Pure Wisdom

What is wisdom? I mean, you've heard that term in how many sermons? We need more wisdom. What exactly does that mean? What is wisdom? We need it, we should have it, we preach about it. The Bible is full of all kinds of instructions about wisdom, but when you break it down, what is it? What is it we're supposed to learn?

What is it we're supposed to have as part of our lives? You know, it's interesting in 1 Corinthians 3. Let's go there. 1 Corinthians 3. In verse 18, Paul writes, Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you seems to be wise in this age, let him become a fool, that he may become wise.

For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God, for it is written, he catches the wise in their own craftiness. And again, the Lord knows the thoughts of the wise that they are futile. Well, wait a minute, that means there's two different kinds of wisdom here. There's a wisdom that comes from God, and there is a wisdom that seems right to human beings that God says it's in craftiness. In other words, it seems intelligent. It seems to make sense, but it's absolutely futile.

It has no meaning. It leads to nothingness. Okay. Well, we're supposed to be wise. Now we find out there's two different kinds of wisdom. How do we sort through that? How do we sort through that? You know, in the Book of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, we have the writings of Solomon, the man who was considered at the time to be the wisest man in the world. And even today, we read Proverbs, we read Ecclesiastes to learn about wisdom. I think Proverbs sometimes is the most neglected book in terms of the amount of information that's in that book on wisdom.

And he talks throughout the book about how important wisdom is. He wrote things like a wise man fears and aparts from evil, but a fool rages and his self-confidence. There's the difference between this right kind of wisdom and this wrong wisdom that's filled with anger and arrogance. He also wrote a fool vents his feelings, but a wise man holds them back.

There's a number of places where he talks about wisdom is learning to be able to control your emotions. Now, we also know that Solomon became known for his lack of wisdom. God gave him a special gift of wisdom. It wasn't just something he developed by studying, you know, the philosophers, by studying the ancients of his time.

This is something God gave to him. And when he gave that to him, if you go through the book of Proverbs, you'll see he breaks the process down. And much of the time, he's talking about practical application of spiritual principles that lead to decisions.

That's how he uses it all the time. So he talks about knowledge. You have to have a certain knowledge. If you have the wrong knowledge, you're going to make the wrong decisions. You can't be wise if you're basing your decisions on wrong knowledge. You have to have the right knowledge. He talks about understanding. Now, you can have lots of knowledge and come to wrong conclusions and not understand.

So you have to understand the knowledge. And then he says you have to have wisdom. Now, wisdom, the word, the Hebrew word that's translated wisdom, is very interesting because it's used throughout the Old Testament in different applications because basically it means to be skillful and practical. You will see that craftsmen who are good at making things, they had wisdom in their craft. When they made the tabernacle, they had to find people with wisdom in creating the things that God wanted created.

So it's skillful and it's practical. He uses wisdom in terms of decision-making in life as you have to be skillful in what real wisdom is, and it is practical. It is not just some kind of, you know, we sit around and we pontificate on and come up with nice sayings. And if you go through Proverbs, you find so much of Proverbs is very practical.

Even the one I just read on wise people learn to control their emotions, their self-control. There's a lot of instructions in there about self-control. It's very practical. So here we have a man who God gave a special blessing to of wisdom, and yet something happened to him. Let's go to Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes chapter 1. Well, if you were the wisest man on the earth and God gave you a gift of wisdom. And what's interesting is that he actually says at one point, and God never took that away.

God never took away the wisdom, and yet his life ended up as a failure. How could you have wisdom from God and end up as a failure? And that's what we're going to look at because there's a very important lesson for us today from the life of Solomon. And looking how God can give us everything, and we can squander what God has given to us. So let's start in verse 12. Now, it doesn't say Solomon wrote this, it just says the preacher, the wise man. He was the wise man. And all Jewish sources say this has to be Solomon. Most Christian sources say this has to be Solomon when it was written and how it's worded and how it fits in with Proverbs.

