The problem with being wise,

n the eyes of others, is that we become wise in our own eyes, and lean on our own understanding. This is NOT biblical-wisdom, but human-wisdom. Biblical-wisdom is realizing that we have NO wisdom worth leaning on, but that Jesus DOES. We do NOT know what’s best, but Jesus DOES. Biblical-wisdom is sanity/faith/dependency/humility and results in the other-worldly peace that is vastly superior to the circumstance-dependent peace experienced by human-wisdom-reliants. Atheist peace. Leaving Jesus followers without the benefit of Jesus in THIS life. And worse — leaving us unfruitful with seculars — seed cast on thorny soil that gets choked, does not reproduce a hundredfold, or even thirtyfold, or even ONE-fold.

Christians who have a lot of human-wisdom rarely have biblical wisdom. Only Christians who are clueless-they-know-what’s-best have biblical-wisdom — have faith that is contagious to seculars — especially the turned off and antagonistic. Christians with a lot of human-wisdom RESIST the humiliation of admitting to self and others that we dunno what to do. And with a lot of human-wisdom we think we know what’s thankable and what’s not — what’s good news and bad news in daily life. Christians with biblical-wisdom THANK Jesus for everything just as it is, and everyone just as we are, because they don’t know Jesus’ genius plan, but trust that He’s totally sovereign and knows exactly what He’s doing, so they are curious/expectant to see what He does NEXT, in them, others, circumstances.

So how do Christians GET biblical-wisdom — another way of saying fresh faith/dependency/humility? Only by the Spirit of Jesus freshly convicting us of human-wisdom-reliance — opening our eyes to SEE our pathetic condition, so we can CONFESS it and receive momentary relief. The starting place for fresh faith is fresh conviction of human-wisdom-reliance.

— Dave McCarty, GospelFriendships, grateful that grace is for failures whose eyes are opened by the Spirit to see their failures

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