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We live in an information age, bombarded with worldly wisdom, theological wisdom, biblical wisdom, and endless “pratical” wisdom for Christian living—and much of it may actually be wise. Yet Paul’s words encourage us to ask: “Does all this knowledge lead us to know God, or have we mistaken knowing things about Him for knowing Him?”
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Anyone make it to Shakespeare in the Park this year by chance? I have to confess, I don’t even know which play they show this year. Does anyone know? I’ve been there a number of times. It’s a lovely set up where they go to part of Forest Park, which is wonderful in general. I haven’t actually been down there since the tornado damage. I don’t know if the Glen, as they call it, where did it hit that part where the Shakespeare in the Park takes place? No? Well, that’s good. But yeah, I don’t even know if I want to see how bad it is. But you know, you go down there and it’s lovely and it’s beautiful. And what could be better than a, if you can find a night that isn’t excruciatingly hot, you go down there and just soak in Shakespeare.
Now, some of you may be saying, I don’t know about that. But if it’s something like Hamlet, Hamlet’s my all-time favorite play. You go there and you see Hamlet and it’s wonderful. And it just feels like you’re being taken back to what it would have been like a little bit more so when it was first performed. But imagine if I went there and I sat in the Glen and went to watch Shakespeare in the Park and some other play by some other playwright was performed instead. Maybe something like Samuel Beckett, who drives me crazy. And they perform this play and I think, this is not what I came for.
Even among Shakespeare’s plays, there are plays I love and I would even go with whether it’s a little less comfortable to see, like Hamlet or Twelfth Night. And then there are ones that I admit I’m not as crazy about, like Macbeth. Or for you actors, the Scottish play. It’s fine, but I don’t need to be in 90 degree humid St. Louis summer nights seeing it. I can live without it. Maybe it’s not Shakespeare for you. Maybe you’re going to the Muny. Maybe you’re going to some other outdoor performance. But we would care what we’re going to see, right? We’re not just going because we want to see a play, whatever, generic. We’re going to go to see the things we want to see. The things that matter to us, that mean something to us.
I think the funny thing is, while we get that, sometimes when we’re talking about wisdom and here we are as we’re continuing in Ephesians 1 thinking about wisdom, we don’t apply the same metric to wisdom. We say, well, if I can get some wisdom, good. We don’t say, well, what kind of wisdom? What wisdom’s going on that stage? Sometimes it’s wisdom about God, but it isn’t the life-giving wisdom even in that that he wants us to have. We go down for Hamlet, and there’s Macbeth. There’s a lot of Macbeths of theology, a lot of theology out there that, you know, it belongs in Shakespeare’s canon, but it isn’t the core that you… If I want someone to know one play from Shakespeare, I hope it’s Hamlet, because if you truly wrestle with it and absorb it, it’s so profound.
I found over time, I’ll talk to people, and maybe you remember in high school reading Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth, and they say, ah, I’ve had enough Shakespeare. A lot of times when people interact with us as Christians, they’re getting some of the side bits, the marginal stuff of theology, and they say, I think I have enough. I don’t really need Jesus because I’ve had enough. I’ve seen it. Characters seem a little flat to me. Okay.
And what Paul is talking about in this next part, Ephesians 1, 17 to 18, is the heart of it, the part that we need to make sure that we understand, that we absorb, and the part that we need to make sure we’re conveying to others. And when we talk about wisdom, that all of our wisdom is imbued with this, so that it’s not just something that sounds wise, it’s not even something that is wise, but it is the wisdom that God actually wants us to have. We need to know Him. We don’t just need to know some stuff. Let’s pray tonight that we would know Him. Will you join me in prayer?
Father, as we come before you, there’s so much information in this world. We do live in the information age, and we’re bombarded with worldly wisdom, we’re bombarded with theological wisdom, with biblical wisdom, with Christian living wisdom. There’s so much information out there, and a lot of it actually is wise, but it’s only truly meaningful if it is bound to the ultimate wisdom that we find in knowing you. Lord, would you help us to have that wisdom, wisdom from you, wisdom that brings us to you, wisdom that gives life. We pray in Jesus’ precious name, amen.
