"My son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding; yes, if you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God." Proverbs 2:1-5
Who else wishes getting Wisdom would be easy? I thought all I had to do was ask for it. Well, I do, but I have to give my attention; incline my heart; call out, raising my voice; and seek and search for it to find it. That seems like a lot more work that I expected.
We live in a world full of opinions, human wisdom. We hear and see it in all sorts of places from our TV screens, computer screens, newspaper pages, schools and universities, and even from pulpits. There are so many, well-meaning, slightly distorted words out there that are claimed to be wisdom, but there are not. They are full of half-truths and even flat out lies, and we are assaulted with them on a daily basis. So it'll take action to give my attention to true Wisdom. The other voices will not go away, so I must pay attention to the real Voice of Wisdom.
More worrisome that the outside voices, is my heart. It wants to have more of God and be more like Him, but I also wants what I wants. My heart can be stubborn, selfish, and willful. God must increase in me so those things decrease. Less of them can help my heart incline to understanding, but they don't have to be completely gone. If I needed to wait for then, I would never get Wisdom. I can pray that God will help my heart to lean more and more toward Him and toward understanding.
Thankfully, God doesn't expect me, or you, to be perfect, or to live in such a way to be isolated from all other influences. He knows there will always be other voices, images, and even our own hearts to distract us. He asks us to look and pay attention, and we don't need to be perfect to do that.
