Colin is in a group called Trail Life, and I’ve told you a little bit about Trail Life. They like to go camping, they do a lot of learning out in the wild, they study the Bible, they do a lot of things. Last weekend, they went to a place in downtown Kansas City called Steamboat Arabia.
Has anybody ever been to that museum? At that museum, we learned the story about the Steamboat Arabia, that it was this incredibly, it was, you stand in a place that shows you how large this boat was, this steamboat. It was built in 1853 in Brownsville, Pennsylvania at the boatyard of John S. Pringle. And what it was used for was the storage of cargo.
You could get more cargo on there than you could on the back of a mule to get it across in the Old West. You could get a lot there. It was like the predecessor to a cargo train or something like that.
And they would put the cargo on the steamboats, but they would also have passengers on the steamboat. And this steamboat was driving down, driving, riding, steering, floating, chugging, steaming, down the Missouri. And it hit what is called a snag.
Trees used to fall down. And how many of you have love when you go to the Missouri to get out of the car, to go down to the water, to get a cup full of water? No. Kind of smells, doesn’t it? It’s known as the Muddy River.
And there was a snag or a tree that had fallen down, and you can’t even see him in that mud. And that boat hit, and it sank in a matter of minutes. It was gone.
They couldn’t save any of the cargo, but they saved all the people. And there’s a part of me this week after we went there, and I was thinking about this Pringle guy who built the boat, thinking, if it’s going to go up and down the Missouri, where hundreds of boats that went up and down in the Missouri sank, because of stuff they couldn’t see or whatever else was going on, you would think you would reinforce that boat with something. It would still have to float.
But you’d think you would build it in a way that if a tree hit it, it wouldn’t just go right through the wood that isn’t even as hard as the wood of what was going in there. That’s just one way I think of that that could have shown a little more wisdom. Today, last week we were talking about Solomon.
Our series is Anointed, and we went through how David was anointed in his journey to be king, and now we’re talking about Solomon who was anointed to be king. And last week we talked about how God asking for a gift, does anybody remember what the gift was he asked for? Wisdom. And God was very pleased with him asking for wisdom.
And in order to do that, he said, but I am just a child. I don’t know how to lead these people. That’s not normally something you hear a leader say.
It takes a lot of humility, like we were talking about last week. But in that, Solomon became a very, very wise man. Will you stand as you are able? We’re gonna look at 1 Kings 4, 29 through 34 today.
And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure and breadth of mind like the sand of the seashore, so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt, for he was wiser than all other men. Wiser than Ethan, sorry, man. Wiser than Ethan, the Etherite, and Heman, and Coppel, and Darda, the sons of Mahal.
And his fame was in all the surrounding nations. He spoke 3000 Proverbs. His songs were 1005.
He spoke of trees from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke of all beasts. He also spoke of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish.
And people of all nations came to hear the wisdom of Solomon and from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom. The word of God, inspired by God, for the people of God, thanks be to God. You may be seated.
Now Solomon was pretty wise, and as we continue in this journey, as we journey the steamboat Arabia, and we sink with it, as we were going through there, one of the things that really I started thinking about was not wise was the Arabia sunk in 1853 with 200 tons of cargo, now between 1820 and 1870, there were over 400 ships that sank in the mighty Missouri. So you think after 1820, 30, 40, 50, you might think, hmm, wisdom says we should probably take another route. But they didn’t.
They, why, in that day, it’s easy sometimes in our day and age going, why would you take that risk? It’s happened to so many hundreds of other boats, and here the boat sank. You know, this was a big thing. There was a, has anybody heard of Nebraska City, Nebraska? There’s a town that was supposed to be right near Nebraska City that never got off its feet because a fourth of the cargo on the boat was supposed to go to the general store of this town to help them build the town, and they could never recover after this.
Sometimes we take risks. Sometimes we say, I’m gonna do this based on what I know here, and we look back on it and we go, why did I do that anyway? They took a risk, and it failed, and it failed miserably, and we need to learn in our day and age, which we think it’s tougher because maybe they didn’t know, but they had newspapers back in the 1850s. They had places you could see stuff like this.
They probably didn’t have warnings like we have warnings on cans now saying, if you eat the top of this can, you may die, or don’t heat this metal in the microwave, but they probably didn’t have a warning on the side of the ship that said, you can ride and you can have fun, but at some point, you might die. Nobody died except a goat, and that’s their favorite story was the owner of that goat had it tied to the side of the boat, and he said, that goat was so stubborn. I could not get that goat off the boat.
I tried, and I tried, and I tried, and he had an interview that was in the Lawrence paper, and when they excavated the boat, they found that the goat was still tied to the side, and so they refuted his story. Now, in order for us to figure things out in the world today and how to navigate and where to go, we need to be wise. We need to be wise.
We need to understand. We need to be able to discern what is right and what is wrong, where God is calling us to go and where God is calling us to turn from. We need to be able to understand what we should do and what we shouldn’t do.
And it is not that much easier today than it was back then, and you say, well, that doesn’t make sense. Information is so accessible today. I mean, you had to research in the library forever and ever.
