Midtown Presbyterian Church
The Great Con | Wisdom is from the World - James 3:13-18 - Daniel Barth
(upbeat music) - You're listening to a sermon for Midtown Presbyterian Church in Phoenix, Arizona. If you'd like to learn more about Midtown and its ministry, please visit us at midtownprez.org or follow us on Instagram or Facebook. - Thank you Gabby for leading us in that space. And thank you Gary for leading worship for us this morning. Guys, if you get the chance to meet Gary afterwards, please do. He's an awesome guy and he has driven all the way from the East Valley to be with us this morning. So very appreciative Gary being with us. And it is a privilege to be up here. Always an honor and something that I don't take lightly and something that I really love to do. So thank you for being here this morning. Any Olympic fans in the building? Lot of Olympic fans. All right, I've got a couple of shakies and not so much. In case you haven't been paying attention, the Olympics are currently happening. They are in full swing in Paris in 2024. There's been lots of fun things floating around the internet about it. So if you feel like doom scrolling and reading some comments, go read about the Olympics. But I have always loved the Olympics since I was a kid. I have dreamed about having an Olympic moment. And whenever they were on TV, I was constantly glued to the screen. Whether it was watching Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt or these people who have accomplished incredible athletic feats. I was always like, you can't make me do anything. I'm not doing my homework. I'm not doing any other extracurricular activities. It's Olympic time, much to my parents chagrin. And I loved growing up, watching the feats of these people, serving as a source of inspiration. And those of you who were before my time, maybe have fond memories of athletes like Jackie Joyner-Curse or Carl Lewis or Nadia Comanic or Mark Spitz just to name a few. And those of you that know me know that I have been training in karate for 20 years now. And it's always been my dream to head to the Olympics for karate. And my reality was it was close to the forefront during the Tokyo Olympics when karate finally got added to the Olympic rotation. It was not an Olympic sport before then. And it was gonna be held in the Budokan, which is the most famous martial arts arena in the world, right in downtown Tokyo. It was gonna be this amazing spectacle. And then there were no fans because of COVID. And then karate didn't get added to the permanent rotation. So it's not in Paris and currently not in Olympic sport. So I'm very sad. This was very disappointing for me. But that is a rant for a different day because I will stand up here for an hour and tell you how wrong it is that break dancing replaced karate in the Olympic rotation. You hate to see it, folks. You really do. The point being, I was taught as a child that Olympic moments were the pinnacle of life, that if you could work your way to the top of the ladder and whatever your respective discipline was, then your life would be significant and that you would be happy. And I spent most of my childhood longing for my gold medal moment to fulfill me forever. If you've been watching the Olympics, there is a commercial that they have been playing that has reminded me a lot of my past and the things that I used to tell myself. So if you haven't seen it, we're gonna watch it on the screen here. (upbeat music) - Tell me, am I? I'm single-minded. I'm deceptive. I'm obsessive. I'm selfish. Does that make me a bad person? Am I a bad person? Am I? - I have no empathy. I don't respect you. I'm never satisfied. I have an obsession with power. I'm irrational. I have zero remorse. I have no sense of compassion. I'm delusional. I'm maniacal. You think I'm a bad person? - Tell me. - Tell me. - Tell me. - Tell me. - Am I? I think I'm better than everyone else. I wanna take what's yours and never give it back. - What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine. - Am I a bad person? Tell me. Am I? (upbeat music) Does that make me a bad person? Tell me. Does it? - Some sermon illustrations just write themselves. I mean, this is real low-hanging fruit for me. I don't know about you, but Willem Dafoe, the green goblin from the original Spider-Man series narrating a commercial for Nike was not on my bingo card for the year. Did you catch some of the objectives that Mr. Green Goblin used, the adjective? Sorry, not objectives. He says, "I'm single-minded. "I'm deceptive. "I'm obsessive. "I'm selfish. "I've got no empathy. "I've got no respect. "I'm never satisfied. "I'm irrational. "I've got zero remorse or compassion. "I'm delusional. "I'm maniacal. "I want to take what's yours and never give it back. "What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine." And we end with the lovely Nike tagline, "winning isn't for everyone." Friends, this train of thought is nothing new. For thousands of years, people have been trying to find the secret to the good life. And winning has often been the