[Week 27] Wisdom Was Never the Point (James 1:5)

This week, we are memorizing James 1:5.

• Check out my latest Scripture Memorization song here: James 1:5
• If you're new here, see my introduction to this series here.

Now if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given to him.
— James 1:5 (CSB)

What's the Most Important Word Here?

Last week we dove into James 1:2-4: trials, and the endurance and maturity that they are meant to grow within us. Which leaves a fair question hanging in the air. How? How do you endure something you didn't choose and don't understand and come out wiser instead of just wearier? Fortunate for us, James doesn't make us wait for the answer. It's the very next verse, and it all hinges on a single word.

I was twelve when God showed me the most important word in James 1:5. I remember reading it and just sort of staring at it. "Could that really be true?" In my childlike mind, I figured that if God said it in his Word, he meant it, and I should act on it. And it has shaped my life more than just about any other verse since.

Read it once more, slowly. Shockingly, the most important word isn't wisdom. Wisdom is the gift, what we all wish we had and know we need. But it isn't the word that changes anything.

The word that changes everything here is ask.

Now, James could say all sorts of things here that the world usually says: "study your way to wisdom", "wait long enough and it will find you", or even "rack up enough life experience and one day you'll be wise". Instead, he just simply says: ask God.

And that's what I wanted to focus on today. All we have to do is ask.

Wisdom Is Calling and Nobody Comes

Of course, if we're going to discuss wisdom, we've got to go back to Proverbs. And here's one of my favorite things about how he describes wisdom: it is not hidden, nor locked in a vault, and not silently waiting for the "spiritually elite" to discover it. Solomon paints a striking picture:

Wisdom calls out in the street;
she makes her voice heard in the public squares.
She cries out above the commotion;
she speaks at the entrance of the city gates.
"How long, inexperienced ones, will you love ignorance?
How long will you mockers enjoy mocking
and you fools hate knowledge?
If you respond to my warning,
then I will pour out my spirit on you
and teach you my words."
— Proverbs 1:20-23 (CSB)

Do you see that? Solomon's use of "Lady Wisdom" as a metaphor here makes it so easy for us to get lost in this metaphor and see a lady standing there, but that's not the point. Wisdom is standing in the busiest, most public place in the ancient world, raising her voice above the noise, and nobody stops to listen. She's not whispering in a corner. She's shouting at the crossroads, where many would come from all over to do business or travel. And the question she calls out is devastating: "How long, inexperienced ones, will you love ignorance?"¹

So the problem with wisdom has never been the supply. Our good God put wisdom in the most public place imaginable and has been offering it freely since the beginning.

And the problem is that nobody stops to listen. Nobody stops to ask for her help.

So, if wisdom is given freely, and she's standing in the street calling our name, why do we keep passing by?

Why We Walk Past

If we answer honestly, there are lots of reasons why we don't take up Wisdom on her offer, but if we dig deeper, they all point to one single source for why we don't ask.

James starts this with, "if anyone lacks wisdom", and his charge is that we ask for help. But, needing help means lacking, and lacking feels like exposure of our weakness. And rather than sit in it and own it, we reach for the most respectable cover we own, self-sufficiency, which is really pride. However, pride was never the root of this. What's really going on here is that we feel shame for "not being enough" or "not having it all together". Shame is the root.

And here is something I learned about that word, shame, that I have never been able to unsee. The Hebrew for shame is bosh (בּוֹשׁ), and at its root it has nothing to do with "I feel bad about myself." It means the disappointment of putting your full weight on something and feeling it give way. Picture a caravan, days into the desert, walking toward a riverbed they have been counting on, only to arrive and find it dry. That is the exposure we are so desperate to cover. Not that we might look weak, but that the thing we leaned on to hold us up, our own selves, has run dry. Bosh (shame) is what we feel of self-reliance the moment the water is gone.²

Chip Dodd, a Christian counselor, covers this in his book, The Voice of the Heart:

Shame tells us: "I am limited." "I am mistake-ridden." "I have some answers, but I don't have all of the answers." "I need you to help me; I can't do this alone." "We need each other". Shame is the emotional and spiritual recognition of the potential to fail and to do harm, to succeed and to love.³

But shame carries a gift, if we let it do its work. That gift is humility.³ Humility is simply admitting the truth about what you lack. While the proud already "have it handled", the humble admit they're short and open their hands. Grace runs to the open hand. James says it plainly two chapters later: "God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble." (James 4:6).

James built the whole instruction on the admission that we "lack wisdom". You never reach the asking until you've named the lack. Naming it is not weakness, it's the doorway to strength. Proverbs even says it out loud: "with humility comes wisdom." (Proverbs 11:2). The very thing you've been trying to manufacture on your own is waiting on the other side of the admission you've been avoiding. Even the wisest man who ever lived started in exactly that spot.

