Get Wisdom Series

Wisdom is certainly helped by experience, but there’s a difference between wisdom and experience.

Knowledge.

God gave Solomon both wisdom and knowledge.

1 Kings 4:29 - God gave Solomon wisdom and very great insight, and a breadth of understanding as measureless as the sand on the seashore.

Neither wisdom nor knowledge works well all by itself.

Man has always been searching for both, except it seems to me that our post-modern world has changed that. Man today isn’t lost in his search for wisdom. Instead, he has substituted the search for knowledge in its place. The ability to get knowledge has increased incredibly in the last decade. As one man puts it, “the very amount of information that computers make available threatens us with cognitive overload: overwhelmed with facts, people tend to mistake data for truth, knowledge for wisdom.” So, the mind of our world has brilliance without conscience; a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

Don’t try to impress me by how much you know about something. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can be a genius on any subject in 10 minutes now. I can get on the internet, look up “the history of soup” and get sent to 77,000,000 websites. Big deal. To quote Shania Twaine, “That don’t impress me much.”

The internet has placed knowledge in the hands of our kids without supervision unlike any time before. What will happen with the loaded gun we place in the inexperienced hands of our children?

The answer to that can be seen in the amount of research being done by adults in human genetics. Now we have to consider how or if to ban human cloning, stem cell research, and embryonic engineering. What will happen with the loaded gun of vast knowledge placed in the hands of scientists who have only pygmy-sized moral skill to handle it? Yet this relentless pursuit of knowledge speeds ahead.

It reminds of a dog chasing a car. You know, some dogs will approach a car speeding down the road and chase its wheels like their life depended on it. But what would a dog do if it ever caught a car?

Proverbs 26:6-9 - Like cutting off one's feet or drinking violence is the sending of a message by the hand of a fool. Like a lame man's legs that hang limp is a proverb in the mouth of a fool. Like tying a stone in a sling is the giving of honor to a fool. Like a thornbush in a drunkard's hand is a proverb in the mouth of a fool.

I knew Keith in high school. He had a brilliant mind. His dad was a professor or something, and he obviously grew up surrounded by a lot of knowledge which landed inside his head. But as smart as he was, Keith was foolish in his choices. I used to get pretty frustrated by that. What a waste.

7 years ago, at my brother-in-law David’s funeral, someone shared a testimony. – my brilliant brother-in-law, the doctor – that for all of the medical knowledge he had, and all the treatments he underwent fighting cancer, his hope wasn’t in medicine at all. His hope was in the Lord. How empty his hope would have been with only knowledge and experience to help him. Instead, his hope was wisely founded on his Lord.