GARNERING WISDOM

None of us has what it takes when we begin! And what is it we must garner along the way? Wisdom. We don’t have what it takes to connect all the dots that would enable us to apprehend all the promises God has given to us, potent promises that we can walk into and see fulfilled in our lives. We may have dreams and visions, but we don’t’ have the wisdom necessary to navigate the highs and lows we will most certainly encounter.

A choice of instructors
Life has given us two very effective teachers. Both are top flight instructors, but neither comes cheap. While both are effective, both require something of us. We have to choose one or the other, and if we choose neither, the second will be chosen for us.
The teachers are Wisdom and Consequences.

We can learn a great deal from either teacher. I should warn you, however, of the huge difference in their instructional styles. While Wisdom will amaze and delight us with her lessons, Consequences is by far the tougher teacher of the two.

For one thing, Consequences’ enrollment cost and ongoing tuition are sky-high. Oh, she’ll teach us well, all right – but by the time we learn her lessons, her instruction may have cost us years. It may have cost us our marriage, our family, our job, perhaps even our life. Consequences has a huge back-end cost.

Suppose you run full blast into a wall, and bang, you break your nose. What did you learn? Wall hard, nose soft; wall win, nose lose. Good! You are wiser now. What’s the lesson? Don’t run into walls that don’t move right along with you. Congratulations. You’ve garnered a pearl of wisdom from a personal experience that included some suffering and pain.

So now you’ve got your pearl. It’s pleasing. It’s valuable. But that’s just one pearl…one nugget, one bit of treasure. Becoming the husband or wife or teacher or leader you want to be – the person you were created to be – will require a whole bag full of these gems.

How else will you know how to navigate life’s twists and turns? To get where you want to go, you’ll need far more wisdom than what you’ve gained from your unfortunate experience with the wall.

Oh, you’ll learn, on the path of Consequences. You’ll even learn a few things about God, as the psalmist did: ‘Before I was afflicted, I went astray, But now I keep Your word…It is good for me that I was afflicted, That I may learn Your statues.’

In the school of wisdom
Wisdom has a front-end price. It requires discipline, obedience, consistency, and above all else, time. Then it gladly pours on you its promised tremendous riches. Do you want to know the biggest difference between Consequences and Wisdom? Wisdom teaches you the lesson before you make the mistake. On the other hand, consequences demand that you make the mistake first. Only then will it teach you the lesson.

Solomon put it like this: “A prudent person foresees danger and takes precautions. The simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences.” That, in the proverbial nutshell, is the difference between Wisdom and Consequences.

Two pains
Just as there are two teachers in life, so are their two pains. Both can cause suffering, but one moves you forward while the other sets you back. The two pains have names. They are Discipline and Regret.

The kind of wisdom the Bible offers us takes discipline to extract; again, discipline can cause some pain. Spending time in the Bible is not always convenient or comfortable, nor does it always yield immediate or obvious benefits. Some days it may feel like a drag. Other days it may seem like the last thing you want to do.

What’s the alternative? I would simply remind you: The pain of discipline costs far less than the pain of regret.

If the pain of discipline can gain for us the wisdom of others – men and women who had to suffer through a great deal of regret – then isn’t the pain of discipline worth it? In 1 Corinthians, Paul recalls the experience of some ancient Hebrews from Moses’ day: “[Don’t] grumble as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. Now these things happened to them as an example, and they were written for our instruction upon whom the ends of the ages have come.”
It is as if Paul is saying to his friends, “Look, you appear to be in danger of heading down the same road that destroyed your ancestors. Don’t you remember, traveling that way brings regret and death? You have a choice here: Either learn from their pain and get back on the right road, or follow their example and end up as they did.”

James says it even more plainly. He tells us that we can get wisdom from two primary sources – and that we don’t want it from the first! He speaks initially of a wisdom that comes from below: street wisdom. This wisdom from beneath is “earthly, natural, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every evil thing.” That kind of wisdom will get you nowhere in the long run; it will only bring you oceans of regret.

Instead choose the alternative: “But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits.”

If you and I don’t put together a package of godly wisdom to chart a course through our current season of life, we will go through the season and come out the other end to find nothing but a brown, barren landscape. It won’t be a fruitful season. I may even feel like a waste.

Praying for the Overflow,

Michael