Clothesline - Edition 217

By Rev. Elizabeth L. Nelson, Pastor

September 18, 2024  

If you had to choose between infinite wisdom and infinite wealth, which would you choose?

There’s a story about a pastor whose church had a sizable debt. Suddenly, an angel appears and announces that God wants to reward the minister for his service. “What do you want God to give you: infinite wealth or infinite wisdom?” the angel asks. In a flash, the pastor asks for wisdom. “Granted!” says the angel, and vanishes. The pastor tells his church leadership what happened. After a stunned pause, one person asks the pastor what wisdom he could offer them now. The pastor looks at them rather sheepishly and replies, “I should have asked for infinite wealth.”

How would you have answered the angel in that situation? We might think it would be wiser to pick riches to make life a little easier. The lure of worldly wealth has tempted humans from the beginning of time. The serpent tempted Eve, saying it would make her wise. Instead of trusting the wisdom of her Creator, she follows her own path.

When judges governed the people of Israel, “all the people did what was right in their own eyes,” the Bible says. The same tendency was repeated in the nation’s history later, as the prophet Isaiah wrote: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way.”

The apostle James tells us in one of his letters that there are two kinds of wisdom. The first is earthly, unspiritual and devilish. At the center of this “wisdom” is ‘Me, Myself and I’. The second kind of wisdom comes from above. It comes from God. God’s wisdom is not like human intelligence. God doesn’t think the way we think. God says, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” James tells us that God’s wisdom isn’t about knowing lots of stuff, but about living the way God wants us to live.

Have you ever asked God for wisdom? When we ask God for wisdom, we are really asking for more of Jesus, more of his spirit, attitudes and values. When we pray according to God’s will, God will hear us and grant our requests. Surely it is God’s will to fill us with the wisdom from above, with more of Jesus. We can’t go wrong when we ask God for that kind of wisdom.