From The One Year Devotional Prayer Book by Johnny Hunt
Heavenly Father, please give me Your wisdom and grace throughout this day. Fill me with Your Holy Spirit so that I may be pleasing to You in all my ways. Thank You for using me as a reflection of Your glory! In Jesus’ name, Amen.
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. – James 3:17, 18
This great text had as its author “James, a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.” While James was a common name in the first century (and there are several opinions as to who the author exactly was), the general consensus by most biblical scholars is that the author was James the half brother of Jesus. He had been a skeptic about Jesus and His claims prior to the Resurrection, but in a dramatic reversal, as a result of the risen Lord’s appearance to him, James put his faith in Christ and assumed leadership in the Jerusalem church.
Knowing this fact, James had the opportunity to observe the Person and life of Jesus firsthand. He saw Jesus in every possible circumstance. He was able to recall just how Jesus reacted to every situation. What he saw in Jesus was wisdom “from above” that he described this way: pure, peaceable, gentle, submissive, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial, and sincere.
It is for that reason that God gave us His Holy Spirit to bear these same attributes in our lives. What a remarkable, supernatural transformation this transaction is. Therefore, we, above everything else, must be focused on our walk with Christ. The Book of James is a book of Christian practicalities, but it is rooted in the reality that wisdom and all of the other virtues mentioned here are “from above.” They are those elements that God, for the glory of Jesus, bestows on all who request them! And our God “gives to all liberally” (James 1:5), so ask boldly!
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