The Quest For Wisdom - Bill Johnson

What follows is an absolutely brilliant article on wisdom by Bill Johnson as a follow up to the dream and article I sent. Let it roll around with 1Corinthians 1 & 2and Ephesians and then let me know what you think. Lots of love, t

The Quest for Wisdom
In the last few years I've talked about a tragedy of revival, which is that there is no record of revival accelerating in the second generation. Every great move of God has declined in the next generation. But I think I have found one exception; when David was king and he passed the baton to his son Solomon, revival was taken to another level. I think that may be the one exception in human history where things have actually accelerated instead of declined.

Solomon was given one wish. Most of you know the story; God appeared to him and said, "You can have anything you want." There's a reason he was given that choice.
Proverbs 4:3-6 says,
When I was my father's son, tender and the only one in the sight of my mother, he also taught me, and said to me: "Let your heart retain my words; keep my commands, and live. Get wisdom! Get understanding! Do not forget, nor turn away from the words of my mouth. Do not forsake her, and she will preserve you; love her and she will keep you.

Wisdom is the principal thing, therefore, get wisdom. I would like to suggest to you that the reason Solomon was given the choice to have anything he wanted is because he had a dad who trained him to make the right choice.

The story about David and his kids is interesting because he wasn't that great a father. Sometimes people in ministry don't translate the authentic relationship they have with the Lord, or the effective ministry they have with everyone else's kids, into the practical setting of their own home. It's one of the great tragedies through the years of failure in the church. David was no exception. He is called the "man after God's heart," yet he had troublesome children that he just didn't correct or raise correctly. He had his deal with Bathsheba, which was a huge mistake. (To show you how God redeems such a horrible sin, David's heir, Solomon, was born through Bathsheba. When God redeems a situation, He redeems it so completely that He turns it into a benefit. It's all the way through the scripture. It's so stunning. The grace of God should stun every person because it's the opposite of even our really good thoughts about what it should be like. It's way bigger than that.)

So here's Solomon; God appears to him and says, "You can have anything you want," and he says, "I choose wisdom." When I was living in Sacramento, California, I was in the garage talking to a friend. I had just heard the story about Solomon making this choice. Somehow it really impressed me. You have to understand, I wasn't known for making great spiritual choices.

I remember talking to this friend and saying, "If you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, and God showed up and said you could have anything, what would you choose?" I forget what he said, but I said, "I'd take wisdom." Now, I was clueless what that meant, but I knew one guy in the Bible did it and it worked really well for him. So I thought, "If I have half a brain I better do it the way he did it." So I said, "I'd choose wisdom," and went on to explain, "That's what happened to Solomon. He had a choice and he got whatever he wanted." Somehow that stuck in my mind all these years, and has actually become a principal pursuit. I know a few years ago we encouraged all the men in the church in Weaverville to read Proverbs every day, just to take a chapter according to the date: "Today is the 3rd, so we're going to read the third chapter of Proverbs." There are thirty-one chapters so it seems to work out. But here's the principle thing: the pursuit of wisdom.
Our understanding of wisdom is somewhat lacking. I want you to go to Proverbs 8 for some additional insight, and we'll try to build a case for this quest for wisdom. In Chapter 8, Wisdom is actually talking. Wisdom "cries out" in verse 1, "I, Wisdom, dwell with prudence" in verse 12, and then starting in verse 22 Wisdom talks to us and says,

The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way, before His works of old. I have been established from everlasting, from the beginning, before there was ever an earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills, I was brought forth; while as yet He had not made the earth or the fields, or the primal dust of the world. When He prepared the heavens, I was there, when He drew a circle on the face of the deep, when He established the clouds above, when He strengthened the fountains of the deep, when He assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters would not transgress His command, when He marked out the foundations of the earth, Then I was beside Him as a master craftsman, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him, rejoicing in His inhabited world, and my delight was with the sons of men.