Here’s the first thing we need to understand about God’s wisdom, and it’s different from other wisdom. And if this test doesn’t come back positive on anything that we encounter that’s allegedly wisdom, we can immediately know it’s not life-giving gospel wisdom.
Verse 17, Paul’s been praying, and he prays that God, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him. We’re not just praying for wisdom. He’s not even praying for them to understand, say, some biblical wisdom. What’s he praying? That they would have a revelation of God, a revealing, in other words, of God. When we think about that word that’s translated revelation, the same one that is the title in Greek for the book of Revelation, what is it? It’s a revealing. God pulls back the curtain. He reveals Himself to us.
And what is it that Paul wants us to know? Look again at this. He may give you the spirit of wisdom and of revelation in what? In the knowledge of Him.
Now, for starters, what’s the spirit of wisdom? And depending on your translation, some translations actually translate this with capitals because they take this as a direct reference to the Holy Spirit. Commentators make a very compelling case that we should take it as a little variation from there, more the spirit which the Holy Spirit gives to us of wisdom. So we’re still talking Holy Spirit here, but in particular, when it’s phrased this way, it often is in mind what the Holy Spirit gifts us with. And so what Paul’s really praying for here is maybe something sort of akin to what God gave Solomon, that God gives His wisdom to somebody.
But you know, for all of Solomon’s wisdom, the problem is his wisdom, he had wisdom in all sorts of different areas of life, but the part of the wisdom that he was given that he didn’t hold onto was his wisdom with his relationship with his God. We’re told that he allowed his heart to stray and to worship other gods, the gods of his wives. And he may have been a man of wisdom without compare, but we see what happens even with wisdom if it isn’t rooted in that ultimate wisdom. And that’s the wisdom here that Paul is praying that they would have. Wisdom given by God, wisdom of God, because those are both true, right?
And I think we kind of know this intuitively because there’s a lot of worldly wisdom that’s true. We come back every so often, and I think this is the perfect example, to thinking about, for example, the wisdom, say, a doctor has in treating a patient. And if you have a really great surgeon, does he acquire wisdom about what’s going on? Not just the basic knowledge, the medical knowledge that he learned in school, but how to apply it, when to apply it, which things he’s learned to apply in a certain moment, when there’s only time to do one thing to try to save someone, which one to choose. Those are aspects of wisdom. And even we might say God-given wisdom, right?
Because God gave that doctor the mind, and God gave him the world to study that is intelligible. We can know our world. And so every time we study anything, in some sense we’re giving, we’re encountering wisdom that’s a gift from God. But in this particular instance, what Paul has in mind is specifically wisdom about God. Because you can have the most wise doctor, as far as medical treatment goes, who doesn’t know Jesus, and he’ll do a lot of good work in his life, but he won’t be healed by the great physician. He won’t actually experience life eternal.
The wisdom that we should most crave, the wisdom we should be most focused on, doesn’t just give us wise, true things, even useful things, but it presents him. And so when Paul talks about that unveiling, what he has in mind is a personal relationship sort of wisdom. And I realize, depending on what your church background is, sometimes that sounds, now I’m talking. Tim, you’re just, you’re hitting my kind of language about the church, and others of you are saying, oh no, not the personal relationship talk, right? See the Bible doesn’t only want us to dwell in the intellectual realm certain parts of the church like to dwell in, and he doesn’t want us to only dwell in, I know Jesus, but I’ve never thought about who he is. He wants us to bring them together, and that’s why we have wisdom about a personal relationship with him.
Because it matters who he is, right? What saves us isn’t that we can utter sounds that sound like the name Jesus. What saves us, who saves us, is Jesus. And so there’s a coming together there of wisdom and what we might call knowledge into a life-giving wisdom. It’s so important to have both.
What we need to understand is that the most important wisdom we will ever encounter in life is not the kind we can easily measure. Our temptation in our current society is to measure wisdom by how many degrees a person has, or how many certifications, right? How many impressive things can you hang on your wall? And we think, there’s wise, right? I’ll listen to the person who has the most impressive things hanging on the wall, the diplomas and the diplomas with the little extra shiny embossed gold that says summa cum laude, ah, the graduate with the highest honors, okay, now that’s the person I’m going to listen to. And multiples, right? And however many, and then some certifications on top of that to say the person’s still current in a field.
