What does James 3:16 mean?

The world's definition of success is getting whatever you want out of life. According to this attitude, each person should look around and decide what will make themselves happy—pleasure, money, power—and then make a plan to go get it. Whatever it takes, in order to get that result, is worth it, according to the wisdom of the world. The problem is that this wisdom runs on the engine of human envy and self-serving ambition. In the previous verses, James made clear that such so-called-wisdom isn't God's wisdom.

Worldliness, this false wisdom, promises to give us the desires of our hearts. Instead, it fills our hearts with envy. We're never really satisfied, because we learn to constantly covet what others have that we don't. And it fills our hearts with selfish ambition to do whatever is required to get what we want. James points out that the result of everyone focusing on themselves, and working for themselves, is disorder. Billions of personal agendas compete with each other, creating a form of chaos that seems both normal and exhausting to all of us.

The second result of worldly wisdom is every evil or vile practice. Why? Our self ambition will eventually require us to hurt someone else to get what we want. It encourages us to make excuses for our selfishness. It makes us hard and resistant to correction. Our standards for what is acceptable will eventually need to be compromised to keep us moving onward and upward, working under the world's system.

When everyone lives according to this worldly wisdom, pain and destruction become the norm. Self-sacrifice for the good of others becomes the rare exception. Consider the classic summary of evolution by natural selection: "nature, red in tooth and claw." If personal achievement is the most important goal, all sorts of immorality is implicitly on the table.

As James will spell out in the following two verses, those who follow the self-sacrificing wisdom of heaven experience a very different reality.