“5 If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. 6 But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. 7 That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; 8 he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does. ”
Trials require wisdom. Let’s imagine that a child of this church has walked away from the faith. He is now twenty-five years old and wants nothing to do with grace. He wants nothing to do with Jesus. His parents rightly see this as a trial. The apostle John wrote, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” Those parents could respond, ‘we have great sorrow that our child has walked away from the truth.’ Those parents are in the midst of a trial and trials require wisdom. How should they react to the rotten fruit that grows in the soil of their son’s unbelief? How should they pray for their son? Would it be wise to invite him to join us for worship on Christmas morning?
Trials require wisdom. Let’s imagine that a young woman wants to be married but no eligible, Christian man expresses interest in her. She feels the truth of Genesis 2:18, “it is not good for man to be alone.” She finds little contentment in Bible’s vision for singleness. She has been a bridesmaid many times and with each new dress it becomes harder to, “rejoice with those who rejoice.” That young woman is in the midst of a trial and trials require wisdom. How should she understand her own emotions? How should she pray? How wide a net should she cast when looking for a future husband? What social situations should she pursue? Which should she avoid?
Trials require wisdom. Let’s imagine that a man finds out that he has a particularly nasty strain of cancer. The doctors are hesitant about giving any prognosis. He and his wife have three children at home between the ages of six and sixteen. He owns his own business and is the only employee. His wife works part-time at a grocery store to supplement their income. This family has now entered a trial and trials require wisdom. How should these parents talk to their sixteen-year-old about his cancer? How should they talk to their six-year-old about his cancer? Should his wife work more to supplement the hours he won’t be able to work because of treatments? Should she work less to be with him and the children during this trial? How can they consider not only the sorrow of their trial but also the joy as James taught us?
Trials require wisdom. Trials reveal how much we do not know and how much we cannot know. Trials reveal how very hard it is to mature. We are often bewildered by trials and that bewilderment deepens the pain of our trials.
The Father knows that trials require wisdom. He doesn’t want you to be bewildered in the midst of your trial. He wants you to mature in your trial as we saw last week. He mature you, in part, by giving you the wisdom you need. You need to ask for this wisdom with a heart ready to put it into action.
God gives wisdom in trials to those who ask and will put it into practice. That is the claim of this sermon: God gives wisdom in trials to those who ask and will put it into practice. We see this in two points. First: God gives wisdom. Second: asking and doing. We see that God gives wisdom in verse 5. We see asking and doing in verses 6-8.
First: God gives wisdom. When trials come, and trials will come, remember to ask God for wisdom. “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God.”
You need to be instructed to ask God for wisdom because left to yourself you will most likely forget. I regularly forget. When I walk into a trial, my stress and anxiety narrow my awareness to the point that I often forget about God. I don’t remember to ask God for wisdom to help me move forward. Sometimes I act like Israel in Isaiah 40, “Why do you complain, Jacob? Why do you say, Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord; my cause is disregarded by my God’?”
In your trial, you must remember God. You must ask Him for the wisdom you need to deal with the mess in front of you. “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.”
God gives wisdom in a variety of ways. We have time for three. First, God gives wisdom through His word. Nabeel Quereshi found wisdom in God’s word in the midst of his trial. He grew up in a Muslim family but became increasingly convinced by the claims of Christ. He knew that if he were born again, he might be rejected by his family.
He writes, “On the first day of my second year of medical school, it became too much to bear. Yearning for comfort, I decided to skip school. Returning to my apartment, I placed the Qur’an and the Bible in front of me. I turned to the Qur’an, but there was no comfort there. For the first time, the book seemed utterly irrelevant to my suffering. Irrelevant to my life. It felt like a dead book. With nowhere left to go, I opened up the New Testament and started reading. Very quickly, I came to the passage that said, ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’ Electric, the words leapt off the page and jump-started my heart. I could not put the Bible down. I began reading fervently, reaching Matthew 10:37, which taught me that I must love God more than my mother and father. ‘But Jesus,’ I said, ‘accepting you would be like dying. I will have to give up everything.’ The next verses spoke to me, saying, ‘He who does not take his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for my sake will find it’… I knelt at the foot of my bed and gave up my life.” “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.”
If you need wisdom, ask God and then listen to God. He speaks in His word. Don’t pretend that you have the wisdom to walk through your trials. You don’t. I don’t. If we did, the Holy Spirit would never have inspired this passage. When you are in trials, you need God’s wisdom. He speaks wisdom to you in this word.
Second, God gives wisdom through godly counsel. Pray for wisdom and then be open to the wisdom God provides through His people. God tells you as much in Proverbs. “In an abundance of counselors there is safety.” “On the lips of him who has understanding, wisdom is found.” “The mouth of the righteous brings forth wisdom.” “Listen to advice and accept instruction, that you may gain wisdom.”
