Wisdom 7 What’s in Your Cellar?

 We have been talking about wisdom and even put wisdom on a card, an IPFL card, which is a way to personally check where you are in the arena of wisdom. It’s important to immediately assess the word itself and grasp its source as God Himself. He is the Wise One on every level. If we’re talking intellect, He is the perfect Mind. If we’re probing our heart, He is the perfect heart. If we’re seeking real motivation, He is the perfect Spirit. That perfection is His Holiness. He is the ultimate Holy God beyond which nothing exists. His Holy nature is beyond human definition.

 Now, this is important to understand, we are not talking about perfection as something that is derived from us. That is, we don’t look at our imperfections and assume that He is the perfection of where we are imperfect. Quite the opposite. We are talking about our Creator God revealing Himself beyond any human measure as He did when He appeared to Moses and through Jesus. He has revealed Himself as totally different. The only measure we have is Jesus who shows us what perfect human and spirit nature really are. That’s part of the reason He came among us. It was to reveal and show what being Holy is.

 When God told Isaiah, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways…as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts (Is.55:8-9).” God will always be above and beyond us, but in Jesus, He has revealed all we need to know and understand about Him. The fact that He loves us, cares what happens to us and gives us His Son to save and guide us, is all we really have to know. What He wants us to know He’ll reveal to us while we are on our way each day.

 It might also be worthy of lifting a question here. Do we, any of us, really know anyone completely---even ourselves? Then, how can we possibly know the One who created everything unless He reveals Himself in some way, even a limited way? Can the pot know the potter, the invention know the inventor, the art know the artist, the building the architect, the music the composer?

 So, if we start with Jesus, who was sent by God to reveal His nature, we are looking at three things that distinguish His nature from ours: His fearlessness, His confidence and His wisdom. These are things we have to learn and acquire while God is these by nature. And those are only a start. The words we use to evaluate one another like love, kindness, compassion, truth and grace, all place Him in another dimension that is beyond our understanding. Jesus was born with these but grew in them like we have to. Each one of those qualities is Holy because they originate in God. Granted, we were created in His image, having a mind, heart and spirit, but that’s where it stops. To top it off, Jesus comes and tells us to do the impossible, to be perfect like His Father is (Mt.5:48) and Peter quotes Leviticus 11:45 when the Lord tells the Israelites, “You shall be holy for I am holy.”

 Being an image is the only similarity we have. So, what do we do? Let’s get down to it. To start with we listen to Jesus’ first words as He started His mission, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near (Mt.4:17).” In other words, we face reality. Something is eating at us, at our insides, at our inner self, keeping us alone and scared. It’s called sin.

 Sin is the hungry vagabond hiding in the cellar of our self-definition. It is constantly moaning in our inner ear that life is all about me, what I think, who I am and what I do. If I don’t know my Creator, life is looking through the rear-view mirror of survival and taking cues and direction from the attitudes and reactions of those around us as we struggle with the outer physical environment in which we live. Life in a physical body is always a momentary adjustment that depends solely on me. Wisdom in the context of ‘me’ is putting off the fear of the inevitable, the unpleasant and the uncontrollable. ‘Stuff’ is going to happen, ‘stuffering’ is my word for it, a more accurate appraisal of suffering. The physical ‘stuff’, the emotional ‘stuff’, and all the stuff ‘out there’ that’s beyond my control. ‘Stuffering,’ That’s the stuff this world is throwing at us every day. In the midst of it all I’m reaching out into the unseen. I’m chancing it. I’ve got hopes and dreams, plans and strategies. The one thing I feel, and I see in everyone around me, is not very different. We’re all, each one of us, alone and have to make the best of it.  All this spiritual aloneness is what the vagabond feeds on, tempting and prompting me from the darkness beneath.

