Tuesday: Trust in the Lord with all your heart;do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take. Proverbs 3:5-6 (NLT) My child, listen to what I say, and treasure my commands. Tune your ears to wisdom,and concentrate on understanding. Cry out for insight, and ask for understanding. Search for them as you would for silver; seek them like hidden treasures. Matthew 7:24-27 (NCV) Reflection: Last week we talked about the law of sowing and reaping. I am grateful for this law, even if its lessons are sometimes uncomfortable. It’s freeing to be able to learn from our successes and failures. The results aren’t personal. Poor choices produce unfortunate consequences as consistently as poison ivy seeds produce plants that result in itching and scratching. But what I enjoy even more than learning from my own mistakes, is learning from someone else’s. The cost is so much less (for me anyways…) and the lesson is just as valuable. Wisdom works. If we search for wisdom and practice it, we can seriously decrease the lessons that we have to learn the hard way. It still takes an unfortunate result to change my mind when my thinking gets stubborn, but listening to wisdom spares me a lot of trial and error. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel so much. The proverbs talk about the benefits of heeding wise instruction. You don’t have to be smart to gain from wisdom. It is the recognition of what the seeds we plant are going to produce. Wisdom is the label that tells us if a packet of seeds produces delicious fruit or poisonous plants. We don’t have to be able to identify every type of seed to read the warning on the label. The Old Testament is a treasure trove of practical wisdom. We have stories and histories to help us learn from other people’s triumphs and failures. We have proverbs and instructions to crystallize what really works. It is because of God’s creation of order and natural laws that wisdom works. The Judeo-Christian worldview gave birth to the sciences when other cultures still attributed events to capricious and unpredictable gods. Wisdom can be observed by anyone. All wisdom comes from God, but you can discover the validity of His natural laws even if you’re an atheist. Wisdom speaks to everyone. The problem is that we don’t always want to listen. Jesus, like the proverbs, talks about the wise person and the foolish person. The difference between the two is less about intelligence, and more about practices. A wise person is one who listens to wise counsel and seeks instructions from a reputable source rather than just doing whatever he feels like doing. A wise person listens to a professional and says, “Huh. That doesn’t seem right to me to put those beams in the framing there. They’re awefully expensive. But since my architect has designed thousands of homes that lasted, and this is my first building project, maybe his judgment is worth considering.” Well designed frames work. The homeowner doesn’t have to have impeccable judgment about architecture if he recognizes his own limited knowledge… and the expertise of the professional architect. As human beings we all have mental maps about how reality is supposed to work. The wise person doesn’t have flawless maps. He’s just willing to update them. We aren’t going to find a mental framework that never has to be modified and makes us right about everything. We don’t get to be right all the time in this life. We long for certainty, but we have no aptitude for it. There’s nothing we can do to completely eliminate faulty judgment from our own thinking. What we can do is let go of what seems right when something more effective comes along. When a wise person’s biases conflict with reality, the bias is reconsidered. When a foolish person’s biases conflict with reality, reality is discarded. The fool is more committed to being right than to learning from reality or instruction. The question which we should all be considering today is, which one am I? Prayer: Father, I want wisdom. I want to be a wise person. I want to make wise choices. Show me how to do that. Give me the courage to let go of my own ideas about what’s right and look to You instead to inform my choices. Today I begin (or continue) my quest to become a person of wisdom. In Jesus’ Name, amen.
Posted on: Wed, 28 May 2014 02:00:00 +0000
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