Wherever He may guide me,
Dr. Luke is a great “noticer.” Twice he notices and records something about the early life of Jesus that gives us great insight for growing in a wholly healthy way.
First of all, Luke tells us how Jesus grows (check out my thoughts on this by clicking here), and then he begins to zero-in on the four areas in which Jesus grew. The first thing Dr. Luke notes is Christ growing in wisdom (see Luke 2:40 & 52).
Knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom. In fact, lots of people have knowledge without ever having wisdom. But we have to remember that you cannot get wisdom without getting knowledge.
The Greek language as a couple of different words for knowledge:
Let me give you a quick example. One time my facilities team was overseeing the reinstallation of our zip line from our 30-foot-high ropes course. This zip line stretched some 500 feet from the platform on top of the ropes course all the way down a big hill. After the zip line was replaced, our facilities guys believed that they had successfully connected the zip line. But only Phil believed in their work enough to put on a harness, connect to the zip line, and jump off the platform!
In order to grow in wisdom, we have to have good information (ginosko) to work with. Then we have to test this knowledge in our personal lives (oida). Only this will help us develop wisdom that can be applied to our every-day lives.
Otherwise, Oswald Chambers notes this: “We do not think on the basis of Christianity at all. We are taught to think like pagans for six days a week and to reverse the order for one day, consequently in critical moments we think as pagans and our religion is left in the limbo of the inarticulate.”
Often times the Holy Spirit will use the Bible, or a sermon, or the advice from a friend, or even a “slip of the tongue” to alert us to thoughts that aren’t healthy. Jesus tells us that the so-called “slip of the tongue” is actually a tip off to what’s really in our hearts (see Matthew 12:34). Solomon counsels us to guard our hearts and minds (Proverbs 4:23), and then Paul builds on the guarding theme to tell us to capture our thoughts and make sure they line-up with God’s Word (2 Corinthians 10:5).
This is what develops God-pleasing wisdom. If we don’t constantly grow in this area, we will hold back growth in every other area of our life—physical health, spiritual health, and emotional health, but growing in wisdom brings harmony to all of these areas.
So ask yourself:
God wants to grow wisdom in you! May He equip you with all you need for doing His will. May He produce in you, through the power of Jesus Christ, every good thing that is pleasing to Him (Hebrews 13:21).
This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.
The Wisdom In Appearing Foolish
A man can kill his own wisdom by living a part; he can atrophy his real life by keeping up a certain role. … It takes a tremendous amount of relationship to God for a man to be what he is. …
A wise man who has built his life in confidence in God will appear a fool when he is amongst people who are sleek and cunning. … If you stand true to your faith in God, there will be situations in which you will come across extortioners, cunning, crafty people, who use their wits instead of worshiping God, and you will appear a fool. Are you prepared to appear a fool for Christ’s sake? …
If you are going to be true to God, you will appear a fool amongst those who do not believe in God, and you must lay your account with this. Jesus said, “Every one therefore who shall confess Me before men…,” and it tests a man for all he is worth to confess Jesus Christ.
From Shade Of His Hand
Oswald Chambers is referencing Solomon’s words—Extortion turns wise people into fools, and bribes corrupt the heart (Ecclesiastes 7:7).
True wisdom comes from a trusting relationship to God as He is revealed in His Word, which to cunning people “who use their wits instead of worshiping God” sounds like pie-in-the-sky foolishness. Much like satan did with Eve, they will ask you, “Did God really say that?” and you are faced with a decision: will you stand true to God’s wisdom and look like a fool in their eyes?
Jesus said it would take the courage that comes from a sold-out relationship to Him to be able to endure the bribes and barbs of the world’s cunning people.
I pray we can all be wise enough to be willing to appear as fools in the world’s eyes!
This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.
