Scroll down past Sermon for more info
Nobleton Community Church
29084 Sentinel Street PO Box 224
Nobleton, Florida 34661
Rev. Paul V. Lehmann, Pastor
813-389-8683
Nobletoncommunitychurch.org
info@nobletoncommunitychurch.org
OUR VISION IS:
To experience SPIRIT-FILLED WORSHIP AND PRAYER
To be involved in EVANGELISM, DISCIPLINING AND TRAINING PEOPLE
To use our SPIRITUAL GIFTS
To SERVE AND REACH PEOPLE FOR CHRIST, BOTH
“ACROSS THE STREET AND ACROSS THE WORLD”
Nobleton Community Church
Date September 7, 2025
Text James 3:13-4:10 (Reading verses 13-17 of chapter 3 and verses 1-10 of chapter 4)
Pastor Paul Lehmann
I’m sure that: You have heard that we use only 10% of our brains at any given time. There was a movie that came out in 2011 entitled “Limitless.” I never saw the movie, but the review of it says that it takes that idea and runs with it, spinning a story about a writer who takes a secret experimental drug that allows him to use 100% of his mind. This causes him, until the drug wears off, to be the perfect version of himself, incredibly creative and attentive. Everything he’s ever read or seen is instantly organized in his mind and available for him to use in whatever way he needs. While he’s taking the pills, he’s such a radiant and appealing person that people are immediately drawn to him. And with his entire mind focused like a laser, he’s able to grasp the details of complex business situations and outguess the stock market, a skill he uses to great financial success.
Of course, there’s a wrinkle—-bad guys who want to get their hands on this drug and kill anyone else who has it. The movie apparently is an action-thriller that keeps you engaged until its surprising end. If nothing else, the movie presents one vision of what any of us might be able to do and how dazzling we’d be if only we could use 100% of our brains.
But here’s the problem. Turns out, we’re already using most of our brains! The old assertion that we are using only 10% is a myth. Now that we have better technology —like PET scans and MRIs—for studying brain activity, researchers have found that any mentally complex activity uses many areas of the brain, and over a day, just about every part of our brain gets a workout. Other evidence that the entire brain is operating most of the time, makes a devastating impact on us to discover what even a small amount of brain damage has on a person.
Our text in James is basically saying, however, that even if we’re brain-smart, we might still be dumb—we might still do really stupid things. For instance there is a list that was published showing the 10 top stupid (or dumb) things people do.
- Cannon ball into a two-foot deep pool.
- Cut coupons and never use them.
- Order diet soda a t a fast food restaurant.
- Wash clothes without separating the whites and colors
- Wash clothes without putting soap in the machine.
- Park in a Tow Away Zone for two minutes and then wonder why you got a parking ticket.
- Not vote and then complain about the president.
- Gossip about people who gossip
- Marry a person you met at a bar and then wonder why it’s not working out.
- Pick up a porcupine.
In our reading,
James talks of wisdom that is from above and wisdom that is earthbound, and he makes his remarks to Christian believers. In verse 16, James speaks of “disorder,”
About that: commentator Thorsten Moritz says;
“It is a reference to the schizophrenic situation in which Christians who are double-minded find themselves. They claim possession of wisdom from above on the one hand, while on the other hand they display the fruits of wisdom from below.” Earthbound, human smart isn’t always very smart.
James, who was very concerned about how Christians behaved with one another in the faith community, saw that the community was fit and vigorous only when it was hyperlinked to divine wisdom. James’s distinction between the two kinds of smart is especially clear in
The Message –Eugene Peterson’s New Testament in contemporary English. James 3:13-17 reads like this:
“It’s the way you live, not the way you talk, that counts. Mean-spirited ambition isn’t wisdom. Boasting that you are wise isn’t wisdom. Twisting the truth to make yourselves sound wise isn’t wisdom. It’s the furthest thing from wisdom—it’s animal cunning, devilish conniving. Whenever you’re trying to look better than others or get the better of others, things fall apart and everyone ends up at the other’s throats. Real wisdom, God’s wisdom, begins with a holy life and is characterized by getting along with others. It is gentle and reasonable, overflowing with mercy and blessings, not hot one day and cold the next, not two-faced. You can develop a healthy, robust community that lives right with God, and enjoy its results only if you do the hard work of getting along with each other, treating each other with dignity and honor.”
When it’s put that plainly, we might want to say that this so-called earthbound smarts is not smarts at all, and James acknowledges that when he says.
“It’s the furthest thing from wisdom—it’s animal cunning, devilish conniving.” But he’s meeting people where they are, where even some Christians viewed people who were getting ahead by mean-spirited boasting, twisting the truth and pitting one person against another, as cunningly wise.
It may sound strange to say that even some Christians admired such persons, but sometimes there is a begrudging admiration for the cons among us, or the bullies who get away with their behavior because of their brilliance in other ways. Steve Jobs comes to mind. He probably was not a Christian, but:
On some level—we admire at least what he accomplished before he died? His biographer, Walter Isaacson, compares him to Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), who was known as the “Wizard of Menlo Park.” He was a prolific inventor a little more than a hundred years ago. Edison was a 19th-century Steve Jobs, the Genius (Jobs hated the word) of Silicon Valley. Jobs changed the world we live in, as did Edison. We can’t go through a single hour anymore without being affected in some way by a product Jobs created.
