Following God's wisdom

James 1:5-8 (NLT)
5 If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking. 6 But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind. 7 Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. 8 Their loyalty is divided between God and the world, and they are unstable in everything they do.

In these verses James, the half-brother of Jesus, tells us God is generous to give us wisdom when we ask for it. It’s not a request God turns down, but is a promise He keeps. There is a condition to our request. The condition is we must place our faith alone in God and not waver from it. We cannot be divided between God’s wisdom and the wisdom of the world.


We all have someone in our lives we love and yet they can do some small thing that makes us feel rejected. I love my mother. She is a kind and very sweet person. However, there are times when she will call for my advice, then go on to ask the advice of others and then make her own choice. I acknowledge most of us probably do the same thing. We seek out knowledge; then we reject sound ideas and choose something of our own pleasing. I remember a car my mother was purchasing. She called me with the details and asked my opinion whether it would be a good purchase. I enjoy researching so I found out everything about the car. The car was rated well, it had a great expected service life, and the asking price was below average. I called my mother and said it would be a really good purchase. Later on she calls me back to say she got the car. I’m feeling good I was able to give her some wisdom; but that feeling didn’t last long. She informed me it was a different car, not the one she called me about. She tells me about the used car she just bought. Then she asks, “Do you think it was a good purchase?” All I could say was, “I have no clue mom.” I didn’t know anything about the car, its reliability or its price. When I went back and looked everything up I had to tell my mom she could have gotten a new car for the price she paid for a used car. She got a good car, but the price was unreasonable. It was an “as is purchase” so the car was hers. She missed out on the knowledge I passed onto her.

Hopefully you can see God’s point in this story. If we are going to ask for His wisdom, His advice, His Knowledge we need to be ready to accept and follow it. We don’t need to be looking elsewhere and end up with something less than God planned for us.