E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
Reihe: Preaching the Word
Hughes James (ESV Edition)
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3849-0
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Faith That Works
E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
Reihe: Preaching the Word
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3849-0
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
R. Kent Hughes (DMin, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is senior pastor emeritus of College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, and former professor of practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Hughes is also a founder of the Charles Simeon Trust, which conducts expository preaching conferences throughout North America and worldwide. He serves as the series editor for the Preaching the Word commentary series and is the author or coauthor of many books. He and his wife, Barbara, live in Spokane, Washington, and have four children and an ever-increasing number of grandchildren.
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AN UNKNOWN AUTHOR of another century wrote this timeless poem:
My life is but a weaving,
between my Lord and me;
I cannot choose the colours.
He worketh steadily.
Ofttimes He weaveth sorrow
and I in foolish pride,
Forget He sees the upper
and I the under side.
Not till the loom is silent
and the shuttles cease to fly,
Shall God unroll the canvas
and explain the reason why,
The dark threads are as needful
in the Weaver’s skillful hand,
As the threads of gold and silver,
in the pattern He has planned.
This old poem correctly expresses the truth that in this life we will never fully understand the particular blending of joys and woes in our lives because we see only the underside of the tapestry. Only when death stills the loom and we stand before God will he turn the canvas over and allow us, to our eternal delight, to see what he has done.
However, we must not think we cannot understand anything of what God is doing or that the mixture of trials and joys in our lives is totally inscrutable, for it is not so. In James’ opening words (1:1–4) he informs the suffering church that testing develops perseverance (spiritual fortitude) and that as they tough it out they will develop a dynamic maturity, becoming “perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (1:4b). We can understand something of the process, and this is why he has called the suffering church to “Count it all joy” (1:2a).
The problem immediately apparent to any who have experienced the various trials of life is that while you are in the midst of them it is hard to understand what is going on and to believe they are for your benefit. It is easy to be the wise pastor assuring the hurting that they are being matured and to “hang tough.” But it is another thing when I am the one being tested! It’s much easier to say to someone else, “Count it all joy . . . when you meet trials of various kinds” than to joyfully embrace my own angst.
James, who was no armchair general, understood this, and in the closely connected verses that follow (vv. 5–8),1 he instructs those who are suffering on how to get the wisdom necessary to plow victoriously through life’s many trials. James, brother of one whose life was filled with trials and who died at the hands of murderers, is telling us how to lasso the bucking, uncontrollable trials of life and ride them to wisdom and triumphant spirituality. What he says ought to command our undivided attention.
Wisdom for the Asking (v. 5)
When we are in the midst of trials, we may reflexively cry out, “God, why me? There is nothing redemptive in my trial! Why does it go on?” Or, “Lord, get me out of this.” But how many of us say, while being tested, “Lord, I need wisdom—please use this trial to increase my wisdom and understanding of you, your people, and life”? But that is exactly what James commands: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God” (v. 5a). What is this wisdom for which we are to ask? The idea becomes clear when we see what it is not.
It is not knowledge. Wisdom is far more than the accumulation of information and intellectual perception. The fact is, man, through his vast accumulation of knowledge, has learned to travel faster than sound, but displays his need of wisdom by going faster and faster in the wrong direction! Man has amassed a huge store of information about the world, but shows his abysmal lack of wisdom by failing to live any better in the world.2
Professor Allan Bloom touched on this in his best-selling book The Closing of the American Mind:
My grandparents were ignorant people by our standards, and my grandfather held only lowly jobs. But their home was spiritually rich because all the things done in it, not only what was specifically ritual, found their origin in the Bible’s commandments, and their explanation in the Bible’s stories and the commentaries on them, and had their imaginative counterparts in the deeds of the myriad of exemplary heroes. My grandparents found reasons for the existence of their family and the fulfillment of their duties in serious writings, and they interpreted their special sufferings with respect to a great and ennobling past . . . [and then comes the punch] I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American way, all of whom are M.D.s or Ph.D.s, have any comparable learning. When they talk about heaven and earth, the relations between men and women, parents and children, the human condition, I hear nothing but clichés, superficialities, the material of satire.3
Wisdom, therefore, in distinction to knowledge, is understanding for living. And Biblical wisdom is understanding for living that surpasses earthly wisdom. It is temporally and eternally practical. A. T. Robertson, the towering genius of Greek grammar, calls wisdom “the practical use of knowledge.”4 F. J. A. Hort, in his painstaking commentary, terms it “that endowment of heart and mind which is needed for right conduct in life.”5 J. H. Ropes describes it as “the supreme and divine quality of the soul which man knows and practical righteousness.”6 And Ralph Martin in his study states, “For the Jewish mind wisdom meant practical righteousness in everyday living.”7
The Scriptures teach that this practical wisdom is rooted in the fear/reverence of God. Job asked the question, “But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?” (Job 28:12). Then, as he variously discussed its whereabouts, he said in verse 15, “It cannot be bought for gold, and silver cannot be weighed as its price,” and similarly in verse 18b, “the price of wisdom is above pearls.” Further, he said in verses 23, 24, “God understands the way to it, and he knows its place. For he looks to the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens.” And finally he concluded in verse 28, “And [God] said to man, ‘Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom.’” That proclamation is a persistent motif in the Old Testament. Consider the following Scriptures:
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom;
all those who practice it have a good understanding.
His praise endures forever! (Psalms 111:10)
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge;
fools despise wisdom and instruction. (Proverbs 1:7)
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,
and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight. (Proverbs 9:10)
Because of this we must understand that Einstein may have been a genius in atomic theory, but if he had no fear of God he was a man without wisdom—which at one point in his life he indeed was. During a conference attended by outstanding churchmen and scientists, Albert Einstein read a paper in which he said: “In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal god.”8 God’s Word says, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1).
Wisdom begins with a healthy reverence for God. For the Christian, this is personally connected with Christ, “who became to us wisdom from God” (1 Corinthians 1:30). Jesus Christ is the perfect expression of the wisdom of God, and if we know him, we receive and are changed by his wisdom.
This practical knowledge for living is a gift from God. While we have its beginning in our reverence for God and a further endowment as we come alive in Christ, he has even more wisdom to give us—practical wisdom that will enable us to ride the trials of life to new spiritual heights.
The thrust of James’ language in verse 5 is that God is just waiting for us to ask: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.” In the original the phrase “God, who gives” graphically emphasizes giving as a grand characteristic of God. It reads literally, “let him ask the constantly giving God.”9 The Scriptures are replete with this facet of the character of God. “He himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25). “He gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). God is like a pitcher tilted toward his children, just waiting to pour wisdom over the trial-parched landscape of their lives, if they will but ask.
Notice how James says God gives—“who gives generously to all without reproach.” God will pour wisdom over us without putting us down or demeaning us. It is easy to wear out our human benefactors after they have repeatedly given to us, but not so with God. We will never encounter divine irritation, like “I gave you a head, why don’t you use it?” or “What did you do with what I most recently gave you? Have you ever been thankful?” Rather, his response is, “I’m so glad you asked. Here it comes!”
The “trials of...