answer for how you get to it. And today's day and age, you'll hear many things like what you just heard on that commercial. You need to be selfish. You need to look out for yourself. You need to climb the ladder of success. You need to achieve your mountaintop Olympic moment. And then you'll be happy. That's what life is all about. For many years, I bought into this wisdom. Whether it was from coaches or from other athletes or just what people would tell me in the world. However, I found out very quickly this life didn't exactly deliver what it promised. And it was one of loneliness and anger and restlessness and frustration and disappointment. Here's a picture of the moment that I thought would change my life forever. Here's cute little 16-year-old Daniel. After I had just won my first national championship in Karate, which had been a goal of mine all growing up. Like if I say that I'm the best kid in the nation, then my life is gonna be just smitten. This was taken on like a 2012 Blackberry. Look at how granulated that is. I saw all the politicians had Blackberries. I was like, "Cool, I'm a person of influence and status with my Blackberry as a junior in high school." But this picture, on the outside, what looks like a really happy kid who had it all going on. Brand new national champion. Really well liked in school, in popular. Had a lot of extracurricular stuff outside of Karate going for me. Like I had the life on the outside. But internally, I was fighting a very different battle that was not one of contentment and fulfillment but loneliness. And not feeling like I would ever know what it took to be fulfilled. If you're familiar with the history of the Olympics, you will know that it started in ancient Greece. These games began nearly 3000 years ago and they were a staple in Greek culture from 776 BC to about 393 AD. The Greeks have long been credited with being the innovators of our modern sporting competitions. But that wasn't the only thing that was prominent in their culture that Greeks really cared about. The other thing that would make a major impact on the rest of the world was their philosophy. And Greek philosophy had a very simple quest, trying to answer some of these same questions. What is wisdom? Before Socrates came around in 496 BC, there were people for hundreds of years that had been arguing over this. Like Homer and Hesiod wrestling with this idea of what is the good life? What is wisdom? And how am I ever gonna be happy? And Socrates came around and he introduced a new way about human happiness, a new way of thinking about human happiness. And it was the idea that human wisdom is essential to the well-lived human life. This was a way of thinking that could actually be rationally argued for and not just depicted in art like philosophy from the past. From that moment, human action rightly conducted by reason would be considered as the key to happiness, at least among philosophers of the time. This line of thought would be articulated in many different ways by the main successors of Socrates, first by Plato and then by Plato's best student, Aristotle, philosophers we are all familiar with today. It was because of this general idea that schools have thought like Epicureanism and Stoicism developed their theories. There were variations of this Socratic idea, so much so that Stoics recognized Socrates as their direct predecessor. So while our society today looks radically different from ancient Greece, most people are still after the same things, things like power or prestige or glory or wisdom. However, how much progress have we made in the last 3,000 years in the area of wisdom? It depends on who you ask, but some would argue not so much. When asked about the topic of wisdom, religious scholar Dr. Roger Walsh had this to say. We often say that one of the defining qualities of the 21st century is that for the very first time, all of the world's knowledge is available to us, resulting in an explosive growth of technology and communication over the last decade or so, as well as the emergence of a genuinely integrative wave of psychosocial development across the planet. However, as the knowledge quest continues to accelerate at a breakneck speed, our search for wisdom seems to be lagging quite a bit behind, pulling and stretching the fabric of civilization itself. Humanity is currently locked in a race between sagacity and catastrophe. And if we do not take our present challenges seriously, the perilous gap between our knowledge and our wisdom will continue to widen until it threatens to swallow our precious civilization in a single dystopian goal. Not very kind words from Dr. Walsh in terms of how he thinks we've developed in wisdom. Maybe we wouldn't go that far to agree with his words, but I don't think we have to look far to say that we are not surrounded by tons and tons of wise people on a regular basis. So what is real wisdom? And how are we supposed to get it? This is the question that we're gonna answer today. We're in the middle of a teaching series here in Midtown called The