Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Becoming more mature by wisely willing to do what is good

Wisdom functions as a matter of maturity. The wise person is one who conscientiously chooses well continuously for this is what will make one more mature (cf. Hebrews 5:14). Maturity comes with time and experience. Over time, one’s experience is accumulative – choice after choice is made with certain consequences following. The immature fool chooses poorly, resisting wisdom’s discerning drive for doing good. Thus is doing what is good related to being wise. One hopes that age will fix the folly of youth, but one need not wait on age to begin acting wisely now. It is the way of wisdom to be determined to discover and remember what is good so that one may rightly choose to do only that which is good.

Consider Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden: the Tree of the Knowledge of good and bad/evil appeared desirable for gaining wisdom. Appearances can be deceiving if one’s attention is fixed on the wrong thing. It would have been good to keep attending to the Lord's quite explicit word regarding to do. Yet, the serpent slyly focused attention elsewhere so that they acted in contradiction to conscience - in how they hid in shame when the LORD came looking for them!

The attempt to know the thoughts of another person is merely speculative without the other’s cooperation. One must depend on what the other reveals, trusting the other’s word to be sincere. It is impossible to judge the intentions of another person, for we can only observe one’s actions, not one’s thoughts. The function of one’s conscience is to observe one’s own thinking so that it can be compared with one’s actions. We cannot make any claim for another person’s conscience.

The Word of God is the measure for what good means. What is good is good because God declares it to be good. To see things from God’s perspective requires that such perspective be revealed by God. This is the function of the Word of God, given so that we can know the mind of God (cf. 1 Cor 2).

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