3.4.12 Captured by Jesus Pt. X – His Perfect Wisdom

Captured by Jesus Pt. 10 – His Perfect Wisdom

I Corinthians 1:25 & Proverbs 3:5-8

Today Casey spoke about an aspect of Jesus’ character that is often not stressed enough or can even be overlooked completely. As Dallas Willard has written:

Far too often he [Jesus] is regarded as hardly conscious. He is taken as a mere icon, a wraith-like semblance of a man living on the margins of the “real life” where you and I must dwell. He is perhaps fit for the role of sacrificial lamb or alienated social critic, but little more.

But can we seriously imagine that Jesus could be Lord if he were not smart? If he were divine, would he be dumb? Or uninformed? Once you stop to think about it, how could he be what Christian’s take him to be in other respects and not be the best informed and most intelligent person of all: the smartest person who ever lived, bringing us the best information on the most important subjects.

Most of us have never thought of Jesus as being the smartest man who ever lived. He knows everything about every subject we can imagine. As Paul says of Jesus in Colossians 2:3, “in whom [Jesus] are hidden all the treasures and wisdom and knowledge.” Earlier in the letter of Colossians, Paul states,

For by Him [Jesus} all things [the totality of the universe] were created, both in the heavens and on the earth, visible and invisible,  whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things [eternal] and in Him all things [the totality of the universe] hold together. (Colossians 1:16-17)

So it is Jesus, the Word of God, who created the whole universe, things we can see and things we can’t see. And it is He who is holding it all together! What does this say about the wisdom of Jesus? If He created and holds together the very universe itself, His wisdom and knowledge must be beyond anything we can imagine.

We can trust Jesus to be at work in our lives at all levels. We can trust Him to create in us a new character. Peter tells us,

Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life an godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust. (II Peter 1:2-4)

Jesus, as we have seen in other messages, has given us precious and magnificent promises. He will never leave us or forsake us. He is the way, the truth, and the life. It is by these promises, by appropriating them for ourselves, that we can become “partakers of the divine nature;” become like Christ. Again, Dallas Willard puts it clearly this way:

Then he invites us to follow him into his practices, such as solitude, silence, study, service, worship–we call them spiritual disciplines. There, with him, the readinesses to do evil that inhabit our bodily members through long practice are gradually removed, to an ever increasing degree. Our flesh increasingly comes to the side of our spirit in service to God. The disciplines for the spiritual life are a central part of the crucial information which Jesus brings to us, and we dare not neglect it.

As believers, we place ourselves under the care and nurture of Jesus. We can do this with complete trust because He possesses the wisdom of the ages. He is the omniscient God of the universe. As we see in the Gospels, there was never a situation or problem that Jesus was not perfectly prepared for. He always had the answer. He could always see into men’s hearts and make the right judgment.

As we saturate ourselves with Jesus, through prayer and the reading of and meditation on His word, we will find Jesus to be the same way with us, here and now. He is still the same today as He was 2,000 years ago. You can still trust in His wisdom and His willingness to work in your life to make you more like Him.

You can read Dallas Willard’s article entitled, Who is Your Teacher, on the web at http://www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artid=67