HAPPY NEW YEAR! A quest for Wisdom

SCRIPTURE: Buy the truth and do not sell it—wisdom, instruction and insight as well. Proverbs 23:23NIV

QUOTE: “Truth is that by which the heart must be guided and governed, for without truth there is no goodness; no regular practices without right principles … Riches should be employed for the getting of knowledge, rather than knowledge for the getting of riches.” – Matthew Henry 

THOUGHT: Today begins a series on wisdom; one, I must admit, flowing from my own core longings. These are days in which I don’t need just knowledge – there’s plenty of data in a thimble – I need to buy the truth and not sell it. Great discernment between truth and error. Regular practices with right principles. To find the path of wisdom and walk it with a steady stride.

This great hole of desire has been with me since I can remember. Some persistent hunger for something I couldn’t name to help me through life. Even as a child, I would open the cabinets or pantry looking for something to fill that longing, but nothing ever satisfied. I honestly remember as a young teen dealing with a deep frustration that my ability to know things superseded my ability to understand them. “I don’t know how to think,” I remember saying in anguish to myself, more than once crying over it – and I didn’t cry very often in those years.

In this way at least, I think I was odd (others who know me well may be able to add to the list!): at an early age, I found Ecclesiastes and Proverbs and Job and began to take them in. Mom read Bible stories to us kids, but I don’t remember her reading those. That was my own doing, and I followed Solomon’s own trajectory as far as asking that God would give me wisdom and Job’s as far as asking for faith. Wow, what a journey. I’m pretty sure God wiped his furrowed brow every time I asked. How was he going to get me from point A to point B? As I penned in a song a few years ago, “what happened there is a mystery still, the slow, steady shaping of fire on steel.”

So, Proverbs 23:23 has very deep, personal meaning to me. Someday, maybe I’ll tell that whole story, but today I just want to say that God commissioned me to buy and truth and not sell it. This weekday devotional is part of that journey. I’ve been on it now for most of three years and 720 posts today. As Henry’s quote on the passage urges (see quote above), I’ve been employing some riches getting knowledge about what is happening in culture and our world when a few years ago, I couldn’t even stand to watch the news. I’ve read books by Francis Schaeffer, Robert E. Webber, Jonathan Cahn and others with large vision who helped me understand what we’re dealing with. Seven years ago I completed seminary. I’ve done some preaching, which drives me into Scripture like nothing else. But it’s expensive – in time, in passion, in intellect and psychic energy, and yes, even dollars.

Maybe the place to land for today is just to encourage us if we really want wisdom, we must be ready to pay for it in some way, and likewise, we must be ready for the fight we’ll encounter to never, ever, ever sell what we’ve gained.

PRAYER: Oh God, you are the source of true wisdom, and you’ve promised you won’t withhold it when we ask (James 1:5). Give me wisdom for this day and these times. Give me a firm place to stand when the wind blows and the waters rise. Grant me faith in the winds and waters to not doubt, not waiver, not sink – but if I do, to reach for your hand once again.