And again, there’s quality to that. It’s good to know. And the point here isn’t that we shy away from the study of things and studying knowledge and studying theology, but rather we understand that all that is meaningless unless it’s linked to something more.
There’s a really interesting sort of case study in progress right now, and I’ll have to come back to them in a while because I’m not really sure where this is going yet, but a number of weeks ago on X, the man who has been certified to have the highest IQ in the world proclaimed that he believes in Jesus. And so now he’s been making different proclamations about Jesus and saying the man with the highest IQ in the world believes this, and he says something about Jesus. A lot of it’s been really pretty good. And I have to say, isn’t it neat that someone, that he’s decided, what is he going to use this platform for? Is the person with the highest measured IQ in the world, he’s going to use it to talk about his savior? Wonderful.
I don’t want to condemn him for that at all. But there have been some things he’s said about Jesus that have been kind of, hmm, I don’t know about this. And again, this is developing. He’s just started doing this. So I’m not saying he isn’t a true believer. That’s not my point at all. But to say, is he giving the clearest depiction of who Jesus is of anyone? No, I wouldn’t say so. Not yet. And maybe that’s in time. Maybe God’s working on him. I think we should be praying.
Here’s a man who has a wonderful opportunity. We should be praying for him that God uses him to proclaim his truth clearly and accurately. But it is to say that by worldly measures, ah, highest IQ. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to give the best description of what it means to believe in Jesus and exactly how God functions.
And sometimes, I bet we’ve all experienced this, there’s someone who would, that we talk to who would never factor highly at all on an IQ test, maybe doesn’t have a single impressive diploma to hang up, but speaks clearly about God’s love. And here’s the thing we need to understand, there, there is the greatest wisdom. Philippians chapter 3, verse 10, Paul says, all the things he accomplished, all the impressive accolades that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and may share his sufferings and become like him in death, that he can have that, he counts all those other things as loss, as rubbish.
Paul had the impressive diplomas, he had the certifications, he had the achievements, he was a rising star, he had all this stuff. And on top of that, he had a wonderful genealogy and in a people that respected your lineage and that was a big deal. He had both the lineage biologically and the lineage academically, he had it all. And he went and took all that and he used it to go kill Christians, and then he encountered Jesus.
When he encountered Jesus and he got the wisdom that really mattered, what did he say? I’d throw all that away. If I can be someone who dies to myself in him, if I can have Jesus instead, I don’t care about all that, it’s all rubbish, it’s all worthless. And Paul, in evaluating his own achievements and his own things that could build him up and his ego up and make him feel important in the world, brings to us something that we should ask ourselves about everything we acquire and everything we value in our lives. Is helping me to know God better as he really is? Is helping others know God better as he really is?
And Paul could look at all those things and say, you know, for as long as those were the things that put my hope in, my trust in, the answer was no. Now they were useful, and if we look at the life of Paul after his conversion, he doesn’t literally throw those things away. He doesn’t pray that God wipes his mind and he forgets all that stuff and he never uses it. No, he pulls it out time and again, but he pulls it out time and again in the service of the only wisdom that really matters.
God’s been saying this from the very earliest revelations of himself in the world. Exodus 6, verse 6: Say therefore to the people of Israel, I am the Lord. I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians and I will deliver you from slavery to them and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. I will take you to be my people and I will be your God and you shall know that I am the Lord your God who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.
Notice where it all culminates to. Where did the Lord want the people of Israel to look? It wasn’t to the status of their land, their success in it, to their tribal heritage. It wasn’t to the greatness and splendor of the kingdom even under Solomon. It was to the fact that the God of the universe came into their world and rescued them from slavery and loved them. And if we want to understand the gospel, that’s the wisdom that’s still true today.
John 17, verse 3, what does Jesus say? And this is eternal life. They know you, the only true God in Jesus Christ whom you have sent. There’s wisdom.
And over time as God has revealed himself, it keeps coming back to that. It’s not that the other stuff wasn’t important. God rescued the people of Israel and he brought them into the promised land. He gave them all kinds of laws. He gave them a story to tell and he wanted them to tell that story. He wanted them to teach those laws. He wanted them to actually embrace the whole breadth of the wisdom that he provided. As the cornerstone, as the thing that they could hold on to, what did he want them to hold on to? That he loved them.