So we accept that this is Solomon. He says, I the preacher was king over Israel and Jerusalem. So, okay, there's no other king at this time, you know, except Solomon. And I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom, okay, by wisdom in my decision-making process of getting knowledge, developing understanding, and then having this wisdom to make the right choices, to make the right decisions, to do the right things. By this process, I decided, he says, concerning all that is done under heaven. This burdensome task God has given to the sons of men by which they may be exercised. And one thing you'll find out about Ecclesiastes, Mr.

Rains just did a series of webcast Bible studies on Ecclesiastes. And he said, it sort of got depressing after a while. I said, yeah, that's why I've never done a full set of Bible studies on Ecclesiastes. But when you said you wanted to, I said, go for it. Because you're watching a man come apart. You're literally watching a man come apart. The king of Israel, Solomon, he says, I have seen all the works that are done under the sun and indeed all is vanity.

In other words, all things are worthless. And grasping for the wind, he says, I've come to the conclusion towards the end of my life that life is basically meaningless and you're just trying to grab the wind. As a kid, you ever tried to grab the wind? I used to run out and I was trying to grab it.

I just, I don't know, what is this? Can you catch it in a pot? He says, he's just trying to capture the wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight. And what is lacking cannot be numbered. I communed with my heart. He says, I got deep inside myself and deep inside myself, I was going to use wisdom to discover everything there is to be discovered. Saying, look, I have attained greatness and have gained more wisdom than all who were before me in Jerusalem.

My heart was under, understood, my heart has understood great wisdom and knowledge. He said, I realized I was the smartest guy on earth. You know, Elon Musk was nothing compared to me. I mean, when you look at what he did from architecture to, I mean, everything you can imagine, he excelled at.

People came from all over the world, kings and queens came to see him because why? He is unique. Why he knows how he puts things together, how he understands how things work. They came to see Saul. And he looked at that and said, yep, that's me. So I decided to, how far can I take this? I set my heart to know wisdom and to know, now think about this, madness and folly. In other words, if this is wise, why is the opposite not wise? This was the Epicurean philosophy at the Roman times.

You don't know what good and evil is until you try both, and then you decide what is good. So he came to the conclusion that I have to find out, I've discovered what is good here, what is wise, but I have to experience the other side to know that that's true. In my search for knowledge and for understanding. But he says, after a while, I perceive this also as grasping for the wind.

For in much wisdom as much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. Here's a man who had received joy from God because he had received wisdom and knowledge from God. A lifetime of trying to expand that out to have an answer for everything in life through experience left him to saying, you know what, you can be too smart. You can experience too much, and it's just meaningless. Your life becomes meaningless. So he says here in verse 1 of chapter 2, I said in my heart, once again, he's talking to himself. I made this decision, I have this wisdom. You know, it's knowledge, understanding, wisdom, how to apply things.

What I need to do is do the other side, to experiment. And you know what he's experimenting with? It's the same thing you and I experiment with. His own life. He's using his life as an experiment, and that's what we do as human beings. That's all human beings are using their lives as experiments. He had the unique opportunity that God said, no, I will give you everything you need to know. But in that, he became obsessed with knowledge and understanding and was obsessed, obsessed, obsessed until what God gave him wasn't enough, and we'll see why.

And that's where we face a danger. Sometimes we face that danger. So I come on, come now, I will test you. In other words, he's going to test himself, okay? I'm going to see with his life how much mirth I can have. How much happiness is too much? Therefore, enjoy pleasure, but surely this ended up being nothing after a while. I was vanity. I said of laughter, madness. You know? I don't know what he did. Maybe he brought in all the world's comics. Had to perform all the time. I'm making a joke, but think about the entertainment he would have had. In a world without television, a world without the internet, his entertainment was he brought in entertainers constantly.

He received entertainment. But he even said, I wanted to explore humor, and I wanted to find out what real humor is. And after a while, he says, I couldn't even laugh at anything. In other words, he obsessed to the overuse of everything. I searched in my heart now to gratify my flesh with wine while guiding my heart with wisdom. I'm going to get drunk, but I'm only doing this to figure out how bad it is. I don't know how many years he did that. When did he figure out getting drunk wasn't good? And how to lay hold on folly till I might see what was good for the sons of men to do under heaven all the days of their lives.