Yet as smart as he was, he was a beast of a human being to work with or work for. Isaacson cites colleagues, friends, family, and acquaintances, and the adjectives that come rolling off the tongue include autocratic, controlling, changeable, temperamental, cold, absent, obsessive, distant, passionate, rebellious, and so on. He shouted, he yelled, he bad-mouthed people, and he misled. He was a jerk. “Velvety diplomacy was…not a part of his repertoire,” writes Isaacson.
He was also only one of the most influential people of the past 40 years. His mantra might be identified by the ad campaign Apple ran for some time: Think Different. The grammatically incorrect spelling was intentional. It was a choice to challenge unconventional thinking.
Jobs knew that for Apple to succeed, the company had to not only have a kind of smarts that was unlike its competitors, but that it had to encourage its customers to tap into their own creativity. He also spotted the wisdom in the idea that “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication—a word which itself is rooted in the Greek word for wisdom, sophia.”
So, isn’t it true that we’re sometimes in awe of people who, on the basis of their brain-power, carve out a moneymaking niche for themselves? People who think differently, like Mark Zuckerberg launching Facebook from his college dorm room, jobless J.K. Rowling writing the Harry Potter series from a story idea she thought of, and young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founding Apple in Jobs’ garage. Isn’t there a kind of wisdom that many of us envy? Or how many of us have said something like, “I wish I’d had the wisdom to invest in ————–some successful company—-like McDonald’s in 1958 or shortly after. Or Walmart when it first started. Or more recently—Google or Bit coin.
What we get from our text is that Christians don’t automatically get a dose of heavenly smarts. The other kind of wisdom—the world’s wisdom—to often predominates in the community of faith.
Commenting on this passage, Luke Timothy Johnson says that James “is addressing members of the Christian community who gather in the name of Jesus and profess the faith of the glorious Lord Jesus Christ, but whose attitudes and actions are not yet fully in friendship with God.”
FOR US IT IS CLEAR THAT SOMETIMES,
OUR ATTITUDES AND ACTIONS ARE
NOT YET FULLY IN FRIENDSHIP WITH GOD.
Johnson is not condemning this congregation, but simply recognizing that conversion does not remove the ambiguity of life and that complete consistency “is not given by a first commitment. It is slowly and painfully won through many conversions.” He also says,
“There is always double-mindedness, even among those who truly want to know God and be friends of God. The wisdom from below is not easy to abandon or avoid, precisely because:
The ‘way of the world is,’ inscribed not only in the language and literature of our surrounding culture but also in our very hearts.”
The true story is told of this “Bowery bum” as he describes himself, wonders drunk as a skunk into a downtown mission. He’s come to the mission for the free dinner but stays for the service, and when the preacher gives an altar call, this man, Frank, goes forward, where a counselor prays with him. He says that night was the big turnaround for him as he repented of his sin and received Christ into his life. Although it doesn’t always happen this way, Frank doesn’t ever drink again after going to the altar that night.
But he says that in many ways, his conversion was only a start. He felt that his sins had been forgiven, but in most ways, he was the same self-centered, profane, bigoted, uncaring person he’d been—except that now, he was attending worship services in a church where he prayed and started listening for God
. There came a time when:
He realized that he had to give himself completely over to the power and control of the Holy Spirit, or he would just keep on being this saved man, who continues to walk in his carnal flesh. So one by one, God revealed things to Frank that he needed to give up or rethink or do differently or take on if he was to continue following Jesus, and growing in His grace.
Little by little, he began to make those adjustments—more changes—but he never said or even felt like he had “arrived,” but he had a sense of where—and toward whom—he was headed.
The point I want us to understand is not the nature of Frank’s conversion, but that:
He didn’t get “divine wisdom” all at once, but after he “got saved,” (and the alcohol problem was a big one to be delivered from), he was filled with the Holy Spirit in a crisis experience of realization that he had to surrender everything to the Lord. Then his spiritual growth and his knowledge of the Lord became progressive. The appropriation of wisdom that is from above is a lifelong learning event, and that should not discourage us, but animate us. C.S. Lewis, puts it this way using a house—-a lifelong building project—for a metaphor:
Imagine yourself as a living house. God come in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what he is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on…. But presently, he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts and does not seem to make sense. What on Earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage; but he is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself.
If current brain research is correct, we’re already using most of our brains each day. But that doesn’t keep us from being double-minded.
Maybe we’re giving only 10% of our thinking power toward living a holy life. That doesn’t disqualify us from discipleship—-but it gives us lots of room for growth…and lots of room for Jesus to build on. We need to give 100% of not only our thinking power but :
We need to give 100% of ourselves to Him, so He can wholly sanctify us, purify us, and take control of our lives. He wants to walk with us, and live His life through us.
Won’t you let him do that this morning?
That’s the wisdom He imparts to us.
James tells us that in order to come to this place we must resist the devil, who will do everything he possibly can to keep us from this. But when we take the step he runs away.
When we walk close to the Lord, He comes closer and closer to us.