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Imagine jumping into your friends car and going with them to various places that you want to go. As you are trying to listen to your favorite tunes, the GPS guidance keeps pausing the music and voicing directions which your friend ignores. The GPS says “turn right”, then your friend goes straight. Then the GPS says “recalculating… make a U-turn in 700 feet.” He or she ignores it again. So you ask, why do you keep ignoring the instructions? And your friend answers: “It’s programed to take me home, and we are going somewhere else, so I ignore it.”

This is our metaphor today. A GPS system must be programmed to our desired destination or its amazing technology is completely wasted. When our GPS is unhelpful, we usually “turn it off.” However, in life, our GPS cannot be turned off, and it cannot be turned down. So when we don’t want to follow instructions (wisdom) we learn how to ignore it. The world has trained us to focus our attention on something (literally anything) else.

Our first lesson is hearing wisdom again. If we want anything more than wisdom, we’ll never get what we truly want. All we think we want can be had by ascending (pride), wisdom is possessed by descending (humility).

Last week I introduced this series on the premise that what young adults need more than a job, or to get out of the house, or real friends, or a true love, or a politically stable world, is true wisdom. Wisdom is the skill and will to use the knowledge we possess. Wisdom is a spiritual gift, given by God to all who ask, and it comes with the expectation that we will use it and not squander it. This will do two things:

1. Wisdom will free you from the consequences of foolishness.
2. People will assume you are “lucky”. The effect of wisdom is life opens to you rather than fights you.
3. Wisdom provides the long-view, and orients you toward the long-term, not just immediacy.

Let’s break down this last point.

We are all drawn to short cuts. Easy money. Quick fixes. When people say: “There’s no quick fix.” they’re only partially correct. Translation: “Don’t get your hopes up.” or “You’re going to have to work a long time at things.” While this is true, it’s not all that is true. Winning the lotto would be a “quick fix” to many problems. Wisdom helps us realize that winning the Lotto isn’t necessarily a win…proven by the fact that most multi-million dollar winners are broke within five years.

Wisdom isn’t like this. Wisdom values what is gained in the struggle more than avoiding it. However, there is a sense in which wisdom is the ultimate quick fix. The nuance is that it’s only a quick fix if it’s true wisdom. True wisdom returns us to the GPS which is constantly running in the background which we’ve been suppressing. The moment we trust Wisdom again, it reprograms our route, and we seek new destinations. True wisdom never takes us to our destination. The Bible puts it like this:

“…the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. ¹⁹ For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.” (Romans 1:17-19)

Those who follow wisdom, will “do the right thing” (righteous) and we navigate life by way of “faithing.” Don’t get triggered on the word “wrath.” Paul is gifting us with an ability to see. Do you realize that everything we hate about the evil aspects of life are proving the point about wisdom? Can you see how ignoring our GPS coordinates causes each of us to dis-integrate from each other, and pridefully, assert our will in opposition to everyone else? Paul proves that we all know better, but choose to ignore it.

Back to wrath for a minute. Religion told us the messed up world will be the cause of God’s wrath, but wisdom (and Paul) reveal that the mess is the wrath. Have you ever felt discouraged by the daily news and the suffering and anger (wrath) of people hating one another? Have you felt like we are too far gone for anything to ever change? Has the severity of life ever made you want to avoid even trying? Have you ever asked: “What’s the point?” Does it feel like love, marriage, and family don’t belong in a world like this, so why bother? All of this is wrath…the default mode within us all when we forsake wisdom.

It feels horrible because it is supposed to. That’s the design.

If the world’s suffering leaves you feeling hopeless, then allow me reorient you back to the quickest fix…Wisdom.

The quick fix doesn’t mean world peace within the next two months. The quick fix is that it could be. C.S. Lewis gives an example of performing a mathematical sum, when we realize we’ve made a mistake. He said the most progressive thing we can do is go back to where we made the mistake and keep going. It doesn’t help us to keep trying to make the math work, by building upon an error.

This is a portal through which you can see the world. Instead of going back to our mistakes, we keep piling them on when the math isn’t mathing.

The Quick Fix appears once we seek a factory reset…our return to Wisdom. Once wisdom re-programs our coordinates, we’re instantly returned to our intended course. Changing coordinates may require us to give up on some of those things we think we want, but the promise is that we will gain what we truly want. We can complain about the world’s collapse if we are focused only on ourselves. The latter is the cause of the former. It only takes a moment to pay attention to our GPS…the quick fix is bringing that instruction to the foreground. The sorting out of our route, and the time to reach the destination is then fully optimized. The journey does in fact take time, but at least you know “You’re still on the fastest route.”

I’ll close with this example:

Last weekend our family attended the Metallica concert in Denver. It was awesome. Prior to the show, a small section of the stadium was trying to get other people to do the wave. As more people caught on, the wave got bigger. If the wave stopped, the “wavers” would boo the “non-wavers” and start again. Pretty soon, others were catching on and after several minutes, the entire stadium had “tuned in” to the collective consciousness and the wave began circling the stadium. It was epic.

More than just the wave, this example is the promise of what the Bible calls “The Good News” or the Gospel. We are all designed, GPS programmed, to work together…to wave. The stadium is full of complete diversity, but for that moment when we all focused on the same thing, something so much more than any single one of us began to emerge. All people, political parties, ages, sexes, religions, everything that could possibly divide us was fixed, it was put to the background, and for a brief moment we all had fun, we were all one. If we can all be one in Metallica, we can certainly all be one in God. That’s wisdom.

Wisdom exists to free us from the isolated, individualistic, hopeless experience, unto a unified, diverse, rich integrated family, that forms a body out of eight billion parts. When that becomes our destination, wisdom has come. Next week I’ll begin showing how this is practically applied.