Wisdom From Above

I'm going to ask you to remain standing and turn in your Bibles to the book of James in chapter three. This is God's holy and infallible word, and I'm going to read the whole chapter to refresh your memory since it's been a while since we've been there.

James, chapter three. My brethren, let not many of you become teachers. Knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment. For we all stumble in many things. If anyone does not stumble in word, he is a perfect man able to also bridle the whole body.

Indeed, we put bits in horses mouths that they may obey us and we turn their whole body. Look also at ships, although they are so large and are driven by fierce winds, they are turned by a very small rudder wherever the pilot desires.

Even so, the tongue is a little member and boasts great things. See how great a forest, a little fire kindles. And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. The tongue is so set among our members that it defiles the whole body and sets on fire the course of nature.

And it is set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird of reptile and creature of the sea is tamed and has been tamed by mankind. But no man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.

With it, we bless our God and father, and with it we curse men who have been made in the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be so.

Does the spring send forth fresh water and bitter from the same opening? Can a fig tree, my brethren, bear olives or a grapevine bear figs? Thus, no spring yields both saltwater and fresh. Now the section we'll be taking up today.

Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show by good conduct that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth.

This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual, demonic. For where envy and self-seeking exists, confusion and every evil thing are there. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits without partiality and without hypocrisy.

Now the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. The Lord be pleased with our consideration of his most excellent word. Please pray with me. O Lord, we greatly desire wisdom and understanding.

And you have commanded and instructed us even in this epistle to ask you for it. So today, O Lord, individually, as families, as a congregation, we ask for your wisdom and your understanding that we might live in a way that's consistent with the grace and gospel of Jesus Christ, that accords with holiness in your holy name.

And we pray in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Please be seated. For those of you who are needful of an outline, I only have two very simple points for which you can organize the bulk of the sermon. The first is worldly wisdom, something that we want to avoid.

Number one would be worldly wisdom. And second, that which we aspire to is wisdom from above. So there's two kinds of wisdom that are delineated in our section. And we want to have that wisdom, which is from above.

The goal of this message today is that we would seek wisdom and understanding from above, that we would actually desire it in our hearts and that we would act upon that desire and pursue wisdom and understanding in the Lord.

Our text today opens with the question, who is wise and understanding among you? I want to point out at the outset that wisdom is a moral duty. We are obligated to become people of wisdom. When I think of wisdom and folly, I often think about giftedness.

That would be an incomplete view of this notion. Wisdom is absolutely moral and it's absolutely attainable for the child of God because we have a heavenly birth. We have a heavenly citizenship. Our father is in heaven.

Christ is standing at the right hand of God in heaven and we are united to him. We have a great capacity for wisdom and understanding from above. James's aim in our section today is that we would know and easily recognize the difference between worldly wisdom and genuine wisdom, the wisdom of God, wisdom from above.

Now, we've often thought and I've said several times in our study in James that James has a proverbial feel, but upon greater examination of the text, we realize there's a great deal of cohesion throughout James's letter.

In James chapter three, verse one, which I started with today, it says, my brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment. In the context that follows, he then goes on to give his second and fullest treatment on the dangers of the unbridled tongue.

And in the immediate preceding context, it says, out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be so. Now, this should cause us to pause because out of our mouths, we have said uncharitable things, unrighteous things.

We today have been using our mouths properly to praise the Lord. We need to alleviate, remove, excise all of this inconsistency and hypocrisy in our lives. We shouldn't have a coarse jesting in the streets and then sing praises to him in the church.

Can a spring send forth fresh water and bitter from the same opening? No, of course not. Can a fig tree, my brethren, bear olives?

No.

Or a grapevine bear figs?

No.

Thus, no spring yields both saltwater and fresh. We are going to be known by our fruits. A living faith is a faith that produces good works that come and flow out of that faith. Now, I have argued a number of times that I believe James draws heavily on the themes of the Sermon on the Mount, and today is no different.

I'd like you to turn with me, please, in your Bibles to Matthew chapter seven. It could be argued that this line of reasoning is taken up by Paul in a number of places. I'm only going to touch on Jesus's words here in Matthew to show a link between the argument that Jesus makes and the teaching of James in our section.