Who’s ever written a paper and had to go and use the good old Dewey Decimal System to find the research you needed and write that paper, and you probably had to type it out, and if you made a mistake, did you have correction tape or did you have to start over? Anyway, information is so acceptable, but what can we trust? Now, in businesses and think tanks and other places, they use something that is called many different things. Some call it the wisdom pyramid. Some call it the information pyramid.
Some call it the knowledge pyramid, the wisdom, information, knowledge, and data pyramid. Now, what this tells us is that sometimes there can be a bunch, the data side is its raw data. It’s messed up.
It’s not in any order. You go to it, and you may be able to find the truth in it, but it’s not going to be clear. Now, somebody’s gotta take that data and put it into information, like in a library or like a place that is worthy of researching or in a book, and then you can read that, and you have that information accessible to you.
The next step on the pyramid is knowledge, that you know what that information is, and you know what that information means, and finally, they have wisdom. Wisdom takes it to a whole nother level. Wisdom is, it can be taught to others and help them apply it.
Wisdom takes that information that we know and helps us apply it to our lives. You know, sometimes we learn and learn and learn and learn and learn and learn and learn and learn and learn, and nothing seems to change. Wisdom allows us to move to that next step, so we have it.
Now, in the 80s, there was a group of guys in Kansas City who were, one guy owned a restaurant, a couple other guys were businessmen in Kansas City. One guy got to work with the team because he had something called an excavator, and they did research. One guy went to microfilm, and he researched and he researched and he researched, and he discovered that a boat that sank in the Missouri River in the 1850s, a couple things could happen.
When the floods come, the rivers eventually change course and they go in different ways, so if you just go trudging through the Missouri River, you’re not gonna find all that debris. Now, you wouldn’t intuitively know this, but they believed the boat was way off of the Missouri River into a Kansas cornfield, and in this Kansas cornfield, they went to the owner of the land, and they said, hey, do you mind if we dig up your land? We’re gonna find the Arabia steamboat, and he said, oh, really? My great-grandfather owned this land, and people have been coming and searching for that for 130 years, and you think you’re gonna find it. It’s your money.
Probably not the best investment you’ve made in your life, but it’s your money, so what they were doing did not look too smart, did not look too wise, but eventually, they found all that, all the stuff, and when they tell us the story, we got to talk to one of the guys who was actually there at the time, and he said when they started digging and they found all these plates, there were personal dishes and plates and plates that were going to the mercantile stores, and the big money was supposed to come in these big barrels of bourbon, and those big barrels of bourbon washed away and were never found. So they decided, let’s turn this into a museum and let everybody see it. I mean, I read in there that if there was really a lot of money in it, they would have sold, but they haven’t sold anything from it.
They had to give 15% to the owner of the land. How would they know this was right? It doesn’t make any sense. That was way off course from the Missouri River.
It was in Kansas, and most people from Missouri are going, what good can happen in Kansas? And they went and they looked and they dug, and over a four-month period of time, they dug up everything, found it, covered it back up just in time for the farmer to plant his spring crops, but they had to have some wisdom that they garnered, not just information, not just understanding that information, but they were acting on it, believing this was the right place, and they found it when, in over 130 years, nobody else could find it. Now, we, like Solomon, can have wisdom. We can learn to understand what God has in store for us.
In Proverbs 2 that we read, that Dana read for us, it says, for the Lord gives wisdom. That right there tells us there’s two kinds of wisdom in the world, there’s the wisdom of God, and there’s the wisdom of, yes, wisdom of God, wisdom of people, worldly wisdom, or heavenly wisdom. Which one’s gonna make you happier? Which one are you gonna base your life on? And how are you gonna distinguish what is of God and what is of people? Proverbs 2.9 says, then you will understand righteousness and justice and equity, every good path, and 2.10 goes on to say, for wisdom will come into your heart and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul.
If you’re open to the wisdom of God, if you’re open to going to God and say, God, teach me. Now, the Bible goes in a lot of places saying, the wise man does not turn away knowledge. In other words, wisdom does not say, I know all there is to know.
I can’t learn anymore. The wisest people are always learning, always growing, always exploring, always trying to find something new and see where God is working. Brett McCracken wrote a book called The Wisdom Pyramid.
And this Wisdom Pyramid, a lot of it is based on Solomon. The whole thing is based on the Bible. And this gives us a practical way of seeking wisdom.
Now, he based this off the old food pyramid. How many of you had to learn the food pyramid in school? I had to learn it. Today, you probably don’t have to learn it.
But the food pyramid would start with the basics. And at the top, you remember what was at the top? Sweets. Oh, ice cream.
All those things we like to give up for Lent, just chop off the top of the food pyramid. Those are the kind of things we don’t need. We want, we desire, we wanna consume, but we don’t need.
He says, Brett McCracken says, in our day and age, he calls us information gluttons, that we want more and more information. That decision-making, which takes wisdom, is harder to do in this day and age because there’s always more information, always things you can reach out to, always another Google search you can do. But he says, he inverts it and says, the greatest source of wisdom we have is the Bible.
