FACT
There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver or purple.
“Dreamt” is the only English word that ends with the letters “mt.”
Almonds are a member of the peach family.
Maine is the only state whose name is one syllable.
There are only 4 words in the English language that end in “dous”: Tremendous, horrendous,
stupendous and hazardous.
Bert and Ernie of Sesame Street fame were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in
Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” movie.
“Stewardesses” is the longest word that is typed with the left hand only.
It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open…..
Life is easier if you know the facts of Life, if you know the Truth. Life is full of Hope and Joy if we know the Creator of it. The Bible/Gospel is a list of Facts. I like to put them into a box called Wisdom, and if we know the Truth and apply the Bible’s Wisdom we discover a Life, not just a life we’ve created with our own ability, but one that satisfies our heart. In Chapter 4 of his Gospel, John shares about living water that, once discovered, we will never thirst again.
God is the author of Wisdom. Scripture says that the Spirit of Wisdom is granted to us by the Creator of it. In the books of Exodus (28) and Deuteronomy (34) the Word says that we may be filled with the Spirit of Wisdom. Solomon had Wisdom granted to him. The Book of Proverbs probably contains the most quotes about Wisdom. There, in 136:5 it’s declared that by Wisdom, God created the heavens. Proverbs 2:6, it’s prophesied that the Lord will give Wisdom with His words. Proverbs 3:3 encourages us that happy is the man that possesses Wisdom. And this little tidbit seems so obviously true today, in Proverbs 23:9, we’re told that fools hate Wisdom. 1Cor. 2:7 refers to God’s Wisdom being present before the world began. Verse 13 of that chapter characterizes Wisdom as capable of being spirit to Spirit. James 3:17 states: But the wisdom that’s from above is first pure, then peaceful, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without variance, without hypocrisy.
The 10 Commandments are wise advice on how to experience Life as the Father would have it for you. The Sermon on the Mount has the Creator of cosmos telling us how the cosmos works best. The Beatitudes give us secrets to finding the Power of God in our daily lives. The Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm are full of Wisdom. All of those, all the Bible, are given to help us discover the ‘best life’; a life of quality not just quantity. God did not give us His Wisdom or send His only begotten Son in order to seek His own (1 Cor. 13:4-8), but did those so that believers might have Life and have it more abundantly. The way He enabled that was sharing His Wisdom with us. In 1Cor. 2:16, Paul says we have the mind of Christ. Literally, the Greek word for mind refers to the ‘human side of God’s Spirit in man; as to its source- it is Spirit,’ as to its action in man, our mind can be the product of His ‘wise’ Spirit.
Unfortunately, we disregard so much of His Word today. Whether something is Wise is not generally questioned, either culturally, politically or economically today. This ‘Me’ generation promotes that all thoughts (ideas) are equal, not evaluated for quality or future results. With secularists, all ideas are precious simply because they are ‘someone’s’ idea, at least suggested to us to be original thoughts. Today, whether something is wise is not a qualifier for accepting them as valid anymore. What results in not having guidelines: every man’s, perhaps better expressed any man’s, thoughts become the norm. An upside down ‘right’ seems right to many today, but that leads to trouble. As mentioned earlier, the Bible says that fools hate wisdom; that proverb gets proven true every day.
I like to study The Gospel using the King James Version and using a lexicon to measure the language used in the original text. However, sometimes I like to go to a ‘today’s’ translation/paraphrase, and many times I take a look at Eugene Peterson’s The Message Bible. There is a Greek word used for ‘foolish’ two times in the New Testament. One is Luke (24:25) and one is Romans (1:22). That word is defined as not applying the moral or religious Truth. The Romans paraphrase is: they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives.’ Peterson continues a few verses further, ‘Since they didn’t bother to acknowledge God, God quit bothering them and let them run loose. And then all hell broke loose: rampant evil, grabbing and grasping, vicious backstabbing. They made life hell on earth with their envy, wanton killing, bickering and cheating. Look at them: mean spirited, venomous, fork-tongued God-bashers, bullies, swaggerers, insufferable windbags. They keep inventing new ways of wrecking men’s lives…they hand out prizes to those who do the worst things best.’ Rejecting God historically, those are the fingerprints of the kind of world, country, town, we become. You might even be able to make the case it’s as ‘the days of Noah.”
The Bible’s full of: do this and it will work for you, but if you don’t live like that…trouble. America in the past has applied Christian wisdom in its Constitution and its culture, maybe not perfectly but overwhelmingly. A great country resulted; people wanted to come and experience our way of living. That way of living, while not always perfectly represented by its people, none the less was represented by its perspective and law.
All creation has a judgment created within it. If we practice the foolish or evil they have pre-set consequences. Those may not always be obvious to our eyes but the consequences are present, many times simply in our heart and soul. The global culture ideas pushed today have a payday. The Creator of the cosmos is big enough and wise enough not to get snowballed by the creatures of that cosmos. You can’t un-hook your life from the consequences of your ‘bad’ decisions. John 12:48 says (I’ll paraphrase): People that reject me, if they don’t receive my sayings (the Wisdom in them), they have one that judges them, and the Word that I say will judge them. Significantly, humans think they’re smart enough to avoid those consequences…thinking themselves wise they became fools. (Rom. 1:22) Jesus’ Wisdom wasn’t given to only be true or work in cultures 2000 years ago; it was given to work in all cultures in all generations, work in 2024. Our eyes and ears may not tell us that, but Jesus did and does. With the pressures of the social, political and economic stress we can become forgetful that Jesus said that he was the same yesterday, today and forever. Cultures may change, the True never does. His Wisdom is made out of what is True. Jesus even went so far as to declare: I am The Truth (John 14:6). Wisdom is the right application of knowledge (Proverbs 9:10).
I think Wisdom is revealed to us to live every day with the reality of God is with us. My attitude is that the Spirit of God is speaking to us each day. Out of the Grey has a song that made an impression on me back in the 90’s. The lyric says, “He is not silent, we’re just not listening.” I think that’s true. Sometimes Jane comes into our family room and I’m just sitting in my chair staring at nothing and she always asks me what I’m doing. Many times I’m just listening. There’s an old Native American proverb that reads, “Listen to the wind, it talks. Listen to the silence, it speaks. Listen to your heart, it knows.” That’s pretty good advice when applied to the Gospel. It’s a small, still voice that sometimes whispers to us. I don’t try and do a mental process during those moments. It’s more like turning your brain computer off and letting His Spirit bring the words.
Hearing God is not about thinking up something or coming up with an idea. Its closer to being quiet long enough for something that you’ve never heard anyone say before and you never imagined before. It touches a place that I’ve written about before: it’s like something coming into my heart and I can easily declare: ‘I didn’t know that I knew that.’ Those words and ideas I’ve never imagined or heard before. Much of my experience in the Christian life has been like that. That’s when the unimaginable becomes more interesting, and surprising, than the imaged.