Wisdom Matters

Are you living a stronger, closer walk with the Lord’s Spirit than before? When we grow older, we don’t discuss the topic of spiritual growth as often. Many of us have been Christians for a long time, and we are comfortable with most of our choices. Some would say we become “set in our ways.”

Paul urged the Thessalonians to continue to please God “more and more.” There is never an “age” that we have grown in the Lord all we need to grow. There is always another passage to understand, another person to serve, and another chance to spend a day with God’s Holy Spirit, quietly aware of God’s glory.

The Holy Spirit within us is eternal and therefore ageless. His voice and guidance never grow weary and never grow silent. The vitality of our faith depends on our growth. Is our goal to know God more next year than we do right now? Is every day an opportunity to serve and store up our treasure in heaven?

Jesus spoke about the weeds that grew in Israel, describing their quick growth but their shallow roots. He encouraged his disciples not to be like that. Instead, we should look to the strength of the trees, deeply rooted by the waters and standing strong for many years. Our spiritual growth should be like those trees. The longer we remain rooted in the Lord, the stronger our spiritual lives become. 

Wisdom is pleasing God. Understanding that our spiritual lives were designed to continue eternally is wisdom. We are never fully grown until we step into our lives eternal. Is your spiritual growth pleasing to God? If so, continue to grow more and more. If your growth has slowed, you know what to do. The apostle Paul would urge you to please God and live wisely.

Jesus is the only person who could ever say, “I always do the things that are pleasing to him.” There has only been one person who lived a perfect, sinless life. The rest of us can say, “I make every effort to do the things that are pleasing to God.”

Imagine living a perfect life with no sin! It would be wonderful to end each day with zero regrets. Pleasing God is an imperfect goal for all of us this side of heaven. But Jesus taught us the key to leading a life that pleases God. He said, “He who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone.”

Detecting when we have strayed from our walk with the Lord is easy. A darkness creeps into our spiritual lives and impacts our moods and actions. We worry about things we cannot change. We can become angry, less patient, and more judgmental of others. We become motivated by selfish desires or plans rather than the compassionate love of God.

One of the markers of spiritual maturity is recognizing the darkness and knowing you need to run back into the presence of light. Jesus said he was the “light of the world” (John 8:12), and he wants to be the light in our lives.

Loneliness is an increasing sickness in our culture. The statistics are clear, and experts talk about the dangers of living that way. So many in our culture have decided there is no God, and therefore they do not seek God. 

As Christians, we know the value of dwelling in God’s presence. We are a prayer away from knowing we are “not alone.” We trust God’s word and know that if we walk with God, we can please him. God’s pleasure is our joy! 

None of us will ever be able to repeat the words of Christ, saying, “I always do the things that are pleasing to him.” But we can aim at the goal of saying, “I always try” to do that. Wisdom is pleasing God. If we seek God’s wisdom, we seek to please God and dwell in his presence. Christians are “the light of the world” too (Matthew 5:14). Let’s allow his light to radiate through us to a culture becoming increasingly accustomed to the darkness.

Everyone needs to rest from their work and take a few days off now and then. But Scripture doesn’t ever suggest we take a vacation from our efforts to please God. Every day is an opportunity to live as a strong witness to the Lord. Paul wrote, “Let us not grow weary of doing good” (Galatians 6:9). But sometimes we do grow weary.

Pleasing God isn’t about simply trying to do good things. What pleases God is when we become the Christian who overflows with works of faith. When our hearts remain close to God, we walk more fully in his Spirit wherever we go. It’s that relationship with God that enables our witness “whether we are at home or away.” We please God when we aim to live closely under his leadership.

All of us have people in our lives whose witness calls us to live with higher standards. Every Christian can serve as a spiritual encourager in the lives of others. We should also have a few people in our lives whom we have given permission to hold us accountable to our faith.

Living with God’s high standards is easier when we're “home” and surrounded by those who know us. However, making the effort to please God when we are away from home is just as important, if not more important. We are never supposed to take a vacation from pleasing God.

Wisdom is pleasing God. Becoming a person who pleases God, regardless of where we are, is wise. Our witness is not simply what we do but also who we are to become. We can take vacations from our busyness but never from the business of serving the Lord with our lives.

This verse makes every preacher, teacher, and disciple of God’s word shudder. Doing our ministry for an audience of One is a constant battle. In the first century, there were those who sought the Christian pulpit for the sake of gaining the ear of the audience rather than for the sake of pleasing God. There were those who spoke the message they knew would entertain or influence the crowd rather than speaking a message that would present the gospel of Christ.

There were always preachers who wanted to impress the audience with their eloquence rather than bring honor and glory to God. That problem existed in the first-century church and has continued to exist for every century that has followed. 