 Enter Jesus, God the Son, the Holy One, the Right One, the ‘Your-Ways-Are-Not-My-Ways’ One, the ‘In-The-World-But-Not-Of-The-World’ One. He was not born alone. He did not live alone. He did not die alone. His Father and His Spirit surrounded Him through the faith He chose to live by, even our aloneness and its sin. What He showed us was that faith is wisdom. Faith in His Father. Faith in His Father’s Word. Faith in His Father’s will. Faith through the Holy Spirit. That is Holiness alive and well. Jesus was demonstrating Holy Faith. Faith is not how we gain control. Faith is how we lose control and give control to God. Faith is accepting Jesus as the role model of faith whose Holiness washes over us as we view life from His perspective. Life is not something we try and get. It’s losing what we think life is and letting Him live His life in us while we are on the way in our day to day movements.

 Let’s go back to the sin paragraph that gets us to face our inner reality. Put the Lord Jesus in it line by line.

 “Sin is the hungry vagabond hiding in the cellar of our self-definition.”

Jesus is sinless because He is Holy, so it is impossible to do anything but repent and let Him be sinless and Holy through us. If we let sin control us we are in the dark cellar. If we let the Lord Jesus control us we are out of the cellar in the light.

 “It (the vagabond) is constantly moaning in our inner ear that my life is all about me, what I think, who I am and what I do. The vagabond is the tempter playing on our fear of the moment, our indecision, our feelings of inadequacy and aloneness.”

Jesus is One with His Father and the Spirit, the Holy Trinity, the ultimate Holy Family. That family always has our back. Living under the Cross is our freedom in God.

 “Life is looking through the rear-view mirror of survival and taking cues and direction from the attitudes and reactions of those around us as we struggle with the outer physical environment in which we live. Life is always a momentary adjustment that depends solely on me.”

Jesus declared He was and is life eternal. His mirror was really His Father’s will, His Word and His presence as He faced every next moment, situation, event and circumstance. He’s in us.

 “Wisdom in the context of ‘me’ is avoiding conflict, the inevitable, the unpleasant, the uncontrollable and ‘doing the best I can.’”

For Jesus wisdom is loving God with all our heart, mind, soul and spirit and our neighbor as ourselves. This is the every-next-moment eternal life experienced now.

 “‘Stuff’ is going to happen, ‘stuffering’ is my word for it, a more accurate appraisal of suffering. The physical ‘stuff’, the emotional ‘stuff’, and everything ‘out there’ that’s beyond my control. ‘Stuffering,’ That’s the stuff this world is throwing at us every day. What is your “stuffering?”

For Jesus, enduring ‘stuffering’ was a daily experience for which He paid the final price, His death on the Cross. He showed faith being His ultimate wisdom, His Holy Wisdom.

 “In the midst of it all I’m reaching out into the unseen. I’m chancing it. I’ve got hopes and dreams, plans and strategies. The one thing I feel, and I see in everyone around me, is not very different. We’re all, each one of us, alone and have to make the best of it.”

For Jesus, life is not about chance, being alone, or resignation to whatever. It is about a looking -forward relationship with His Father, what He willed and brought out in Jesus through the Holy Spirit.

 “All this is the vagabond prompting me from the darkness beneath.”

Jesus defeated the vagabond devil on the Cross. He rose from the dead as only a Holy One could. Now we, who have accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior, have become holy ones to serve the Holy One into eternity.

 Yes, there is a vagabond in the cellar, the tempter’s sin. The vagabond writhes in the agony of eternal aloneness doing what he can to disrupt the Father’s recovery plan. It lurks in the tendencies of our mind’s doubt, our heart’s fears and our spirit’s retreat. But the Lord Jesus has exposed him as the cause of ‘stuffering’ and has defeated him and his strategies on the Cross at Calvary. He has revealed our true and personal Father, Himself as Savior and Lord and the Holy Spirit as our daily Guide from one moment to the next. So, Jesus replaces sin with His Holy Spirit, the Spirit of wisdom, in the cellar of our self-definition.

 Now if someone asks me what’s in my cellar I just tell them this:

Having accepted Jesus in my heart, I am a recovering sinner made holy through His Cross, a child of God, a disciple and a witness for Him. Those make my identity, my eternal ‘creds’ in this world and in the Kingdom to come.

 Jesus is truly God’s wisdom, “that is, our righteousness [being right before God and others], our holiness [being set apart for God’s use] and redemption [our broken image being put back together] (1Cor.1:30).”

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