We'll begin reading in Matthew chapter seven, verse 15. Remember how we started, let not many of you become teachers. Verse 15 of chapter seven, Sermon on the Mount. Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.

These are self-seeking, boasting, non-God glorifying prophets. They are in it for another reason. And I hear tell that one of the big prosperity evangelists is about to fall for his scandalous life.

When you listen to his teaching, when you look at his actions, he is in it for something other than God and his wisdom and the gospel of Christ. James was fighting and confronting this very thing. Jesus, throughout his earthly ministry, was confronting the false prophets.

And we need wisdom and discernment that we would know what the truth is and that we would be able to spot and reject and condemn the false prophets. It says in verse 16, I think this is apropos for our own text and even the whole of the epistle, you will know them by their fruits.

Christians are to be known by their fruits. We can talk a big theological game, but we undermine the credibility of our profession when we fail to live and act as Christians. We are going to be known as those who bear fruit for Christ.

They can see in us that we are from that vine, the Lord Jesus Christ. We are the branches. We bear the fruit in ourselves that comes from the vine in Christ himself. The text continues, do men gather grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles?

Sounds a little bit like our text, doesn't it? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

This sounds like the vine and branches discourse of Jesus in John chapter 15, verse 20. Therefore, by their fruits, you will know them. So the first pause in application that I want us to consider, I want you to search your own heart.

What does the fruit of your life communicate? When people see you, do they see that is a Christian? I can see, I can hear, I can taste the fruit of their faithfulness. We want to be known as those who are united to Christ.

Then there would be no mistake that it would be easy for them to discern and to see that we are part of the covenant people of God, that we love Christ and we love his holiness and we love to serve him.

Now the terror of it all, one of the great halting things when we think about our covenant children. As we know that sometimes that wheat grew up among the wheat grow tears. This is terrifying to think, I pray it would never happen to us.

It says in verse 21, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my father in heaven. A person could have a dramatic Damascus Road experience like we heard in Sunday school today, and then it would turn out that they bore no fruit because they didn't do the will of the father in heaven.

Verse 22, many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name, cast out demons in your name and done many wonders in your name? Then I will declare to them, I never knew you depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.

Now, here's the part they want us to pay close attention to. This is going to frame our whole understanding of our text today. Paid close attention. Children, I want you to see if you find the word wise or wisdom in this text I'm about to read.

Verse 24, listen carefully. It's so simple, yet so profound, so penetrating, so forceful. Therefore, Jesus says, whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I want to say that again, whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them.

I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock. We want to be the wise men, women and children who build our houses on the rock. We want to be those people. It's clear here that it's not only do we have an intellectual assent to the facts.

We say, yes, that is true. I have good Orthodox doctrine. But now, as the Christian born of Christ, I act upon it. I hear the sayings of Christ and I walk in obedience. I do them. Jesus would say that that person is a wise man and he built his house on the rock.

And children, that's why obedience is so important. Become very skillful in obeying your parents now. That you would be trained in the school of Christ to obey your father in heaven. You see, it's moral, it's ethical, it's not so much intellectual.

And we could dive into the Hebraic meaning of wisdom. We'll touch on it in a minute just a little bit. This is entirely, mostly moral and ethical. Wisdom is something to be performed. Wisdom is something to be and to do.

We need to hear these sayings of Christ and we need to act upon them. And therefore, our houses, our lives, our relationships will be built on the rock. When the rain comes, it's coming. Some of our children learned that they had some trials.

They didn't know they're going to deal with this week. And the rains descended on their house. The floods came, the winds blew, and they beat on that house. And that house will not fall if it be in Christ, if they hear the sayings of Christ and they walk in them and do them because it was founded on the rock.

The converse is true and our section alludes to false wisdom of the world. Verse 26, it says, but everyone who hears these sayings of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.

We could go through and talk about the folly of the foolish man. I often think of him as being adult and ignorant man. He's a disobedient man. The foolish man is a sinful man. He's not just a stupid man.

He's his sin has made him stupid. He hears the word and doesn't act upon it. Now, I have to interject this here now in our study today. What about the Christian who never looks into the word of God? The presupposition is the the wise man and the foolish man are both hearing the sayings of Christ.