The best preachers, teachers, and disciples make a few enemies in the church. Why? Because they speak “not to please man, but to please God who tests our hearts.” If you want to be an effective minister of the gospel, you must be willing to speak what will please God, not man.

The power to please God might come from these words: “We have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel.” We have been given a high and holy possession, and now God has entrusted us to be faithful messengers of his plan of salvation. 

Wisdom is pleasing God. It is, therefore, foolishness to do the work of your ministry in order to please men. Nothing will alter your focus or your message more than caring what people think rather than caring only about what God thinks. At the end of the day, we want to hear God say, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:21). If pleasing God is our goal, we will live wisely.

Hebrews 11:6 provides crucial information to those who want to please God. The verse is worth reading, rereading, and then giving careful thought.

Hebrews 11 is often called the Hall of Faith. The author had just finished talking about Enoch and the fact that Enoch had pleased God and was taken up to heaven. Then he wrote verse 6: “Without faith it is impossible to please him.” It is a big statement. 

As Christians, we do a lot of things that pertain to our faith that might not be the product of our faith. Those things might seem “faithful” but may have nothing to do with the direct leadership of God. How do we make certain that our actions and our works are motivated by our faith? Pleasing people by our actions is possible, but, without faith, pleasing God is impossible. How do we know the difference?

How can we be careful to allow our faith to produce our works? The rest of the verse provides our answer: “whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” We have to live closely with God to know he exists. We also have to believe he is God and seek his will to live for our promised rewards.

To put it bluntly, we can spend our lives doing good things we hope will please the Lord. But the way to be certain is to know God exists and that he has a voice that will speak his leadership into your life. We aren’t rewarded for the good things we do unless those good things were God’s ideas. Doing one God-thing is better than spending hours and hours accomplishing our own “good” ideas. God rewards “those who seek him.”

Wisdom is pleasing God. Wisdom will seek to live closely with God, faithfully knowing he has the plans for your calling mapped out. Seek to faithfully accomplish those God-things and your wisdom will please him.

The gift of spiritual discernment is the ability to view things in this world as God sees them. Discernment separates good from evil. It is the ability to recognize truth from falsehood and detect God’s wisdom from the world’s ideas. There are those who have the spiritual gift of discernment, but all Christians can be discerning.

When we consider something from the perspective of Scripture, through the leadership of God’s Spirit, we can discern what God would think about those things. If we know what Jesus would do or say, we have our best answer.

Paul told the Ephesians, “Try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord.” When we want our lives to please God, we can carefully contemplate each day as Jesus would have lived it.

Jesus healed many people, but he didn’t heal every person. We need to be discerning about the needs people have, but we also need discernment to know if their need is our calling. Jesus had probably walked past the lame man at the temple gate called Beautiful many times yet never healed him. Later, after Christ’s death, Peter and John discerned that it was their calling. Peter took the lame man’s hand and said, “Walk.” That moment changed the momentum of the Christian movement in Jerusalem. That momentum continued throughout the Roman Empire. 

Jesus discerned the man’s need but also knew that God’s direction and timing were important. Jesus pleased God by obediently allowing that man to remain lame for a while longer. Peter and John pleased God by discerning it was their calling to be part of his healing. 

Wisdom is pleasing God. We should pray for the spiritual discernment to know how we are called to please God. Discernment is knowing what Jesus would do, knowing what Jesus wants to do through us, and submitting ourselves to God’s wise guidance. It takes discernment to please God because it takes discernment to obey his calling.

Most people wear their wedding rings wherever they go. The rings symbolize a marital bond every moment of every day. We need to keep that same mindset for our faith relationship with God as well.

There is never a room we enter, a conversation we have, or a moment of our day when we are not joined with God through Christ. The Holy Spirit “marks” us as belonging to God, and he indwells us permanently after our salvation.

Our daily witness is our most important sermon to preach. The people we work with should witness Christ in our lives. Those we sit near in a restaurant who hear our conversations should detect our faith. Those we pass on a walk, those who serve us in public, and those who meet with us at church should see genuine faith at work in our lives.

We will all have moments and days where we fall short of that high goal, but, thankfully, we all have God’s grace. Sometimes our strongest witness is actually apologizing to someone for not treating them as we should have. God can use honest humility, almost more than anything else, to reveal and redeem his own character within us.

Paul said that “whatever” we do, we can do it all for the glory of God. We serve a holy God, and our calling is to live in such a way that others can learn to love God and live for him for themselves. Pleasing God is wisdom. What a privilege we have to live this life for the glory of our great, Almighty King!

