God’s Kind of Spirituality

The meekness of wisdom

What kind of music do you like? Country, rock, classical, rap? What kind of food do you like, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, American? I’ve been around the world and I’ve found that there are three types of food that are popular everywhere: Italian, Chinese, and American.  What kind of sports do you like? Football, basketball, baseball, soccer, Nascar?

What kind of spirituality do you like?

“Chauncy” thought she was spiritual. She was so spiritual, she could tell her pastor that he was wrong about something she only knew second-hand. Her spirituality gave her great confidence in herself. So when she read on the internet that fluoride causes cancer, she made sure her kids didn’t get any fluoride, even in their toothpaste. Never mind that decades of testing by scientists, approval by government experts had determined that fluoride doesn’t cause cancer. She trusted her few minutes of reading on-line over their expertise. The result was predictable: the kids got so many cavities that they had to be sent to an oral surgeon and put under general anesthesia. Her kids suffered for her spirituality.

James 3:17 says that God’s kind of wisdom makes you teachable. The wise person knows that he or she doesn’t know everything, so they are willing to learn. True wisdom gives you a humility that makes you know that you don’t know everything; you know that there are others with more knowledge and wisdom to whom they should yield. So, the wise person knows that the doctors know medicine better than they do; the dentists and FDA know better than they do (and better than some conspiracy theory nut on the internet); that they have reasons for what they say is good or harmful, reasons we can’t easily learn after just a couple of minutes of a google search.

The wise person respects, defers, and listens.

The wise person defers to the judgment of those who know better. The wise person understands that if something is legal and widely practiced by the experts, what they read on the internet about it causing cancer probably isn’t true and you don’t know why it’s not true because you’re not an expert. The wise person respects the scientists who study, doesn’t arrogantly scoff at their conclusions, about the age of the earth or climate change, because they read an article somewhere and they think reading one brief article gives them the ability now to pass judgement on the conclusions of people who spend their careers studying it. Sure, they might be wrong but the wise person isn’t so arrogant as to elevate himself to having a superior knowledge based on what little he or she knows.

The kind of spirituality that comes from God is humbling and listens to others who know better than himself. Such humbled people understand why Abraham Lincoln said that a man who has himself for his lawyer has a fool for a client. Or, to modify it, the person who has himself for a doctor has a fool for a patient. Or, the person who has himself for a church member has a fool for a pastor.

He who has himself for a church member has a fool for a pastor.

Sadly, today churches are full of people who think they know better than their pastor. They heard some guy teaching on Revelation on-line and they are sure that that fast-talker with no seminary degree has it all figured out. Or maybe they’re unyielding and unteachable about a particular Bible version. They are sure the only one to be used is over 400 years old, even if they often can’t understand what it is saying. If the pastor doesn’t agree, he’ll go find one who does, maybe start another mini-church proudly declaring that they only use the old version and they are quite unreasonable about it, thinking that unreasonableness is spirituality.

The church depends on the “meekness of wisdom.” Listening to a sermon — or reading this article — is a total waste of time if you don’t have the “meekness of wisdom.” God wants us to have a spirituality that makes us open to reason, a noble character to study scripture instead of assuming we are right; to meekly listen to others, especially our leaders; to be humble and yielding. Get the spirituality that makes you open to reason.

John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022).