Wise Choices

Monday, August 29, 2022

My child, listen to what I say, and treasure my commands.  Tune your ears to wisdom, and concentrate on understanding.  Cry out for insight, and ask for understanding.  Search for them as you would for silver; seek them like hidden treasures.  Then you will understand what it means to fear the Lord, and you will gain knowledge of God.  For the Lord grants wisdom!  From his mouth come knowledge and understanding.  He grants a treasure of common sense to the honest.  He is a shield to those who walk with integrity.  He guards the paths of the just and protects those who are faithful to him.  Then you will understand what is right, just, and fair, and you will find the right way to go.  For wisdom will enter your heart, and knowledge will fill you with joy.  Wise choices will watch over you.  Understanding will keep you safe.  Proverbs 2:1-11

Making wise choices isn’t just a good and smart thing; it’s how we were hard-wired by God.  Kicking against that plan just isn’t smart.  Revered Christian apologist and author, C. S. Lewis wrote:

 “Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before.  And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself.  To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power.  To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.  Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”[1]

Solomon, according to God’s Word, was the wisest man of his generation.  His writings reflect that wisdom, and in this advice to his children, that wisdom instructs them to turn their attention to God’s ways.  They will find their lives will be blessed proportionately to how well they tune their ears to God’s teachings.

If our choices in life rest solely on our feeling, or mood when we got up this morning, the result of our life will be as chaotic as the messy world in which we live.  If our choices are consistent with just what our friends think, we’re as liable to fall into the same kinds of holes as they do, prisoners of our own making.  Absent of the study of God’s Word and ways, we are at the mercy of the coin-flip.  Heads, I go this way; tails, it’s the other way.

If the choices you make create you as a Heavenly or Hellish being at the other end of those choices, leaving the direction your life to the coin-flip is hardly a plan to inspire confidence in the outcome.

For You Today

Take the road less traveled today – follow God’s wisdom, and watch it take you to the throne room of Heaven…it’s there you’ll meet the King of Glory.

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

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these:  Choices and All-In

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

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[1] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (1960 ed.), Goodreads

Finding Wisdom

Title Image:  Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

How can a young person stay pure?  By obeying your word.  I have tried hard to find you—don’t let me wander from your commands.  I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.  I praise you, O Lord; teach me your decrees.  I have recited aloud all the regulations you have given us.  I have rejoiced in your laws as much as in riches.  I will study your commandments and reflect on your ways.  I will delight in your decrees and not forget your word.  Psalm 119:9-16[1]

My child, listen to what I say, and treasure my commands.  Tune your ears to wisdom, and concentrate on understanding.  Cry out for insight, and ask for understanding.  Search for them as you would for silver; seek them like hidden treasures.  Then you will understand what it means to fear the Lord, and you will gain knowledge of God.  For the Lord grants wisdom!  From his mouth come knowledge and understanding.  He grants a treasure of common sense to the honest.  He is a shield to those who walk with integrity.  He guards the paths of the just and protects those who are faithful to him.  Then you will understand what is right, just, and fair, and you will find the right way to go.  For wisdom will enter your heart, and knowledge will fill you with joy.  Wise choices will watch over you.  Understanding will keep you safe.  Proverbs 2:1-11[2]

I ran across a marketing ad for a new kind of Bible study this morning as I checked my mail.  It has an updated version of the Scriptures broken up and rearranged chronologically, so as to put the order of the books in an understandable manner.  The name is a trendy-sounding single word, Immerse, connoting a better way to get God’s Word into God’s people.  The marketing piece was well-designed, and got my juices going a little bit.  The promotional focus hook was to get God’s people reading the Bible together, which sounded really good.  There were all the right buzz words, community, intentionality, discipleship, and more.  By the time I heard in my head “community” it dawned on me why it sounded so good – serious Christians had been doing this for two millennia; it wasn’t a new thing – it was an old thing, dressed in modern clothes to capture the way minds think in this century.  It’s Sunday School, Schul (Yiddish for Synagogue), church meeting, all rolled in one.  Sunday School is a term as old as 1780 when Robert Raikes began the first children’s Sunday school; it soon spread to America[3].

The Psalmist and the Proverb writer (most likely David or Solomon) instructs his son to give close attention to the Scripture and to let his life be guided by its wisdom.  It has always mystified me as to why otherwise intelligent Christians miss this important advice from the wisest of the wise.  I have known many believers who would make a regular habit of coming to worship, but avoid the Bible Study hour like there might be a plague.

If you examine what Sunday School, or small group Bible Study offers you can see why it is offered with a new name and format, but with the same essential components:

Discipleship – class peer pressure of the best kind, a place of encouragement in the Christian life.

Ministry – looking out for one another in the ways that fellowship always suggests, care in sickness, joy in blessings, and faithfulness in all things.

Community – a group of believers investigating the wisdom of God’s Word, where you’re covenanting together to live the best life of a disciple.

For You Today

Did you miss Sunday School last week?  Was that wise?

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

Go to VIDEO

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[1] For another post on Psalm 119:10 see Inheritance of a Lamb’s Ear  For Psalm 119:11 see Scriptural Sticky Notes

[2] For another post on wisdom see:  Wisdom & Discipline

[3] When Did Sunday Schools Start, Christianity Today