Are you consuming more of the Bible than anything else? Wisdom starts with consuming the Bible. He talks in there about prayer and our devotions and personal prayer, and he moves up to the next level with the church, where he talks about the local church and the global church and traditions. Now, when the Global Methodist Church was started, they had an emphasis on something called, not necessarily conservative, but it was on being traditional.
Such a boring name for 2022. 2022, I think that was the start date. Traditional.
Traditional says, it’s not talking about a worship style, it’s not talking about music, it’s talking about the tradition of the ages, saying that whatever is new and whatever is bright and whatever is shiny and whatever theology comes up, we test that first against the Bible, then against tradition, the age-old tradition. He says, one of the troubles we have is we look at old books and old things and old traditions in the church, and we say, that is not relevant to our lives today. We read the church fathers from the early beginnings of Methodism, and those show us how they sought after wisdom and they sought after God, and we developed the theologies that have been an age-old part of the church.
Those traditions are what we uphold. Those traditions bring us wisdom about God. The Nicene Creed, there’s a lot of wisdom about God in that.
You drop some of these things, and you can create your own God. At the base is the Bible. The second level is the church.
The other thing, as we’re talking about the church, a lot of people say, I don’t need the church to have a relationship with Jesus, but you can only go so far on your own. He said, everybody needs other people they can be accountable to in their lives. He said, like me being a book writer, I need an editor.
I’m gonna have mistakes if I don’t have an editor. Everybody in their work, in their lives, needs people they’re accountable to, people who encourage them to grow, people who seek God. Now, the cool thing is, before he gets into books or anything else, do you see what he has there in the green? Nature and beauty, all the natural beauty, that if you wanna understand creation, I’m sorry, if you wanna understand the creator, you have to get to know what? The creation.
The creation reflects God, gives us an understanding of how big God is, how amazing God is, that we can read books about creation, we can read all kinds of books. Like Solomon, it says here, when he wrote the Proverbs, he wrote the Psalms, he also wrote books about trees and animals, and I was like, oh, those are their science books. But when I started digging into them, those are his books on creation.
How he understood creation, and how creation can reflect God, and how those things draw people to God. Now, beyond that, there are books, he says, don’t not, he reads all kinds of books, whether they’re novels or history books, or science books, or whatever those are. Those help us learn, but we have to remember and compare them back to the Bible.
I mean, maybe we read a book that has nothing to do with the Bible, but it helps us understand someone else a little more. But we always check back with the Bible. We always discern good and evil within it.
And those books help us learn to think instead of being thought for. How did he put it? Like a, like resigning your life to the algorithm. How, if you’re searching online, they see that, oh, maybe you should look at this, maybe you should look at this.
But these help you think beyond that. Then it’s the internet. The internet has a lot of stuff in there that’s like raw data.
Did you know there’s some fake news on the internet? Does that change your whole life now? And there are some good things the internet can be used for, and there are some good things social media can be used for, but there are ways in which it can pull us down and pull us further away from God if we don’t have the right base in our lives. It kind of reminds me of something that I didn’t know too much about till I went to seminary, but it was called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Now, the Wesleyan Quadrilateral was scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.
Now, if you look at the vast array of denominations we have, some of them may rely on scripture and don’t use, they may or may not use reason and tradition to help interpret that. Some of them leave out experience, which Wesley would have said that’s more experience with the Holy Spirit than just life experience. Reason, some may say reason can overpower scripture and some may say tradition is the biggest one.
Now, Albert Outler, who came up with this term, eventually later in his life, said, I wish I never would have come up with it because I saw how people were equalizing each one of those. But the truth is, scripture was the foundation and you use tradition, reason, and experience with the Holy Spirit to help you interpret scripture, to help you understand who God is. The wisdom that we find in the Wesleyan Quadrilateral still has that same base of scripture.
And with that scripture, it helps us understand the world today. So since we’re done here, I’m looking out here going, wow, there’s now so much wisdom in this room. But the wisdom we have starts with Jesus, starts with the Bible, starts with prayer and with the church and with corporate prayer, moves on to nature.
Do not forget the power of creation. Do not forget the positive side of God. The positive ways you can grow by reading books and by discerning what is good on the internet and what is right and what is fake news and not fake news.
What are your trusted sources? And the same thing with social media. Let’s pray. God, help us learn to distinguish what is right and what is wrong, what is of you and what is not of you.
Help us take this barrage of information that is thrown out to us today. The raw data, fake news, the things that are worldly wisdom. Help us put more of you and your word on our heart than anything else.
Wisdom begins with trusting in you. Wisdom begins when we read the Bible. Wisdom begins when we surround our pit selves with people who will encourage us and lift us up.
Wisdom continues when we go out into nature and see how it reflects you. And when we read books and we can tell what’s of you and what’s not of you. And we can learn and expand our minds and our thoughts.
And we can learn not just to learn the Bible and other things to show we know it, but learn it so we can live it. Help wisdom means we live out your word, Lord, in Jesus’ name, amen.