Wisdom is not a stoic trait; Wisdom is like the party-animal of heaven. It delighted in what God made, the order God made and how it functioned, and His massive delight was in the sons of men. That's because you and I were created for several things. We were created, number one, to live in and dwell in the Glory. "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." That was the original target. Redemption restores us to the original target, which is dwelling and living in the manifest presence of the Lord. The second thing is, Wisdom found its supreme delight in the sons of men because you and I were born to walk in the wisdom of God, and express and display the wisdom of God. Wisdom is generally thought of more as a stoic trait, yet it's celebratory in nature. It rejoices, it celebrates, and it parties in right things.
The other thing I want to point out about Wisdom from this passage is that Wisdom calls itself a "master craftsman." Now, Wisdom was standing next to the Father as the Father would speak. If you could imagine this, the Father would speak, "Let there be light," and light was formed. Wisdom was there working with the Father, designing, establishing boundaries and the nature of the very thing God was creating. It was Wisdom, we find out later in I Corinthians 1:30, that was actually the person of the Lord Jesus Christ working in tandem with the Father. Now, there's a nature to Wisdom that I don't remember ever hearing until recent years. Wisdom was a "master craftsman," so Wisdom worked in tandem with God to create. Wisdom is creative in nature.

When we lived at that same house in Sacramento we had some neighbors called the Blankenships. The father was a very famous woodcarver. His father before him was a famous woodcarver, and they had large pieces of furniture that were all carved out of pieces of wood. They were the most amazing things I'd ever seen. (John F. Kennedy had a piece of this furniture in the White House.) He was very highly revered and respected--a master craftsman. When you think of a master craftsman, perhaps you'd think of a stained glass maker or a glassblower, some kind of artist who is at the top of their field, perhaps a cabinetmaker, somebody who does precise work. A master craftsman is what Wisdom is. It is creative in nature. Wisdom is the creative expression. You know there's wisdom when there is a freshness and a creative nature to what God is doing. Wisdom has always been thought as that which handles knowledge correctly, but it's so much more than that. It is the creative nature of God. Here Wisdom speaks, and says, "I was beside Him on the day of creation as a master craftsman."

We have been given a call and a privilege to walk in wisdom. It's not a sterile call to be smart and live correctly; it is an invitation to walk in the creative nature of God. The call to walk in wisdom is the invitation to partner with the Lord, that His creative ideas, His creative expressions, would flow in and through His people. People are bored, and Christians especially are bored. For some reason, something "got into our water" that makes people sterile, which is the fact that if there are desires, dreams, visions, or aspirations, they get shut down in the name of devotion to Christ. The religious spirit loves routine without purpose and calls it suffering. You were born to live with fulfilled desires.

Solomon is the brilliant example. Here's a man who became the example in all of scripture, with one exception (who is the Lord Jesus Christ), of the wisest person to walk the earth. Picture this: the stories of his wisdom were so extreme that they scattered all over the world. A queen in a faraway country put together an army of people to escort her to come and see Solomon. She had questions. She wanted to see if the stories she'd heard were true. After she got to him she found out, "I wasn't told half the story. It's far bigger than I ever imagined." Do you know what she brought with her as a gift besides the jewels and spices unlike anything Israel had seen before? She brought four tons of gold as a gift. Four tons. How many people do you need just to carry gold, let alone protect it? Here was this army carrying this queen across the known world into Israel so she could sit at Solomon's feet, another king, just to hear wisdom.

I would like to suggest something to you. Both Isaiah 2 and Micah 4 say that the nations of the world are going to stream to the people of God asking for the word of the Lord. In the last days, the people of God embrace the true Spirit of Wisdom, which is always looking for fresh, creative expression. Then the world will come looking for answers and solutions to the dilemmas, the issues of life. When creative ideas, artistic expression, inventions and the whole world is led by unbelievers, the church has embraced a false kind of spirituality. They have shut down the very thing that God created us to be, do, and function in. They have shut down ways to live and ways to do things better. The religious spirit looks to lock people into routines without purpose. We have some sick gratification by just sticking with a routine that doesn't work. Now, I realize things are changing, and hopefully there are not too many in this room who are saddled under that, but so many have a simple religious routine with so little life, so little release of freshness, so little release of power. The mantra is, "We're just holding course. We're just doing what we were told to do." They shut down all the realm of dreams, aspirations and desires. This is the way it's supposed to be: You are one huge creative machine waiting to explode upon an unsuspecting world. That's really the truth.

Let's go to 1 Kings 10:4-5:
And when the queen of Sheba had seen all the wisdom of Solomon, the house that he had built, the food on his table, the seating of his servants, the service of his waiters and their apparel, his cupbearers, and his entryway by which he went up to the house of the Lord, there was no more spirit in her.

