Telling the Truth

Announcer (Male): It’s important to never stop learning, but there’s a big difference between earthly and spiritual wisdom. Today on Telling the Truth, Stuart Briscoe explains where real spiritual knowledge comes from and how you can get it.

But first, the Bible’s wisdom teaches you a lot about how to succeed in every dimension of life. Stuart and Jill want to help you master the art of being successful with their three-message series, A Lifetime of Wisdom. It’s our thanks for your gift today to keep this broadcast going strong.

As an additional token of our appreciation, we’ll send you a beautiful frameable art piece featuring Hebrews 10:23 that will help you remember God’s faithfulness daily. So call today to request your copy: 1-800-889-5388. That’s 1-800-889-5388, or you can give online at tellingthetruth.org. Now let’s get to Stuart with today’s message, Finding Spiritual Wisdom.

Stuart Briscoe: Let’s make sure we have a biblical basis for what we’re talking about, so let’s turn to the Scriptures, Colossians chapter one. Colossians chapter one, beginning at verse nine. Paul puts down in some detail what precisely he is praying for the people who live in the city of Colossae.

And let me just suggest this to you, that very often we have difficulty knowing what to pray. I have found when that happens to me—and that’s not infrequent at all—that if I turn to the prayers of Scripture, the prayers of Paul for instance or even the prayers of Jesus, they’re there in considerable detail, and they are extremely helpful.

Now just look at this prayer commencing with verse nine. "For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you." All right, now here it gets into the details. "Asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way, bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God."

Now that’s quite a mouthful that he says there. I want you to notice particularly that his prayer is based on God’s action in the lives of the Colossians with the result that they will be filled with the knowledge of his will. This will lead to spiritual wisdom and understanding to the end that they will live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way.

Now I would suggest to you that is what we mean by life lessons. That God works in our lives, brings us to an understanding of God’s will, fills us with the knowledge of his will and discovery of it in our own lives. The result is spiritual wisdom, understanding of the things of God that work out practically into a lifestyle characterized by two things: it is a lifestyle worthy of the Lord and it is a lifestyle that is not predicated on pleasing myself, it is a lifestyle predicated on pleasing the Lord. Life lessons. That’s what we’re going to be talking about.

I’ve been asked to illustrate this from some of my own experiences, but I want you to understand that this is what we are talking about and we’re simply trying to illustrate what the Scriptures are prescribing for us. Now one thing I have learned is that an educated person is somebody who has learned how to learn and never stops learning.

That is a definition, I think it comes from Peter Drucker, the management guru, so it must be right. An educated person is somebody who’s learned how to learn and never stops learning. Very often people will say to me, "Where did you get your education?" And I always say, "Well thank you very much for assuming that I am educated, and thank you for assuming that it is complete," for the question was, "Where did you get your education?"

But I say as far as I’m concerned, I take great comfort in the fact that whilst my formal education ended rather abruptly when I was seventeen years of age, I take great comfort in the fact that an educated person is somebody who’s learned how to learn and never stops learning. Incidentally, I think that is a beautiful definition of a disciple, for a disciple is literally a learner.

And if you said instead of saying an educated person, you said a disciple, you’ve got a great definition of a disciple. A disciple is somebody who’s learned how to learn and never stops learning. Now how do we learn how to learn? I think back to my formative days. I can answer the question as to how we learn how to learn.

One of the most amazing things about newborn babies to me is that they come with an instinct or an intuition as to where they’ll find their first breakfast. They know mama will provide that for them and they seem to know where to find it and how to get it. Who told them that? They know, there’s a knowing there, but that’s about the limit of their knowledge.

Now it is quite possible that if you fast forward fifty or sixty years you might find that they have a PhD in nuclear science or you might find that they have had remarkable achievements. Now how in the world did they get from that helpless baby who only knew its mother’s breast to a very, very erudite, highly sophisticated, very knowledgeable person? How’d you get there? And the answer: lessons, lessons, lessons, learning, learning, learning all along the way.

Now how do we learn? How do we learn? Well, one way we learn as young people is by asking questions. I like the story of the little boy who said to his dad, "Dad, how hot is the sun?" "Oh," he said, "I don’t know, son." He said, "Well dad, how far is it from the middle of the sun to the middle of Mars?" "Oh," he said, "I’m sorry, I couldn’t tell you that."

He said, "Well dad, if I were to travel around the sun how far is it?" "Oh," he said, "you’ve got me there, son, I really don’t know." He said, "Dad, you don’t mind me asking you these questions, do you?" He said, "No son, of course not. How are you going to learn if you don’t ask questions?" So we certainly learn by asking questions, but we have to admit that the degree of learning is determined by the quality of the answering. So here you go. Think back to your formative days. What were your questions? Who did you ask? What was the quality of the answers? That had an awful lot to do with your life lessons as you started to learn how to learn.

Announcer (Male): You’re hearing from Stuart Briscoe today on Telling the Truth. He’s coming right back with more on how you can get wisdom for life straight from God. But before Stuart jumps back in, here’s a note from Tracy, a listener in New York, whose testimony shows the kind of impact your partnership has.

She says, "I am so grateful for your in-depth Bible teaching. You’re not afraid to tackle tough, convicting texts of the Word. Thank you for doing it with powerful illustrations sprinkled with humor." Thanks so much for sharing, Tracy. That’s the kind of teaching and encouragement you help provide listeners around the world through your financial support.

So if you’ve never given before, please consider a gift today to help more people experience life in Christ. We’ll show our appreciation for your support by sending you the Briscoes' three-message series, A Lifetime of Wisdom. In this powerful series filled with colorful stories and insights from Stuart and Jill Briscoe, you’ll discover how to make the most of the lessons God is teaching you through your experiences.

And as an added token of our thanks, we’ll send you a beautiful frameable Bible verse featuring Hebrews 10:23 to help you always remember God’s faithfulness. So request your copy of A Lifetime of Wisdom when you give today and thank you for helping more people around the world experience life in Christ.

Call 1-800-889-5388. That’s 1-800-889-5388, or give online at tellingthetruth.org. All right, let’s get back to Stuart with more of today’s message from the series, A Lifetime of Wisdom.

Stuart Briscoe: We learn from impressions as well. I have a vivid impression that has never left me and was very formative in my theology. You see, my father owned a small grocery store. Our home was immediately behind the grocery store, so the quickest way in and out of our house was for me to come in through the store, go behind the counter, pass the candy shelf within a few inches of my left hand—all those enticing candies were sitting there—and then I’d go into my house. When I came out, the other way around.

On one occasion it occurred to me that all these candies were just sitting there begging to be eaten, and so I decided to help my father do that. He observed me doing it and decided that was going to become a teachable moment. And so I, the dutiful little boy, stood there before my father who taught me that certain things belong to you, Stuart, and certain things belong to your daddy.

The things that belong to your daddy do not belong to you. If therefore you take the things that belong to yourself, that’s perfectly all right, but if you take things that belong to somebody else, that is called stealing. He then went into the details of this so that we finished up with a life of crime and me spending the majority of my life incarcerated. It did seem a little bit over the top, but I got the drift, you see.

So this was firmly fixed in my mind, so try to imagine this little boy back and forth, back and forth by the candy store, all those enticing candies there, and he knew perfectly well he should not touch them at all. One day the opportunity was too much. And making a quick glance around the store and making sure there was not a soul there, with a dexterous athletic movement, in a split second, I whipped one of those candies into my mouth, and then I heard the voice of God.

Well actually, it wasn’t the voice of God, it was worse. It was my father. He had a counter that was at right angles to the one I was working behind, and this counter was stacked up with shelves, but he had little peepholes in it so that when he had to go around the back to cut the bacon or the cheese or the butter or whatever it was, he could keep an eye on what people were helping themselves to around the other side of the store. And so he saw what happened.

And he says, "Stuart, come here." So I dutifully presented myself before my father. Little boy knowing he’d done wrong, knowing that he’d been seen, knowing that he was guilty. My father in those days used to wear a long white apron that my mother insisted on starching. So my mental image of my father was a very tall gentleman—he wasn’t all that tall but he was compared to me—and he had this glistening white, impenetrable, unspeakably pure apron that completely clothed him.

And I had this picture of pure white, impenetrable, gleaming holiness. That was my father. He had a voice on top of it all, a sonorous voice for he was a preacher, and he began to remind me of the life lesson that I had heard. And I remember that his apron was tied with a big bow in the front of what he called his middle-age spread. And I used to stare him straight in the bow while he was talking to me.

And he went into great details about what was going to happen to me. Then in the end he said, "Now look at me, Stuart. Look at me." That was the last thing I wanted to do, but slowly my eyes traversed the glistening white impenetrable purity of his white apron and I looked at his face, stern, serious, with two saving graces.

In the corner of his eye I saw the trace of a tear. In the corner of his mouth I saw the ghost of a smile. And I have fixed in my mind as a little boy a mental image of the God of whom I have been taught: holy, righteous, just, gracious, merciful, kind, loving, full orbed. That’s an impression that never left me. Became foundational to my understanding of God in all his self-revelation. That’s how you learn. That’s how you learn. Now think back to your life lessons, the formative years.

Fast forward to where I’m a teenager during the Second World War. We had a Royal Air Force station close to the small town where we lived. Young men came from all over the British Empire to join the Royal Air Force defending the mother country. And many of these young men were believers and they heard about my home and they began to congregate there, dozens of them every single day they would come.

My mother had cancer. She was raising two small boys, she was running the family business, and she entertained all these kids. We had rationing of food, and she fed all these young men. I have no idea how she did it. And I watched her and I saw loving sacrifice and service like I’ve never seen it replicated anywhere else. And I learned how to serve.

How do we learn? Well, we learn by asking questions, we learn by sitting in classes, we learn by experiences, we learn through interactions, and all this information begins to pile up within us. I heard a talk by a very erudite friend of mine called Dr. Os Guinness, Oxford PhD, smart as they come. Brilliant talk he gave on a subject I knew nothing about.

I’d had the privilege of teaching Os when he was a teenager at our youth conferences. Now I sat at his feet. He was talking about something called postmodernism. And I tried to find out what postmodernism was. I knew what post meant: it meant after. So postmodernism meant something that came after modernism. I tried to find out what modernism was and nobody seemed to agree on what it was. So I realized that postmodernism came after something that nobody agreed what it was.

Sounded confusing and I discovered that it really is confusing. But this was the line of thinking. A postmodernist would ask you the question, "You say that you know such and such a thing, that this is a life lesson you’ve learned this thing. Yes. From whom did you learn it? I learned it from so-and-so. Did that person know everything there was to know about that subject before they taught you? No. That which they did know, incomplete though it was, did they know it perfectly? Well, no. Was there anything prejudicial about their understanding of this, even though they didn’t know it all and only understood it imperfectly, the part they did know? Yes."

By the way, who did they learn it from? Did that person they learned it from know all? And back and back and back, you see. So in the end they said to me, "Well what you say you have learned, in actual fact you don’t know the whole story. What you do know you don’t know perfectly. It was prejudiced by the people who taught it to you and you had your own prejudices when you took it, so how in the world can you say you know anything?"

That’s postmodernism in case you didn’t know. That’s incidentally where we live right now. The net result of that is people say you can’t really know anything, so you shouldn’t be dogmatic about anything. You should simply say, "This is my truth." And then you’ve got to allow everybody else to have their truth. So everybody has a different truth, so there is no such thing as absolute truth. Isn’t that wonderful? That’s where we are, so we can’t know anything perfectly.

Announcer (Male): You’re listening to Stuart Briscoe today on Telling the Truth and he’s coming right back to talk with us about today’s message. But before he does, what is the definition of a successful life and what does it take to have success?

Scripture is filled with wisdom designed to teach you what God defines as success and how you can achieve it. That’s why we’re excited to send you Stuart and Jill’s three-message series, A Lifetime of Wisdom, as thanks for your gift of support today to keep broadcasts like today’s message coming your way and going out through Telling the Truth’s global ministry.

This series brings you Stuart and Jill’s combined teachings on wisdom and will help you make the most of the lessons God is teaching you through your experiences so you can unlock the secret to a truly successful life. Request your copy when you call now to give and help more people experience life in Christ.

And as an additional token of our appreciation, we’ll send you a beautiful frameable art piece featuring Hebrews 10:23 that will help you always remember God’s faithfulness. Call 1-800-889-5388. That’s 1-800-889-5388, or give online at tellingthetruth.org. Okay, let’s get back to Stuart to get some answers about today’s teaching. Stuart, how does...