Wisdom notes

If you type into Google “Famous quotes on wisdom,” here’s a sampling of what first comes up:

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
-- Abraham Lincoln
If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. You may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
-- Abraham Lincoln
Know thyself.
-- Linnaeus
Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.
-- Konrad Lorenz
A love affair with knowledge will never end in heartbreak.
-- Michael Garrett Marino
If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.
-- Judith Martin, "Miss Manners" columnist and author
We are drowning in information, but starved for knowledge.
-- John Naisbilt
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
-- Isaac Newton, Brewster's Memoirs of Newton. Vol. ii. Chap. xxvii

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Romans 15 is a great epilogue on the way of wisdom found in Romans 14. The issue is taking the wisdom God’s given us by His grace in His Word and living on a daily basis, dealing with one another, on that basis.

As Jordan explains, “Romans 14 literally lays the groundwork for practical living in the details of life. Practically letting the gospel and the life of Christ that lives in us live out through us in our relationships one with another and that’s a critically important issue because it’s only as we live and walk on a daily basis based on an understanding of who we are in Christ, and in what God’s doing in us and through us for Himself, that we’re able to use the details of our lives for God’s glory.

“Unfortunately Romans 15 is mostly overlooked. You read commentaries on Romans, or hear preaching on it, by the time they get down to Romans 15, the instructions here kind of get a short shrift. I guess time’s running out and people are trying to get through, or space is running out in the book, and they think of other chapters as being more important, so these passages are often passed over.

“The two great principles of the way of wisdom that Romans 14 sets forth. First, there’s the issue of living purposefully, living our lives with the proper focus, on what God has saved us for. No thoughtless, casual living. You should live with passion, but you should live with purpose. Purposeless passion is dangerous and passionless purpose is useless.

“The second great principle is to concentrate on Christ. He’s our model and our motivation. We’re not living to please ourselves; Christ didn’t and neither should we. Christ understood that source of the energy and power for His life was that which God was doing and the working of the Word.

“The application of sound doctrine to the details of our lives; that’s what wisdom is all about.”