God has brought wise people into your life. If you are in a trial of grief, there are other people in this congregation who have walked through similar fires. Seek their wisdom. If you are seeking to love a difficult spouse, you can’t be the only Christian trying to do so. Seek wisdom. If you have no idea how to forgive a grievous injury, others around you have been sinned against. Ask them what they did.
If you are still under your parents’ roof, ask your parents. Parents, are you the sort of parent who is asked for wisdom? Do you keep in confidence what your children have told you? You want them in the habit of asking your advice. When your little girl is fifteen, you don’t want her getting her views on dating from another fifteen-year-old. You want her to come to you.
If you are fifteen-years-old and honest with yourself, you don’t want wisdom on dating from a fifteen-year-old. You want wisdom from someone wiser than yourself. We all want that. God gives wisdom through His people. Ask God for wisdom and then seek counsel.
Third, God gives wisdom by calming you through prayer. As you ask for wisdom in prayer, God calms your spirit. He loves to remind us children that He is in charge and that the universe does not rest on our shoulders. As you pray for wisdom, you will be like David in Psalm 131, “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother.”
Once you are so calmed, you can see your situation anew. Perhaps you are in a trial of conflict. Once you are calmed, you begin to see your fault in this conflict and you become willing to confess what you need to confess and pray that your friend will confess what she needs to confess.
Perhaps you are in a medical affliction. Once you’ve calmed your soul before God you can see that there really is nothing you can do about your situation other than depend on God and that this is what you must do.
Perhaps you are in a trial that might entail suffering for your beliefs. Once you are no longer anxious but are instead confident in God’s faithfulness, you can see that the choice before you is not really all that complicated; it is a choice between obedience and disobedience.
Perhaps you are in a trial that has to do with your future. Once you’ve been reminded that God is big and you are small, you can see that your entire future doesn’t depend upon this one decision but rather upon God.
Ask God for wisdom in your trials. He won’t rebuke you for needing it. God “gives [wisdom] generously to all without finding fault.”
God will give you wisdom in your trial because He wants you to act wisely in your trial. He wants to mature you in your trials. You can’t mature unless you know what to do. God isn’t going to place you in a trial and then refuse to give you what you need in your trial. John Calvin put it this way, “Since we see that the Lord does not require from us what is above our strength, but that He is ready to help us, provided we ask, let us, therefore, learn whenever He commands anything to ask of Him the power to perform it.”
Calvin wasn’t simply talking theory. He had asked God for wisdom in trials. Like James’ first readers, Calvin was exiled from his home. He was driven out by people he had counted as friends. He was quite sickly throughout his life. He lost his only son and all his daughters in their infancy. His wife died nine years into their marriage. He was forcibly removed from the church he served in Geneva. He had three wonderful years at another church until Geneva called him back. He felt compelled to return to Geneva even though he thought of it as a, “torture chamber.” Those are trials of many kinds and if Calvin was going to consider the joy of those trials, he needed wisdom. He prayed for it. “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.”
Will you do that? Will you ask for wisdom the next time you find yourself in a trial? Will you ask with your heart in the right place? We see what that heart looks like in our second point: asking and practicing.
When you are in a trial, you can ask God for wisdom. At any time, in fact, you can ask God for wisdom. He will give it provided your heart is in the right place. We see this right place in verse 6, “But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.”
If you believe, you will receive wisdom. If you doubt, you will receive nothing. How do you know if you will receive wisdom? How do you know you believe and will receive?
The man who believes is willing to obey whatever he receives. The man who prays for wisdom with a heart ready to put it into practice will receive wisdom. The man who prays but is unwilling to put God’s will into practice will receive nothing. James calls him double-minded, “That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.”
James refers to the doubter as a double-minded man, or in the Greek ‘a double souled’ man. The double-souled man is only interested in God’s wisdom provided he likes it. The double souled man cries out, “why, O Lord?” but no respond could ever satisfy him.
The double-souled woman has no desire to keep the greatest commandment; “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” She wants security from God unless she can get security from her savings account. She wants wisdom for her marriage from God on Sunday and wisdom for her marriage from Cosmo on Wednesday and she doesn’t see much difference between the two. She wants whatever will give her the answer she wants.
She is like a wave according to James. She is like a swell in the ocean which never has the same contours from moment to moment. She is constantly shifting. Her life is like the sand in Jesus’ parable. Anything built on it will crash.
Maybe a brief sketch of such a person will help you see the difference between the believer and the double-souled man. Imagine a man needs financial advice and Love INC in Canton asks you to advise him. You agree to meet with him once a month to work on his budget. At your first meeting, you run through his expenditures and cut the fat. You stress the importance of saving. He is excited and tells you that he feels hopeful for the first time in years. The next month he drives up to your house in a black 2019 GMC Sierra. You keep working with him. You show him how this was not a wise purchase for him. He is confused and at your next meeting he invites you over to watch football on his new 88” flat-screen TV from Rent-A-Center. He seems genuinely shocked and hurt when you tell him that these purchases were not wise. He was excited about your wisdom until he was more excited about the truck and the TV. He wanted wisdom until he wanted something else.