Great Khan, where we are working our way through the Book of James and combating cons or lies that we are often told in our culture with what scripture has to say. I really enjoy the Book of James because it speaks very plainly about the difference between a profession of faith and a possession of faith. That if you have this possession of faith, it will touch all of these areas of your life in tangible ways. It's more than just speaking. You don't just get to say that you're wise, but you embody wisdom with how you live. And this is so much about what the Book of James is about. We have heard about topics through this series like our speech, our favoritism, our individuality and our anger and how our faith actually touches every aspect of these areas. And today we're gonna do the same thing with wisdom to combat the Khan that if you follow the world's lead on wisdom, you will be happy and fulfilled. This idea that through study and contemplation and abstract thinking, you can grasp wisdom for yourself. All of the wonders of the world will be available to you and you will know exactly what you ought to do if you just work hard enough at it. I think that this is bad wisdom, spoiler alert. And I think that the Bible's teaching on wisdom is far more robust and I think that the words that it has to say are very thought provoking. So that is what we're going to look into today. And it is so much more than just an individual pursuit but a communal pursuit as we learn about what is wisdom and how do we get it. So we are going to be reading today from James chapter three verses 13 through 18. So if you have a Bible, turn with me. The Book of James is going to be towards the very back of your Bible close to the end of the New Testament. If you don't have a Bible, no problem. The words are going to be behind me on the screen. So let's read James chapter three. Who is wise and knowledgeable among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be arrogant and lie about the truth. This is not wisdom that comes down from above but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure than peaceable, gentle, willing to yield full of mercy and good fruits without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. So James gives us a very helpful definition here of what wisdom is, but first I thought it would be good if we started looking at our very baseline definition of wisdom from the very elegant and classy lady that is Miriam Webster. So let's look at our dictionary definition of wisdom here. It says this, it's broken into three parts. Wisdom is the ability to discern inner qualities and relationships. Wisdom is good sense and generally accepted belief. And wisdom is accumulated philosophical or scientific learning. I find that we tend to think of wisdom mostly as that third line there. We think of wisdom as knowledge. Oh, someone who's wise knows a lot of things. They can just recall information like this. They are buried in the books and they've got a big brain, they know stuff. I was surprised to see particularly the first part of the definition. Wisdom is the ability to discern inner qualities and relationships. I don't know about you, but I don't really think of wisdom like that. What does relationships and inner qualities have to do with wisdom? And I like that it's broken up into three different parts that wisdom is not just knowledge, but it is knowledge, insight, and judgment come together. So how does this actually play out tangibly? Why is wisdom tied to understanding and discerning relationships? So it'll be a little bit confusing for me at first, but then as I studied, I'm like, wow, this makes perfect sense. Miriam Webster is smarter than me. James asks the question, who is wise and understanding among you? And he follows it up by saying that they should show it with their good life, painting this picture that you show wisdom by how you live. It's not just what you know, but how knowledge is actually applied and lived out in the world. How does something relate to life and everything around it? The Olympics are a perfect example of this. I'm just gonna keep hitting you with the sports analogies. If you watch most sports, there's a surprising phenomenon that happens where a lot of older athletes actually tend to win, which goes against common reason. You would think that younger athletes would have a leg up. They're probably in better shape. They're definitely more athletic. They haven't lost that step or two yet. They don't have to take as good a care of their bodies to recover. So knowledge would tell you that a younger athlete is definitely gonna have an advantage over an older athlete. And yet, you see all of these older athletes winning. And when you ask younger athletes about it, why does this person always tend to win? And it's almost intangible. It's like they just know how to. They understand these relationships and inner workings of the game that they're playing. They know how to use their body. They know how to take advantage of officiating. They know all of the biomechanical