Truly Wise

May 10

Likewise you younger people, submit yourselves to your elders. Yes, all of you be submissive to one another, and be clothed with humility, for God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time,” I Peter 5:5, 6.

Humility is something foreign to modern thinking. Today’s parents and educators do not endeavor to instill the ideas of submission and humility into the current crop of youth; rather, the effort is put forth to assure that they ‘feel good’ about themselves.

It is purported that no less illustrious a personage than Bill Gates stated, “it’s important that young people actually accomplish something before they feel good about themselves,” but that wise counsel has not been widely embraced.

The outcome is a generation that does not submit itself to the wisdom of its elders but rather, is contemptuous of older people. Perhaps the shift in attitude has come because of the way parents and grandparents are portrayed by the media. Instead of being wise characters with sage counsel, they are depicted as dunderheads who can’t quite grasp reality until it is explained to them by their children.

By embracing this reversal of Biblical roles, we are propagating the fallacious notion that youth equates to superior intelligence when in actuality it generally expresses itself through its fallibility. Instead of “seeking wise counsel” as the Bible admonishes us to do, we take counsel with ourselves and in so doing, we are undone.

May the Lord help us to return to the old pattern established to enable the young to learn from the old, and in so doing, may the generations that follow us be truly wise, not “in their own conceit, “ Proverbs 26:12, but wise in “the nurture and wisdom and admonition of the Lord,” Ephesians 6:4.