A young man was searching for the secret of wisdom, and heard that there was a guru high in the Himalayas who knew he secret. So, he set off to find the guru, going through much hardship and travail until finally, high in the mountains, he found the Master sitting in the lotus posture.
“Tell me, oh Master!” he cried. “What is the secret of wisdom?”
The Master replied: “Good judgment.”
“But how do you get good judgment?” asked the young man.
The Master replied: “Experience.”
“And how do you get experience?” the young man persisted.
“Ah,” said the Master: “Bad judgment.”
While there certainly is truth in that humor, we know that few fictional gurus are going to give us what we need when it comes to the difficult situations, problems, and choices we often face in life. Wisdom is not easy to find when questions pop up such as:
- Shall I continue in this relationship?
- Shall I take this new job even though it means moving my family?
- What do we do now that we know that our mother or father can no longer live on their own?
- How do we best help the family member battling addiction?
- Or, when do we quit fighting the disease and accept the help that hospice will provide?
No matter how much knowledge we accumulate, finding wisdom to answer the difficult questions that life brings to us, is hard. Really hard. The same is true at a community, or national, or global level – no matter how much technology advances, no matter what artificial intelligence might be able to do. And, that is not just true in the aftermath of an election. As someone has observed, “we may be able to probe the surface of Mars, to place unfathomable amounts of information on a computer chip…bring life to the dying through organ transplants, but we seem unable to bring justice to the oppressed, reconciliation to the estranged, hope to the brokenhearted,…” and peace to the peoples of the earth.[i]
As the poet T.S. Eliot once asked, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?” Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? And, how do we find the wisdom we need for living life? Unlike with that guru, the answer in the Scriptures is that wisdom is a fruit of the Spirit, a gift from God. That is why in two of our passages today we have prayers for wisdom.
In the passage in 1 Kings, Solomon is a young man who has ascended the throne once occupied by his father, David. Near the beginning of his reign, he has a vision in which he hears God asking him, “What should I give you?” Solomon responds, “Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern this your great people?”
Similarly, in his letter to the Colossians, Paul tells those Christians that he is praying “that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God.”
How can we be grow in wisdom and understanding so that we may lead lives worthy of the Lord and bear fruit in every good work? The Biblical passages we heard today instruct us on three things we need so that we can grow in wisdom.
The first is a “listening heart,” which may be a more helpful way to translate “the understanding mind” that Solomon prays for. What does it mean to have a listening heart? It means that we recognize our smallness and our need for the bigness of God. It means that we stand in awe, or “fear of the Lord.” Wisdom is closely related to the fruit of the Spirit we highlighted last week: humility.
Solomon knows that he is small in the face of God’s awesome “bigness.” “O Lord my God,” he says, “you have made your servant king in place of my father David, although I am only a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in.” The beginning of wisdom is acknowledging that no matter how great our knowledge, how tremendous our power, or how high is our office in government, before God we are like little children who do not know how to go out or come in.
In a proverb attributed to Solomon, Proverbs 3 declares “Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil.” (v. 7) This is what wisdom looks like. In contrast, Proverb 18 paints a picture of what wisdom doesn’t look like: “a fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing personal opinion.” (v. 2)
As one Biblical commentator notes, “the fear of the Lord,” is not, “Be afraid, because God’s gonna getcha!” Instead, “fear of the Lord” refers to a mixture of faith and humility that makes one open-handed to receive from God, rather than close-minded in thinking that we already have the answers and personal opinions we need. “Fear of the Lord” is like awe, ‘a mix of transcendence in trusting in God’s faithfulness, and being willing to take directions from God. It is the one fear we are to spend our lives cultivating, the fear to end all lesser fears.”[ii]
The first step towards wisdom is to become small before God and tremble in awe before him. Then, and only then, can we hear what we need to hear, receive what God wants us to receive, so that we can grow in wisdom.
The second thing we need, these passages tell us, are perceptive eyes. Think about the situation Solomon faces when the two women come before him claiming to be the mother of the surviving child. Solomon initially does not know who the mother is and there is no inner vision or voice that gives him the answer. So like a good detective or scientist, he gathers information, interviewing the two women. He looks at them and listens to them.
Then he expands his point of view to try to look at the situation through their eyes. What makes a mother tick? How would a mother of an infant feel? His judgment depends on his ability to think and feel like these two women in the loss of a son.
In the same way, if we are facing a difficult question or problem, we too must gather information and look at things from different points of view, so that we can see that situation or problem more clearly. We must take off our blinders, and approach the situation open-minded and open-hearted, with a curiosity and compassion that does not assume we already know the answer.