How foolish is the man who's not doesn't have his nose in the Bible to to learn what it says, to to get the mind of God, to hear what the wisdom from above is. What is the depth of folly in a man who will not open and study the word?

The foolish man in our study here in Jesus's sermon on the mount hears the sayings of Christ. But he doesn't do them. This all follows really naturally and nicely with what James has been teaching throughout his epistle.

What happens to the foolish man? The rain descended, the floods come, the winds blew and beat on the house and it fell and great was its fall. Let's turn back to the book of James now. The summary statement of the sermon on the mount is a call to wisdom.

You and I should be those who are eager and zealous to be wise men and wise women, wise children. Look again at our text. Who is wise and understanding among you? We're familiar with the term wisdom and in the Greek, that's Sophia.

And we we know that term. We did a little bit of a good study on that in the beginning of James. And this word wise, of course, is a derivative of that. And this wisdom is a wisdom in a very practical sense.

It's one whose actions are governed by piety and integrity. It has a lot to do with character. So when we think about wisdom, we think about the acquisition of knowledge. It's actually the proper use of knowledge.

You have to have the knowledge, certainly, but you have to use it properly. You have to apply it. You have to act upon it. In First Corinthians, chapter six, the wise man is the one who is suitably able to settle private quarrels.

Like Solomon, having the two competing women or the child, they come to him. He's able to sort out who the real mother is because he's a wise man. We need to be the kinds of people who are so skilled.

We have such insight and intelligence. We have such practice, obedience that we can see clearly right from wrong. And we could speak into the lives of erring brethren and say, this is what you ought to do.

We need to be wise. James asked the question, this interrogatory mood, and he's asking a question because the people who are claiming they are wise are actually wise in another way. They are wise in the ways of the world.

The next thing I'd like us to consider is the word understanding. Wisdom and understanding really go together very well, and it's very important that we link these ideas. The word is where we get the word epistemology from, knowledge.

It's thoroughly knowledgeable. But here's the part I want you to catch. To gain understanding, the way you get it is through a long term personal acquaintance with the truth. And its emphasis is that understanding that results from building upon previous knowledge.

Which supports the next stage of understanding. I've mentioned this to you before, but I was always amazed at my father's ability to fix and build anything. He has skills that I certainly do not have.

And this is true in your workplaces. You have people who are great practitioners of their trades. And one of the things I asked, I remember asking him one time, and he was doing something he had never done before.

And I asked him, how could he do this thing that he had never done before? And he explained to me that there were principles in place that were true elsewhere and they apply to this. So he could take that previous knowledge and wisdom that he had garnered building and fixing other things.

And he could take it and directly apply it to this situation. You and I need to become skillful, general practitioners of the Christian faith. We can become specialized and have our little areas of theology that we're expert in, that we're apologists for.

But we need to become those people who are so nimble and crafty and able, as the people of God, to take a situation and know what the right practice is for that occasion. So we need to seek after wisdom.

Very important chapter in the Bible to me. I'm going to ask you to go there is Proverbs chapter four. Really quickly, it's going to support this wisdom and understanding idea. It's going to help us understand this a little bit better.

It's interesting. This is Solomon, who's so gifted in wisdom as a gift from God. And he's writing about wisdom here. And I hope these words will really grab hold of us and we will learn the lesson like the wise man building his house on the rock.

And that we'll take these words in Proverbs that we will also integrate this into our own thinking and our own living. Hear my children the instruction of a father and give attention to no understanding.

For I give you good doctrine. Do not forsake my law. When I was my father's son, tender and the only one in the sight of my mother. He also taught me and said to me, let your heart retain my words. Keep my commands and live.

Listen carefully, get wisdom, get understanding. Do not forget nor turn away from the words of my mouth. Do not forsake her, referring to wisdom, and she will preserve you. Love her and she will keep you.

Wisdom is the principal thing. Therefore, get wisdom. And in all you're getting, get understanding. Exalt her and she will promote you. She will bring you honor when you embrace her. She will place on your head an ornament of grace, a crown of glory.