I will be able to teach people real wisdom once I've messed up enough. Once I can say, I know this is wrong. I know getting drunk all the time is bad. Do you know why? I spend three years drunk all the time. That's a decision he made. Now, most people become alcoholic, so because they make a decision, well, it's a decision, but they don't know what they're doing. He decided, I'm not saying he was alcoholic, but he decided to go down a route because, well, I just want the experience.

Then I can tell people, I know that, that's like, so I can tell you what to do. Now, it's interesting. He's not saying, so God can tell you what to do. The smartest guy in the room can tell you what to do. I can tell you what to do. So he goes on, and he talks about how he amassed great wealth. He became probably, by far, the wealthiest man on earth. He's probably more wealthy than the pharaohs of Egypt at the time. He is the most wealthiest guy on the earth.

He has everything you could want. You know, with his many, many wives, if one of them says, I like some gold earrings, no problem. How big? I don't know what you do with that many women. That is the height of, I fully should have seen even a strong enough word. I don't want to use the word I'm thinking to apply to Solomon. It is stupidity. I'm just going to have all the women I can have. And then I'll tell you all about women. One thing you know at the end of his life, he didn't understand women at all. He said, I can't even find love. Well, of course you can't. He figured that out.

So if any of you are tempted to have a thousand wives and concubines, you can take it from him. It doesn't work. Just ask your wife first. See what she says. So verse 11, and when I looked on all the works, you know, he did active work. He just didn't sit around and be a lazy king. He built things. He designed things.

He had projects. People came to him by the thousands to receive wisdom, judgments and their problems, judicial judgments. People came from all over the world to hear him give a judgment because it made so much sense. It was so wise. But when I looked at all the works that my hands had done and on the labor which I had toiled and indeed it was vanity and grasping for the wind, there was no prophet under the sun. He said, I didn't have any goodness in life. He had every physical possession you could have at that time. How many houses do you want?

How much gadgets do you want? Because whatever gadgets they had then, he had them. What kind of entertainment? What kind of furniture? How many women? He had everything that human beings would say, no, that would make me happy. And he did it to show I'll be able to tell you the difference between good and evil. And at the end he said, yeah, and I've wasted my life in nothingness. It's all nothing. And yet people came to hear the wisdom that he wasn't applying in his own life.

So we go down. Well, before I go there, Solomon's life was wasted looking for something he already had. And that's part of the lesson we need to learn. God has called us and given us his spirit. And we spend life looking for something we already have. We just have to use and submit to what he's already given to us.

Or we can be like Solomon. I'll figure this out. I'll be the smartest guy in the room all the time because I've done everything, had everything, been everything, you name it. And I'd be famous all over the world because of that. Fame, recognition, adoration, all the things that people say, well, if I could just be famous. I mean, that's the whole thing with social media, right? Andy Warhol was right. How many know who Andy Warhol is? All of you do, okay. He was right. Everybody gets 15 minutes of fame.

And that's supposed to make you happy. That's supposed to now fulfill your life. Look, I had me and my cat, and 8,000 people watched me and my cat. I have value. I'm a real person now. Solomon was given what it takes to be a real person and spent his whole life trying to become a real person. And what God had already given to him. And at the end he figured it out. At the end he figured it out. But it wasn't a good pathway. Solomon did what was sort of natural for human beings. He had this unique gift from God, but we tend to measure everything by our five senses and by our emotions.

And then we all got some really cloudy thinking. I mean, no human being is clear-minded all the time. So our cloudy thinking, our senses and our emotions, and we use that to define everything. He became a student of all kinds of knowledge. In verse 17, he studied everything. He learned everything. Therefore I hated life. I hated life. I mean, how could you hate life with everything?

I hated life because the work that was done under the sun was distressful to me for all his vanity, all his nothingness, and grasping for the wind. He keeps going back to his sleep, going out and grabbing the wind. I spent my lifetime trying to grab and bottle the wind. I never thought of this. You could probably, I'm sure someone's done it, just take a bunch of bottles out in the wind and say, I bottled the wind and sell it, and somebody will buy it, right?

