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Exchanged Glory III: Wise as Serpents
<page 20>Wisdom was shouting in the street. The answers were all around me; I just needed to find them.
In the early 1990s, I decided to memorize my way through the book of Proverbs. I wrote eight verses a week onto index cards, and then I spent one week memorizing those verses and another week reviewing them while I moved onto the next group of eight verses. It took me about two years to make my way through all thirty-one chapters of the book.
I have never done a Bible study which has changed my life as much as that study of Proverbs. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was the exercise God was going to use to teach me how to read the manual and build the engine. I quickly forgot the exact wording of each verse, but Solomon’s thoughts reshaped my world.
Wisdom shouts in the street, she lifts her voice in the square; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out; at the entrance of the gates in the city, she utters her sayings …
(Proverbs 1:20-21, NAS)
I had spent the two years leading up to my memorization of Proverbs studying self-help books. As I meditated on Proverbs 1:20-21, I thought about the practical training I had received from those books. I realized that Wisdom had been shouting at me from the bookshelves for my entire life, but I hadn’t heard her until I started reading.
I wondered what else I was missing. In what other ways was God speaking to me while I walked by without listening? It began to dawn on me that He might desire to do much more in my life than I was experiencing. Perhaps He wanted to address my many internal struggles. He might even be showing me a new way to deal with my sexual problems. Wisdom was shouting in the street. The answers were all around me; I just needed to find them. I suspected that incredible changes could happen if I really learned to hear her voice.
The New Testament taught a similar message. It told me that God wasn’t muttering in secret:
If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him.
Why wasn’t I experiencing this? It certainly didn’t feel like God was liberal with the insights I needed. I had spent my first eight years as a Christian searching in vain for a way to handle sexual temptations. Then when I finally found that way, it hardly seemed that He was being generous about it. Instead, it felt like He was grudgingly giving me only enough to survive.
<page 21>As I meditated on the difference between the Scriptures and my experience, I remembered that the Bible is always right. If I wasn’t getting wisdom, it must be my fault. God was sending His signal out; I must be tuned to the wrong station.
Fortunately, God also gives wisdom without reproach. He doesn’t hold our foolishness over our heads, even if we have spent many years ignoring Him. He quickly forgets our sins and is eager to teach us how to move past them.
I began to have faith that He would soon open my ears.
At about this time, I read the book, Exploring the World of Dreams,[12] by Benny Thomas. Following its instructions, I wrote down several of my dreams and attempted to interpret them. Most of them were beyond my ability to understand, but occasionally one clearly spoke to me.[13]
At the end of 1991, I had an extremely positive dream. I felt that it was a confirmation of what God was teaching me from Proverbs.
I was praying and had a vision of the Lord Jesus. He walked toward me, and I reached out to Him. He also reached out to me and walked right past my outstretched hand and into my heart. I began to have “spiritual feelings.” At first I thought, “This won’t be too big of a deal,” but then the feelings became incredibly strong. Eventually, they felt so good that I think I may have experienced a touch of what heaven will be like.
Somehow, the Lord was both outside of me and inside of me, and from the outside He said, “Go.” I repeated, “Go.” After a short silence that started to feel awkward, I said, “You don’t have to tell me this, Lord, but where should I go?” He said, “Go to the mountains of wisdom.” (Actually, He used a person’s name here, but in order to avoid an unnecessary discussion of the symbolism involved, I have put in the word “wisdom,” which is what I believe the person symbolized.)
I repeated everything He said. I was excited to be commissioned by God. I reached out to shake His hand, because I was grateful. He shook back and smiled at my enthusiasm.
The vision then faded and I said, “Did He say the mountains of wisdom or the mountains of music?” (Once again a person’s name was used rather than the word ‘music.’ There was a clever play on words in that the name of the person for wisdom and the name of the person for music sounded similar.) In the dream, my wife was with me, along with others who had either heard or seen the vision. They all said, “Wisdom!”
In my mind I pictured the place of ministry being a small village in the mountains. I thought about the fact that it was not a big money-making position. It might not be warm. I wondered if people from my church would come and minister with me. I saw myself being largely alone. Finally, I thought to myself, “It’s OK if these things aren’t the way I would like them to be. I am a slave of Jesus.”
<page 22>I woke up still feeling the incredible “spiritual high” that had come after Jesus entered me. The interpretation was simple. Jesus was entering my life in a new way as I studied Proverbs (Jesus entered me). This would cause changes that would be small at first but would eventually transform my spiritual life (growing spiritual feelings). God would use these changes to give me a ministry of sharing wisdom with people (commissioned to go to the mountains of wisdom). I had thought as a young man that my ministry would be in the area of music. Instead, Jesus was letting me know that it was in the area of teaching (mountains of wisdom rather than the mountains of music). It wouldn’t be an easy ministry (not a big money-maker or in a warm place), but that didn’t matter to me. I was happy to go where Jesus was sending me.
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