Why we don’t get wisdom when we ask for it …

Times are tough.

You need more wisdom than you have.

What do you do?

It’s at times like this good Christian friends dust off a well-known Bible verse and offer you this:

“If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking,” James 1:5.

So you ask God — once again — to bless you with wisdom. You’ve asked God for the same thing many times. But in many cases, wisdom doesn’t come.

Why?

Because you’re asking just for wisdom.

Huh?

The problem is, we want to go from not knowing to having wisdom in one swoop. We don’t know what we need to know, so we just want God to drop a dose of wisdom on us so we can best navigate our challenges and get on with life.

What’s missing are the developmental steps to wisdom. Sometimes God directly blesses us with wisdom, just as simply as James calls for in the Bible text. But we also see in scripture that it’s God’s intent that we grow spiritually in such a way that wisdom is more of a natural outflow of our development, rather than more commonly a missing aspect of our lives.

How does that happen?

It’s a three step process:

1. Knowledge. Jesus calls us to be His disciples, His students. The first step is to learn Him. Not just about Him, or from Him, but to learn Him. To build a solid foundation of knowledge.

2. As we build our knowledge, we strive to increase our understanding. The value of knowledge is more than simply having a collection of information or facts, but to gain understanding from that source of knowledge.

3. Finally, we strive for the best and highest application of that understanding, which is something we call “wisdom.”

Many of us want to go from challenge, directly to God providing wisdom, skipping over the growth steps of learning (building knowledge) and gaining in understanding. James wasn’t suggesting this leap frog approach to wisdom. Sometimes, even with the best discipling and understanding, we still struggle for wise insight. God delights in helping us past those difficulties. If we lack wisdom, we should ask God, who is happy to bless us with the wisdom we need … but often, it’s IF we’re doing our part.

God isn’t going to learn for us. He expects us to be students of Christ, diligent in His Word, yielding to the Holy Spirit who instructs us in all truth. By building our knowledge as children of God, growing in our understanding in Him, we will grow in wisdom.

And when we need an extra dose?

“If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking.”

Scotty