James 3:14 But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth.
With the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom comes the temptation to be competitive. I see this a lot in the academic world. There is great prestige in rising in rank as a professor, being in an endowed chair, getting good grades, and so on. The same is true in the business world and church work. Competitiveness can be a good thing because it will push us to excel and accomplish great things. James points out the potential problem. We see others who have better positions, better jobs, have written more books, and we envy them. Or, we have goals of becoming one of these “in-crowd” people who seem to have it all made and we want to be like them. Our pursuit of wisdom shifts from being motivated by love to making ourselves look better. All this can blind us to the bigger issues. This verse invites us to look deeply into our hearts and see what our motives are. Have we fallen into the temptation of boasting about our accomplishments and our own creativity? This is a slippery slope that may slowly harden our hearts our blind us to the truth. How do we overcome this? We must be ever vigilant about our motives and humble before God as people in need of God’s grace and forgiveness.
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