Ascension Presbyterian Lord's Day Worship

Call to Worship from Psalm 150

Good morning my brothers and sisters in Christ. Grace and peace be unto you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Welcome to our corporate worship of our God. Please stand and hear God call you to worship through his word from Psalm 150.

Praise the Lord, praise God in his sanctuary, praise him in his mighty firmament, praise him for his mighty acts, praise him according to his excellent greatness, praise him with the sound of the trumpet, praise him with the lute and harp, praise him with the timbrel and dance, praise him with stringed instruments and flutes, praise him with loud cymbals, praise him with clashing cymbals.

Let everything that has breath praise the Lord, praise the Lord. Come let us worship God, let us pray. Oh Lord, you are the king eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God. You are the blessed and only sovereign, the king of kings and lord of lords, who alone possesses immortality and dwells in an unapproachable light, whom no name has seen or can see.

Prayer of Adoration and Thanksgiving

To you be the honor and eternal dominion. We bless the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. We praise the glory of your grace that chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.

We thank you that in love you predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ. We rejoice that we have been sealed in Christ with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance.

We worship and adore you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Open the eyes of our hearts that we may know the hope of your calling, the riches of the glory of our inheritance, and the surpassing greatness of your power toward us in Jesus Christ.

All of this you have brought about in Christ when you raised him from the dead and seated him at your right hand in the heavenly places. Receive our worship and our praise to the glory of your grace, and we ask this in Christ's name.

Amen. Please kneel as you are able for the corporate confession of sin. Let us join together in confessing our sins. Most holy and merciful Father, we confess to you and to one another that we have sinned against you by what we have done and by what we have left undone.

We have not loved you with our whole heart. We have not fully loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have not always had enough. You alone know how by wandering from your ways, forgive us, we pray, and free us from our sin.

Renew in us the grace and strength of your Holy Spirit for the sake of Jesus Christ, your Son, our Savior. Amen. Please stand for the assurance of pardon. We can be thankful that we have a Savior who has been tempted in every way, who knows our frame and knows we are but dust, and we are not left where our striving would be losing.

Assurance of Pardon and Hymn 44

Hear God's assurance of comfort for you and his assurance of pardon. Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgressions of the remnant of his heritage. He does not retain his anger forever because he delights in mercy.

He will again have compassion on us and will subdue our iniquities. He will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. My brothers and sisters in Christ, rejoice! Your sins are forgiven. Amen. Please take up the Trinity Hymnal and open up to Hymn 44, How Great Thou Art, Hymn 44.

Please take up the insert and turn to our Psalm of the Week, Psalm 54. By your name, O God, Psalm 54. Brother, any instruction and encouragement? Thank you, brother. Psalm 54. Amen. Please remain standing for the reading of God's word from Revelation chapter 6.

Revelation 6 and the Six Seals

Revelation chapter 6. Now I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying with a voice like thunder, Come and see. And I looked, and behold, a white horse.

He who sat on it had a bow, and a crown was given to him. And he went out conquering and to conquer. When he opened the second seal, I heard this second living creature saying, Come and see. Another horse, fiery red, went out, and it was granted to the one who sat on it to take peace from the earth, and that people should kill one another.

And there was given to him a great sword. When he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, Come and see. So I looked, and behold, a black horse. And he who had sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand.

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, A quart of wheat for a denarius, a quart of wheat, oh sorry, a quart, three quarts of barley for a denarius, and do not harm the oil and the wine.

When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, Come and see. So I looked, and behold, a pale horse, and the name of him who sat on it was Death. And Hades followed him, and power was given to them over a fourth of the earth to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, and by the beasts of the earth.

When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice saying, How long, oh Lord, holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?

Then a white robe was given to each of them, and it was said to them that they should rest a little while longer until both the number of their fellow servants and their brethren who would be killed as they were was completed.

I looked when he opened the sixth seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became like blood, and the stars of heaven fell to the earth as a fig tree drops its late figs when it is shaken by a mighty wind.

Then the sky receded as a scroll as it is rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved out of its place. And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave, and every free man hid themselves in the caves in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the lamb, for the great day of his wrath has come,.

And who is able to stand? This is the word of God. Thanks be to God. We will continue our worship by confirming our ancient Christian faith in the singing of the Apostles' Creed. Please take the Trinity Hymnal once more and open to hymn number 115, All Creatures of Our God and King, hymn 115.

Prayers of the People

Please now prepare for the prayers of the people. Let us pray. Almighty and everlasting God, in whom we live and move and have our being, we, your beloved children, offer to you our humble praises for having preserved us from the beginning of our lives to this day.

Especially do we praise you for having delivered us from the dangers and uncertainties of this past week. For these mercies we bless and magnify your glorious name, humbly beseeching you to accept this, our morning sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.

For his sake, who lay down in the grave and rose again for us, your Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. Fulfill now, O Lord, our desires and petitions that may be best for us, granting us in this world knowledge of thy truth and in the world to come, life everlasting.

Amen. I ask your prayers for God's people throughout the world, for our denomination, for this church, and for all ministers and missionaries. Pray for the church. I ask your prayers for the poor, the sick, the bereaved, the burdened, and for the widows, orphans, and prisoners.

Pray for those in any need or trouble. I ask your prayers for those who do not know Christ and for those who seek a deeper knowledge of him. Pray that they may find and be found by him. I ask your prayers for our children and future generations which will be.

Born to them. Pray that the knowledge of the Lord will fill the earth through them. Pray that we may.

Have grace to glorify Christ in our own day. Finding ourselves in agreement with all these things, we join our voices together and say, Amen. Please stand. Please stand and take up the insert once more and find our Psalm of the Month, Psalm 96.

This is our last time through Psalm 96 for this month. Ascribe unto the Lord. Amen. I'm going to ask you to remain standing.

James 3:1-12 and the Tongue

And turn in your Bibles to the book of James chapter 3. This is God's holy and infallible word. 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 3. 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 salt water 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 exist, 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.

Now 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 7. 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 7, verse 15. Remember how we started? Let not many of you become teachers. Verse 15 of chapter 7, 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 in 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. 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 is 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. Pay 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.

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 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 over 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.

Wisdom and Understanding from Above

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.

One of the things I asked, I remember asking him one time, and he was doing something he had never done before. I asked him, how could he do this thing that he had never done before? He explained to me that there were principles in place that were true elsewhere and they applied 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.

We need to seek after wisdom. Very important chapter in the Bible to me. I'm going to ask you to go there. It's Proverbs chapter 4. 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. 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 in 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 and all of the steps.

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 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.

The Meekness of Wisdom and the Contrast with Worldly 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, and that's God's way, and a contentment with his providential care and purpose.

The wise man is willing to yield. The wise man 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 there's 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 TikTok 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 in its ways always promised something. It promises expediency, doesn't it? That 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. It's the first thing I did. May 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. Look at 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. It's that 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. It's also peaceable. Of course, the Hebrew idea of shalom looms large here. This is based on the root arene, 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. We know that we don't do this perfectly, but we have forgiveness in Christ and we can try again. We can live a life that is at first pure and then peaceable.