And there’s an awful lot of time today that we see Christians still who can hold on to a great deal of the wisdom about God. Forget that.
If you look in my one drawer, you’ll find a whole bunch of keys. And I have some really neat keys in there. Big keys, little keys, gold colored keys, silver keys, plastic keys, little ones with the wrapping around it that indicate they’re probably for a car, key fobs. I have all kinds of keys. A lot of times I don’t have anything to put them in. I can pick one up and say, oh, here’s a car key. But that doesn’t mean if the car’s not there that it doesn’t mean any good, right? I have the first car key I ever had in my drawer and it won’t start anything up because that car isn’t there. And so if I want to drive someplace, it doesn’t matter if I have that key. What matters is I have the key that actually gives life to that car.
And so as we look at wisdom, there’s a lot of things that are wisdom. There’s a drawer full of wisdom and some of it’s big and golden and some of it’s silver and some of it’s plastic and some of it has some pretty key chains and some of it’s kind of weird and rounded looking going into some kind of neat safe type keyhole. There’s all these different things, but the question is, is it actually going to turn on the engine? Is it going to bring life, bring life to me and bring life to others? My goal is to start the car, I need to make sure I have a car key. If my goal is to get into a house, I need to make sure I have the right house key. And I can look at a key and say, I am sure this is the right key, but if it isn’t, it doesn’t magically become the right key.
I kind of hate to admit how many times I’ve walked up to that door there and reached into my pocket and I either don’t have the keys or I don’t have the right key. And you know, no matter what keys I might have in my pocket, if it’s not that key, it doesn’t do any good. I’ve tried. Maybe it really is this key. It has to be the right key, right? And when we’re talking about wisdom, there’s lots of good wisdom. Useful for different things.
I save some of those keys because they’re actually kind of nostalgic, right? I pull out that old key and I think, oh, I remember this key and I remember using this key and it has happy memories to it, but it’s still not going to get me anywhere right now. And there’s a lot of wisdom that will bring back happy memories, it will maybe help us serve in different ways, but if we don’t have the key that actually starts the car, we’re in trouble.
I think a lot of times when we talk about the gospel, there’s a lot of keys we pull out and we say, that’s a gospel key and that’s a gospel key. And the problem is they’re not actually gospel keys. They look kind of like it. They might even serve it, but they’re not it.
I read about a theological group this week that’s become popular in some of our circles and they’re having a theologians camp this summer. And there’s a lot I could say about it that kind of makes me scratch my head. It’s in an undisclosed location. They’re screening everyone who tries to join it to make sure they’re not going to spy on the camp. There’s a lot of things that are kind of weird about it that I could talk about.
But the thing that really struck me as I was reading it is it mentioned all the different things and it threw out a bunch of different esoteric theological terms that you’d be able to sit there in the woods and it said, drink lots of caffeine and smoke cigars while talking about. And you know, as I looked at those terms, the one thing that struck me is that none of them were talking about how do we actually communicate the life-giving truth of the gospel to the people around us? How do we, as people who are so into theology, that we’ll actually go to a camp that has OPSEP to make sure that only the right people come into it, that we’re so into it that we’re going to try to do this. How do we take that brain trust and actually share the gospel rather than just impress each other? Play theological one-upsmanship, as one theologian once put it, where we just see if I can say a more impressive term than you say. And near as I can tell, the answer is that didn’t factor into the conversation.
And I can point fingers and cast stones, but it’s really easy, it’s really, really easy to fall into that same trap. As easy as a church, as easy as individuals, we fall in that trap where, okay, we can do some impressive things, we can do some things that people compliment us on and think we’re really smart, think we have the degrees and the certification and the IQ. The question is, are we pointing people to Jesus? Are people hearing the gospel and being transformed by it? Does the gospel as we talk about it reflect who God actually is?
And here’s something that we can see so clearly in these passages we keep coming to. God is a God who serves. He came to the Israelites and he served them. He doesn’t need to, but he serves them. He served them to save them. Is that what my gospel looks like?
