Proverbs Part III-Get Your Brain off its Butt and Your Ears off their Rears (Proverbs 2:1-4)

My brother and I used to draw...a lot. We would put large sheets of paper on the floor and draw epic battle scenes with troops, bombers, tanks, trenches, and missiles covering the landscape. We were not very good artists but we always had fun.

One of our most enjoyable artistic adventures required something special. A dirt road headed to a remote village in Malawi, Africa that had been "wash-boarded" by the rainy season. We would sit in the back of the truck and lightly hold a pen to paper on a clipboard as we bounced down the road allowing the bumps of the road to determine what our picture ended up looking like. We tried not to manipulate the drawing hoping to allow the lay of the land to draw it's own picture.

We may have had fun, but you definitely could not call what we had drawn a "masterpiece". Masterpieces take effort. Masterpieces take planning. Masterpieces require an active response not a passive one.

The call of wisdom into our lives also requires an active response. If we want to experience the growing of wisdom in our lives we cannot sit passively and wait for it to come flying in. We have to actively pursue it. In Proverbs 2:1-4 we see the 5 "A's" of Actively Responding to the Call of Wisdom.

An Active Response to the Call of Wisdom...

1. Accepts (v1a)-Receive what wisdom is telling you, even when it hurts to hear it and is hard to swallow.

2. Adores (v1b)-Take care of and give a special place to wisdom spoken into your life.

3. Applies (v2)-Don't just hear wisdom but LISTEN to it and APPLY it to your life.

4. Asks (v3)-Seek for deeper understanding. Don't be satisfied with surface understanding but want MORE wisdom and seek FULL understanding.

5. Aborts (v4)-Quit less important quests in life for the ultimate quest. Search for wisdom like you would search for treasure (or Jimmy Hoffa). Don't stop until you have it.

What about you? Are you passively waiting around for this “sanctification” (becoming like Christ) thing to happen? Are you sitting back waiting for wisdom to fly into your life? It’s time to get active in the way that we listen and respond to the call of wisdom. Put some effort into becoming like Christ and gaining the “mind of Christ”. It’s not going to happen overnight and it’s not going to happen if we don’t make an effort.