movements that they've been practicing for years and years and years. And they understand how it all relates to the game itself and how they can leverage that to their advantage to then win. If you've been paying attention to all of the memes that have been circling around, there is this man from Turkey who has been making the rounds. His name is Yusuf DeKetch. He is on the right here. The reason that this man has become an internet sensation is because he showed up to the Olympics to shoot and he has no eyewear. He has no protective eyewear. He has no ear protection. He has no fancy equipment or gear. He just showed up, put his hand in his pocket, shot some shots and he won the silver medal. (audience laughing) You can trust that with who is on the right, who's got the fancy glasses, all the drip. You know, the nice fancy gun, all of the things, the ear protection and this man has become probably the most interviewed person at the Olympics. One of them and they're like, what's your deal, man? How do you do it? He's like, I just like to shoot. I just show up. I just show up and I shoot. I know how to play the game and I don't need all of this fancy equipment. That's wisdom. A great example that I've seen in my own karate career is when my teacher's teacher comes to town. It's a really big deal. His name is Toshio Osaka and he is an 82 year old man from Japan who probably is five foot five, 140 pounds soaking wet. He is not a large man at all. And you look at him on the street and you would think, I could definitely take that guy's money. I could definitely grab his cane and run off with all of his items in the blink of an eye. You contrast him with Damien here, who is the top student at my dojo. He is probably 43, six foot two, 210 pounds an absolute monster in a terrifying human being. Like you do not want to get in a fight with Damien. But when Osaka sensei comes to visit, he always brings Damien up to do his demonstrations and he moves that guy around like a rag doll. It is unbelievable. And you might think that I'm joking. Next time I'm in town, I will invite you when he comes for a seminar. And you will be as amazed as I was the first time that I saw it, that he just moved this grown man like he was nothing. That's wisdom. He understands the physics of how to use his body. He understands all of the biomechanical movements of karate and he's refined them over 70 years of practice in his life to be able to then apply them to the real world in a situation that looks totally unfavorable to him like where he would clearly be the underdog. These are ways that we see wisdom play out in relationships. Or what about musicians? There is only so much that you can do with music theory. There are no new notes that have been recently discovered that have altered the course of music history. And if you think you found a new note, come talk to me because I don't believe you. But if you do, let's go in on it, let's make a fortune. The same notes that people were writing and composing songs with hundreds of years ago are the same notes that are being used today. Knowledge is knowing that there are 88 keys on a piano and that each key corresponds with a specific note. But not everybody who knows the notes and knows all of the theory is a good musician. What makes a good musician is knowing how to take all of that knowledge and compose it into something beautiful, using the relationships of chords and harmonies and melodies and dynamics and production. Wisdom of how to use this theory is what makes beautiful music. Famous theologian Jonathan Edwards has a quote about this topic where he says there's a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet and having a sense of its sweetness. This is the difference of seeing honey and knowing that it's sweet. You see the little beeps doing their hive thing like, yeah, I bet that that tastes really good. The difference of that and actually tasting the honey and feeling it on your tongue and confirming, yes, this is definitely sweet. This is how you move from knowledge to wisdom. You must experience it to move beyond simply knowing. To focus on us for a moment, a beautiful and wise life is one where you relate things to each other. It's where we understand concepts like care for your body equals care for your soul. That when you are eating well, when you are exercising, when you are getting enough sleep, when you are doing things to take care of yourself and things that fill up your cup, physically, things are a little more settled internally. And when we're not doing those things, I don't know about you, but I start freaking out a little bit and I start panicking because I know that things are not right. Wisdom in your life is knowing that resting well enables you to work well. That if you're constantly getting five hours of sleep and you are running around like a chicken with your head cut off, you are not going to be particularly productive. And you are not going to be sharp in your mind to be able to accomplish the things that you need to accomplish well. Wisdom is