I posted a little, this week at Little Hills video before the service, brought my friendly Christmas tree with me. And you think about Christmas and all the different gifts we give, we think about what we should be and do as a church, and the thing we need to make sure we remember at Christmas and every time of the year is the gift that God gives us, and how can we give it to others?
I shared in our church message group this morning that we’re going to be participating in Back to Church Sunday in September, and I’m really excited about that because we’re a list on the map and there’s going to be this big national media campaign to encourage people to come back to church if they haven’t been in church in a long time, and we need to be thinking over these next weeks on how we both personally invite people, maybe they’ve gotten out of the habit of church, and how we can be welcoming to those that may come through the doors because of that.
And in that, what we need to do is not think, how can we impress them so they walk in and say, wow, look at this church, it’s really, they really have this or that down, but how can we be focused on, people walk in and say, there’s a life-giving key, how can we give that gift?
Because the fun thing when you think about Christmas in July or Christmas in September or Christmas in December, the real gift is that Jesus came into this world to save us, and that’s the gift that we can give any time of the year, it doesn’t have to be Christmas or the opposite end of the year from Christmas, it’s every single day we have that opportunity.
That’s true, and if that’s what’s true about the God whom we serve that he serves and saves, then the key thing if we’re thinking about genuine wisdom is that genuine wisdom, life-giving wisdom, well, we absorb its impact, we don’t just store it up in our heads. Wisdom changes us. Take a look at the first part of verse 18.
Paul’s continued prayer is having, through the Ephesians, that they would have the eyes of their hearts, eyes of your hearts, enlightened. Do you think much about that phrase we sang the old praise song earlier, open the eyes of my heart? What does that really mean?
It means all the stuff we’ve been talking about, all that wisdom that we’re building up, we don’t want it just to be on the surface level. We want it to soak in and really absorb in us.
That phrase heart, in the ancient world it could refer to the seat of a person, we often use it that way, not the seat we sit with, but the capital as it were, the place where everything’s running. Paul says that place, maybe we’d say, maybe if you’re writing today, you’d say open the eyes of your brain to the Lord.
We don’t just get so caught up in gathering knowledge that we forget to actually have the transforming power of the Spirit transform our minds, transform our hearts. Knowledge of God shouldn’t be compartmentalized. Here’s some neat books I can pull off the shelf of my brain, you know, here’s something about God on this and this category, right? I don’t really change who I am.
It should be in and change everything and how I do everything.
I think we often hear that it’s supposed to be transformative and we think that means we need to do more Christian stuff. What do I mean by Christian stuff? Well maybe we should have another program, maybe we should, they’re not, I sometimes pick on programs because they become an idol, but there may be a time that God calls us to do a new program. Who knows? Maybe someday we’ll do a VBS or some other children’s program. Maybe we’ll do, add another Bible study because we need multiple Bible studies. There could be different things that God wants us to do.
We think maybe those, or maybe we need to have more Christian gear and we have been talking about, and I think it’s fun, you know, we have Little Hills t-shirts. We need to have some of those just for fun, but we shouldn’t confuse that with actually being transformed. Oh, and I have my Little Hills shirt on. Now I go to a certain number of programs. Does it really mean to be transformed? It means to actually look more Christ-like, to serve like Jesus serves us.
How do we do that in the world? How do we not look at the world and say, the world isn’t Christian enough, I’d like to make it more Christian. It should talk like a Christian, it should build up Christian things, but instead how do we say, how do I serve the world so that more people have the eyes of their hearts open so they actually know Jesus?
Because over history there have been plenty of times where the world looked a lot more Christian than it does now, but there were an awful lot of people who were just as spiritually blind as they are today. They just did it better. But the thing that doesn’t allow that hiding is to actually be transformed. We actually serve people with Jesus’ love when it doesn’t make sense. And when we serve people with Jesus’ love, not so they’ll compliment us, but so they would be those who experience the salvation that Jesus offers.
It’s not the flashy package, it’s not how many things are offered, it’s Jesus.