Sometimes, although rarely, our disobedience pleases God. It’s not our disobedience to God, but it’s placing our obedience to God ahead of any ungodly choices the world might seemingly require.

After Pentecost, Peter and the other apostles were actively sharing the gospel, performing miracles, and making a huge impact on the city of Jerusalem. A great number of believers were being added to their numbers. Scripture says the Sadducees rose up and were “filled with jealousy” at all they saw (Acts 5:17).

The Jewish leaders arrested the apostles and put them in a public prison. During the night, an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors, sending the apostles to the temple to continue sharing the gospel. When the high priest called for the apostles to be brought before him, the guards went to the prison cell and found it locked and empty. They were told they could find the apostles back at the temple, preaching. When the men stood before the high priest, he questioned them, angry that they had disobeyed his command not to preach the gospel message of salvation. 

Peter and the other apostles responded to the priest’s reproach, saying, “We must obey God rather than men.” They then shared the gospel message with the high priest! The apostles knew they were standing before the same group of leaders that had arranged for the death of Jesus, yet they bravely refused to let fear keep them from their calling to share the gospel. They could not obey those men without disobeying God.

It was their choice to disobey these men that actually pleased God. Pleasing God is wisdom. Are you spiritually prepared to stand against the will of men if that’s what is necessary to obey the calling of God? If so, God is pleased with your wisdom.

All of us have attended a funeral of someone who was a faithful friend, faithful co-worker, or faithful to their system of belief. We have also attended the funerals of Christians who didn’t live their lives by the admonitions of the Bible. John 14:6 is a difficult verse to understand and believe.

We want to believe that God rewards faith, even if that faith is placed in a different god. We want to trust that God understands how a person is raised to believe and therefore accepts their mistakes. Most of us have quietly questioned the blunt words of John 14:6. Especially the phrase, “No one comes to the Father except through me.”

People have skirted that phrase by choosing to believe that Jesus died for everyone, therefore everyone is saved. The problem with that belief, called universalism, is that Jesus spoke of hell and those who would go there. In his parable of the sheep and the goats he taught that all people would be separated into those two groups. The sheep would “inherit the kingdom” while the goats would be sent away “cursed . . .into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). If Jesus was going to save everyone, he would have taught that lesson instead.

If “faithful” people were going to be accepted into God’s Kingdom, Jesus wouldn’t have been so angry with the Pharisees and Saduccees, and the disciples wouldn’t have sacrificed their lives in order to share the gospel with their devoted families and friends. 

If people of any faith can be saved, then what about the people who worship Satan faithfully? If faithfulness is the answer, then heaven should belong to those who faithfully do evil in the name of their god. Universalism makes us feel better about those who remain outside the Christian faith, but it isn’t biblical truth. If Jesus didn’t teach universalism, then we should ask, “who is the author of that idea?”

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Jesus also said, “the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:14).

Jesus is the model for our own faith, and the pathway for our eternal relationship with God. If there was another way to heaven, Jesus would have told us. He is our model so his message must be our message.

Someone could enter that narrow gate one day and rush to find you, eternally grateful that you taught them the blunt truth of John 14:6. Jesus is the only way because only one way leads to eternal life in heaven.

Jesus offered brilliant answers to the Pharisees and Sadducees who tried to trick him. Jesus was able to touch a blind man’s eyes and cause him to see. Jesus could cast out demons and speak calm into a storm. 

Jesus’ lessons and parables taught men the nature and character of God. Jesus lived with sinless perfection. His anger was righteous, his discipline was justified, and his love was unconditional. Jesus never made a promise that wasn’t guaranteed, and Jesus made this promise to whoever would believe in him. He said, “Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”

Why do we underestimate our ability to share the gospel with others? Why do we think someone else should speak up instead of us? Why do we lack confidence in the promise of Christ?

Jesus said that “living water” would flow out of our hearts, if we are believers. Your witness is more powerful than you think because it isn’t your words that matter, it is what Jesus will choose to speak through you. 

Do you feel like you don’t know enough Scripture? You can learn.

Do you feel like you haven’t earned the right to speak? Jesus gave you that right.

Do you feel like you are too shy, too afraid, or too uncomfortable? Jesus isn’t, and he wants to do the talking anyway.

Out of your heart will flow rivers of living water. Your heart knows Jesus, so instead of believing your doubts, trust your heart. All of us have reasons to feel timid when it comes to sharing our faith. None of us has an excuse to allow our timidity to hinder the truth.

Jesus is the model for our own faith, and the pathway for our eternal relationship with God. Jesus always knew what to say and do and now he indwells the lives of every believer. You can speak and waters of living faith can pour from you. Jesus was always perfectly able to serve God and others. He still is.