealousy is frustrated the Self does not have what others seem to have. Someone is being praised, why am I not being praised? Someone is being listened too, why am I not being listened to?

Now think about selfish ambition. Selfish ambition is a plan to exalt the Self. To assert Self more forcefully, more visibly, more loudly, more noticeably. It is a plan to become heavier and heavier in a situation. If jealousy is a bitter lament, selfish ambition is a sinister plan to cure it, a plan sometimes hatched in seconds or over the course of hours, even days.

Do you remember the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son?  He saw an ocean of grace and joy flow out of his father upon his once lost younger brother, but he could not share in it. There was a celebration in the house, but of the older brother it says: “He was angry and refused to go in” (Luke 15:28).

He had hatred in his heart toward his younger brother and he did not want to be anything like his father. Why? Because he was not being exalted. His heart was full of jealousy and selfish ambition. He was so important in his own eyes, he could not see what all of life is really about: the exaltation of God. It is about the praise of God’s glorious grace, the divine grace which seeks, finds, and welcomes sinners and bears all the costs of their restoration to the glory of the Redeemer Son.

James, knowing we like to hide our jealousy and selfish ambition, adds, “Do not boast and be false to the truth” (v. 14). In other words, do not add a second evil to the first. Do not add to your selfish ambition false statements about how you are the wise one and the understanding one. James is continuing here his whole thesis about the tongue in verses 1–12. Don’t use your mouth to try to wallpaper over the grim reality of your conduct.

Wisdom from Below or Above

James wants us to come to grips with a grim reality: when we rely on a selfish tongue instead of works done in the meekness of wisdom, we are controlled by a wisdom that is “earthly, unspiritual and demonic” (v. 15).

The cure of this disease of the present evil age is not to abandon life, hide in a cave, or cut out your tongue. The cure is to seek the wisdom that comes down from above. Which is always the wisdom from the Man who has come down from above, our Lord Jesus Christ. It is he who gives his wisdom freely to those who ask (James 1:5). But remember, when Christ shares his wisdom with you, it will make you a living sacrifice. You will suffer, but without regret.

Wisdom from below does not produce meekness. Wisdom from below does not want to accomplish the exaltation of God and the praise of his glorious grace. It wants to accomplish the exaltation of Self. Wisdom from below is the primordial wisdom of the devil. It is slick. It is learned. It is shrewd. It is logical. It is subtle and skillful. It is all these things for the advancement of Self—to gain praise, respect, and followers. It is wisdom for the deification of man, of Self.

The wisdom from above is quite different, as different as death is from resurrection. As different as Adam is from Christ. Wisdom from above is wisdom given by grace. It is the wisdom celebrated forever in the age to come. It is the wisdom delivered by the Holy Spirit from the throne of the risen Christ. It is the wisdom not natural to fallen men but gifted to all made new in their union with Christ by faith. It is the wisdom that now sees the world not as Satan sees it—a platform for the exaltation of the creature—but as a platform for the risen Christ to be revealed as the only exaltation the makes true and pure and happy the souls of men.

Think of it this way. The wisdom from above looks at a situation and says, “This situation is not a platform for me to promote myself, to show off what I know, to do better than someone else. This situation is a platform for making a godly peace. Not a platform for pride. It is a platform for drawing men and women to the peacemaking God, not to me.” Wisdom from above does not feed the soul on the failures of other men or women. Wisdom from above does not need someone to be put in their place to be happy.

Even deeper, wisdom from above feeds the soul on its identity in union with the crucified and risen Christ. “This situation does not need more of me,” says wisdom from above. “It needs more of Christ. This situation needs a clear window through which someone might look and see that my own soul is at rest in Christ, that everything I need for my reputation, my honor, my approval, I already have in Christ crucified for my sins and Christ raised for my justification.”

And this is why in verses 17 and 18 James says the wisdom from above—when it is flowing out of us—showers people with the things we see so beautifully and perfectly flowing from our Lord Jesus: 

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.

Everything James has just said in those two final verses could be the résumé of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is even more vivid if we, for a moment, swap out the word “wisdom” for the word “man.”

But the Man 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 the Man who makes peace.

The true farmer from heaven sowed his own life into the ground by way of the Cross to make peace. “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God,” Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:24. He sowed his own life into humiliation, so he might gather a harvest of righteousness from souls once ruled by jealousy and selfish ambition.

His lowly ways of bringing us to peace with God now must become our lowly ways with all men, to the praise of His glorious grace.

Prayer

Almighty and gracious God, fill us with the wisdom from above that belongs to the Man from above, Jesus, our God and Savior; grant us to see all we have in Christ and how we have obtained it; make self-exaltation look absurd, ugly, and boorish to us; teach us to add gentle things, slow judgments, carefully chosen words. Keep us from using our tongue as a consuming fire that burns down worlds; grant that our ways and words will allow righteousness to prosper, that men and women will love the Savior more because of how we have dealt with them. In his name, Amen.

The author is pastor of Apple Valley Presbyterian in Neenah, Wisconsin. New Horizons, April 2025.