Embracing Wisdom Series

Sermon series Campfire Talks #1

Embracing Wisdom

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

Proverbs 8

Good morning- Today we start anew series I am calling Campfire Talks! Remember those times maybe as a kid that you sat around the campfire you had some great times talking about all kinds of things…some important and some silly stuff but it was fun. It was healthy! If you have never experienced it, you should try it, don’t live at the campfire…that is not healthy.

Prayer-

All of us like good stories. Stories with a happy ending are best.

No one really enjoys hearing about someone’s misfortunes that ruin them.

We seem to love that when bad things happen something good comes out of it.

We are saddened when bad things happen and it destroys someone or something. (At least you should)

I heard this week of a success story of a friend of the district that lost his wife to cancer a while back. I can relate to that at every level. What makes him different than me is that his wife was only 3o years old and that they were raising two small children. This past week, he announced that he is officially seeing someone special and that it is getting very serious. That Almighty God would take a tragic situation and somehow turn it to be good. That would be a story with a happy ending.

Our text this morning is Proverbs 8- it is a long chapter about wisdom-

We will not read all 30 verses at once because I don’t want to lose anyone but it is important and we will digest this proverb one bite at a time.

How do you eat an elephant? One bit at a time because otherwise it would be overwhelming!

Proverb 8:1-8 read from bible

While I was on vacation last week, I went with Pastor BW and barb to one of our Nazarene churchs and enjoyed a well done message. One of the things that stuck with me was his showing us just how far we have come in the last 20 years of innovation and knowledge.

In a study he found that since the beginning of time up to 2003 we used 5 Exabytes of storage for knowledge.

If you take all the information known to man at that time to 2003, it could fit on 5 Exabytes of storage.

I had to dig how much that was- that is one million Gigabytes.

That is one Trillion Megabytes. Today, every two days, we use over 5 Exabytes of storage for knowledge.

What does that say to us?

It says that there is more information out there today than at any time of the history of the world but that does not mean that we are smarter than any time of the history of the world.

Knowledge is one thing, wisdom is another.

We have knowledge- pure do with it what you want information. Useless information to life saving information. It is knowledge.

We have wisdom, take what you have gone through and you learned a lesson that could make you a better person and you used for the good of your life. Learned lesson, retain it and use to better your life- that would be wisdom.

We have wisdom given to us from God- From His Word, spoken to us from God’s servants with His anointing.

Living life from God’s perspective.

Where we allow the creator of the universe, the savior of your soul if you are a believer to give you words of life from His Word.

The wisdom that He gives not only gives you (Smarts) knowledge, not only (good sense) wisdom to use for this life, but Godly wisdom not only allows you a good life here but allows us to be home with Him for eternity.

Worldly wisdom- I am going to preach

Let’s give everyone a trophy so no one feels bad… it is a competition with a design to have a winner and a loser.

The winner should learn to be humble and grateful and thank God.

The loser should learn a life lesson that everything doesn’t always go your way and you must understand and deal with it.

One group worked harder to get the trophy, they don’t get the recognition they should and someone who really didn’t put enough effort gets a trophy for just for participating. (just come out)

You think that sounds strange but that is how the world is responding to the things of God-

God you are such a loving God… I know what you said in your word is to follow and obey, to trust and put effort into our relationship with you but I want to be the one who is satisfied to get a participation trophy instead of having a relationship with you that is centered on what you have done for us.