Then I hated all my labor which I had toiled under the sun because I must leave it to the man who will come after me. He said, then I really got depressed because you know what? When I die, somebody else is going to get my palaces. Somebody else is going to be king. Somebody else is going to get all my gold and silver. Somebody else is going to take all the fields. You know, he became an expert at raising animals, of growing food and all the ...

He did all kinds of things. Someone else is going to take his fields and someone else is going to take his animals. And they won't be his wives anymore. And he says, I'm going to lose everything I've spent my life gathering as the meaning of life. And who knows whether he'll be a fool? The guy after me may ruin everything I did. Yet he will rule over my labor which I toiled and which I have shown myself wise under the sun. I'm smarter than anybody else and someone else is going to destroy it.

You know, excuse me. I read an article a while back. The guy did a study of businesses that were developed and they weren't even nonprofits by one strong personality. But that personality became the total face of that business. And what happened when he died? They usually don't have a very good track record. They usually collapse within 25 years because he never passed on the knowledge, the wisdom.

He passed on what he had made. And he was, I don't want to pass on what I had made. But he realized he was an old man. He was going to die. So he goes on a lament that now I'm going to lose everything. Solomon's failure is a simple thing but a complicated thing. Solomon was double-minded. He tried to live as two different people at the same time.

He tried to live as a man of God with wisdom from God and be as worldly as he could. So he could learn all about that by experience. If I get the experience, I'll understand. After years and years of getting the experience, he said, my life is meaningless because of all those experiences. Because in the end, I even lose my wealth. What happens to me afterwards? He started thinking about eternity and now his life had no meaning at all. Fortunately, you and I do have a vision of eternity. Those holy days we just kept, trumpets, atonement, at least the tabernacles.

That last day when there's a second resurrection is about what? Eternity. It's about what the promise of what God will do and give us at that future. Understand at this point Solomon despares of life. At this point, he couldn't even see a future after death. And he still could make good decisions for other people. He just didn't make good ones for himself.

What he lacked is the simple term, the word we use, integrity. We want integrity in everybody else. We want our bankers to have integrity. Good luck with that. Now I'm not saying that. I have some bankers I really trust.

I have to say, I won't tell you the bank I go to, I don't trust anybody at corporate headquarters. But the local guy I trust, mainly because he tells me at times, no don't do this, this bank's just taking advantage of you. We want integrity from the guy that sells us the car, right? The used car. We want integrity from everybody else, but then what is integrity?

Here we are going through what is wisdom? Well, there's two kinds of wisdom. And we have to be able to look at them and choose. Solomon was given the wisdom, kept it while he did all the foolishness, and then at the end said, I should have stayed wise. We don't have to go through that. Of course, we all carry enough foolishness in from ourselves before we're converted anyways. We got lots of foolishness we bring in.

Even if you grew up in the church, come on, you brought an awful lot of foolishness with you into your conversion process. We can't go back to it. Integrity comes from a Latin word that means inter-ker. You know, a whole unit, integer. Thank you. No, I already laughed because I think every time I've used that word in public, someone's looked at me and...no, yes. So, it means a whole number. I'll do it. You know, you get stuck in a mispronunciation of a word, and you can mispronounce it for 30 years, and you just can't seem to get over it.

But anyways, it means a whole number. It's not infractions. It's not imparts. One is a whole number. Now, we can theoretically tear that apart. I can have one apple and cup it up. That's not the whole point of the word integrity. It is that it's a wholeness. The person isn't imparts. Solomon lived his life as a fractured person, ups and downs. There were moments he was probably the most excited man in the world, the happiest man in the world, and there were times he didn't even know why he was alive.

He's going up and down, and it's because of the experiences he's having. It's because of the way he's thinking. I must totally grow in knowledge and understanding and wisdom outside of the framework that God gave it to me. And then I'll truly be wise. I'll truly be the best man, the smartest man in the room all the time. And he was. Didn't erase his failure. There was a book written back in 1996. I still have a copy. It was written by a man who was a Stephen Carter.

He wrote a number of books during the 90s on political issues, and I didn't read his political books, but this one I thought was fascinating. It was on integrity. What is it? What is the good definition of integrity? He says the word integrity comes from the Latin word as integer and historically as it understood to carry much of the same sense. That sense of wholeness. A person of integrity, like a whole number, is a whole person.