She will deliver to you. Oh, people of God, we must be those who zealously pursue wisdom. Then we'll be equipped for every good work. Then our understanding will grow and we will be able to build upon these truths and we'll be able to be given difficult, hard situations and we will act exemplary in those instances because of this training and wisdom.

I like to think of it this way. I just realized I've never made anything from a recipe before. So this is maybe for the ladies to affirm better. Imagine the Christian doctrine. Laid out for you like a recipe of your favorite dish or dessert, and you would look upon that recipe.

And maybe you even remembered all of the measurements in all of the steps. And in fact, I think this is very much what the reformed quasi pseudo intellectual state of the church is. We're good at making and reading recipes.

But until you bake that cake. And you eat it and you bake it again and you improve upon it and you serve it to others, that's where the real test is. We are so smart and we're so wise, we quote all our theologians, but do we practice the Christian faith?

Are we expert bakers of the recipe? I think this is the place where we need to devote a lot of attention. That we need to be those who are practiced and we have accumulated wisdom and understanding and greater discernment.

And we've we've put it in the fire of the oven and we put it on the table. We've eaten it ourselves and we've served it to others and we're improving upon it and making it better and better. This is what wisdom looks like.

Let's go back to James. There's something that has to happen when we. Answer the question, the false teacher raises his hand quickly to James's question and says, I'm wise and I'm understanding. And James says, you have to show us by your good conduct that your works are done in the meekness of wisdom.

That phrase meekness of wisdom is very interesting. It's probably a Hebrew idiom. And we think about meekness. We think about gentleness, mildness. It's a gentle strength for the believer. Meekness begins and ends with the Lord.

It's his inspiration and it ends with his direction and empowerment. It is knowing and acting as if there is only one way. That's God's way and a contentment with his providential care and purpose. The wise man is willing to yield.

The wise man is recognizes there are imperfections in his knowledge. And his understanding, he's always shoring them up. But he's also always teachable. He's willing to be instructed by the Lord. He's willing to be instructed by the word and by the teachers and preachers in the church.

He's willing to be wrong that he might be ultimately right in obedience. This is something that the false teachers want nothing to do with. Do you have this spirit of the meekness of wisdom? Well, the first point is here contrasted.

I'm not going to spend as much time on this. It says in verse 14, this is the false wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts. Do not boast and lie against the truth. Bitter envy, self-seeking doesn't come from above.

We all like to be the answer man. We like to be the one who has it right. But do we love the truth? Do we love God so much? Do we love his word so much that we're more eager for God to be true and every other man, including ourselves, to be a liar?

If there's bitter envy, if they're self-seeking. There's a dearth of wisdom. And in fact, because we have already described the glories of the wisdom that is from above, this makes these descriptors even more painful.

Verse 15 says this wisdom, which the earth earthly, the ungodly, the worldly practice does not descend from above. But is earthly. It's sensual. It's demonic. One of the things that is troubling, I was really shocked several years ago to learn that that tick tock was an agent of the Chinese government or whatever.

It was related to them.

And I was thinking about it and I was thinking about all of these social media platforms and all of their algorithms. They are masterful at giving us false wisdom. If you watch the 24 hour news cycle all day, you will accumulate a lot of worldly wisdom.

If you were raised and had to go to public schools and you're growing up, you have been inculcated in worldly wisdom. Now, this morning, I wonder how many of you, please don't raise your hands. I wonder how many of you rolled out of bed and the first thing that you read this morning was the scripture.

Or did you open up your phone for some social media or did you check your email? I only illustrate it because our natural impulse is to hear from the world. You were scrolling this morning on Facebook or whatever you do, your Instagram or Snapchat or whatever it is, that's where we scrolled.

But we don't open these scrolls. We have consumed by osmosis in many cases and actively in our folly. We have sought the world's instruction in nearly every area of our lives. Some of the reason we're not experiencing the joy and the thanksgiving and the gratitude and the peaceableness of the Christian life, I think, is because we have stoked the fire of the holy war that rages within us.

The world and its ways always promise something. It promises expediency, doesn't it? These are methods that work in this sinful world. Leverage hundreds of millions of dollars and you can make billions of dollars that's not your own.

