“With me are riches and honor, lasting wealth and righteousness. My fruit is better than solid gold, and my harvest than pure silver. I walk in the ways of righteousness, along the paths of justice, giving wealth as an inheritance to those who love me, and filling their treasuries.” (Proverbs‬ ‭8‬:‭18‬-‭21‬ ‭CSB‬‬ – Read the chapter)

Do you want to be rich? Who doesn’t? Sure, you may be able to find someone here or there who will claim they are perfectly content where they are, but I suspect just about all of us could think of what to do with a sudden and great infusion of wealth—and I don’t just mean charities you would support. And yet, it is true that there are many ways to be rich, not all of which have anything to do with the volume of physical resources you control. Every single one of these manifold of ways, though, has one thing in common: they all start with wisdom. Let’s talk about it.

I remember interrupting class one time in seminary. Actually, I hijacked an entire lecture for a few minutes. I wasn’t trying to be disruptive at all, and I didn’t even realize that was what I had done until a year or two later when my teacher’s husband who was then my boss shared her version of the story with me. In the moment, I was so excited that she was teaching about something I had actually been studying on my own while doing research for a paper she had assigned that I piped in and she didn’t stop me. She actually let me plug my flash drive into the class computer so I could show the class the numbers I was talking about.

It was a class on missions, and I had been researching short-term missions trips that churches often send their people out on. Maybe you’ve done one of these before. You go somewhere exotic for a few days, work on a project, and come back to share with the church what a difference you made and, more importantly, how much your own life was utterly transformed by what you had experienced.

I had actually found a data-rich article examining the practice, and while the tone was entirely cynical about the whole thing, it wasn’t exactly complementary of it either. The basic thrust of the argument, backed up by a fair bit of carefully collected data, is that these missions trips very often wind up being far more about and for the people going than the people on the receiving end. The work accomplished is at least somewhat helpful for sure, but when it takes away from the ability of locals to establish solid ownership over a project, it can actually be a net loss for the Christians “being helped” by it.

No, the real thing these projects do is to open the eyes of otherwise sheltered Westerners to the realities of the rest of the world. Almost without exception, the people going on a short-term missions trip are in an economic position that is vastly superior to any of the people they are helping. In other words, it’s a group of rich people flying in to help a group of poor people for a few days, staying in conditions that are vastly superior to what the people they are helping are living in while they are there, and then flying back out to their economically vastly superior situations back home.

What is so impactful about all of this for the people going is that they go to these exotic places (that aren’t nearly so exotic to live in as they are to visit for a few days) and encounter all of these people who are by comparison to their own situations or simply actually desperately poor, and rather than finding misery and suffering everywhere they look find joy and life and contentment. Seeing this blows their minds and helps in genuine ways to show them that contrary to our culture’s claim, happiness doesn’t depend on financial security, and also there are ways to be wealthy that don’t involve large amounts of capital.

The thing about these alternative paths to wealth is that while they can be and often are more physically difficult than their large capital cousins, they are able to be sustained regardless of a person’s current financial realities. That is, you can be poor and happy just like you can be rich and happy. What Solomon is talking about in these verses is that wisdom is one of the most important secrets for getting on this alternative path to a more lasting wealth and staying on it.

“With me are riches and honor, lasting wealth and righteousness.” Wisdom can result in financial security. Someone who is wise is going to make better decisions regarding their money than someone who is not, and this will make it more likely that they become at least financial stable if not downright prosperous. But there aren’t guarantees of that. What wisdom can also bring that is really the thing we are after with our money anyway is honor and right relationships. That’s really all money is about acquiring anyway, isn’t it? I mean, the stuff is nice. Luxury doesn’t suck. But we want money so that people will think about us a certain way.

And yet, “my fruit is better than solid gold, and my harvest than pure silver.” Why? Because “I walk in the ways of righteousness, along the paths of justice, giving wealth as an inheritance to those who love me, and filling their treasuries.” When you pursue and acquire wisdom, you gradually gain all of those bonus items we talked about yesterday. And a life filled with those things is better than a life that is only filled with wealth. In fact, just like all those other characteristics of a life lived well, if you have wealth but not wisdom, you will soon find that it is not a blessing when it is on its own.

Sure, it will gain you access to a variety of things that give your life the semblance of being better than it would be without those things. But absent the honor and righteousness that come only from wisdom, all of those things will be empty. Those people won’t really care for you at all. They’ll envy you. They’ll flatter you in hopes of gaining access to some of your wealth or at least its benefits for themselves. But they won’t be there when the wealth goes away. Because it always, eventually goes away.

Wisdom, on the other hand, doesn’t go away. And if you get to the end of your life and discover that you only had the thing that will go away rather than also having the thing that won’t, you’ll be left with nothing. So, pursue wisdom. You might get wealth thrown in as an added bonus, but more than that, you’ll get the kind of life that you can enjoy regardless of what your financial circumstances happen to be. You’ll be trusting in a God who can make what you have enough to satisfy your needs and to share with others no matter how much it is. That’s better.