A person somehow undivided. Now, you and I are still divided. We will fight the divisions inside of us until we're changed. When we are changed, we will be whole. And much of the stuff we deal with today, even physically, we deal with physical issues now that are because we're divided inside our own minds. Our own bodies are breaking down because we're divided. We will be whole in the resurrection. That's why we can't even imagine what that life's going to be like. So you and I struggle with our dividedness.

What we strive for is integrity. What we strive for is to become whole. All the pieces of our lives fit together. And you know, Solomon talked about integrity. Let's go to Proverbs 10.

Proverbs 10.

Verse 9.

He who walks with integrity walks securely, but he who perverts his ways will become known.

In other words, you can live a secure life, or you can live a perverted life, and you'll become known in a bad sense, which is exactly what he did. This is the kind of integrity God was teaching him. He wrote it down and then didn't follow his own advice. Tom in Hebrew basically means wholeness.

It has somewhat the same meaning.

When you walk as a whole person with God, you walk securely.

You know he's there. You know he's going to take care of you. That doesn't mean that bad things are going to happen, but you trust in him. You know, he wasn't trusting in God and his decision-making.

He couldn't have been to make all those bad decisions, because he knew they weren't what God wanted. I gave my heart to do this. I decided to do this. I was going to discover this.

Right? That wasn't what God had told him. I can't imagine what it's like to be probably in the world around the Mediterranean. He's probably the most famous man in the world at the time, and possibly the richest man in the world at the time.

And the whole world came to you just to hear you talk. That's a heavy burden, but it was never enough.

The more we know what we believe, and the more we live by what we believe, the more of a whole person we become. It's hard because you and I live in a fractionized world.

We can act one way at church, one way in our house, one way at work, one way at school, right?

We learn to become different people. It's part of what we're taught to do.

And as we struggle through life doing that, the whole journey that we have to stay on and not make the mistake Solomon did is to stay focused so that we become more and more, and it's like I said, we'll struggle with this until the day we die, and then we're changed. We become more and more the same person wherever we are. Now that's hard. Don't ask my wife how perfect I am at home.

Sometimes I'm a different person at home because why? Let's see. I haven't slept. I had too much coffee. You know, I'm not taking care of myself. I'm not exercising. I'm not doing this. I'm not doing that. And I'm working too many hours every day. And all of a sudden, I'm just sort of grumpy and mean. And I realize I'm being that way because she just usually sits and looks at me and smiles.

Right? Now, as long as we're physical, we always struggle with that, right? We always will. Because when we talk about Solomon as an example, we can't do this. No human being can do this exactly. Just the fact that we're physical means we can't always be exactly the same person. We can't. Age changes you. Hopefully for the better in some ways. Other ways, it's not for the better, right? Certain periods in life can be so stressful that you change for a while. We accept that in each other. But the journey is wisdom and the journey is integrity. Stephen Carter wrote something I thought was very interesting in that this one reason I kept his book. I mean, there's so many books I've read. I've gotten rid of because, okay, you know, it was interesting. But he said that to have integrity, there's three things that you must do. I actually added a fourth. He said, you must discern the difference between right and wrong. Oh, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.

Knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. You are able to discern the difference between right and wrong.

The second point is you act on what you've discerned, even if it is at personal cost.

So many of you have had to do that when you discovered and discerned that the Sabbath was the truth of God. And you went to your employer and got fired. And you stepped down from the job.

You discerned, you act on your what you knew was right, and even if it was you had to pay a cost.

And then the third thing is very interesting, saying openly that you're acting on your understanding of right and wrong. In other words, I'm sorry, I'll lose my job. I can't give up what I believe God wants me to do in keeping the Sabbath. When you state that, you're saying, this is why I'm doing this. Now, I've added a one between one and two here. I think it should be in there. And that is you choose what is right. Because this is where Solomon made a mistake.

Okay? Discerning what is right and wrong. He discerned what was right and wrong a lot because you read Proverbs and he's telling you what's wrong. And yet he kept living the wrong because he was a fractured man. Two, you have to choose it. So you discern it, but you must choose it. That's the I put in this list. It's not just discerning right for wrong. You choose the right. There's a point in here where we make a decision, wisdom. No, this is right. I will do it.