It is just amazing to me that this queen traveled to the other side of the known world to sit at Solomon's feet and ask him questions. She was stunned by the wisdom, answers, his insight to nature, how things live, and how they function. This is your inheritance as a believer, to have all Solomon had and more, because you're not a disciple of Solomon, you're a disciple of Jesus, who is wiser than Solomon. The queen of Sheba came, sat at Solomon's feet, and this is what rose to the top of her list: "the house that he had built, the food on his table, the seating of his servants. . . How many ways can you seat servants? The food, the way it was delivered, their clothing, the stairs that went from his house to God's house"; every one of those has to do with artistic expression. Food, design of clothing, the way they function in service in some way, everything you and I do has got to be represented in that list somewhere, because it's just an oddball, weird list. They way they were seated, the way they served, the way the food was prepared, the food that was prepared, the house that he built, the stairs--everything had to do with some artistic, creative design.

Now most people check themselves off of that list because at five, all of us were artists. Everyone's an artist at five, but there are very few left by the time you get to ten, right? Why? Part of the reason is that we enter an educational system that weeds out those who don't paint or draw well. Art, in other words, has been reduced to painting or drawing or music or something of that nature, when the businessman who's about to start a business in a new city needs an artistic mind to come in with fresh ideas to create something that's going to work. The politician who's going to run a clean campaign needs creative ideas to communicate his convictions. The school teacher needs the anointing of the artist. The Bible calls it "wisdom," to know how to touch the one child who just doesn't seem to learn. We have a group in the church who work with students who have a very, very difficult time learning, and God has given them wisdom and strategies to see dramatic and immediate improvement.

Here's the thing: We do best serving and fixing problems. That's just what we do best. We don't do so hot when our goal is to become president of this club or to get notches on our Bible. Too many people want to help in the public school system because they want to have souls saved. What's wrong with that? Not a thing, but it becomes obvious to everyone in the school that you're after that instead of wanting to help the school become better. See, to stand alongside someone to help them succeed is what Wisdom did with the Father. Wisdom stood alongside the Father to make Him successful in His creation of all things. To stand alongside the leaders of a community, whether it be a police department as a chaplain, or down at the hospital, as an employee working at a department store; it doesn't matter what field you work in, there are always opportunities to stand alongside someone else and help them succeed, help them be better at what they do.

The people of God have legal access to God's vast realm of mystery. It is His good pleasure to give you the mysteries of the Kingdom. That means all the secrets are your inheritance. Nothing is withheld. The believer has the privilege of engaging in life and finding a problem. Let's say you're a school teacher and there's a massive problem at the school, truancy or whatever. The believer has the responsibility and privilege to enter into the situation and say, "We've got a major problem. God has the answer. In His Kingdom exists the way this should function. I have legal access to His mysteries. I will therefore seek Him for the answer so that this gets fixed." That's called "wisdom." You have just become the master craftsman. You didn't paint a picture, you didn't build a cabinet, and you didn't do a stained glass window. But you walked in the same anointing to carry out God's purposes and plans in a creative, fresh, expressive way where His Kingdom is established.

Anne Kalvestrand is one of our heroes. She just got back this week from Bahrain. She was in a situation working with the U.S. Embassy in Bahrain where they were having discipline problems with high school students. She took the DNA of this house (Bethel), which is made of Kingdom principles. The Bible says that Jesus is the Desire of the Nations; He is what everybody is longing for and they just don't know it. So it's wisdom to have Jesus come and fill the longing of that heart in some way to fix this problem. It's not just a thing of preaching and saying, "Listen if you don't repent you go to hell," it's that we have the opportunity to step in as His representatives of the Kingdom and bring Kingdom order so people realize, "Oh, Jesus is the One that I want." Anne wrote a paper based on what happens in this house (Bethel) regarding discipline according to Kingdom principles and the U.S. Embassy was so impressed by it that it was adopted in Bahrain. Then the U.S. Embassy stamped it and sendy it to all the U.S. embassies, on discipline for high school students. Anne does this very well. She looks for a problem and how to fix it. It's the Kingdom mindset; it doesn't say, "What do I have?," it says, "What do I have access to?

Go to Exodus 31:1:
Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. And I have filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to design artistic works, to work in gold, in silver, in bronze, in cutting jewels for setting, in carving wood, and to work in all manner of workmanship. And I, indeed I, have appointed with him Aholiab the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan; and I have put wisdom in the hearts of all the gifted artisans, that they may make all that I have commanded you."