Our ultimate goal is to see the situation or problem as God sees it. Someone has said, “we become wise as we begin to see the world through the eyes of God.” (Kathleen Norris) To do that, we need to be more than a good detective or lab scientist. Our vision needs help.
Alyce McKenzie, who has needed to wear glasses all of her life, describes the first time she took her son, Matthew, with her to her annual eye exam. He was 3 years-old at the time. “I sat in the big, padded chair. He stood beside me, looking around with wide-eyed interest at the grapefruit-sized plastic replica of the human eye on the counter and the eye chart on the wall. At the doctor’s request, I took off my glasses and began to read the lowest row I could.
‘A E B…and that is, well, I’m not sure what that one is. It could be a D or it could be an O.’ At that point, I heard an earnest little voice in my ear, ‘Mommy,’ he said, ‘It’s an O!’ I looked down into his worried little face and read his thoughts. ‘My future is in the hands of a woman who does not even know the alphabet!’ ‘Son,’ I said, ‘I can read, I just can’t see. That’s what the glasses are for.’” She goes on to say, we all can see, but we need God’s glasses so we can have the wisdom to see the world as God sees it.[iii]
Reading the Bible and taking time to look through those Biblical spectacles at the world, our situations and problems, and other people – that is how God helps us sharpen our vision. Prayer and worship – they too train our eyes to see things anew, more through God’s eyes and not just through our eyes. Spending time with God’s people: listening and learning, serving together and praying for each other, laughing and crying with each other – these are all ways that God gives us glasses to improve our eyesight, so that we can see things as God sees them. Not all at once but gradually over time.
A listening heart, a perceptive eye – these are the first two things we need for growing in wisdom according to these passages. Here is the third thing we need: a trusting spirit. Wisdom is not a matter of knowledge, not a matter of having the right idea. Wisdom is a matter of understanding, of doing the right thing.
As Jesus says at the end of his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7, everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. When the rain, winds, and floods came, the house did no fall because it was built on rock. But the person who hears the words and fails to do them is like the foolish man who built his house on sand. When the wind, rains, and floods came, the house tumbled into the river.
To be wise is not only to hear and understand; it is to take action and do. And in that doing, we will not always know if we have made the right choice, will we? When we sign the papers, or make the decision, or end the call…there can always be a haunting thought: did I just do the right thing? Did I just make a wise choice? Have I made a decision pleasing to God?
As Robert McAfee Brown once observed, “we must live with the possibility that decisions made in good faith will turn out to be disasters.” If that is the case, we need to pay attention and reflect on our actions and choices so that we can learn, understand, and do better. We need to acknowledge what we did wrong and what we need to do differently so that we do not just repeat the same mistakes. Wisdom is not inevitable with age; without reflection and a willingness to change, we will only repeat the same mistakes and grow in anxiety and prejudice rather than wisdom.
But if we focus only on those mistakes and foolish choices, we may be paralyzed by over-analysis and guilt. Being so fearful of doing the wrong thing, we fail to do the right thing. As Robert McAfee Brown goes on to say, if our decisions do turn out to be disasters, we trust that “grace will provide enough power to turn even a disaster towards good and useful ends.” We cannot undo the past, but we can, with God’s help, learn from our mistakes, grow in wisdom, and step into a new future not bound up by that past.
On October 24, 1863, Abraham Lincoln made these remarks to some Presbyterians from Baltimore who came to visit him in the midst of the civil war. He knew he needed help; he knew his size, he knew the size of the problems he was facing, and he knew God’s size. What he told those Presbyterians applies not only to those in high office; these are words worth following in our daily lives.
He told them: “I saw upon taking my position here, that I was going to have an administration, if an administration at all, of extraordinary difficulty. It was, without exception a time of the greatest difficulty that this country ever saw. I was early brought to a living reflection that nothing in my power whatever… would succeed without the direct assistance of the Almighty…all must fail [without God’s help]…amid the greatest difficulties of my Administration, when I could not see any other resort, I would place my whole reliance in God.” A listening heart, the fear of the Lord – this is the beginning of wisdom. A perceptive eye trained over time to see other people and situations as God sees them – that is the middle of wisdom. Trust in the Lord in all things – that must be its end.[iv]
Watch the Livestreams
[i] Maxie Dunnam and Kimberly Dunnam Reisman, Workbook on the Virtues and Fruits of the Spirit (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1998).
[ii] Alyce McKenzie, Making A Scene in the Pulpit: Vivid Preaching for Visual Listeners (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018), 63.
[iii] McKenzie, 61.
[iv] From a sermon by Rev. Kerry Pidcock-Lester, preached at First Presbyterian Church, Pottstown on November 22, 1998.