Even if it may cost me something. I will do what is right.

And then his third point, acting. You have to act on it now.

And then the last point, you have to be willing to defend it.

You say, no, this is why I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm defending what I'm doing.

That kind of integrity, if we live by that, we are constantly moving towards becoming more and more of a whole person instead of the fractured people that we are. All human beings are fractured.

We just are because we live in a fractured world. Satan's fractured beyond repair.

We can be repaired. We can be repaired because of God and God's Spirit.

We see this fracturedness all the time. And you can see it in extreme cases where you've seen it in people's lives that you know. A man is having an affair. But when he's with his wife and children in a church or whatever, his business or whatever, he seems absolutely like the perfect father and husband. Have you ever seen these cases where a man has a wife on the east coast and the west coast? He's a trucker or something and does it for years? I read one case where it was for 10 years before one of the wives figured it out. He had children. He was legally married to two different women and had children. And the wives, because he was gone a week at a time, haven't figured out that they were spending every other weekend with a different wife and children. And the wives were shocked because they thought he was such a good husband. And how do you do that? You live in a box.

When he's with her, he's the perfect husband. When he's with her, he's the perfect husband. The truth is, he is an absolute failure as a husband. This is the box that Solomon did.

He could live in these boxes where he was the wisest man on earth while he was doing some of the greatest foolishness of anybody on earth. And he always found a way to justify it until the end. And then he figured out it wasn't right. So we must be striving to be a complete, full person.

Now, I don't have time because I knew I was going to be short because of the blessing of little children. But I gave a sermon a few years ago on this. Some of you might remember it, but you could do this. I may still go back and give that sermon again here in the near future. But I went through James 3, 16-18, where James describes in detail the difference between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of God, but he doesn't describe it in the practicality that Solomon did. And it's interesting, wisdom in Greek means different, different than the word wisdom in Hebrew. Remember, skillful, practical, this is what you do to live. In Greek, wisdom literally means to understand the true nature of things. So when James says wisdom, he says you understand the true nature. You've cut through all the different stuff that's in your life, and you're down to the true nature. And what's interesting in James, I may give that as a sermon again, but in James, what James says is that you understand the true nature. And James, what James does is, so let me tell you the character and the fruits of wisdom.

He takes it from just skillful and practical to this is who you are. You become wisdom, and you become the wisdom of God. And he starts it by showing in three verses, here's the wisdom of the world. And this is why it doesn't work. And here's what happens when you literally have the knowledge of God, the understanding of God, and the wisdom of God. This is who you become.

So we talk about wisdom. We generally think about learning to make decisions. In fact, to tell you the truth, that's how this sermon started, how to make decisions. I said, well, okay, before I do that, let's do a little explanation of wisdom. Then I went to the sermon I gave three years ago and thought, oh, that one would be a good one to give again.

Well, anyways, this was the end of that, of going through this process of, let's look at wisdom and why Solomon failed, why he failed. And the lesson in Solomon that's for us today, because God has given us something. And if you don't have God's Spirit in you, God's Spirit is with you. I mean, we just blessed babies up here that God's Spirit is with. It's not in them, because they have to make that decision. They have to repent, and they have to make a covenant with God and receive His Spirit. But God's Spirit is with them. That's what we're asking for. His presence, His help, His guidance, His protection, right? So we're asking that we ask that God be with these children. And we believe He is. And we know that God has given us His Spirit.

And with that Spirit, we will grow not only in the skillful and practical side of wisdom, but into the character of wisdom. Wisdom becomes part of who we are, at the core of who we are. And that's what Solomon discovered at the last of his life. I had it, but I wasn't it. I wasn't wisdom. I just had wisdom. And in the end, he figured it out. And maybe that was his repentance. I look at the end of Ecclesiastes, and I think maybe he finally repented, and God said, boy, you were a foolish man. I gave you everything, and you finally figured it out at the end.

And yet the book of Proverbs is amazing work. It's an amazing work that God inspired.

So maybe here sometime in the next few months, we'll go through James again and look at the character of wisdom.