Special Sunday Edition
Ethan Barton, Pastoral Resident, Tallowood Baptist Church
What do we really desire the most? If the Lord invited us to ask him for anything in the world, what would we actually say? Money would probably be a common answer. Or maybe fame, or love, or healing, or comfort, or superpowers. Not Solomon. He decided the greatest gift he could possibly have was wisdom.
Wisdom is hard to define. In one sense, it involves knowledge, understanding, and intuition. But it goes much deeper than that too. Wisdom means having a mind like God’s mind. That’s quite a tall order for us! But while we’ll never fully attain that, we can at least learn an idea of how God thinks, what he loves, and how he acts. We know that God is a God of truth, justice, mercy, and love; we can at least try to imitate that. We must start with truth—seeing ourselves with proper humility and God with proper awe—and then discern from there how to conduct ourselves with justice and mercy and love.
When I was little I became fixated on this passage. The more I learned about God, the more I realized how little I really knew. So I devoted myself to constantly praying for wisdom just as Solomon did. The Lord has been answering that prayer little by little ever since. And I have been realizing more and more how much wisdom I still lack.
Solomon would later write a whole book trying to convince us that wisdom is invaluable. He says in Proverbs 8:11 that “wisdom is more precious than rubies, and nothing you desire can compare with her.” How do we grow wiser? How do we learn God’s truth? Step one is to constantly ask God for it. Our pleas for wisdom are one of his favorite prayers to hear. Step two is to devote ourselves to studying our God—he’s given us his Scripture, his Spirit, and his Church for that. It’s a lifelong endeavor, but it’s the most worthwhile one in the world.