You can take someone else's money and leverage it and get billions of dollars possibly. But the Lord says that the borrower is servant to the lender. Do we believe that or not? There could be some reasonable debt.

I'm not saying all debt is bad. But do we actually believe that the borrower is? That's what the scripture says. The borrower isn't a servant to the lender. I wonder how much of our thinking has been clouded by the world and its ways.

This wisdom which we imbibe in and if we're not actively rejecting and refuting and keeping out of our lives, this earthly, sensual, demonic wisdom so-called has infiltrated our lives. It is the whack-a-mole that we have to continually to hammer and another one pops up in its place.

You and I need to purge some things in our lives. I opened my Bible this morning because I'm a preacher on Sunday morning, so I got a pass today. But I'm not sure I woke up the first thing and I opened my Bible.

I think I checked my email yesterday. So first thing I did, the Lord give us a greater hunger and thirst for his word and his wisdom. It says, and look around you, look at the effects, look at the fruit of the world and its wisdom around us.

Verse 16, for where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there. Take a look, the evidence is all around us. It's plain for our eyes to see their system, their way doesn't work, it's broken, it's propped up by their own iniquity, but it too will collapse.

You and I need to drive out our sinfulness, our envy, our self-seeking, we want to have no acquaintance with the world and her ways. We want to be people of clarity and holiness, not people of confusion and evil.

But here there's hope for us. Verse 17, the wisdom that is from above is first pure. And I love this word because there's something exquisitely beautiful about purity. It's free from defilement. That word means it's holy, it's pure to the core, it's virginal, it's chaste, it's holy because it is undefiled from sin and spoilage.

It's not mixed with guilt. Now, in the modern psychoanalysis world, that they're striving that we would have a guilt free existence and their methodology is saying basically whatever sinful thing you do, there's no shame in it.

There's no guilt in it. You should go on and live your life. I think we should live in a guilt free existence because we're walking in purity and we have no reason to be guilty. That would be superior to the other notion you and I, no matter what we've done in the past, this new creation in Christ, we now today can be free from defilement, we can be pure, we can be chaste, we can be undefiled from sin because of the wonder of Christ and his gospel.

The wisdom that is from above is pure.

Pure.

It's also peaceable. Of course, the Hebrew idea of shalom looms large here. This is based on the root araneh, which we've talked about a number of times recently. It's really God's gift of wholeness, which results from knowing and discerning the Lord's will and obeying it.

That's where you get peace. Do you know the will of the Lord? Search the scriptures. The principles are laid out there for you to follow. You can have a peaceable life when you walk in his ways. And we know that we don't do this perfectly, but we have forgiveness in Christ and we can try again and we can live a life that is at first pure and then peaceable.

It's gentle. The wicked have to use the power of the sword to enact their wisdom. The wise man in Christ is mild and forbearing. He fulfills the spirit of the law as well as the letter. I loved, it's very impactful.

I think it's in Desiring God from John Piper. I'm sure that you could find some fault with Piper and we like to find fault with people. But in Desiring God, he he talks about showing up to his house with flowers for his wife.

I haven't read that book in a long time, so I might get the details wrong. And the illustration goes something like this. I'm your husband. I'm obligated to give you flowers. Here are your flowers. There is a letter of the law obedience that's not consistent with wisdom.

This is why Joseph was a just and wise man, because of the way he navigated the covenant relationship of this young woman who turns up pregnant. He fulfills the spirit of the law in his gentleness. He's forbearing, he was insulted, but he doesn't act rashly.

That's a wise man responding appropriately to the scandal of his betrothed wife turning up pregnant. Joseph was willing to yield to the providence of God. He's not obstinate. He's not stubborn. You and I are stubborn and rebellious people.

We we do not want to yield to God and his truth. But the wise man yields. The wise man submits to God's truth. There's another thing I'd like to emphasize here that look, find in your translation the phrase that says full of mercy and good fruits.

What I love about the definition and description of these terms is it's covenant loyalty. It's covenant love. It's mercy as it's defined by loyalty to God's covenant. It's merciful. It's pitiful. It's compassionate.

