The Nature of Wisdom

 Wisdom is a subject I love to meditate on. In scripture, it is often compared to treasure that you can acquire. For me, this always meant that wisdom is like any other commodity in life: you can acquire it, steward it, and, by investing it, get a profit. In the profit, your wisdom will increase. That also means, though, that by making a bad investment, you can lose some of your profits. I see so many people struggling to understand how to invest wisdom or even struggling to see what wisdom is.

The first thing we have to understand when it comes to wisdom is that we cannot acquire it without God. This tells us a lot about the nature of wisdom, mainly that we will not find true wisdom in a place where God is not present. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom. So wisdom starts with having a healthy understanding of God's nature and how you relate to it. Scripture also teaches us that God is love and that perfect love casts out all fear. So how do we relate these two things to God without a conflict? Personally, I like to think of the fear of God as a feeling of awe and reverence, combined with a state of being overwhelmed by the size and power of His person and nature. It is important, though, that we also realize that this all-powerful omnipotent being is love, so we are struck by His greatness and undone by the fact that this all-powerful being loves us in a way that we cannot even comprehend.

So we start with the fear of the Lord, and the Lord is love. All wisdom should, therefore, be rooted in love. Love and fear are opposites, so fear can never be wisdom. Some people try to sugarcoat fear with terms like caution, or they call it life experience, but we should not fool ourselves. If wisdom is rooted in love, wisdom should also be risky because love is a power that moves people to take risks. Love makes people do crazy things. In Paul's famous poem on love in his first letter to the Corinthians, he says that faith, love, and hope will always remain. I would say that having love without faith and hope would be impossible. Faith and hope are the engines that make it possible to move in love. Hopelessness and despair are the opposites, and they are both rooted in fear. So if we would like to advance in wisdom, we should press into love, using faith and hope, abandoning all reasoning grounded in pain, despair, hopelessness, and ultimately fear.

Meditating on this, I feel a sense of irony. What we consider wisdom is so often grounded in caution and logic, designed to avoid risks and see all possible outcomes. In the last ten years, I have seen so many people who wouldn't move in love because they thought wisdom said they couldn't. I have seen people abandon other people in the name of wisdom because they couldn't foresee if their love would be enough or that something might go wrong. One might think, "If someone is not sure that they could give what a person needs, would it be love to try?" It almost sounds like love, and it feels like wisdom to consider this, but it is fear in disguise. When we press into love, using faith and hope, we cannot oversee with certainty what the outcome will be; otherwise, we wouldn't need faith and hope. I love that faith implies that there is a reason to expect a good outcome, but hope doesn't even imply a reason. It's just a choice to look at what could be as opposed to what could go wrong.

It's sad to me that so often people who love but don't achieve what they hoped (or what others think they should have achieved) are used as examples of a lack of wisdom. If you do a Google search on a Christian ministry that takes a risk, you will find websites dedicated to pointing out everything that goes wrong, seeing all their flaws. People are calling it discernment, though they are only judgmental. A discerning person would feel the love those people poured into their ministry and feel compassion over their struggles.

I feel like true wisdom would seldom be recognized. We live in a day, age, and culture that needs to understand everything. Our churches are infected with this obsession of the mind, to understand and have control. If the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, and the Lord is love, we need to understand that this all-powerful, omnipotent God expects you to move in love without having any fear because if you truly fear the Lord, you will not dare to fear anything else.

One last thing to conclude would be that wisdom doesn't necessarily lead you to success or to the goals you set. That is not the point of wisdom. If you truly take risks, you will fail. If you never failed, you have never taken any risks. Wisdom is calling you into a realm of risk and failure. True love manifests in the possibility of failure and loss. Investing wisdom, moving in love, and taking a risk will bring you to a place of surrender. You don't always know what you'll get, but your investment will pay off because your love increased. And know that your God is all-powerful and watches over all your failures, ready to fix them. When you fear failure or fear that love will make you lose something, you have an opportunity to ask God to increase your fear of Him. So a word of wisdom to all: stop thinking, get out of your study, and start moving already!