Good Morning Everyone,
Our theme for this month: “Wisdom from Proverbs”
Our Bible verse for today: “I am the least intelligent of men, and I lack man’s ability to understand. I have not gained wisdom, and I have no knowledge of the Holy One.” Proverbs 30:2-3 (HCSB)
Our thought for today: “You can do something about it.”
Proverbs 30 was not written by Solomon. It was written by a man named “Augur”. We know next to nothing about his man, except that God selected him to write a Proverb that would then be preserved in the inspired Word of God and handed down to multiple generations for thousands of years, and it would be used to teach and inspire others.
And yet, he begins his Proverb with a somewhat astounding admission that he believed himself to be unintelligent compared to others, and unschooled in the ways of God. I wonder what caused Augur to feel this way. Maybe, since most of the other Proverbs were written by Solomon (the most intelligent man in the world in his day), perhaps Augur felt inadequate by comparison and was expressing that in verse two. And perhaps his claim in verse three that he didn’t know much about God was simply a statement of humility in the face of God’s majesty. He also evidently thought that he had little real wisdom. He was referring to the Godly wisdom as described in Proverbs, the kind that makes people truly wise. Augur felt he didn’t have it.
I can relate to how Augur felt. As I’ve mentioned before, as a child in school I was a terrible student. Second grade ended up being two of the hardest years of my life. Throughout all my years in grade school I was happy with any grade that was a “D” or higher. I ended up quitting school at 17, only part way through the 10th grade, and I went in the Navy. There I discovered that everyone else was smarter than me, and I didn’t like it. That feeling of inadequacy instilled in me a burning desire to learn. Consequently I’ve been a student and a learner for the rest of my life.
Likewise, when I came to faith in Christ I was already in my late 30s. Almost immediately I felt as if I had wasted many years when I could have been learning about God and growing as a Christian. My awareness of how little I knew about God ignited a passion within me to read the Bible, to listen to sermons, to participate in Bible studies, read Christian books, pray hard, and to learn all I could about God and His ways.
The sense of deficiency that Augur wrote about with respect to academic knowledge, spiritual understanding, and godly wisdom, is a sense of deficiency that we all share to some degree. But fortunately there is something we can do about it. We can take the necessary actions to correct it. We can study different subjects; we can read good books; we can take classes in areas of interest to us; we can commit ourselves to being diligent students of God and of His Word; and we can gain godly wisdom by learning Biblical principles and then actually applying them to our lives.
I appreciate Augur’s transparency in admitting how he felt. I also suspect he was smarter than he gave himself credit for. The rest of his Proverb seems to bear that out. But still, a feeling of inadequacy in these areas could actually be a good thing. It can keep us humble and it can cause us to want to learn and grow.
God Bless,
Pastor Jim
Oak Hill Baptist Church 