Last night and this morning, I was reading in the books of Mark and James in the King James translation of the New Testament. In James 1:5, I was struck again by the familiar message:
“If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God…”
Few members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would be unfamiliar with this verse—it is the very scripture that inspired Joseph Smith to go into the grove and pray, leading to the First Vision and the beginning of the Restoration.
But as I read further in the chapter, I came across another verse that caught me by surprise—one I hadn’t connected with that same passage before. James 1:27 reads:
“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”
Being a person in recovery from alcohol and other addictive substances, these two verses seemed to glow on the page. They spoke not just to spiritual insight, but to a lived experience of healing, connection, and action.
In Step 11 of the Twelve Steps, we are encouraged to:
“Seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”
This is the essence of James 1:5—asking God for wisdom. It is foundational to recovery.
Then in Step 12, we are invited to put that spiritual awakening into practice:
“Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”
To me, this is exactly what James is teaching: Ask. Receive. Do.
Or put another way: Seek divine wisdom, then live it through compassionate service and personal integrity.
This principle echoes beyond religion into philosophy and scripture.
Socrates once said, “I know that I know nothing.” That statement isn’t despairing—it’s the beginning of wisdom, because it invites humility and inquiry.
In Mosiah 2:17, King Benjamin teaches:
“When ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.”
This ties directly to James 1:27—pure religion is service, not status.
T.S. Eliot once wrote:
“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”
Wisdom, then, is not just knowing—it is a posture before God and others. It leads us to treat people as ends, never as means. It leads us to love.
James 1:5 isn’t a promise of private enlightenment for our own gain. It’s a calling to become instruments of God’s love in a suffering world.
Asking for wisdom (verse 5) leads to living a life of selfless love (verse 27).
Without love, wisdom is empty.
Paul put it plainly in 1 Corinthians 13:3:
“And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.”
May we all seek and find, learn and do—and in doing so, help to establish covenants of healing and hope in this dispensation.
Good morning.
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