What’s the difference between knowledge and wisdom?
Where does wisdom come from?
What does wisdom look like in everyday life?
Where does wisdom come from?
Worldly Wisdom:
Naturalism: Everything comes from natural properties and causes.
Hedonism: Life is motivated by the desire for pleasure and avoidance of pain.
Existentialism: Every person is responsible for creating his or her own meaning.
Postmodernism: There is no universal or ethical absolute standard. Right and wrong is determined by different places, times, and cultures.
Godly Wisdom:
Job 28:20-24
From where, then, does wisdom come?
And where is the place of understanding?
It is hidden from the eyes of all living
and concealed from the birds of the air.
Abaddon and Death say,
‘We have heard a rumor of it with our ears.’
“God understands the way to it,
and he knows its place.
For he looks to the ends of the earth
and sees everything under the heavens.
Wisdom: A Definition
Hebrew: Chokmah—Greek: Sophia
Knowledge. Ability. Understanding.
Discernment. Prudence. Insight.
God’s wisdom means that God always chooses the best goals and the best means to those goals.
-Grudem, Systematic Theology, 193
Wisdom comes from a personal relationship with Jesus. Since fearing God is the beginning of wisdom, and since the only way we can love, honor, respect, and obey him is through Jesus, only the true believer can have true wisdom.
What does wisdom look like?
1. A believer who demonstrates godly wisdom lives with eternity in mind (Eccl 7:1-4).
2. Believers who demonstrate godly wisdom surround themselves with true friends who speak truth (Eccl 7:5-6).
3. A believer’s wisdom is not bulletproof.
• Be careful with your finances (Eccl 7:7).
• Practice patience (Eccl 7:8).
• Guard against anger (Eccl 7:9).
• Don’t live in the past (Eccl 7:10).
…The memory of the past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only a scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, new from a far country we have not yet visited.
-C. S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory) quoted in Living Life Backward, David Gibson, 103.
We long for the past—but the past was never as good as we remember it to be. Lewis says the wise person understands that when we long for the past, God is nudging us to long for the future—Heaven—where every earthy experience will be finally fulfilled.
Wise people who understand how God has made us to long for him and for heaven don’t look backward when they get nostalgic. They all the feeling to point forward. They look up to heaven and to home.
-David Gibson, Living Life Backward, 103
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