Friday, May 20, 2022

A Treasure of Common Sense

Friday, May 20, 2022

For the Lord grants wisdom!  From his mouth come knowledge and understanding.  He grants a treasure of common sense to the honest.   Proverbs 2:6-7a

Solomon would have known a thing-or-two about wisdom; Scripture informs us there was not a wiser man on planet Earth.  Following the reasoning of Proverbs here, the wisdom of God, granted an honest person, is a treasure of common sense.  Common sense is defined as:  sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts.[1] 

A decision which is “sound and prudent” is my kind of joy.  Most of us have made more than enough of the other kind of decisions, the less-than-sound, and woefully-imprudent.  That kind of decision usually gets one in trouble. 

Now, having stated the (painfully) obvious, let’s unpack the source of common sense…how to move towards being a wise person.  It arguably begins with truth.  Solomon[2] tells us it is to the honest person that God grants a treasure of common sense.  So, that would be a starting point for developing into a person said to possess a treasure of common sense.  Sadly, in the 21st century world that would be a sparsely-populated starting gate.  James Russell Lowell’s famous line, truth forever on the scaffold; wrong forever on the throne, has never more accurately described a culture that populates this world as now.

Whoever first said honesty is the best policy may have been a Solomon reader.  And she or he was right.  If not just because of some lofty aspiration to be noble or admired, but to rightly understand one can be neither without pure and discerning judgment.  And to be such a person requires an ongoing, absolutely intimate relationship with knowing truth, and speaking truth, all in the context of love.  Paul urged the believers at Ephesus to do just that:

Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church.  Ephesians 4:15

For You Today

You could go to graduate school at the most prestigious universities in the world for the next 20 years to study ethics and the workings of honesty.  You might come out with a PhD of this world’s approval, and high-sounding theoretical philosophy.  And the world would probably buy your books.

Or you could sit at the feet of the One who said:  I am the way the truth and the life[3], and begin to experience the common sense treasury’s flooding your soul with what really matters. 

Your call.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road with Jesus; have a blessed day!  

[1] Title image: Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©  


[2] Author of much of the Book of Proverbs, probably chapters 1-29

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