Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom.
James 3:13
Answered With a Life
To understand what James 3:13 is about, you have to understand what James has been talking about for the twelve verses before this one. All of chapter 3 up to here is about the tongue. He warns that not many of us should become teachers, because teachers get judged more strictly. He compares the tongue to a bit in a horse's mouth, to a rudder on a ship, to a spark that sets a forest on fire. Then he says something that should make us pay more attention. A spring can't produce both fresh water and salt water, and a fig tree can't bear olives, so why does the same mouth produce praise and cursing?
That's all the context James has provided up to this point. Who is wise and understanding among you?
After twelve verses about talking, you might expect the answer to be about talking well. It isn't. He says, let them show it by their good life. James answers a question about wisdom with a life instead of a sentence, and he does it right after telling us how little our sentences can be trusted.
Then he adds what makes it hard. Deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. Humility isn't a prerequisite for wisdom here. It's what wisdom produces. So if you want to know whether your wisdom came from God, you don't need to check how you sound. You check whether it's made you humble. James spells it out in the next few verses. Bitter envy and selfish ambition aren't wisdom from heaven at all, and the wisdom that is from heaven is peace-loving, considerate, and full of mercy.
I wrote about this from another angle in Ask for Wisdom, where James says God gives wisdom generously to anyone who asks him. This verse is the other half. He gives it, and then it shows in us.
The Humility Test
You can see it in small moments, long before anybody would call it wisdom.
You can see it in the person who has the better argument but prefers to preserve the relationship than win the argument. You can see it in the one who says "I was wrong about that" even when nobody was going to make them. You can see it in the friend who knows the answer and asks a question instead, so the other person gets to find it. You can see it in the coworker who does the unglamorous part of the job and never mentions it.
None of that seems impressive in the moment. James is describing a wisdom you'd have to watch someone for a month to notice, compared to cleverness you can spot in ten seconds.
My encouragement to you today is to pick the room where you're most likely to be right, and to walk into it looking for a way to be gentle instead. That isn't a smaller ambition than being wise. It's what being wise looks like from the outside.
Prayer
Father, thank you that you give wisdom to anyone who asks you for it. Help us to want the wisdom you actually give, the kind that makes us gentler and easier to live with, rather than the kind that just wins. Where we've used what we know to get the upper hand, forgive us. Show us today where our good life can say something our words can't. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.