Living In The Now
Jesus did not use figurative language in talking about the Hereafter. He said: “Let not your heart be troubled”—“My Business is with the Hereafter.” Our business is to live a godly life in the present order of things, and not to push out beyond the durations God has placed as limits. …
I have no power to choose whether or not I will take the consequences of my choice; no power to say whether or not I will be born…but I have power to choose which way I will use the times as they come. …
Jesus Christ taught a reasonable life on the basis of faith in God—“Be carefully careless about everything saving your relationship to Me. Don’t be disturbed today by thoughts about tomorrow, leave tomorrow alone, and bank in confidence on God’s organization of what you do not see. Yesterday is past, there is no road back to it, tomorrow is not; live in the immediate present, and yours is the life of a child.” …
Jesus Christ deliberately chose “the long, long trail”; we choose “the short cut,” and continually go wrong until we understand the meaning of the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my Shepherd, He leads me in the right paths.”
From Shade Of His Hand
In Shade Of His Hand, Oswald Chambers is taking an in-depth look at the book of Ecclesiastes. In chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes, Solomon says there is a time for everything.
Chambers reminds us that we don’t choose the time we will be born, and we don’t choose the time we will die—God alone chooses those. But everything between birth and death is our choice. Jesus taught us that our choices and our level of joy in the moment will be much better if we seek God’s wisdom for all of those choices we make.
“It’s not easy to overcome recurring sexual temptation. That’s because sexual sin is, at the most basic level, an illegitimate way of fulfilling a deep and legitimate human need: the need for love and intimacy.” —Focus On The Family
“Here is the secret of the power of faith to break the enslaving force of sinful attractions. If the heart is satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus, the power of sin to lure us away from the wisdom of Christ is broken.” —John Piper
The book of Proverbs has so much timely wisdom. Many of the proverbs are presented as the opposite of what pop culture promotes. Nowhere is this more stark than chapters 10-15.
In these six chapters, nearly every verse uses the conjunction BUT to set apart God’s way from the world’s way. In fact, I counted 144 BUTs in these chapters. Clearly there is a lifestyle that God blesses, and a lifestyle that God rejects.
I would encourage you to read these proverbs for yourself, but let me give you just a taste of what I’m talking about. In chapter 10, the BUTs show us that doing things God’s way leads to:
And doing things the world’s way leads to:
Or consider the proverbs about our vocabulary from chapter 12:
Take some time to study the BUTs in these chapters, and then comment below on what you find.
“satan is real and may have a hand in our calamities, but not the final hand, and not the decisive hand. James makes clear that God had a good purpose in all Job’s afflictions: ‘You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful’ [James 5:11]. So satan may have been involved, but the ultimate purpose was God’s, and it was ‘compassionate and merciful.’” —John Piper
“God’s will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces, the intrinsically good.” —C.S. Lewis
“Let us never suppose that there is any lack of charity in speaking of hell. Let us rather maintain that it is the highest love to warn men plainly of danger, and to beseech them to ‘flee from the wrath to come.’ It was satan, the deceiver, murderer, and liar, who said to Eve in the beginning, ‘You shall not surely die.’ (Genesis 3:4.) To shrink from telling men, that except they believe they will ‘die in their sins,’ may please the devil, but surely it cannot please God.” —J.C. Ryle
“You aren’t the only person with your skill. But you are the only person with your version of your skill.” —Max Lucado
“There is nothing natural about the Christian life. It is all supernatural. It’s a life dependent upon miracles from the very beginning (including your conversion). And it simply can’t be lived without faith in the supernatural.” —David Wilkerson
It is time for science to detach itself from an atheistic worldview. Douglas Rushkoff states, “By starting with Godlessness as a foundational principle of scientific reasoning, we make ourselves unnecessarily resistant to the novelty of human consciousness, its potential continuity over time, and the possibility that it has a purpose.”
Detroit Tigers fans (like me!) will love this: an interactive map that shows where every Tiger has been born.
John Stonestreet asks, “Why is pop music so angry?” Check out his answer in Bad Blood.
[VIDEO] John Maxwell challenges us to find someone we can inspire this weekend—
The endless cycle of idea and action,
There are always way too many quotes for me to share when I’ve finished reading an Oswald Chambers book! Check out my review of Our Portrait In Genesis, in which Chambers is our guide through the book of Genesis. Here is my second helping of quotes from Our Portrait.
