Grant Me Wisdom Series

[This is the third sermon on Reinhold Niebuhr's "The Serenity Prayer," asking God to grant us the wisdom to know what to accept and what to change. This was also preached on Communion Sunday, hence the lead up to Communion at the end.]

Wisdom. What is wisdom? Well, let’s see.

A good place to start would be the dictionary, amen? According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “knowledge” is “information gained through experience, reasoning, or acquaintance.” “Wisdom” is “the ability to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting.” Ah … okay.

As straight-forward as these definitions may seem, if I were to go around and ask each of you to explain the difference between “knowledge” and “wisdom,” well … we’d probably get as many definitions and explanations as there are people in this room. Go online and you’ll see what I mean. The definition of “knowledge” is pretty standard. Basically, “knowledge” is what I “know,” right? It has the word “know” right in it. “Wisdom,” on the hand is one of those words that slips through your fingers. The more you try to define it, the harder it is to define … which is why Reinhold Niebuhr asks God to grant him the “wisdom” … “wisdom” not “knowledge” … and the distinction is important. As the Apostle Paul once lamented: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:15, 19). Paul “knows” the right thing to do, he wants to do the right thing, but he ends up doing the thing that he hates … the thing that he knows is the wrong thing to do. The solution to Paul’s dilemma, says Niebuhr, is to pray for wisdom … not knowledge … Paul already had that … but for wisdom … and not just any “wisdom” but God’s “wisdom” … which makes sense if we go by Merriam-Webster’s definition of knowledge and wisdom. If knowledge is “information gained through experience, reasoning, or acquaintance” then why not ask for guidance and direction from the One who is the source of ALL information, amen? And if wisdom is “the ability to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting” who better, I ask you, to go to than God, who is True, Righteous, and Everlasting, amen?

Remember the old days, before there were cellphones and GPS? You’d be driving along the highway, everything’s fine … and then you notice everyone hitting their brakes and you find yourself in the middle of a rolling parking lot and you wonder: what’s going on … accident? … construction? … how long is this traffic jam … should I get off at the next exit and go another way? The problem is that I don’t know where I am. You pull out the map only to find out that you’d have to go miles and miles out of your way. What if you got off at the next exit only to find out that the traffic ended just past that exit but you won’t know that because you got off at the exit and you have to go miles and miles out of your way. What if you could see ahead? What if you knew the cause of the traffic jam? What if you knew exactly where the congestion ended? Well … we have satellites looking down, so to speak, and they can tell us what’s up ahead and even tell us how long it’s gonna take for us to get past the congestion so that we can make an informed decision and the GPS will usually suggest an alternate route and tell you how long or how far you will have to go out of your way if you decide to get off at the next exit.

That is why we pray to God to grant us the wisdom to know what to do … because He sees the whole picture. He is looking down, so to speak, on our situation and He can see what’s up head … and I’m not talking about traffic but about our lives, amen?

God … grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

God … grant me the courage to change the things I can.

God … grant me the wisdom to know the difference … and, as we shall see, therein lies the problem … I don’t know about you, but I usually don’t know the difference … and usually do the most harm to myself and to others when I think that I do.

Saul of Tarsus is a great example of what I’m talking about. When it came to knowledge of the Jewish faith, Paul boasted that he knew all there was to know about being a good, devout Jew … and he was. Circumcised on the eight day … a member of the tribe of Benjamin in good standing … as to the law, a Pharisee … as to zeal, a persecutor of the church … as to righteousness under the law, blameless (Philippians 3:5-6). His knowledge of Judaism and Jewish law convinced him that the right thing to do was to protect the Jewish nation from the blasphemous cancer of this new and growing sect of messianic Jews who were claiming that some carpenter from Nazareth was not only the long-anticipated messiah sent by God to lead the Jewish nation but the very son of Yahweh. By all logic and reason, these heretics were wrong and by all logic and reason, Paul and many others felt these heretics had to be dealt with and their movement stopped. “I too was convinced,” says Paul, “that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And that is just what I did in Jerusalem. On the authority of the chief priests I put many of the saints in prison, and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished, and I tried to force them to blaspheme. In my obsession against them, I even went to foreign cities to persecute them” (Acts 26:9-11).