Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

July 29, 2007

Grant Me Wisdom

1 Kings 3:5-15

It will come as no shock to you to know that we live in the information age. You knew that, didn’t you? Information is everywhere, more information than I can keep up with. It used to be the computer, but now it’s your cell phone. Everywhere. Anywhere. Information, more information that we can possibly use. I know not everybody uses the internet, but those of you who do, here are some little tidbits.

You know we can find information on almost anything we want to, history, social studies, popular figures, so I did a little Google search this week just to find out how much information is out there. I searched the Battle of Stalingrad. Don’t ask me how I came up with that, but I did, and there were 772,000 references that Google found on the Battle of Stalingrad.

So I thought, “OK. We live in Rome, Georgia. Let’s look up Rome, Georgia.” Two million three hundred and fifty thousand references in Google.

So I thought, “Let’s go to popular figures.” Johnny Depp has been a star recently with all the Pirates movies, so let’s go for Johnny Depp. Three million five hundred thousand references on Johnny Depp.

So then I thought, “Let’s use a woman.” Let’s think up a woman who will probably have a lot.” So I went with Brittany Spears, whom I know very little about, I might add. Seventeen million four hundred thousand different places on the internet where you can find information on Brittany Spears. All of us together could spend the rest of our lives just looking at the pieces of information about Brittany Spears and we couldn’t get done. Do you realize how much that is? That is a lot of information. If there is anything in our lives that we have questions about, anything that we are trying to determine how we ought to do or solve or whatever, we try to get more information.

If we are worried about personal finance or need some help with personal finance, we look up information on that. Parenting, how to choose a college, jobs. Monster.com is one of the biggest websites out there. We think that for most of the issues that we face, most of the problems that are ours, if we could just have more information, we would know what to do. All we need is a little bit more.

Depending on your generation, you get a book, you listen to a CD or you download a pod cast and you get more information. Then what we find out is that there is too much and sometimes it conflicts.

What are you supposed to do with Vitamin E? Have you been keeping up with the news? For years, they said, “Take a lot of Vitamin E. It’s good for your heart.” Then just in the last week or so, “Too much Vitamin E is bad for you.” I mean you get so much information that one side says this and one side says this.

I bet if you have had a health concern, you have run into this. You try to go on the internet to search and find out what you might know about your particular situation, and you walk away from it almost more confused than you were before. What am I supposed to do? This site says this; this site says this. More information isn’t always what we need. Sometimes we need to know what to do with the information we already have, and what we really need is wisdom.

For our guests, if this is your first time with us, I have been preaching a series this summer on The Prayers That God Answers and the Promises That God Keeps. I started off a few weeks ago by saying that there are times when people make some pretty whacky, I believe is the word I used, promises in God’s name. It is pretty clear that a lot of the things that preachers, Bible study teachers, and others proclaim as things that God is going to do are not exactly what we read in the Bible. So what are some of the things that God will grant us if we pray for and what are some of the promises that God keeps. If you have been paying attention this morning to the scripture and the hymns, one of them is wisdom. God will grant us wisdom.

In the responsive reading that Keith prepared for us, it says, “If you lack wisdom, you should ask God who gives generously.” The story of Solomon is a story of a man who is asked by God, “What would you have?”

And he said, “I think I’ll take wisdom.”

I am sure that I learned other Bible studies before I learned this particular story, but the story of Solomon is one of the first stories I really remember learning as a child. Before I remembered David’s courage with Goliath or Abraham’s faith, I remembered the story of Solomon with the baby and the two women who claimed to be the mother. I guess as a child, it struck me to hear this baby was at the mercy of somebody who is lying and Solomon, in his wisdom, says, “Cut the baby in half and give each mother half.” And, of course, the true mother would rather give up the child than see that happen. Solomon got his prayer answered, and he was granted wisdom. This has always stuck out to me.

Let’s be candid. Some people are not praying this prayer. Right? Because we all think, “Wait. There are a lot of people who need some wisdom in this world.” I think it was Mark Twain who said, “The problem ain’t that there are too many fools. It’s just that lightning ain’t distributed right.” Think about that for a minute. There are a lot of people that if God is granting this prayer, then why aren’t they praying? Or me, I’ve prayed it and how come I don’t feel a better sense of having had the prayer answered? How come I don’t feel a greater sense of having received wisdom? A lot of people may be praying it, but it doesn’t seem to be being answered as promised in scripture.

Let me talk a little bit about how this prayer has to be offered for it to be a genuine prayer and for God to answer it. The first thing is that it has to be offered with a humble spirit. What is it that Solomon says when God asked him? He said, “I am just a child.” He is King of Israel, but he says, “I am just a child. I don’t really know. I need you to help me.” The key to a prayer for wisdom is that it has to be based on humility. If you have ever taught, particularly as students get older, the most difficult students to teach are the students who are convinced they already know. Right? Have you ever taught a group of students where there was some student in there who was convinced that they already knew more about the subject; they should be the one up there teaching. What are you doing? They know more than you do. Those are the most difficult students to teach. When you apply it to wisdom and praying for wisdom, sometimes we pray and we are convinced that we do already. Our prayer is actually just asking God to confirm the opinions and the beliefs that we have already got.

One of my favorite quotes about prayer is that a lot of people think they are praying when they are just re-arranging their prejudices. We already think, “I know, but God if you will just kind of confirm what I think, that will be good.” Or we look at it as a Dear Santa Note for Adults.

