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“But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure and full of quiet gentleness. Then it is peace-loving and courteous. It allows discussion and is willing to yield to others; it is full of mercy and good deeds. It is wholehearted and straightforward and sincere” James 3:17
“Donkeys laden with books,” a phrase in rabbinical literature, is descriptive of those who know much but still remain fools.
Another expression says that “knowledge is power.” True, but how is the knowledge used – beneficially or malevolently? That is a vitally important question. We have more knowledge than ever before, but a few would claim that we have more wisdom.
Going faster and faster, we may be still going astray. Just as grapes are not picked from a bramble bush, neither can the good life be harvested from sowing wild oats.
For a nation of people, many of whom are “educated beyond their intelligence,” as an anonymous wit once observed, America sorely lacks a sufficiency of men with real wisdom – that which is given by the Lord Himself.
In our modern education, we seem to be preoccupied with the accumulation of knowledge, to the neglect of that wisdom which alone can save us from the misuse of knowledge.
William Lyon Phelps, famous English professor at Yale University and a godly statesman, once said, “If I could choose between a knowledge of the Bible and a college education, I would readily choose the knowledge of the Bible.”
If we lack wisdom, God’s wisdom, we need only ask of Him and He will grant it when we ask in faith, according to His promise in James 1:5.
Bible Reading: James 3:13-18
Today’s Action Point:
In order to live a supernatural life I’ll look for divine wisdom from the proper source – God, His Word, and His indwelling Holy Spirit.
About this Author: Bill Bright
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Dear Friends,
We are now in the third millennium, it seems likely that the world we know is passing away. For decades we have lived with the knowledge that we have created weapons that could wipe out human life on the planet. The Cold War may have ended, but the new world order seems no less frightening than the old. We are facing the possiblity of ecological disaster. The AIDS virus threatens to bring a plague of unmanageable proporations. Within the next two or three generations, the world population will become too great for the planet to support. Generations before our own have felt that the end of the world is nigh, yet it does seem that we are facing a future that is unimaginable. How will the idea of God survive in the years to come? For years it has constantly adapted to meet the demands of the present, but in our own century, more and more people have found that it no longer works for them, and when religious idea cease to be effective they fade away. May be God really is an idea of the past? We often have double standard when we compare the past with our own time? Secularist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw athesism as the irreversible condition of humanity in the scientific age. There is much to support this view? In Europe, the churches are only occupied by the older generation; atheism is no longer the painfully acquired ideology of a few intellectual pioneers but a prevailing mood? In the past it was always produced by a particular idea of God, but now it seems to have lost its inbuilt relationship to theism and become an automatic response to the experience of living in a secularized society. Many are unmoved by the prospect of living without God. Others find God’s absence a positive relief? Those of us who have had a difficult time with religion in the past find it liberating to rid of the God who terrorized our childhood? There is desolation. The God shaped hole in human consciousness, where God had always been? Nevertheless, even if it is insisted that if God existed, it always negates our freedom. Traditional religions tell us that we must conform to God’s idea of humanity to be come fully human. Instead, we must see human beings as liberty incarnate. Because God represent absolute perfection, there is nothing left for us to do or achieve. People should reject God defiantly in order to pour out all their loving solicitude upon humankind. As always, the atheists have a point? A passionate and committed atheism can be more religious than a weary or inadequate theism.”Believe in God”, since after death we should be able to find out whether or not this is true?
The God of the mystics might seem to present a possible alternative. The mystics have long insisted that God is not an-Other Being; they have claimed that God does not really exist and that it is better to call God Nothing. This God is in tune with the atheistic mood of our secular society, with its distrust of inadequate images of the Absolute. Instead of seeing God as an objective Fact, which can be demonstrated by means of scientific proof, mystics have claimed that God is subjective experience. Like all art, however, mysticism requires intelligence, discipline and self-criticism as a safeguard against indulgent emotionalism and projection. God of the mystics could even satisfy the feminists, since all mysticism have for long tried to introduce a female element into the divine. In the West, mysticism has never in the past been a mainstream religious enthusiasm. Since the 1960s there has been a fresh interest in mysticism, expressed in the enthusiasm for Yoga, meditation, Buddhism and Sufism, but it is not an approach that easily consorts with our objective, empirical mentality. The God of the mystics is not easy to apprehend. It requires long training with an expert and a considerable investment of time. The mystic has to work hard to acquire this sense of reality known as God.(which many have refused to name). The God of the mystic does not arrive readymade and prepackaged. God cannot be experienced as quickly as the instant ecstasy created by revivalist preacher, who quickly has a whole congregation clapping hands. Today many people seem to have lost the will to make this imaginative effort? Mysticism should be a vibrant new faith for this millennium!
Francis Andrew