Wisdom Matters

When God called us the “sheep of his pasture,” he wasn’t complimenting us. He was giving us a truth of Scripture. As we continue to focus on the wisdom of Psalm 100, we will grow wiser if we take every word to heart.

Compared to God, we are sheep. Some sheep are smarter than others, but no one talks about the intelligence of sheep. Sheep are born to follow, and if they follow the wrong leader they can walk over a cliff, into deep water, or just get lost and separated from the flock. Jesus left the ninety-nine to look for the one lost sheep because that was the only hope that lost sheep had. Sheep aren’t smart enough to retrace their steps and rejoin the herd.

Sheep are led to “still waters” because they are too afraid to drink from a running stream. A sheep with wet wool weighs so much that it can easily get swept away, even in a light current. Sheep have no guile because they aren’t able to think that way. Sheep have no guilt because they fall into sin instead of choosing it. 

God thinks of us as sheep. God chooses us to be the sheep of “his pasture.” God made us and has always known how badly we need a shepherd. The eternal human flaw is that we think of ourselves “more highly than [we] ought to think” (Romans 12:3). 

The most gifted and capable servants of God are those who think of themselves as “sheep.” Those are the people who will understand that God created us to “follow” and remain in “his pasture.”

Being labeled a sheep isn’t a compliment; it is an encouragement to understand our great need for a shepherd. And we have a Good Shepherd!

Wisdom is offering our gratitude to God. He created us to be sheep so that we would live this life following him as our Good Shepherd. We can be grateful every day for his loving guidance. 

Psalm 100 should probably be read every day. Every person who devotes their life to the work of the ministry should probably memorize this psalm and think of it throughout the day. 

As a busy pastor’s wife, and now as I continue to work in full-time ministry, I am burdened by the truth of Psalm 100. Before I continue, we should hear the entire psalm.

Psalm 100 has five powerful verses. Hear the Lord speak each word to your heart.

“Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!

     Serve the Lord with gladness!

    Come into his presence with singing!

 Know that the Lord, he is God!

    It is he who made us, and we are his;

    we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

 Enter his gates with thanksgiving,

    and his courts with praise!

    Give thanks to him; bless his name!

 For the Lord is good;

    his steadfast love endures forever,

    and his faithfulness to all generations.”

As Christians, what is the “noise” we have shared with the world? Have they heard our joy and our gladness to serve, or something else? Do people think of us as “sheep” in God’s pasture, or are we more commonly identified by another title? When people see and hear our witness, are they aware that the Lord is good and that his love is steadfast?

Even as I write my heart is convicted. I confess that I have often served God because it was my job. I have often spoken more about the difficulties of my schedule than about how thankful I am for the privilege of my calling. I have presented God as my boss, my taskmaster, and my supervisor instead of presenting him with the gladness I feel that he is my God. Wisdom is offering our gratitude to God. May all of us confess and live more wisely as we consider the truth of Psalm 100.

Every news story can be a praise to God or a prayer. That is also true for the times someone shares a need, a mistake, or a joy with us. All of us live flawed lives in a flawed world. Sometimes we just need to remember that this life is only a small moment on the timeline of our eternal existence.

Christians are going to receive a “kingdom that cannot be shaken.” Every Christian can live each day with the promise of life eternal. We exist here on earth, but we will truly live when we get to heaven. We can enjoy this life, but our happiness here is tempered with the knowledge that all things here are temporary, even momentary. Life on earth does get shaken on a regular basis.

When our lives get difficult, sad, frustrating, or even impossibly hard, we still have a reason to offer our God “acceptable worship, with reverence and awe.” God never wants us to live a day, especially a day that is difficult, without the hope of his promise. 

Heaven is a reality. It is unseen and largely unknown, but we know everything we need to know in order to want that blessing. Heaven is where we will dwell with God and only dwell with his blessings.

“Our God is a consuming fire.” God will destroy all that is temporary in this life so that we can live eternally free from everything that is difficult. God’s fire will purify us so that when we enter heaven, we are free of every sin. Everyone in heaven will live a purified life that is holy and good.

We will offer worship in heaven that is always acceptable because it will be filled with reverence and awe. For now, that kind of worship needs to be a choice, and sometimes it will be an effort. How do we offer acceptable worship now? We remember to worship God today as we will worship him eternally. We are going to receive a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

Wisdom is offering our gratitude to God. May our gratitude wisely model now all that it will be in heaven.

Why was the Samaritan the only leper to fall on his face before Jesus, giving him thanks? This story is similar to the parable of the good Samaritan. Jesus was teaching the same lesson in a different way.

The nation of Israel had come to think of themselves as the “chosen people” of God. Eventually, they began to live as people who were entitled to God’s blessings rather than living humbly grateful to God for those blessings. Their sense of entitlement ultimately led to their judgment and discipline as God allowed the Assyrians and Babylonians to take his “chosen people” into captivity.