“Every time your wits compete with the worship of God you had better take a strong dose of Isaiah 30:15-16—‘In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength: and ye would not.’ Beware of restlessness and wits persuading you that God has made a blunder—‘God would never allow me to fall sick after giving me such a blessing’; but He has! No matter what revelations God has made to you, there will be destitution so far as the physical apprehension of things is concerned—God gives you a revelation that He will provide, then He provides nothing and you will begin to realize that there is a famine, of food, or of clothes, or money, and your common sense as well as other people’s says, ‘Abandon your faith in God, do this, and that.’ Do it at your peril. Watch where destitution comes; if it comes on the heels of a time of quiet confidence in God, then thank Him for it and stay starving and He will bring a glorious issue.”
“All the qualities of a godly life are characteristic of the life of God; you cannot imitate the life of God unless you have it, then the imitation is not conscious, but the unconscious manifestation of the real thing. … The life of God has no pretense, and when His life is in you, you do not pretend to feel sweet, you are sweet.”
“The only standard for judging the saint is Jesus Christ, not saintly qualities.”
“Always beware when you can reasonably account to yourself for the action you are about to take, because the source of such clear reasoning is the enthroning of human understanding.”
“The reason we know so little about God’s wisdom is that we will only trust Him as far as we can work things out according to our own reasonable common sense.”
“Beware of obeying anyone else’s obedience to God because it means you are shirking responsibility yourself. … Remember, trust in God does not mean that God will explain His solutions to us, it means that we are perfectly confident in God, and when we do see the solution we find it to be in accordance with all that Jesus Christ revealed of His character.”
“It is in the dark night of the soul that the realization of God’s presence breaks upon us: we never see God as long as, like Esau, we are perfectly satisfied with what we are. When I am certain that ‘in me…dwelleth no good thing,’ I begin to experience the miracle of seeing and hearing, not according to my senses, but according to the way the Holy Spirit interprets the Word of God to me.”
“The true worship of God can only be maintained when the passing moments are seen as occurring in God’s order. If you try to forecast the way God will work you will get into a muddle; live the life of a child and you will find that every haphazard occasion fits into God’s order.”
“The nature of love is to give, not to receive. Talk to a lover about giving up anything, and he doesn’t begin to understand you! Love is not blind; love sees a great deal more than the actual, it sees the ideal in the actual, consequently the actual is transfigured by the ideal. … If you love someone you are not blind to his defects but you see the ideal which exactly fits that one. God sees all our crudities and defects, but He also sees the ideal for us; He sees ‘every man perfect in Christ Jesus,’ consequently He is infinitely patient.”
To read the first set of quotes from Our Portrait In Genesis, click here.
Craig T. Owens 
Book Reviews From 2016
December 27, 2016 — Craig T. Owens#struggles
Alive
An Angel’s Story
Answering Jihad
Archeological Study Bible
Chase The Lion
Churchill’s Trial
Culture
Hope … The Best Of All Things
How To Read A Book
I Stand At The Door And Knock
Jesus Always
Letters To A Birmingham Jail
Light & Truth—Acts & The Larger Epistles
Light & Truth—Revelation
Light & Truth—The Lesser Epistles
More Than A Carpenter
Of Antichrist And His Ruin
On This Day
One Of The Few
Our Iceberg Is Melting
Shaken
So, Anyway…
Streams In The Desert
The American Patriot’s Almanac
The Bad Habits Of Jesus
The Beauty Of Intolerance
The Blessing Of Humility
The Dawn Of Indestructible Joy
The Duty Of Pastors
The Gospels Side-By-Side
The Mathematical Proof For Christianity
The Philosophy Of Sin
The Place Of Help
The Porn Circuit
The Psychology Of Redemption
The Seven Laws Of Love
The Shadow Of An Agony
The Tabernacle Of Israel
Think On These Things
Today’s Moment Of Truth
Useful Maxims
Your Sorrow Will Turn To Joy
Here are my book reviews for 2011.
Here are my book reviews for 2012.
Here are my book reviews for 2013.
Here are my book reviews for 2014.
Here are my book reviews for 2015.
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