Today, I am reading and commenting on  James 1-5.

James begins his letter by writing that if anyone lacks wisdom they should ask God for it, and God will give it to them generously.  However, when we ask we must believe and not doubt.  Later in today’s passage James writes that fights and arguments among believers occur because we desire and do not have.  He goes on to tell us that we do not have because we do not ask.  Finally, James writes that even when we ask we do not receive because we ask in order to please ourselves rather than in order to please God.  James makes it clear that we should allow godly wisdom to guide us in asking God to give us things.  At the beginning of the letter, he tells us that we should ask God for wisdom, following that up by telling us that God gives generously to all.  Then later James writes about distinguishing between true wisdom, the wisdom of God, and the wisdom of this world.  The latter contains envy and selfish ambition.  The wisdom of this world is about promoting oneself either to fame or to wealth (or to both).  On the other hand, true wisdom leads one to humbly do good deeds peaceably, with purity, and impartiality.  So, James tells us to request wisdom from God, and then to pray for whatever that wisdom leads us to desire.  If we have faith that God will answer our prayers offered with His wisdom, He will grant us our requests.  And how do we know that we have the faith needed to obtain that which we desire?  Because we act on the basis of that faith.  Or as I have written from time to time about Jesus’ statement that if we have faith no larger than a mustard seed if we tell a mountain to move into the sea it will move.  If we genuinely have faith that what God desires will come about by a mountain moving into the sea, we will pray for it to move and then grab a shovel and start moving it.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.