The Samaritans were a group of people the Israelites spurned. They were people whose ancestors had been left behind while others were taken into captivity. It is hard to know all the reasons why they were left behind. Some were weaker physically, but it’s also likely that some had compromised their faith and possibly their allegiance to their Jewish faith in order not to be enslaved. Those left behind eventually married people who weren’t Jewish and produced children who were not purely Jewish. The Jewish leaders were careful never to associate with the people of Samaria or their land, and the Jewish people followed the example of their leaders.

Jesus did go to Samaria and teach them about God’s grace. Jesus carefully pointed out the kindness of the good Samaritan and the gratitude of the Samaritan leper. The Samaritans in both stories pleased God, while the others did not. Jesus was teaching that it wasn’t the entitled who were faithful; it was the people whose faith prompted their actions.

God will bless all that he can in our lives, but he will also judge and discipline those attitudes and actions that weaken our faith and witness. 

Wisdom is offering our gratitude to God. The gratitude of the Samaritan leper was obvious. The Samaritan wasn’t grateful because he felt entitled to his blessing; he was humbly and profoundly grateful for his healing because he knew he wasn’t owed anything from the Lord. The Samaritans remain our clear example today.

I’ve been a Christian for many years, and I always enjoy having a conversation with someone who has recently come to faith. Their gratitude for their salvation is infectious. Their desire to learn, grow, and know God is a reminder that I should feel that same way. My soul is blessed when I am around someone who has “tasted and seen” that the Lord is good! 

Gratitude is infectious, and those of us who have walked with God for many years need to remember to praise God for the grace we might have come to take for granted. Grace is our gift of salvation, but it is also our gift of sanctification, the process of being made holy. 

Jesus taught his disciples, “Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (John 15:2). 

Every tree or shrub in our yards eventually needs to have a few branches cut off or pruned back. That is truth for our spiritual lives as well. 

Sometimes an area of service is no longer our calling. Sometimes there is an old habit or tendency we have allowed to creep back into our characters. There is always going to be the next temptation we need to be careful to ignore or purge from our lives. As long as we live on this earth, we will need to call on God’s grace.

The Lord is constantly at work in our lives, redirecting our calling, convicting us of sins that hinder our sanctification, and pruning the places in our souls that cannot produce the fruit of our faith. When we are aware of his sanctifying grace, we will offer him our gratitude. Others are likely to see the changes in our lives, and we will have the opportunity to share God’s grace with them.

Evangelism isn’t just about leading others to the Lord; it is helping them walk with his grace for their spiritual growth as well. That is how we “increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.”

Wisdom is offering our gratitude to God. Wisdom is gratefully living for our salvation and for his continued grace through our sanctification. 

Generosity is a quality that is honored and respected by almost everyone regardless of personal ideology. Hearts are warmed by the person who gives up their seat for an elderly person. We smile at the one in the grocery line who offers to pick up the rest of the bill for someone. Generosity is a universal language of kindness.

Paul asked the Gentile churches he had founded to provide an offering for their struggling brothers and sisters in Jerusalem. Drought, famine, and persecution had caused extreme hardship to the Christian believers there. It’s important to remember that the greatest divide in the early church was between the Gentile and Jewish believers. Yet, Paul gathered a great deal of money from the Gentile believers to help the Jerusalem church. 

Paul told the Gentile believers, “You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God.” Paul knew that their generosity would honor God and indicate to the Jerusalem Christians that these Gentile believers were filled by the same Holy Spirit they knew. 

Paul taught them that their service was more than supplying help to meet the needs of the saints in Jerusalem; they would also produce thanksgiving to God. 

Generosity, done wisely, honors the giver and their God who leads and blesses their gift.

Paul was warned not to take the large offering from the largely Gentile churches of Asia

Minor to Jerusalem. He was an enemy of the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, and people

feared he would be harmed. Paul chose to go anyway, and his desire to be generous led to his arrest, conviction, and eventually a ship headed for Rome. 

Did his generosity produce thanksgiving? It was under house arrest in Rome that Paul wrote Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. Those letters have been read and studied by the Christian church since that time. Wisdom is offering our gratitude to God. Paul would say, “Wisdom is living a generous life that God will enrich in every way.”

The Hebrew word for soul is nefesh and means that part of a person into which God had breathed life itself. When a verse uses the word soul, it almost always means the most essential fiber of your being, your life itself.

The psalmist was writing praise from the deepest part of his life and the very essence of his existence when he said, “Bless the Lᴏʀᴅ, O my soul and all that is within me, bless his holy name!” His highest praise and his deepest gratitude were for the blessings of the Lord. 

The psalmist repeated himself, which was the Hebrew way of expressing that the statement was complete, profound truth. He said again, “Bless the Lᴏʀᴅ, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.” The psalmist was stressing the great need to praise God for his very life and all that God had done, or prospered, in his soul.

He was calling people to understand the depth of his praise to God for all that God had done in, for, and through his very life. When last did your praise for God come from your very soul?

