How smart are you? How smart do you think you are? Do you consider being smart the same as being wise? What do you consider as wisdom? Do you consider yourself as wise? Do you want to be wise?
There is a significant difference between being smart and being wise. It is one thing to accumulate knowledge and something completely different to be wise. Sure, wisdom relies to some degree on knowledge, but it does not require a degree.
What is wisdom? It is the combination of knowledge and discernment. It is taking what you know and reasoning the best choice. It is the ability to make a decision for the better good after taking into account what you know, looking at the options, and spending the required time thinking through them.
How does God’s wisdom make our human wisdom look foolish? God knows what is best for each one of us. He knows how our decisions will play out in the future. He knows our decision for today will impact our tomorrow and how. God not only knows this for us, but for each person in the world for all time.
How do we tap into this Godly wisdom? As stated in today’s passage, we must become “fools” to become wise. This means that we must lean on God to make our decisions. We must spend time in prayer, accepting that we don’t know everything, and listening for the Holy Spirit to speak to us.
If we are willing to listen to God when He speaks to us, we will end up making decisions others will call foolish. Some of our decisions will be counterintuitive and countercultural. They won’t make sense to most of the people we interact with at the moment, but they will make sense later on.
Once we begin doing this and become more accustomed to relying on God’s wisdom, it will get easier. The first few decisions will be challenging. Our human wisdom will tell us to go one way, while God’s Spirit is telling us to do something different. Unfortunately, we will more often go with our head rather than God’s Spirit. When we do, there is often a price to be paid later. Yet, we can learn from those mistakes and decide to listen to the Holy Spirit for future decisions.
I pray we all decide to listen to the Holy Spirit. I pray we determine to listen for God’s wisdom when making decisions. I pray each of us will seek God and come to rely on His wisdom rather than our own. Seek God. Listen for the Holy Spirit. Reject human wisdom. Choose God’s wisdom. Trust God in every decision.
1 Corinthians 3:18-20 Do not deceive yourselves. If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become “fools” so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness”; and again, “The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.”
Marty Pressey 