Reflections from Knowing God by J.I. Packer. Chapter 10 is "God's Wisdom and Ours".

While reading this chapter I found it to be so relevant for us today, even more so than if I'd read it just three weeks ago. 

What struck me was the reality that it is the movement of faith to trust God in the times we don't know what He is doing. 

This chapter was useful for me back when I did the Ecclesiastes series (check out our webpage for those). 

Packer points out that God's wisdom is perfect but because of the Fall we are distorted in our perceptions. To live in wisdom, as we are called to do, there are two prerequisites:

1.) We must learn to reverence (fear) God- Ps 110:10; Prov 9:10. "We don't learn wisdom until we are humble and teachable..acknowledging our own littleness, distrusting our own thought and are willing to have our minds turned upside down."

2.) We must learn to recieve God's Word - Ps 119:98-99

We need to marinate our hearts in the Word of God. 

"Many today who profess Christ never learn wisdom through failure to attend sufficiently to God's written word."

Friends, there are no shortcuts or substitutes to growing in wisdom. 

Packer makes much of the reality that wisdom is not what we might imagine. The widsom we get from God is not a big overview and understanding of what God is doing in the world as if we gained access behind the curtain. "The gift of wisdom presupposes our conscious inability to see or know what's behind the curtain" (paraphrase).

"Wisdom is not seeing the whole picture, but it is knowing how to do what is 'wise' in the actual situations of everyday life."

This resonates with Ecclesiastes in that we must recognize that life is 'hevel' / vanity of vanities/ temporal. That is essential for us to be wise. It is wise for us to recognize that the God we worship may hide Himself and His purposes. "God in His wisdom, to make and keep us humble and to teach us to walk by faith, has hidden from us almost everything we should like to know about the providential purposes which He is working out in our churches and in our lives." I would add 'in our nation and the world'. 

If you are like me, you long to know what God is up to in the days of COVID 19, and you want to tell Him how to fix it. That is not the way of wisdom; it is the way of presumption.

So, what is wisdom? 

"Fear God and keep his commandments" - Eccles 12:13.

"Trust and obey Him, reverence Him in worship, be humble before Him and do good (Eccles5:1-7; 3:12); remember that God will some day take account of you, so eschew, even in secret, things of which you will be ashamed when they come to light as God's assizes (Ecc 11:9, 12:14). Live in the present and enjoy it; present pleasures are God's good gifts (Ecc 7:17, 9:7-10)."Use all the good sense and enterprise at your command in exploiting the opportunities that lie before you (Ecc 11:1-6).

THE FRUIT OF WISDOM

"The disposition to confess that God is wise and to cleave to Him and live for Him in the light of His Word through thick and thin."

The fruit of this wisdom is to make us more Christlike with the evidence of the fruit of the Spirit. The root of this fruit is faith in Christ, who is the Widsom of God. 

We are not alone. Through Christ God's wisdom confounds the wise of this world. Even Jesus learned obedience through the things He suffered, and He is with us in our times of distress as well. 

Pastor Bob and I are available meet and pray with you on the phone, if not in person. Please feel free to contact us at any time with prayer requests or if you want to simply talk.

Tom May 770 503-6995

Bob Borger 706 671-5564