The One Who Actually Asked

In the whole Old Testament, one man stands out as the person who actually took God up on the offer, of course, I'm talking about King Solomon.

Picture the moment. Solomon is young, newly crowned, standing in the place of a father whose shoes no one could fill. He has just inherited a nation, that his brother even tried to steal from him, and he has no idea how to lead. That night, at Gibeon, God appears to him in a dream and says something almost unbelievable in its openness: "Ask. What should I give you?" (1 Kings 3:5)

No restrictions. No fine print. Just Anything.

Think about everything Solomon could have named: power over his enemies, a long life, wealth that would outlast his grandchildren. Every king before him and after him would have likely grabbed any one of those without blinking.

However, Solomon said this:

So give your servant a receptive heart to judge your people and to discern between good and evil. For who is able to judge this great people of yours?
— 1 Kings 3:9 (CSB)

And look at how God responds: "Now it pleased the Lord that Solomon had requested this."(1 Kings 3:10). God was pleased. So pleased that he gave Solomon more than he asked for: riches, honor, and a name no king would ever match. God responds in verses 11-12 by granting Solomon "a wise and understanding heart, so that there has never been anyone like you before and never will be again."

But here's what I don't want you to miss. Solomon is not remarkable because of what he asked for. He's remarkable because he asked at all. In a world full of people walking past Wisdom while she shouts in the street, one man stopped and said, "I need what you're offering."

How Much Should We Ask

So, if recognizing our own limitations is the first step and asking God for wisdom is the second, here's the question that comes next: if we ask God once for wisdom, isn't that enough?

Well, generations later after King Solomon, Jesus picks up the exact same thread and pulls it further. In the Sermon on the Mount:

Keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened to you.
— Matthew 7:7 (CSB)

I love the way the CSB renders this, it really captures what's going on in the original Greek. It's not just "ask." It's keep asking. The Greek verb is aiteo (αἰτέω), and Jesus puts it in the present imperative, meaning continuous action. The same verb and tense that James uses.⁴ We aren't told to ask once and get back to work. Ask and keep asking. Search and keep searching. Knock and keep knocking.

And notice the progression in it. Asking is simply opening your mouth and making the request. Seeking is getting up and pursuing what you asked for. And knocking is putting your hand on a door and trying it. And if we follow Jesus' words, you likely won't find the right door on the first try, so you go knock on a different door until you are given what you ask. But it all starts with the ask, and the ask is the most important step that makes everything else possible.

Jesus pressed the same point with a story. A widow, no husband to speak for her and no leverage to force anyone's hand, kept bringing her case to a judge who feared neither God nor people. She had nothing going for her but persistence. So she came back, and came back, and came back, and back and back and back, until the man who cared about nothing finally caved, not because his heart softened, but because she would not stop.⁵

Then Jesus turns the parable on its head. God is not that judge. He is the opposite. If even a corrupt, indifferent man will eventually answer someone who keeps asking, how much more will a Father who actually wants to give answer you?

So look at the kind of God who is on the receiving end of your request for wisdom. James says he "gives to all generously and ungrudgingly." The word for "generously" is haplos (ἁπλῶς), and it means more than "a lot." It means with a single, undivided heart, no mixed motives, no quiet calculation of what he gets back from you.⁶ And "ungrudgingly" renders a word that means without reproach. He will not shame or embarrass you for asking. He will not bring up the last time you dropped the ball. He will not sigh when you show up again with the same request.⁷

Sit with that for a second. You know what it feels like to ask someone for help and feel the heat of their irritation. You know what it's like to need something from a person who makes you feel small for needing it. God is not that. He gives with an open hand and a glad, warm heart, every single time.

Start Where You Are Now

I told you I was twelve when I learned this. Here is the rest of it. The night I understood I could simply ask, I did, right there before I fell asleep in my bed. And the next night. And most nights since, for decades now. I've asked pulling into the office and pulling back into my driveway. I've asked over my kids at the dinner table and again when I tucked them in. Plenty of mornings I forgot until I was halfway out the door or in the middle of a hard problem, and I asked anyway. I have never once done it perfectly, and that was never the point.

I can't hand you a before-and-after. I can't show you who I would be without it. But I can tell you that asking for wisdom has quietly shaped nearly every decision that ever mattered to me, and I would not trade it for anything I could have asked for instead.

So here is what I want to leave you with, a challenge for you.

For the next thirty days, pick one real situation in your life, something you genuinely don't know how to handle, and ask God for wisdom about it every night. Set a reminder on your phone to help. Then write it down: the situation, the day you started, what you asked. Then listen and watch what God does, and write down what comes: the "random" thought when you're driving to work, the clarity in a conversation you didn't expect, the door that opens or quietly shuts.

For the next thirty days, for one situation, ask God every night.

Ask him. He's already said yes. Now go expect an answer.

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References

Cover Photo by Mrg Simon on Unsplash