You and I need to be full of mercy because God has been full of mercy toward us. I can bear all of your insults and all of your hate and all of your sinning against me because I have sinned against my God in a far greater way.

The wise man sees these things accurately. The wise man discerns these things. He doesn't feel the same sting of the insult because he recognizes the sinner in front of him is in need of grace. And out of covenant loyalty to his God and covenant love to his God, he responds.

In mercy with good fruits, I love the idea of fruit bearing, it's so riddled in the scripture, but I want you to leave you with this. This idea of fruit bearing is to do everything in partnership, true partnership with Christ.

So there's a kind of fruitfulness out in the world. And there's the fruits that only come from a true partnership, a fellowship in the gospel. And Christ, a believer who is the branch, lives in union with Christ, who is the vine, and the Lord lives his life through ours to yield that in us, which is of eternal value.

He's also without partiality. You and I are partisans. We discern whether something's true or not, whether our favorite theologians and pastors say it or teach it. The person who's wise, who does it without partiality, allows the facts themselves to determine whether these things are true.

We have to be immersed in the word of God in order to be impartial. We have to be so wise and so discerning to see through the fog and the clouds of all these arguments and say, does this accord with Christ and his salvation and his word?

It also has to be without hypocrisy. It can't be two faced. It has to be sincere. This behavior of sincerity is free from hidden agendas or selfish motives. It is utterly filled with integrity. If you're a salesman, you don't want to sell your client a bad product.

Be unwise. It's not righteous. It's not good. If you're performing work for as a contractor, you need to do a good job. You need to perform the work you have told them you would do. The wise man sees not only the duty and the obligation, but the benefits of walking in this wisdom.

Brethren, there's only two ways to live. There's really only two possible ways. By faith in Christ, in his truth, which has words attached to actions, which are derived from God himself and his word. That's way one.

And then there's everything else. You and I have doom scrolled. I don't really know what that is, but we've done that on our phones and we've not opened the scrolls or the parchments. We've run to our favorite theologian, we've run to our favorite podcast, we've run to our favorite radio, whatever it is.

But we haven't picked up the word. And even worse, the Christian who sits in our pews, he doesn't even go to the word. He doesn't even go to the resources. He's just blown and tossed by the winds of the world.

It's kind of a gloom picture, but take heart today. You and I have been in faith united to the wise and understanding man, the Lord Jesus Christ. All of our failures, all of our inability to be wise, all of our failures to progress like we ought, we take solace and take great hope.

That we have been united to the one who in the incarnation is wisdom from above, the Logos himself, the word made flesh. Today, I'm asking you to make, as Proverbs 4 says, the principal thing is to get wisdom, to get understanding.

Do not forget her. Do not turn away from her words. Do not forsake her. She will preserve you. Love her, love this wisdom. And she will keep you. Wisdom is the principal thing. Therefore, get wisdom. And in all you're getting, get understanding.

Please pray with me now. Oh, Lord, we thank you for the practicality of James. And Lord, we confess that we need to grow in our pursuit of wisdom and understanding, which has broad application to every area of our lives.

Oh, Lord, I pray today for your church and your people. That they would have wisdom and understanding to address the issues in their home and their workplace that they're facing even today. That on Tuesday, when they return to work, they would have greater wisdom and discernment in their relationships with their workmates, their employees, their employer.

Oh, Lord, give the husbands great wisdom and understanding concerning the proper shepherding of their wives and their children. Oh, Lord, grant to the wives that they would walk in wisdom and understanding, that they would love and respect their husbands.

That they would love each other in such a way that they would choose the heavenly wisdom, the wisdom from above through all of the anecdotes of the world, which are trash. Oh, Lord, help us to spot the error that we have allowed into our own lives.

Help us to to purge the worldliness from our own thinking. Oh, Lord, help us to derive from the principles and the precepts and the explicit verses of your scripture the way that we live. And this would not be just a recipe for us, oh God, that we would bake cakes and that we would eat it and we would serve it to others.

I pray that you would transform us and our hearts would be filled with gladness, knowing that we've been united to the wise one, to the understanding one. And that we would look to him not only for salvation and forgiveness, but as our example, that we might walk in the path and those steps after our master.

We ask all of these things in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen.