HOW TO GET WISE

You don’t get wisdom from television. You don’t get it from the Internet. You don’t get it from magazines. Wisdom comes from God. Pro 2:6 says, “It is the Lord who gives wisdom; from him come knowledge and understanding”. A wise person is hungry for knowledge, while the fool feeds on trash.” Prov 15:14 (NLT)

If you want to become wise, the first thing you have to do is feed yourself with God’s Word every day. Whatever you fill your mind with is what’s going to come out—garbage in, garbage out. So, if you want to be wise, feed on truth every day.

There are three kinds of things you can feed your mind with: poison, junk food, or health food.

Poison, simply, is stuff that poisons your system. It’s bad for you. It takes you down. Pornography is poison. Some people say, “I can watch that stuff. It doesn’t bother me anymore.” That’s the problem! When you can watch and read things that are profane, blasphemous, evil, vile, and abusive and it doesn’t bother you, you have a problem. You have become a fool. Wise people protect their mind. They don’t allow just anything into their mind. They keep the poison out.

Junk food is neither good nor bad. It just has no nutritional value to it. Most of the stuff you see on TV is not evil. It’s just junk food. It’s what I call “stuffing.” But the problem with stuffing is that when you stuff yourself with stuffing, you have no hunger for truth. If you watch TV for four hours, your mind is full of empty calories that don’t help your body or your mind.

Health food is nutritional food. It helps you grow and maintain your health. Truth is the health food for your mind, so the wise person feeds on truth. It makes you wiser—in your relationships, your time, your money, your business, your parenting, your marriage, and every other area of your life.

To feed your mind with truth, the first place you need to go is to God’s Word. The more you develop the habit of spending time each day reading and studying the Bible, the wiser you’ll become.

(From Rick Warren’s sermon)