The Power in Asking for Wisdom
James 1:5-6 - “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt”
This is one of those verses that I keep coming back to time-and-time again. It's been so powerful and life-changing. Most significant changes in my life have been as a result of applying this one simple verse.
Through this process of consistently asking for wisdom - on what to do, what to change, advice on how to get started – God has been truly faithful to provide wisdom when asked. He has opened my eyes to my own weakness by realizing how much I don't know and how truly dependent I am on Him.
Thru this process of continuing to ask for wisdom - God removed a veil from in front of my eyes that made it impossible for me to see what I needed to change and how to do it – this veil was pride. Before seeking God's wisdom, I didn’t want to admit – how powerless and clueless I was to make changes in ‘my’ life.
The first area of wisdom he gave me is to bring other people into the process of change. The wisdom of those around us is a virtually untapped resource in most of our lives – I know it certainly was in my life.
An exercise God gave me was to prayerfully look for the strengths of those around me – look for their spiritual gifts and natural abilities. I immediately discovered God is so good that he surrounds us with people who are strong in the areas we are weak. He also made me realize that I needed to fight past my ‘human nature’ when it came to seeing others strengths. Our human nature makes us want to be jealous of others, intimidated by their strengths or compare ourselves with them and focus on how we fall short – but instead – God desires us to value their strengths and learn from them.
One example for me is that my husband is amazingly gifted in the area of organization – structure and order come very easy to him. – Where I am completely clueless in this area and it is definitely a weakness. However, by valuing his strengths I was able to ask for help and learn from him thru watching and asking lots of questions. In one years time I was able to make more progress in this area – with his help – than I could have ever made in 20 years on my own.
The second part of this verse is so important that I don’t want us to miss the truths in it - when we ask for wisdom, we must believe and not doubt.
I needed to believe that God could make changes that I couldn’t and that He knows what should be done – and I don’t. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that change is possible – when you’ve failed time and time again on your own power.
To help me with this God gave me a challenge of belief. Before I could apply the wisdom he gave me I needed to ask myself “Do I believe this? Do I ‘really in my heart’ believe this is true and possible in my life? Do I believe God’s wisdom will work”
God allowed me to see that I have a skeptical nature and I didn’t believe Him the way I should. God also desires for us to be real – so I needed to confess my unbelief to Him and proclaim my desire to believe Him and ask for Him to change my heart so I had greater faith.
I don’t want to oversimplify this process of believing – I noticed in my life the harder I tried on my own efforts to make a change and the more I had failed the longer it took me in this stage of struggling with believing God. So, it was not an overnight step – and it might take months to get to the application phase.
After I believed Him – then I could begin the process of applying His wisdom to my life.
So from this one simple verse I learned the process of change for me involved asking, believing and applying.
Created 5 months ago
