wisdom

We all want to be wise. We want the ability to make right choices. My kids attended a Vacation Bible School last week that had James 1:5 as its theme: “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God…” There’s a connection between wisdom and our relationship with God.

So what keeps us from being wise? The same thing that keeps us from God: lack of humility, i.e., pride. Pride isn’t thinking that I know it all or that I know more than God. It’s merely thinking that I know more than someone else.

I’ve spent my life trying to know more than other people. It’s one of the reasons I try to read so widely. Knowledge in itself isn’t a bad thing. In Proverbs 8:12 wisdom speaks and declares that “I possess knowledge.” The problem is not in the knowledge itself, it’s when I use the knowledge as a shield or a weapon. It can become a shield, keeping me from getting to know someone else because I’m trying to prove that I know more than her/him. Or it can be a weapon that allows me to emerge victorious from an argument, but impoverished because I have lost the opportunity to listen and to learn from someone with a different perspective.

Pride severs relationships. It’s the cause of disunity. It quenches the work that the Spirit of Christ is seeking to do in and through his church. Pride doesn’t have to be all-encompassing to be destructive, it just needs to get between me and one other person.

“All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because, ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.’" 1 Peter 5:5