During a break in a Christmas pageant rehearsal, a young boy came running up to the pastor and announced, “I’m a wise man!”

“You are?” said the pastor. “You seem pretty excited about it.”

The boy beamed. “I am!”

“What’s so great about being a wise man?” the pastor asked.

The boy quickly replied, “I get to carry the gold … and I don’t have to hang around any smelly ol’ sheep.”

Many people in our world today seem to have a similar view of wisdom. They believe wisdom is the ability to “carry the gold”—to make a good living, to live a comfortable life, and to avoid association with anything unpleasant.

I believe God’s Word points us to a different definition of wisdom:

Wisdom is the capacity to see things from God’s perspective and to respond to them according to scriptural principles.

In other words wisdom is seeking heavenly opinions on earthly circumstances.

There are five main reasons God desires for us to walk in wisdom:

1. God desires for us to become all that He created us to be. He expects us to develop and then to use all of the talents, abilities, and gifts that He has placed within us. He desires for us to maximize our potential—to become the man or woman He created us to be.

2. God desires for us to accomplish all of the work that He sets before us to do. God does not call us to unfinished tasks or halfhearted ventures. When God places a challenge, opportunity, or goal in front of us, He expects us to pursue it with the whole heart, mind, and soul and to experience a measure of success in accomplishing what He has called us to do.

3. God desires for us to receive, to experience, and to enjoy all the blessings He desires to pour into our lives. God wants us to walk wisely so that we may experience the fullness of His provision as promised in His Word. He wants us to have the fruit born of wise choices and decisions. He wants us to be spiritually prosperous, to be physically and emotionally healthy, and to have our financial and material needs met.

4. God desires for our lives to bring glory to Him. God wants us to live in a way that causes others to want Christ Jesus in their lives. The foolish life does not bring glory to God; the wise life does.

5. God desires that we avoid all the pitfalls associated with foolish living. We may not be able to quickly answer the question, “How do we walk wisely?” but most of us have a pretty good idea as to why people act foolishly.

Charles F. Stanley, Walking Wisely: Real Guidance for Life’s Journey (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2002), 2–5.

We have just released a new Bible study on topic of The Many Faces of Wisdom.

These lessons are available on Amazon, as well as a part of my Good Questions Have Groups Talking Subscription Service. Like Netflix for Bible Lessons, one low subscription gives you access to all our lessons–thousands of them. For a medium-sized church, lessons are as little as $10 per teacher per year.

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