Why is wisdom so valuable but rare? I don’t know all the answers, but I know a few of them. Wisdom, like humility, helps us see life more clearly than before. And with this clarity comes inevitable decisions: continue down the same sinful path, or repent by turning away from lies and related deceit and move in a better and more God-glorifiying direction.  The choice seems easy, until you count the cost. For many of us, wisdom is too demanding because it often requires change. We prefer our comfortable but dark illusions.

Like the good parent mentioned earlier, we know that wisdom requires tough decisions and with them, varies degrees of conflict. We would rather concentrate on piety, which is innately personal, than exercise wisdom, which is innately social, involving conflict with others.

Virtuous living without wise living is not only wasteful, as found in Jesus’ words regarding pearls before swine, it may well make you an accomplice to evil, as drug counselors will tell you when well-meaning people enable others to continue their destructive lifestyles. Personal piety by itself may give the impression that we’re doing good works when we really aren’t. Marry virtue to wisdom in sermons and in your life, and then you’ll find your life being blessed as never before, increasing your ability to bless others as well.

I write all of this knowing that the majority of ministers will ignore it, not because it’s unbiblical (though some will cry it is), but because this message is not part of the script they rigidly follow. We just don’t encourage Christian men to be shrewd, which to contemporary ears is synonymous with criminal behavior. It just doesn’t sound “Christian,” and so the unnecessary suffering continues. Also, as the Barna study shows, it’s hard to teach something that you don’t possess.

We can be grateful that contemporaries like Dr. James Dobson, Chuck Colson, and John Eldredge among others, did haven’t fallen into the Christian Nice Guy fallacy and mistake niceness for wise goodness. We should be grateful that C.S. Lewis did not think he needed to be nice when writing Mere Christianity and instead decided to be wise and good when he critiqued the worldview of Sigmund Freud, referring to him as an “amateur.”