They were filled with the Spirit of God. It's the first mention of someone being filled with the Spirit in the Bible. And yet he was filled with the Spirit for what purpose? Wisdom. Why? He had to build God's house. God just told him, "This is what I want you to build." Moses had to find somebody with wisdom, because wisdom will know how to do what God just said to do. God didn't give a blueprint, He just said, "Go build this." So Moses looked for the guy with the Spirit of God on him. He was filled with the Spirit and wisdom to do artistic design.

In the New Testament, the outpouring of the Spirit is for the demonstration of power. In the Old it has to do with prophetic declaration and wisdom. When the new revelation came, it didn't wipe out the former, it built upon it. Wouldn't it be nice for the church to walk in a fullness of the Spirit that enables us to infiltrate the system, serve to help the schools get better, and help the hospitals be more efficient? Then we would say, "By the way, if you have cancer I can pray for you and you'll get healed!" It's not either or; this is the life we were born for.
So here we find Bezalel. Moses assigns him to the task because he's marked with wisdom. The wisdom he has is marked with creative expression so he would simply KNOW how to do what God commanded them to do.

A story I shared with you some time ago is about a guy named Matt MacPherson who is an archer who developed a tremendous bow. He's a wonderful man and wanted to serve in churches, but churches couldn't afford him. He's a worship leader and wanted to travel and preach. To make a long story short, as a hobby he would build bows and arrows. He was a hunter and liked to shoot bows. He asked the Lord for understanding on how to build a bow, and the Lord literally dropped a blueprint down in front of him with the design of a bow. He now produces Matthew's Solocam, which is one of the most popular bows in the world. In fact, a large percentage of professionals shoot that particular bow. It was developed by this guy who copied a blueprint that was lowered out of the sky. He gets the blueprint, creates the bow, and the Lord speaks to him and says, "Thanks for asking." The Lord went on to say, "I have a lot of good ideas." That is so fascinating to me, that because it mattered to him, it mattered to God, and God spoke to him about what he was pursuing.

We compartmentalize too much. People will come to me and say, "I want you to pray for me. I have a hurt leg, but I really need you to pray for my brother. He's got cancer." Like God can't multitask, or only takes serious things and doesn't do the lesser things. We do the same in our thinking with God, that if He's going to give us creative ideas, He should give it to scientists who are trying to find a cure for cancer. That's really what He ought to do" as though God can't do more than one thing at a time. The whole point is if it matters to you, it matters to Him. That's the deal. I love this because here's a guy sitting in his workshop day after day trying to create a nice bow and God drops down a blueprint. That's brilliant, as the British would say. It's also lovely.

Whether you're working in a department, as a school teacher, a housewife, a den mother for the Girl Scouts, it doesn't matter. Any place you have influence, you have the right and responsibility to look for creative influence. It is not to dominate, nor for self-glorification, but to help the others succeed. There are ideas in music that simply sit here in the realm of mystery, waiting for someone to ask. There are ideas regarding medicine and science, and ideas regarding the simplest of things in life.

It's tragic that hundreds of years ago, if you wanted to hear quality music, you had to go to the church. If you were going to see drama or art, painting, the masters, they were believers. So many of them were in the church; you had to go there if you wanted to see excellence. Something happened some time ago where we were taught that to really follow Christ you had to get rid of everything in your heart that you like to do.

We've gone over this through the years here, but there's the narrow road that we take coming to Christ, the straight and narrow road, and the entrance to the Kingdom. There's only one door, Christ Jesus, and the only way in is "not my will but Yours be done. I give everything I am to you." But something happens as we begin to walk in life in the Kingdom, in intimacy with the Lord. He continually turns to us and says, "Whatsoever things you desire when you pray, believe that you receive them and you shall have them." He starts looking to the desire and the heartbeat, the talents, the gifts, the desires.

He's the one who said, "A desire realized is a tree of life." That's amazing. What's the tree of life? The tree of life was the tree that Adam and Eve were forbidden to go to after they partook of the forbidden fruit. Once you take the fruit of the tree of life, it marks whatever it touches with eternity. So here's Adam and Eve in a sinful condition; if they eat of the tree of life, it makes their sinful condition permanent and unredeemable. So an angel stood guard at the tree of life. Proverbs says you still have access to the tree of life. Let all your agendas get sanctified by your devotion to Christ and then let them rise to the surface because "a desire realized is a tree of life." Your fulfilled dreams and desires are those which identify you and lock you in with an eternal perspective.

That's huge. It's having a cry to write that one song about a message and getting it done. The religious spirit doesn't want you to eat the fruit once you've gotten your desire realized. The religious spirit wants you to say, "It wasn't me, it was Jesus." It's like the guy who sang a beautiful song and was told, "That was a beautiful song." "It wasn't me, it was Jesus." "Well, it wasn't that good. It was good, but it wasn't that good."

Time with God impregnates you with Godly desires. It's the absolute truth. The sperma of His word gets planted in you and things begin to form desires, dreams--and they are there because He not only wants the fulfilled desires, He wants you to get locked into eternal identification, identifying with your place in eternity. It's the fulfilled desire.

What did Jesus say in John 15 and 16? He said, "I want your prayers to get answered so that your joy is full." Why do you think He was the happiest guy on the planet? Every time He prayed for the sick, they got well. When He's praying the day ahead of time and knows ahead of time, "We're going to have a big crowd of folks who will have no food. Oh God, it would be great if you fed the multitudes again." He gets there and the food is multiplied. Why do you think He was the most rejoicing person on the planet? The Bible says His joy was head and shoulders above all His companions. He excelled them all. Why? Because He lived that? "A desire realized is a tree of life." Day after day He went to bed munching on the fruit from the tree of life. "Another day with the Father where He fulfilled the desires of my heart." It's no wonder that Solomon, the man marked as being the wisest man, was also marked as the man who had all his desires fulfilled.

Zechariah 1:18 says,
Then I raised my eyes and looked and there were four horns. And I said to the angel who talked with me, "What are these?" So he answered me, "These are the horns that have scattered Judah, Israel, and Jerusalem." Then the Lord showed me four craftsmen. And I said, "What are these coming to do?" So he said, "These are the horns that scattered Judah, so that no one could lift up his head; but the craftsmen are coming to terrify them to cast out the horns of the nations that lifted up their horn against the land of Judah to scatter."

Horns represent spiritual powers. This is amazing. Not since God sent a choir into battle first has He come up with such an outlandish strategy for war. I mean, we thought the choir thing was weird, but we finally learned about praise and found out, "This is amazing; when we praise God, He fights for us." Well, now He's pulling a new one on us. Here are these four horns, these four dominions rising, they're oppressing the people of God, and they're dividing and scattering them. They're running away in fear. Their heads are hanging low. They've lost all awareness of the presence and the promise of God. Look at the wicked work these horns have done. What is God's answer? Here are four people coming with hammers and saws, stained glass and furniture polish. It's a person with a canvas and a paintbrush, a photographer, a musician. It's the creative anointing, the anointing of wisdom. It doesn't just scatter the enemy. The Bible says it terrorizes them. Does that sound fun to anyone else besides me, terrorizing the terrorists?

Listen, you're working at Macy's, and you're thinking, "There's got to be a better way to do this. I bet I could save this department 10,000 bucks a year if we did it this way." You submit the idea to your boss, they do it, and guess what? That creative idea just chased a horn away. It chased away that which divides and causes people to be downcast. What is it doing? It's creative people reflecting the creative nature of their Father. It's an agreement between heaven and earth. It's giving heaven a target for invasion. It doesn't mean you are even a great musician you just sit down and make that special love song between you and Jesus, and you sing that song. That moment of creativity chased away the horn of division and oppression.

We've learned this through the last thirty years, that you can sit with the guitar and start to play and suddenly there's a peace that settles. There were things going on spiritually in attack-mode that are now dissipated. We've learned somehow that God is so moved by that musical instrument that He just settles. My dad and mom took us into this in the early seventies. We've seen that as musicians with the instruments we play, the presence of the Lord settles and the powers that were working against us are broken. It's glorious. The same is happening now, not just for the worship team, not just for those of you who play instruments privately at home, it's every real estate agent who looks for a creative way to present a property. It's every school teacherwho looks to work with a child who doesn't seem to "get it." We know we have legal access to the mystery of wisdom that unlocks whatever is in the heart of that child. It's the musician who gets the song of a lifetime. They wanted to write it and do it well. It's for every single person, whether you consider yourself an artist, or you just have the routine of working in a department store or garage or wherever it might be. Every person has the privilege of creative expression, and when you do, it terrorizes hell, because that's when you look most like the Father.