Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. | Romans 12:2
I had a friend ask me this week for a definition of wisdom. He was asking, as someone who likes to boil ideas down to make them applicable. I wanted to help him out, but I could not in good conscience make it simple for him.
The typical definition that we are given for wisdom is: knowledge applied. The recipe for wisdom, then, is to acquire a set of facts and then to learn how these facts connect to specific situations. A wise person is someone with a large base of truth that they intentionally implement in ways that produce results. This leads us to measure wisdom by outcomes. There are three problems with this definition of wisdom.
First, there is an issue with our definition of knowledge: how do we know what is true? We see this in the in the personalized idea of ‘your truth.’ If people have different truths, than knowledge is a moving target. Knowledge ends up being defined by outcome, because results are the only proof of how true the original ideas were.
Second, the results we use to measure ‘success’ are short-sighted at best. When we decide that knowledge was applied well, it is by using a scale that only takes direct and immediate outcomes into account. When we problem-solve, we set goals and we apply our wisdom to reach them. The problem is that our lives are not lived in a vacuum, and everything we do has consequences outside of the direct line in which we are acting. It is hard to ever be sure how well you are applying facts, how wise you really are, because we are all blind to the true impact of our actions.
Third, the limits of human beings to define knowledge and measure outcomes, forces us to detach things from one another and study them in isolation. In order to get things down to understandable bits, we break them apart and pretend to understand something because we have studied it intently. The things of this world were designed to live in community and can only truly be understood in how they work within the creation.
A perfect example of this is the phrase: the end justifies the means. The idea is that if the result is good, it can be pursued without concern for how it is achieved. This can’t be. The means by which we achieve can not simply be divorced from the end. It is the whole, ends and means, that define wisdom. We need a better way to be wise; applying our knowledge is not sufficient.
The Biblical definition of wisdom begins with the Bible’s description of knowledge:
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction. | Proverbs 1:7
There are two things in this statement. The first is that knowledge comes from recognizing the supremacy of God. You cannot approach truth without recognizing the Author of it. Along with that, you can’t take God’s knowledge while rejecting His application. To take part of God’s truth without receiving all of it is a despising of wisdom.
Instead, all that God has given us, collectively, is wisdom. The parts that are easy for us to apply and the parts that don’t fit with our understanding of the world are His instruction to us. In Romans 12, Paul tells us how we take this revelation and use it to produce wisdom.
First, he tells us not to be conformed to this world. This means that we must recognize that while our experience is real, it is unable to bring us to truth. Real truth is so much bigger than even the collective wisdom of humanity. In order to accept the truth of God, we must first reject the idea that ‘common knowledge’ is true knowledge. Just because most of the people believe something does not make it true.
Second, we must be transformed by the renewal of your mind. To renew something is to bring it back to what it originally was. In the case of our minds, this means bringing it back to the original created state. This transformation is placing God back in the place of Creator and us taking the position of worshipping creation.
Third, we must test to discern what is the will of God. This testing is putting God’s truth into practice that we can see the results of applying His knowledge. In testing, we live out God’s wisdom and we learn to trust Him more. Living out His way not only produces His ends, but it transforms us along the way, helping us to see what is good and acceptable and perfect.
What is wisdom? God is wisdom. Wisdom is knowing God and learning to trust Him. The reason that there is no easy answer to this question is because it requires both removing those things we want to believe and replacing it with what we were created to know. This process is not easy. The testing of faith and the transforming of the mind takes a long time. As we go, we are being made into, not only what we were, but what we will be. As we: present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship (Romans 12:1), we are not only worshipping, but we are being made into worshippers.
Wisdom is not something that exists in the world apart from God; wisdom is the byproduct of worshipping God.