that cultivating healthy relationships with others helps you care for yourself. That as we invest in community and we get our cup poured into by people that we care about, we are able to take care of ourselves better. There's a balance in harmony in how things work here on earth. And the same thing is true of our relationship with God. To move from knowledge to wisdom, we have to see how all of these things that we read about in scripture actually relate to our lives. Some of you maybe have grown up in the church and you have heard stories from the Bible your entire life. But I'm sure that you can remember moments when they became real to you and that they weren't just a story anymore. I didn't grow up as a Christian, but I had always heard the simple phrase that God loves me. "Hey, God loves you." Didn't really mean anything to me for many years because I didn't know anything else about him and I wasn't trying to be a Christian, so the words were just empty. But there was a day that it became very real to me where I could actually see it and I could feel it and I could sense it. That's wisdom. So what are the markers of this wise life? James gives us a very comprehensive list, but I felt that some additional definition might be helpful. This was taken from theologian William Barkley's commentary on James to better capture the depth of what these words mean. First, he says that James says that true wisdom is pure, meaning that it is cleansed of all ulterior motives and of self that it has become pure enough to see God. True wisdom is peaceable, meaning it has right relationships between people and people and between people and God, that it brings everything into close relationship. True wisdom is gentle or considerate depending on what translation you have, that it knows how to make allowances and when not to stand upon its rights, how to temper justice with mercy and how to extend to others a kindly consideration. True wisdom is willing to yield, meaning that it is never rigid, but willing to listen and skilled in knowing when to yield. True wisdom is full of mercy and good fruits. That means that it is mercy for any person, even if they have brought trouble upon themselves. It's pity that moves us to practical help for people. True wisdom is undivided or impartial. It is based on certainties that come from God through Jesus. It knows its own mind, chooses its course and abides by it. And lastly, true wisdom is without hypocrisy and never pretends to be something that it is not and never acts apart to gain its own ends. I love this list because much like the Miriam Webster definition, there were some things in here that were challenging for me that I don't typically think about. How often do you think about someone who is gentle as being full of wisdom or someone who is impartial? These are not words that typically come to mind for me when I think about wisdom, which is why James's list here is so helpful. We see the picture that wisdom is through these things and it is contrasted with envy and selfish ambition, which leads to disorder. When I think about disorder, I think about my room. When my room is not clean, I'm not doing well. Like I need a clean room to be able to go to bed. There's nothing like that feeling when you have been cleaning all day, you've got your fresh sheets out of the dryer that wood floor of your smells like lemon pledge. It's fantastic and you wrap yourself up at the end of the night in a little burrito and you're like, all right, I'm gonna sleep easy tonight. We see this picture of order being contrasted with disorder that when everything is messy and chaotic around us, it's hard to rest. It's hard to actually feel nourished. And I'm sure we all feel that chomping at the bit when things are not clean. It's I just need to, like I need to clean this. I need to take care of this right now because if things are not ordered, I'm going to feel unwell. And I love having that picture of that with wisdom. It's saying that envy and selfish ambition is actually gonna lead you to that. When you think about your messy room and how much it drives you crazy, that's the disorder in your life that goes on when we're operating out of those areas. But the person who is pure and peaceable and gentle and willing to yield and full of mercy and impartial and without hypocrisy is wise. And that won't lead them to disorder in their life. We'll keep them fully in touch with reality. I want to take a moment here to acknowledge quickly that some of you may hear this and think to yourself, okay, this all sounds great. But it also sounds like an invitation to let people walk all over me and take advantage of me if I'm just full of mercy and willing to yield. And I'm just a very nice, peaceable person. What this is is a challenge to look more like Jesus as he personally embodied all of these traits of wisdom. And in embodying Jesus, that also means that we stand up when things are unjust. That also means that we speak up when we see that things are wrong. We aren't just doormats for people to walk over