Bible Studies

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Lavished Grace

Susan was driving home from one of her teaching assignments in Northern Arizona when she saw an elderly Navajo woman walking on the side of the road. As the trip was a long and quiet one, she stopped the car and asked the Navajo woman if she would like a ride.
The woman climbed into the car, and Susan resumed driving. After a bit of small talk, the Navajo woman noticed a bag on the seat next to Susan. "What in bag?" asked the woman.
Susan glanced at the bag and said, "It's a bottle of wine. I got it for my husband."
The Navajo woman was silent for a moment. Then, evoking a quiet wisdom borne of years and experience, she said, "Good trade!"
-author unknown

Wisdom - it's a complex topic. Its meaning is specific, yet it has more shades than FosterGrant. It includes knowledge, yet it isn't just that. It has a relationship with age, but it is not dictated by it. Wisdom has a moral fiber woven into its intricacies that, lamentably, my mind doesn't always understand. Often, I would have traded something of great value for pearls of wisdom on a specific subject that was causing me to grieve, fear or hesitate. And, too often, what I had of great value was not traded soon enough, clogging my neural net for years with regrets over decisions made in a New York minute - or a NASDAQ one.
According to the Encarta World English Dictionary, conventional wisdom lacks imagination, a stark contrast to God's creative wisdom. On the human level, there are people with vast amounts of wisdom. There are people gifted with the ability to see what others cannot see and to act upon information available that most do not understand. Yet, that is not the wisdom that God offers to us in Christ; and God, who cannot lie, has said we can ask Him for this wisdom, and that He will give it liberally.
The wisdom of the world is mostly accumulative, where you learn from mistakes, get all you can, can all you get, then sit on the can. However, the wisdom that God gives us is both accumulative and distributive. We learn of God as He lavishes us by His grace, then we distribute His grace to others as His Spirit moves us. It's instant, yet it's a lifelong process.
God, by His grace, has given us the ability to know and understand Him. Yet, paradoxically, He is beyond our understanding. We are to seek Him, but we cannot find Him until He finds us. By His grace abounding to us, God has given us the knowledge and understanding that in Christ we have been redeemed and our sins forgiven. Thus, one of the wisest responses we can make is to praise Him for His glorious grace and share our knowledge and understanding of Him with those He has placed in our path.

Mountain Time Moment

that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding

Ephesians 1:8 NIV

http://home.comcast.net/~philemon25/Ephesians108.pdf

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