Blessed is the Wise
I was deeply challenged by the following testimony of Gary Thomas,[1] writer and founder of The Centre for Evangelical Spirituality.
When my wife and I prayed extensively about buying a house we gave God many opportunities to close the door. God appeared to bless the move. Five years later, our house is worth considerably less than what we paid for it.
“Why didn’t God stop us?” my wife and I kept wondering. After all, we had given Him plenty of opportunities. But one day as my wife was praying, she sensed God asking her, “Have you ever considered the possibility that I wanted you in that neighbourhood to minister there rather than to bolster your financial equity?”
We thought of the people we have been able to reach, and then asked ourselves, are we willing to surrender to a God who would lead us to make a decision that turned out to be undesirable financially but profitable spiritually? Does obedience obligate God to bless us, or can obedience call us to sacrifice? Think about the cross before you answer that one!
It is clear from the above that our idea of blessedness and God’s idea of blessedness is often at odds with one another. The Beatitudes or Kingdom Manifesto of Jesus Christ as I like to call his Sermon on the Mount, is a good example. Imagine! Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful! Blessed are the pure in heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted!
Today we can add one more benediction to the above, this time from King Solomon in Proverbs 3:13: How blessed is the man who finds wisdom, and the man who gains understanding. Graduating from a college or university earns us a degree, but it is only when we apply our knowledge and test our education in real-life situations that we will know how much we really know. It is the same with Biblical knowledge. Jesus knew the scriptures from heart and when tempted by the devil during his forty days in the wilderness, he wielded the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God and effortlessly countered each temptation.
Similarly, unless we apply God’s word to our everyday lives, we will not be able to enjoy the eternal worth attached to godly wisdom and benefit from the enduring profits of spiritual understanding. Only as we learn to see life from Jesus’ point of view, will we be able to understand the blessing of Godly wisdom. Thus it is my prayer that as God strengthen our resolve to live by the wisdom that Jesus personified on earth, He will also increase our awareness of the multiple blessings associated with that wisdom.
GRACE CHALLENGE FOR THE WEEK: In the Amplified Version, the benedictions of Jesus are expanded and include being spiritually prosperous, happy, to be admired, forgiven, refreshed by God’s grace, inwardly peaceful, spiritually secure, worthy of respect, joyful, nourished by God’s goodness, content, sheltered by God’s promises, spiritually mature and calm with life-joy, comforted by inner peace and God’s love, morally courageous and spiritually alive! Are these amplified blessings accurately describing your state of being right now? And if not, why not?
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[1] Gary Thomas is a writer and founder of the centre for Evangelical Spirituality. The story appeared in Discipleship Journal:
