James Chapter 3 starts with tongues and ends with righteousness. We’ve been going through James in my mentoring group and, while its been slow progress, we have enjoyed the time studying God’s Word. Last night, I was reading the New International Version and it carried the word wisdom in quotes: “wisdom”. I was confounded as to why it would have that word in quotes and even more so by the use of the word wisdom in the context at all. I turned to the group for help.

In this ninth rule, the book tells us than no one of us is smart enough to do everything well, but that if we have a big enough team, a team can do pretty much anything. There is a passage in Ephesians that is used often to capture the thought that if God is on our team, we can’t help but win. Lots of athletes use this phrase to push through training, and many people use it to help them through trials. However, one of the gains from having God on your team is access to wisdom.

In this third chapter of John, two different flavors of “wisdom” are compared. The first is wisdom from humility before God and the second is not from God. In this sense, anything not from God can be interpreted as of the world or from the devil/Satan/adversary. Within true wisdom is found the desire of God for peace and joy and righteousness. Outside God, the recipe for worldly success comes from envy and self ambition, i.e. putting yourself before all others (including God). So, if we think of “wisdom” as a recipe for success, my confusion with the use of “wisdom” starts to make a little more sense.

The world’s view of success includes self-accomplishment, self-attainment, and self-accumulation. (Self-accumulation may not be a widely used term, but literal license.) Some might call this the American dream of a house with white picket fences and the atomic family. In my paradigm, the American dream was achieved by hard work over a long period of time. I think the world saw it as some kind of gift for showing up. Competing with the next-door neighbors (Jones is the name of my next-door neighbor) was seen as the ideal goal posts for getting more, and more, and more, and so on. As people are learning through this pandemic, living on the edge is the same making the minimum wage or $350,000 a year, just nicer “more” to lose.

Everyone develops their own paradigm of what success is. For some it is a meal to eat, a shirt, a place to sleep out of the rain, or some variation of these basics. For others it is the internet, a laptop, a phone, a car, a house, a wardrobe, membership at the golf club, a relationship with a celebrity, or any myriad of worldly provisions. For some it is simply a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. As Paul mentioned to die is gain because he knew he would go to heaven to be with Jesus and nothing could be better. But Paul was content to stay here and suffer to help serve Christ and maybe bring others to the same saving relationship. Paul was often hungry, in tattered clothes, in the weather, in prison, beaten, half dead or worse. Yet he had joy and he had contentment because he had success.

Paul told us to run the good race. He told us to strive for success, to be the best we can be at whatever we do. We are to be the smartest people we can be and to use those smarts to do the biggest things that can be done. But we are not to do them alone. We are to do them as a team. And a team isn’t just a group of people or as the book rule says a group of really smart people. The team is to be made up of people working towards the same goal and setting that goal higher than they can achieve alone relying on the power of God to achieve there success so that they can give the Glory for success to God.

One of the best things about having God as a teammate is that He promises us that when we ask for wisdom (a recipe for success), He will provide it. He guides, we ask, we believe, and He delivers, and then we praise Him. Make sure to make big plans and follow through, but make sure to do it with teammates, and make doubly sure, God is on your side.