Pause and truly experience a deep breath. Breathing is an action we rarely notice, yet it occurs many times each minute of every day. We will praise God from the depth of our souls when we realize that our need for God is as great as our need for that next breath. We will praise God when we realize our life is full of benefits that we often take for granted yet are the very essence of our daily lives.

Wisdom is offering our gratitude to God. Wisdom is breathing in all our benefits so that we can breathe out the words and wisdom of our grateful praise. “Bless the Lᴏʀᴅ, O my soul and all that is within me, bless his holy name!”

King David led an imperfect life, yet to this day he is considered to be among Israel’s greatest kings. David was a “servant to Israel” and lived with a joyful and glad heart for all the goodness the Lord had shown him.

Today’s leaders don’t hesitate to boast of their accomplishments. David didn’t hesitate to boast in the Lord, grateful for his grace and goodness. Today’s leaders try to disguise and even lie about their failures. David grieved his sin publicly, teaching others to do the same. Today’s leaders try to wait for people to forget their sin. David taught people to repent and trust God’s grace for their sin.

Servant leaders are those who teach us what it means to serve God so that we can serve others well. Good leaders point others to the power of God. Their successes aren’t because of personal abilities; success is their ability to walk with God’s leadership in their lives.

The people “blessed the king” and went home “joyful and glad of heart” because they realized their leader, King David, was led by God and blessed by God with the ability to serve them. 

We can be grateful for those leaders in our lives who cause us to trust God, and we can trust them because of their walk with the Lord. We should pray for our leaders and pray for them to have a life-altering encounter with God just as Paul did on the road to Damascus. Paul is an excellent example of what it means to lead through the power and blessings of the Holy Spirit.

Wisdom is offering our gratitude to God. Every news broadcast or business meeting at church is a call to pray for our leaders to be filled with divine wisdom. We should be grateful to God for pouring out his wisdom for their thoughts and his grace for their failures. How grateful we are for those who lead with the goodness that the Lord has shown them, for the goodness that is God shining through them.

Today’s thoughts are about biblical wisdom that is difficult to believe. Paul wrote Timothy, his protégé, a statement that seems simple and easy to believe—until it isn’t. Paul said, “Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.”

When we first read that verse, we think about the powerful testimony to God we see in our world. The complex simplicity of a newborn baby. The powerful displays of color we see in a beautiful sky or mountainside. The uniqueness of God’s creative genius in each animal at the zoo. Accepting that everything created by God is good is easy—until we realize the truth of Genesis 3.

Adam and Eve had sinned. God told Adam, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). God created the beautiful things in nature, but God also created death. There will be a time when we draw our last breath on earth. God created heaven, but he also created hell. It takes wisdom and gratitude to understand and believe that even that truth can be received with thanksgiving.

How do our prayers and God’s word make holy everything created by God? There are truths of Scripture we would reject if we could, but Paul taught Timothy, and us, to receive them with thanksgiving.

Death wasn’t a punishment from God; it was his provision. He didn’t want us to live in a fallen world forever. No one who goes to heaven misses anything they leave behind on earth. God needed to separate the sinful from the saved. He created heaven to be perfect, and sin could never exist with his perfection. His love and holiness would never have created hell for any other reason. 

“God so loved the world, that he gave us his only Son” (John 3:16). God would never have left us in a fallen creation so he created heaven and gave everyone the chance to dwell there. We can be thankful to God, even thankful to him for creating death, when we realize that prayer and his word give us the joy and comfort of his eternal promises.

Wisdom is offering our gratitude to God. God’s joy can result from our wise praise.

There is a theological reason that worship services begin with hymns, songs, and moments intended to turn our hearts toward God in praise. I try to ignore the distractions of people walking in late or people who sing the lyrics with disinterested faces. I wish I could tell them, “These moments are the way you enter the Lord’s holy presence.” 

Our praise and gratitude usher us to the foot of God’s throne, where he is high and lifted up and listening to the “joy noise” of the praise and thanksgiving we offer to him, “the rock of our salvation.” Next Sunday you might want to arrive at church a little earlier so you can prepare your heart to worship your Creator and King. He will bless your effort!

Whenever the rush or circumstances of life cause you to feel like God is far away, praise him. Your worship and gratitude will usher you straight to his throne. If you have spent a long period of time apart from God’s leadership and love, repent. The word repent literally means to stop walking in one direction and turn to go the opposite way. When you repent you will be able to praise God for the forgiveness he has offered, and your praise will soon guide you into his holy presence where you will find his comfort and peace.

I usually sing very quietly because I don’t know one key from another. Someone asked me one time if I was an alto or a soprano. I told them the truth: it depends on who I am standing next to. But, I learned a while back that I can quietly offer my joyful “noise” to the Lord, and he accepts my offering of praise as worthy. God knows my heart, and he knows when I am singing to him or thinking about something else.

Wisdom is offering our gratitude to God. How will these words impact your next time of worship? You need only remember that we come into his presence with thanksgiving. Your praise and gratitude will usher you to God’s throne. That one truth is all your heart needs to know. That wisdom will change your worship in amazing ways.