Two Types of Wisdom

Truth and knowledge come to us ultimately from the Lord!  All truth in the world is from God because God is truth!  In a Wesleyan Theology Class material that I was teaching from the question was asked would you rather have a really smart, excellent brain surgeon who was an atheist or a fairly intelligent, mediocre brain surgeon who is a Christian? 

So there must be something beyond truth that matters and the book of James describe it as two types of wisdom.  Truth and knowledge are available to all but wisdom is what you do with the truth and how you apply truth to your life.  

James 3:13-15 13 If you are wise and understand God’s ways, prove it by living an honorable life, doing good works with the humility that comes from wisdom. 14 But if you are bitterly jealous and there is selfish ambition in your heart, don’t cover up the truth with boasting and lying. 15 For jealousy and selfishness are not God’s kind of wisdom. Such things are earthly, unspiritual, and demonic.

Godly wisdom leads us to living an honorable life of doing good works in a humble way!!  

Worldly wisdom leads us to living bitterly jealous lives full of selfish ambition.  We end up boasting about our knowledge and not being truthful.  We end up being jealous and selfish! 

If we take an honest look at our lives in this moment - which of these wisdom's are we more like?  How can me move closer to a Godly wisdom in our lives on a regular basis?  

Seasoned with Salt

Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone. (Colossians 4:6 NIV) 

Paul is reminding the church that it is essential that we pray and live in such a way that we will impact people around us with the Good News of Jesus!  It is so important how we live our lives because people won't want to hear a word we say when our actions are inconsistent with our message!  

Then there are our words!  Do our everyday conversations add flavor and goodness to life?  I know for my own journey I continue to work on two areas of my tongue - 

1. Sarcasm is a negative humor that I resort to a times when I am trying to hide my true feelings. Often the flavor of sarcasm is more like the flavor of habanero peppers instead of salt.  Sarcasm is rarely full of grace and it seldom has an answer that people are looking for in my words.  

2. Harshness in my responses when I get pushed in a corner.  I continue to work on this reality that when I don't communicate well with people in the first place - that I will allow things to build up and  "BAM" some pretty harsh word can come out of my mouth.  I am sure my wife and family know this more than the rest of the world.  I can usually see the reasons for these outburst along with failing to communicate up front and they are things like lack of sleep and stress that cause these words to come out when I wish they wouldn't have been said.  

Evaluate your conversations today - are your word like a seasoning salt that brings flavor or are they more like habanero's that bring pain?