Written by Chuck Swindoll, these encouraging devotional thoughts are published seven days per week.
Allow me to offer a simple definition of wisdom. Wisdom is looking at life from God's point of view. When we employ wisdom we are viewing life as God sees it. That's why it's so valuable to think God's thoughts. You look at difficulties and tests as God looks at them.
Cynthia and I recently returned from a life-changing tour of the sites made famous by a small group of strong-hearted, straight-thinking men. We know them today as Reformers. They were the leaders of the Great Reformation that swept across Central Europe in the sixteenth century.
Isn't that closing comment a great line? The wicked man may have more clothes in his closet, but he'll wind up leaving them to us. Remember the materialistic line that is framed around license plates? "He who dies with the most toys wins." The truth is, he who dies with the most toys passes them off to the righteous, and the righteous get to enjoy them!
Thinking God's thoughts is our highest goal. That's one of the reasons I'm such a proponent of the discipline of Scripture memorization. You cannot think God's thoughts more acutely than when you quote God's very words back to life's situations.
Indeed, how unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable are His ways. Now, be careful here. That does not mean He's not in touch, out of control, and He doesn't have a plan. It just means He isn't obligated to explain Himself.
Many years ago I came across this statement: "Pain plants the flag of reality in the fortress of a rebel heart." Even among those who have been stubborn and rebellious, when pain hits and persists, reality comes in full measure.
David, in Psalm 139, makes the appropriate comment, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is too high, I cannot attain to it" (v. 6). If David lived today, he would write, "This blows my mind." The vastness of God's inscrutability has a way of doing that to us—and so it should.
Refuse to believe that life is based on blind fate or random chance. Everything that happens, including the things you cannot explain or justify, is being woven together like an enormous, beautiful piece of tapestry. From this earthly side it seems blurred and knotted, strange and twisted. But from heaven's perspective it forms an incredible picture.
Just as we are different in our appearance, our background, and our levels of maturity and chronological age, so we experience different tests. For all you know, the person living in your neighbourhood is going through one of the deepest times of her or his life.
I'd love to get into my pickup after a tough day at the church, turn the radio on, and have God interrupt, saying, "Before you listen to this station, Chuck, I want to talk to you for a few minutes." Let face it, all of us would love to hear an audible voice or read a visible message from God. But that's not the way it works. Our walk with Him is a walk of faith, not sight.
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