Talking to a sort of friend this afternoon, he asked me what the difference was between wisdom and knowledge. I assume that he had an answer of his own, but he likes to get input from people before he gives a message (he's a youth director)…
When did there ever become a question as to the difference between wisdom and knowledge? Are the lines so blurred that they begin to look like the same thing? Suddenly the guy with the PhD is the first person to come into our minds when we think of someone who has wisdom?
That's a terrifying thought, that in order to gain wisdom you have to pay for an education and take some tests and it will be instilled in you. Somehow through four years spent in cement-walled rooms nodding off during lectures, you get a piece of paper that implies wisdom? Nonsense.
Knowledge and wisdom are, I would argue, inseparably linked, but they are not the same thing. Computers can store nearly unlimited "knowledge" (facts, pictures, literature, etc). But ask a computer to give you wisdom about the gear in your life and you'll only get a regurgitation of knowledge. Your name is Jamie. You are a Computer Science major at UCF. You are taking Artificial Intelligence this semester. You graduate in 26 days. But… I wanted to know what I should be doing with my life after graduation! That wasn't helpful at all!
Wisdom is not a simple restatement of facts. It's facts with a purpose, facts with both a forward direction and a history, facts set into motion.
I likened it to this (and I'm planning my first Thanksgiving dinner so forgive me if I'm a little excited about food): Knowledge is stuff in a pantry. Canned pumpkin. Sugar. Vanilla extract. Wisdom is knowing how to combine those foods into something delicious. You can have all the vanilla extract in the world but unless you have some way to use it with a purpose, there's no way anybody's coming to your next dinner party.
So where should we go to find wisdom? I tend to start with people. There are people in my life who are living examples of Truth — of Christ's love, of the application of scripture — and those are the ones I will (or rather, should) go to first when I am seeking wisdom. People whose lives are pointed in a trajectory toward Truth. They are the only ones who can steer me right. I won't necessarily just listen to their words; I'll listen to their life.
Then I thought about it a minute longer and realized that I should be seeking wisdom not just from people living in the Truth (although that's essential too), but also from the source of the Truth itself. From God through prayer and from the written Word.
It's so trivial, so elementary. Yet we forget. We forget because the pattern of success in our society includes an education and a decent salary. We forget because often the people living in the Truth are not people we want to party with all the time. Maybe.
Here's my final thought for the night. In the end I don't want to assume that I have wisdom because I have a Bachelor of Science degree. Wisdom doesn't stop at a piece of paper hanging in a frame on a wall. Wisdom doesn't stop at all. It is not a point in space, but a moving projectile, a vector with a beginning but no end, pointed toward the Truth that is Christ. If my life looks like that, then count me among those with some wisdom. If not, perhaps you have the wisdom to impart that can point me in the right direction.