“Doesn’t wisdom call out? Doesn’t understanding make her voice heard? At the heights overlooking the road, at the crossroads, she takes her stand. Beside the gates leading into the city, at the main entrance, she cries out.” (Proverbs‬ ‭8‬:‭1‬-‭3‬ ‭CSB‬‬ – Read the chapter)

There are some things that take a lot of effort to accomplish. If you want to run a marathon, for instance, you are going to need to spend weeks training for it. Maybe months. You’ll have to commit to running every single day, and not just a little bit. You may start small, but you will gradually run further and further distances until you can accomplish the whole thing. It will likely be one of the hardest things you’ve ever done in your life. Finding godly wisdom…isn’t like that. Let me explain.

I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about this same idea before, but Solomon keeps repeating themes in this opening section, so I don’t feel so bad about doing the same. Since he considers this one important enough to repeat, we’ll say it again too. Wisdom is often treated like it is the great end of a long and arduous quest. It takes incredible effort to find it. Not everyone gets there. Only the most dedicated can climb to the top of that hill.

If worldly wisdom were our only goal, that would perhaps be the case. The kind of keen awareness of what people are like and how situations often go really does come only by evaluated experience over time. My dad has spent most of his nearly 50-year law career (and counting) doing adoptions. He has been involved in thousands of adoptions. If you have a question about adoption and live in his state, there is literally not a better person in the world to ask than him. He has incredible wisdom on the subject.

In the same vein, my father-in-law has been working in the engineering department of a local hospital for over 50 years. He finally retired last year but then immediately went back to working a few days a week. I’m not sure they know what to do without him there managing things for them. If there is a handyman or home improvement or automotive question I run into, he’s always the first call I make. He has incredible wisdom when it comes to just about any kind of project around the house because he’s been doing them for so long.

The world is right. That kind of wisdom only comes over time and by much effort. But as good and important and useful as that kind of wisdom is, it won’t advance anyone in the direction of a relationship with God. It won’t tell you about how the world actually works and what the best way to navigate it is that will lead to the greatest amount of flourishing for you and for the people around you. It’s not godly wisdom. That kind of experience over time is not how you come by godly wisdom.

Like any kind of wisdom, if you want to obtain godly wisdom, you have to go to its source. If you want wisdom about engineering around a home or commercial building, you have to go to a home or commercial building and get involved in the kinds of projects you will naturally run into around there. If you want wisdom about a certain area of law, you have to go practice in that area of law. Those are the respective sources of those kinds of wisdom. But if you want godly wisdom, it’s source lies somewhere else. And what is this source? It’s right there in the name. You’ve got to go to the God from whom it comes.

But here’s the thing about this greater and higher wisdom: The God who possesses it, who is its source, wants you to have it. He wants you to have it, and He really doesn’t want you to have to work for it all that hard. Oh sure, there is going to be some effort involved. He’s not going to simply unscrew the top of your head, pack it in your brain, and put everything back together. But He goes out of His way to make sure this wisdom isn’t obscure. It’s not arcane. There’s no esoterism here. He makes it as easily accessible as He can. In fact, rather than our having to go search for it, it comes and searches for us.

“Doesn’t wisdom call out? Doesn’t understanding make her voice heard?” For all of Solomon’s gendered examples that seem to demean women at least a bit in modern eyes, it is interesting – and balancing – that he always personifies godly wisdom as female. That doesn’t mean women are wiser than men, but it is nonetheless very often the case that the kind of keen insightfulness about people and situations and how God would move and respond in them that characterizes godly wisdom seems to come more naturally to women than men. We are more brute force and raw strength. They are more evaluated experience and tender thoughtfulness.

In any event, what is godly wisdom doing here? She is clamoring for attention. She is doing whatever she can in order to be heard. She is trying to get others to notice her. And she doesn’t do this in remote places where no one is likely to hear. “At the heights overlooking the road, at the crossroads, she takes her stand. Beside the gates leading into the city, at the main entrance, she cries out.”

Wisdom is going to the places where she is most likely to be found and doing everything she can to make herself known to as many as possible. Godly wisdom isn’t something you have to go and find. It is searching for you so that you can know it. God wants for you to have His wisdom so you can benefit from it to the absolute fullest. He knows that His wisdom is necessary for true flourishing and life and He wants for you to have those things. He wants for everyone to have them.

And how do we come by them? By going to Him? Okay, but how do we do that? Through His word. Through His body, the church. Through prayer. Through encountering other believers. And look: those things are everywhere. There are churches all over the world. Yes, in some communities there are more than others. In my community, you just about can’t throw a rock without hitting a church. My town of a little more than 2,000 people has at least 20 churches in it. Some areas need churches which is why there are so many followers of Jesus committed to planting new churches, but the odds are high that you aren’t far from a church wherever it is you happen to live.

How about God’s word? There is literally not a more common book in the whole world than the Bible. My congregation has four members of the Gideons International among our membership. Those guys are awesome. They are responsible for putting copies of God’s word all over the world in places where people are likely to encounter it. If you go to their website, they have story after story chronicled of people whose lives have been irrevocably changed because they encountered a Gideon Bible somewhere totally unexpected.

And prayer? Everybody prays. Even in a culture that is increasingly secular in its basic assumptions, huge numbers of people still report that prayer is a regular feature of their life. Now, if you pray to a god that doesn’t exist, that’s not going to do very much for you because there’s no one there to answer whatever it is you have asked. But when you pray open handedly and with an open heart to the God who does exist, even if you really aren’t sure you believe He exists in the first place, He can and will respond to that and start to reveal Himself to you in ways you can handle.

God wants for you to encounter and be blessed by the wisdom He provides. He is pulling out all the stops to make sure you have that opportunity. You don’t have to search very hard. You don’t have to go on some difficult quest. You simply need to go to Him, and He will start to take care of the rest as He leads you down wisdom’s path. May you be ready when you encounter His wisdom so that you can experience all the blessings it has to give.