if we are pursuing this life of peace. And ironically, it's wisdom that we need to know when to make our voice heard and when it's time to stand up and when it's time to yield. So now that we've defined wisdom more clearly, it's like, all right, Daniel, you use some great Olympic analogies, lots of different relationships going on here. That's all great. How am I supposed to get it? Because I'm picking up what you're putting down, but that all sounds too good to be true. I've got good news and bad news. You want the bad news first? Everyone always wants the bad news first. The bad news is this, is that you can't will yourself to become wiser, work really hard to get it. So disappointing. So anti-Western. What do you mean I can't just work harder and get wiser? That sucks. But the good news is that it's actually quite simple. All you have to do is ask for it. If we go back to the beginning of the book of James, we're reminded how we get wisdom. So this is James, chapter one, verses two through five, right at the beginning of the book. It says this, "My brothers and sisters, "whenever you face various trials, "consider it all joy, "because you know that the testing "of your faith produces endurance, "and let endurance complete its work "so that you may be complete and whole, "lacking and nothing. "If any of you is lacking in wisdom, "ask God, who gives generously and ungrudgingly, "and it will be given to you." I'm trying really hard not to oversimplify this here, but these are James's words, not mine. He says, "You want wisdom, ask God. "God loves to give things to his children." It's hard to imagine, let's use sweet little Nora Gustafson here. She goes up to Gabby and Jordan. Our lovely parents says, "Could you guys teach me more about how to become wise?" You say, "No." Get back to us next year. We're really busy right now. We don't want to teach you about wisdom. Maybe some other time. It's hard to imagine that playing out. I'm assuming. Gabby says, "Maybe six months." But do we ask God for wisdom? Do we expect God to give it to us? See, wisdom has to come from God because it resides with him, not down here on earth. By wisdom, the Lord laid the foundations of the world. By understanding he set the heavens in their place. God, in the ultimate act of wisdom, brings order out of chaos and creation. All of the beautiful interconnected relationships between creation and us and us with each other and us with God. All art and stories and things that we think are beautiful in the world come from him. There is wisdom and order behind the universe that we live in. But we must be humble enough to ask for it and to receive it, understanding that we cannot grasp this wisdom and our own power. It doesn't come from us. This is why enduring trials is so vital as James speaks about. And when we endure them as Christians, we speak about them as joyful things, which sounds very counterintuitive and crazy. What do you mean the trials are actually a good thing? The reason is because through hardship and some of the worst things that you could ever imagine happening in your life, God uses them to make us more whole. This was true for me certainly at the beginning of my faith journey, that it is really difficult to be told that you're broken and to actually believe it. What do you mean I'm broken? I've got a lot of cool things going for me. Like my life is fine. I have some bad days where maybe I'm not feeling too great and maybe I do some stupid stuff occasionally, but overall like I'm scoring like 85 out of 100. I'm doing all right. It's hard to be told that you're broken and to believe it. You need to experience it and you need to be brought low. You need to understand that you have limitations and that you have weaknesses. You need to feel that apart from God that you're not really capable of much. This is what moves us to a place of wisdom about who we are and the reality that we exist in. As we experience hardship, we should be pushed towards a place of humility, not of pride. Pride is dumb friends. Humility is wise and I have spent a lot of my life being really prideful about a lot of things and I needed to be humbled and I needed to be brought low and reminded that I'm not right and that I don't really have all the answers that I'm really not capable of that much. Those are tough pills to swallow but they are really great pills to swallow because you learn to give up some of these things. Humility is wise because it is perfectly in touch with reality, counteracting this, I made myself what I am, mentality that is so prominent in our culture as you see displayed in that Nike commercial. I believe that this is where so much of the brokenness in the world comes from. It comes from being out of touch with reality. It's great to accomplish things. It's great to strive for things. It's not that achieving something is bad but we have to understand that we don't really choose our circumstances. We didn't get to choose what family we're born into. We didn't get to choose what century we're born. We didn't get to choose