How to Become Wise
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Join a Discipleship GroupProverbs 9:10
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom…
In a recent interview, a man who is considered one of the early developers of modern artificial intelligence (AI) tried to describe how smart the current computer systems are. He noted that historians rated the IQ of Albert Einstein as 160 and then he said that current AI computers have an IQ of about 150. But what he then said was stunning. He said that the way they are rapidly developing and learning, in a few years AI computers will reach a level of 1,500.
Some people confuse wisdom with knowledge so they work hard to accumulate as much information and schooling as they can. They get university degrees and live their lives studying higher education because they want to appear more intelligent. But knowledge is overrated. Many have said that the world's accumulated knowledge doubles every few years, some say even faster. If you make it your focus to keep up with all that information for the sake of getting smarter, you will fall further and further behind and still not be a wise person.
So how is wisdom different? For someone to be able to offer wise advice, they need to have experience, to know how to make decisions that will direct others toward a successful outcome, to be able to warn you if you are on the wrong path, and to understand matters of the heart. Is that the kind of wisdom you want to have?
"Fearing" the Lord means you respect and honor Him and yes, you fear doing something that He has forbidden because you believe Him when He warns you of its consequences.
How do you get wisdom that is based on God's perspective? You saturate your mind with His Word, the Bible, and you transform your thinking to His ways. You reject the views that the world proclaims loudly and you build a lifestyle that walks the path He offers, a path of obedience to Him. As you gain experience, you will be seeing life through His eyes and you will become wise. Start this morning and everyday by reading a chapter in Proverbs (there is one for each day of the month) and thinking about God's instructions for life.