That is the double-souled man. God has offers him wisdom—“God… gives generously to all without finding fault”—but that man doesn’t want God’s wisdom.
Would you keep working with that man on his budget if he was continually unwilling to put your wisdom into practice? Do you think God is going to give wisdom to someone who isn’t willing to put His wisdom into practice? Do you think God is going to give a woman wisdom in her difficult marriage if she isn’t willing to put it into practice? Do you think God is going to give wisdom to a man struggling with his daughter if he isn’t willing to put it into practice? The man who won’t put what he hears into practice doesn’t have ears to hear. What is the point of offering wisdom to a man who will not listen?
Will you listen to wisdom? When you pray during your next trial, will you ask God for wisdom for your next step and then do that next step? If so, you can have confidence that God will give you wisdom.
You need to consider this prayer for wisdom in trials from God’s perspective. I understand why you want wisdom in trials. You are bewildered. You are scared. You want some semblance of control and you think wisdom will give you control of the situation. I get that, but God will not give you wisdom so you can regain control. He will give you wisdom to make you mature and complete as we saw last week. He will give you wisdom to make you more like Jesus.
When you pray to the Father, you agree to His agenda. His agenda is to make you more like Jesus. He will give you wisdom that will make you more like Jesus. When you ask for wisdom in trials, that is the wisdom you should expect—wisdom to respond how Jesus would respond.
When you ask for wisdom to deal with rejection, the Father will give you wisdom that will make you more like Jesus. He blessed those who cursed him.
When you ask for wisdom to deal with the future, the Father will give you wisdom that will make you more like Jesus. During the anguish of his soul, he confessed, “not my will but Yours be done.”
When you ask for wisdom to deal with a wayward child, the Father will give you wisdom that will make you more like Jesus. He came to save sinners.
When you ask for wisdom to deal with financial uncertainty, the Father will give you wisdom that will make you more like Jesus. In his hunger, he wanted the promises he couldn’t see more than the bread he could almost taste.
When you ask for wisdom to deal with bereavement, the Father will give you wisdom that will make you more like Jesus. He wept at the tomb of his friend even as he expected him to rise.
When you ask for wisdom to deal with your own death, which unless the Lord returns soon, is the only certainty you face in this life, the Father will give you wisdom that will make you more like Jesus. “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence.”
You have faced trials. You will face trials. These trials will require wisdom. You will face them with your wisdom or the Father’s wisdom. James is telling you how to face them with the Father’s wisdom.
Consider the alternative for a moment. Our working assumption in the book of James is that the Spirit is offering us wisdom in a foolish age and humility in a proud age. The world has its own wisdom in trials. That wisdom is foolish. It would rather come under the influence of alcohol and drugs than come under the influence of the Spirit. It would rather numb itself with constant entertainment than hear God’s voice break the silence of pain. It would rather shield the heart from any hurt than be vulnerable before God. The wisdom of this world in trials is foolish. It will give you what foolishness can give you, which is further sorrow.
That wisdom of this world in trials is proud. When she walks through trials, the woman of the world assumes that life must revolve around her. She cannot rejoice with anyone who is rejoicing. She will not mourn with anyone else who is mourning. She wants others to put life on hold for her. The wisdom of this world in trials is proud. It will gain you what pride can gain you, which is a mighty fall.
If you have been listening to the wisdom of the world in your trials, you know it is only harming you further. You now have the sorrow of your trial and the sorrow of the world.
The wisdom that the Father gives isn’t proud. It is humble. It submits itself to God’s guidance in the midst of pain. It says, “not my will but Yours be done.”
The wisdom that the Father gives isn’t foolish. It is demonstrably wise, meaning that there is a noticeable difference between a woman embittered by trials and a woman who considers the joy God gives even in trials. There is a noticeable difference between the man who hates God because of his trials and the man who trusts God in trials.
Consider the alternative to God’s wisdom in trials. Consider man’s wisdom in trials. You see it all around you. You see how modern man copes with trials. You see how proud he is in his pain. “Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? Well, think about it,” writes John Steinbeck. “Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.” Consider the alternative to God’s wisdom.
You can ask God for wisdom with a heart ready to obey in the midst of trials or you can feel large and tragic. You can ask God for wisdom with a heart ready to obey in the midst of trials or you can grow bitter. You can ask God for wisdom with a heart ready to obey in the midst of trials or you can numb yourself with television every night. No one will make that choice for you. You must choose to ask for wisdom. You must be willing to obey the wisdom you receive. You must be willing to become more like Jesus in your trials. Amen.