where we were born in the world. We didn't get to choose what ethnicity we are and so many other things. We love to boast and prop ourselves up about things like our master's degree or having a six figure salary. But if you grew up in a fishing village in Vietnam in the 15th century, you probably wouldn't be bragging about your master's degree. Your six figure salary. You'd just be doing what you had to do to get by. Again, this isn't to discredit hard work or to say that accomplishing something is bad but we have to understand that we didn't choose to be here right now. We didn't choose to be what we are. So we shouldn't boast about those things that we accomplish. To bring it back to the Greeks, they were not so foolish to think that the universe and all of its inner workings came from nothing but they didn't understand how to get the wisdom of the universe. They thought that they could grasp it through individual study and contemplation and abstract thinking. But wisdom is not abstract and wisdom actually can be known but we have to relate to it. And this is where the beautiful story of the gospel comes in. This is why the word became flesh through the person of Jesus to dwell among us. The wisdom behind the universe is a person and it's a person that you have to love and have a relationship with. Thank goodness that Jesus is not some abstract idea that I have to contemplate or conjure up in my mind but he is a real person who actually lived and walked the earth and died and rose again. I don't wanna keep hammer in the point home too hard here but God himself is even a relationship. The doctrine of the Trinity which is an essential tenant of the Christian faith that Christians have affirmed for centuries is that we worship one God who exists in three different persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Now I do not have time to break all of the doctrine of the Trinity down because we will be here for two more hours and I know that you don't want that and you have things to do. But we affirm this mystery of the Trinity that God himself is a relationship and that throughout all of eternity he has been a relationship meaning that relationship is the key to nature and grace. The relationship is intrinsic to the universe. And finally we look to the cross. Jesus on the cross related God's law and God's love. God's truth and his love, something that could not be brought together in any other way. In the ultimate act of wisdom Jesus brings these two things together. And as he does that he enables humanity to be brought together with God. Jesus died not so that I might not suffer anymore but that in my suffering I would become like him. Wisdom has come down friends and he extends an invitation to us to follow him so that we too may become wise. I would have never guessed that the good life was that story, that it could be found through pursuing relationship with God and seeking out the wisdom that he has to offer. Life as a pure and peaceable individual sounded not only impossibly out of reach for me but quite boring if I'm honest. There's no way that that could be the key to the good life. I was convinced that my life would look far better looking out for myself and living for the podium moment like those Olympians that we saw in the commercial. I needed to experience the brokenness that came with that way of living to know that there was a better way and that I could search for that better way and God met me in my searching and he was waiting for me inviting me to come on home. So wherever you find yourselves at on this journey this morning my last bit of encouragement as we wrap up would be to be the bee. Look at this lovely little bee. She's so cute, she's nice and fuzzy very vibrant in color. Look at the nice flower that she's on. You see a picture like that and you kind of want to go pet it but then you realize I know if I touch it she's going to sting me and that's going to inevitably and end her life and that's going to be really sad so I'm not going to pet it. But I could admire, I could admire how beautiful that picture is. Puritan preacher Thomas Brooks says that it is not the bees touching of the flower that gathers honey but her abiding for a time upon the flower that draws out the sweet. This is the picture of what it looks like for us. Will we be the bee? Will we abide on this flower that is God and his wisdom? Will we rest in his promises? Will we seek wisdom out and not to be in a rush but to take our time? You can't rush wisdom friends. Would you accept Jesus' invitation to come and abide just like the bee abides upon the flower? Would you ask him to shape you into a person of peace and harmony in a world that so desperately needs it? I needed it. That lovely 16 year old holding the big trophy thinking that life had it made and I was horribly wrong and I needed to understand all of these things that are true about the world. God is inviting you into those things. So wherever you were at on your journey today, I pray that you would be the bee. Let's pray friends. [BLANK_AUDIO]