“Dear God, Would you bring me some wisdom this year.”

We seek God, but if God’s ways are different than our plans or our opinions, we are not exactly sure we want to listen. We all know the quotation from Proverbs, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom,” and that word fear can mean reverence. It means putting yourself in that position that Solomon does saying, “I don’t really know here. My wisdom has come up lacking. God, please tell me.”

Unless the prayer is offered in this sense of humility, then it is going to appear that the prayer is not answered. If we already know more than God, what good is it to pray for wisdom of the eternal if we think we have already found the answer?

Another thing is that we have to realize that God’s wisdom is not conventional wisdom. If you do word association, and you say wisdom, pretty soon, somebody is going to come up with conventional. Conventional goes with wisdom. That means the wisdom that everybody believes is right. In fact, God’s wisdom can be, I guess I would call it, subversive. God’s wisdom kind of comes underneath what we have been thinking, undermines it, and teaches us a new way. It is—here is a hard one—counter-intuitive, you know where you expect it to be one way and it is not. Here is the best example I’ve got. Do you know how to turn a bicycle? This is really counter-intuitive. If you are riding down Fourth Avenue and somebody has the traffic stopped and you want to turn left at Broad Street, how do you turn your bike? Do you turn the wheel? No. You push on the left handle bar. That’s how you turn a bike to the left. You push on the left handle bar. Those of you who don’t ride bikes often are probably thinking, “I’ve got to get a bike to try this out.”

I promise you that if you ride down a street and you push on the left handle bar, you are going to veer off to the left. It’s counter-intuitive. Your body knows it so you don’t have to think about it when you ride a bike. But God’s wisdom is sometimes opposite of what we would expect. Sometimes God’s wisdom comes to us, and because it seems so different than what we would have anticipated, it’s not Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard. It is different and we kind of miss it. It just kind of goes right past us. So how do you get a life? Well, conventional wisdom is you grab it. You just take it. You deserve it. You just grab all the good things of life you can get. The wisdom of God says if you would like to get a life, you have to lose yours.

How would I be more content with what I have? Conventional wisdom says get more. The one with the most toys when they die wins. Right. I saw that bumper sticker just the other day. I thought that had kind of gone away, but I saw it again. God’s wisdom is that the people who are the most generous have learned to live with what they already have. That is subversive. It is counter-intuitive. So sometimes we pray for God’s wisdom, we pray for God’s answers, and God puts it out there in front of us and we miss it. We just absolutely miss it because it is opposite of what we expect.

Then finally this. God’s wisdom has to be practiced. You have to do it. I bet chances are you grew up in a church where there was a deacon who prayed the offertory prayer regularly who always said, “Bless the gift and the giver. Help us to know and to do your will.” Solomon would not have been wise if Solomon had not put the wisdom that God gave him into action. If you go back and read the prayer, he doesn’t want it so that he can sit in a seat somewhere and everybody say, “Oh, Solomon, you are so smart.” He wants it so that he can work with the nation and lead the nation so that he can practice the principles of God, to lead the nation to be who they were supposed to be. Knowing the wisdom of God does us absolutely no good if we don’t act on the wisdom of God. There are times where we pray, “Oh God, give me wisdom,” and we pray with great humility and we pray and we hear the answer and we don’t do it because we are afraid to do it. We are afraid it runs contrary to our lives. We are afraid that we won’t get our way. So many things. If you want wisdom and you want to pray for it and you want God to answer this prayer, then the prayer has to be acted on. We have to do what we hear God say.

So my suggestion is pray for wisdom and pray in humility. The passage from James could have easily been the text for today’s sermon. After he says about “pray and God will give you wisdom,” he also talks about “pray and don’t doubt.” A lot of times people interpret this as, “If you have any doubt, you are not going to get it.” What it really means is if you are going to pray and you are going to commit whatever your decision is to the Lord’s way, and then you have to go ahead and stick with it. You can’t pray and then say, “Oh, I don’t think I like that. I am going to try something else.” If you really want wisdom, you have to pray in that sense of humility that when God gives it, you are going to stick with whatever it was God tells you to do.

And we have to be prepared to hear something that runs opposite of conventional wisdom and then practice it. This is just like temptation. I preached on temptation a week or so ago. We pray and ask God to help us not yield to temptation, and there is that moment in that action where we know we could walk away. We know we could beat it and we don’t. I am convinced that we pray for wisdom and there comes that moment where God shows us exactly what we are supposed to do, how we are supposed to forgive. The way out of this mess is to be kind to somebody or to stop retaliation or whatever it may be. God gives us the wisdom and we see it, but we are not just quite sure that is what we want to do so we go back to our own way. We have to practice what it is God puts in front of us.

At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “It’s not a wise person who hears and understands all this. It’s a wise person who hears and does.”

So our prayer today for whatever it is that besets us, whether it be a relationship problem, whether it be a financial problem, whether it be a health problem, whatever kind of problem it may be, is not that we need more information, but that we really seek God, that we recognize that God knows so much beyond what we could know, that his wisdom is sufficient for all our questions, and that we will pay attention enough so that when the word comes and it comes to us that we recognize it and we see it. Then God grant me the faith to act on it, to act on the wisdom that you have shown us. If we pray this right, God answers that prayer. God answers that prayer and God supplies, every, every need.

Copyright 2007. P. Joel Snider. All rights reserved.

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