I went to Schnucks earlier, let’s do a little shopping. They didn’t sponsor this incidentally, just a local grocery store, right? And I got a few items. I like green beans. Anyone else like green beans? I love green beans. And how about Del Monte green beans? Yeah, premium green beans here. How about Schnucks green beans? Nice pretty picture, right? I never heard of this one before. How about That’s Smart green beans? It even has a little smiley face on it.
Well, here’s three cans of green beans. And I was thinking about green beans this week, or a couple weeks ago I should say, because I was reading about Del Monte. Maybe you heard they’re in bankruptcy proceedings right now.
You might think, I heard several oohs when I brought out the can of Del Monte green beans. Why? Let’s see, how long did they go? I know it’s over 100 years. How can a company that’s just always been around, right? They’re just there. You want a can of green beans, Del Monte is there. How can they be going bankrupt?
Well apparently, they did a survey on American consumers and it’s been discovered that most consumers, probably like 80%, have discovered the same thing that I’ve generally discovered, which is I bet if I poured this can of green beans out for you, and this can of green beans out for you, and this can of green beans out for you, you wouldn’t be able to tell me which one was which.
Now this one is $2.39. This one’s $0.99. This one is $0.79. Now that I mention that, which one would you like to have? Everyone still rushing for this one? No, right? You say, well, hit me up with the $0.79 green beans. That sounds just fine. It’ll be just fine. And I bet as far as stems and everything else, it’s probably all about equal and all, until people are buying these and thus Del Monte is suffering.
I thought about that, how something as simple as green beans, we get it, right? Now I think almost half of consumers actually assume that when they buy a store brand, it might be better than the name brand, because they trust their local store. I’ll admit, I’m an Aldi shopper. I’ve found that is true an awful lot of the time. I love Aldi products.
So we get it when we’re buying green beans, but it’s funny how often we don’t get it when it comes to whiz. I think what really matters is if it looks really impressive, and we forget that what really matters is what’s inside. If you knew that this package looked more impressive, but it had arsenic in it, it doesn’t, but it did, you would say, absolutely, I don’t even need to think about this. Give me one of the other green beans.
But how often when it comes to wisdom, we say, it just needs to look good, right? It has the worldly achievements. It has the person’s written the book that has a quote from someone else that’s impressive on the back of it. And his resume is so impressive. Her resume is so impressive. Give me the Del Monte theology.
What we don’t ask is, are the contents Jesus? And not just something about Jesus, but a really healthy, life-giving, nutritious dose of Jesus.
I think a lot of times when people look at the church, when they look at us, they don’t see Paul’s prayer being answered. They see us rushing towards the impressive package and trying to portray ourselves and focusing on the package. I want people to know I’m wise. Well, if you’re coming to dinner and you see this can there, you know I spent more on the green beans for you, right? I must want to honor you. But the world sees through it and says, I thought what you really cared about was Jesus.
What Paul’s praying for them, what our prayer should be today is that we’re not all about packaging. We realize the point is to have a nutritious, delicious dish of green beans. The point is to have the only life-giving nourishment that exists in the world. And sometimes we’re going to be the 79-cent can of beans, but if we’re nourishing, we’re pointing people to the only God who truly exists and we’re pointing to him as he really is.
It doesn’t matter if a thousand others have the Del Monte label but aren’t actually nourishing anybody. What matters is that people are getting what they actually need.
And if you’re the 79-cent can, if I’m the 79-cent can, that’s okay. Because every single can that’s truly saved, every single person who’s truly saved, you know what we’re filled with? We’re filled with the Holy Spirit. We’re filled with the redemption that comes, the righteousness that comes from our Savior, and nothing, nothing else matters.
That’s what true wisdom’s really about, drawing our focus and our actions toward him, that everyone would be pointed to him. And that’s it.
Will you pray with me, please? Father, we do pray that you would open the eyes of our hearts all the more today. As we get so often wrapped up in packaging, in appearance, in easily quantifiable marks of wisdom and knowledge, Lord, you call us to something different. You call us to focus on the only thing that really matters, which is that we would know you.
And like Paul, we would say, everything we have achieved, everything I know, Lord, compared to knowing you, it’s worthless. That you would make us a people that say that so clearly that the world would take note that we aren’t like the world, because we have a Savior who made the world and redeems the world.
Lord, would you guide us to be more like you, even this very day, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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