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Make Us Wise

From the Series: One Prayer
Speaker: Wayne Cordeiro
Date: July 13, 2008

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Transcript

Mark

Aloha to everybody at NCC. I want to take a moment to welcome you this weekend as we continue our One Prayer series. More than 1,300 churches across the country are all doing a series revolving around one question – if you could ask God for one thing for the church at large, what would you pray for? And during this series, we’ve prayed for lots of things, Make Us One, Make Us Generous, Make Us Dangerous, Make Us Doers. This weekend, I’ve invited my friend, Wayne Cordeiro, from New Hope Church in Hawaii to share a message called Make Us Wise, and I have this gut feeling that by the time you are done listening to this message, everybody is going to want to visit his church in Hawaii. You are going to be challenged and blessed by this message. I am actually returning from the Grand Canyon this weekend and excited to be back with my church family hopefully in one piece and excited about next weekend concluding the One Prayer series. I also wanted to take a moment to remind you that next weekend, we celebrate our Baptism by the Bay and I want to encourage everybody in our spiritual family to make the trek out to Sandy Point State Park and if you have not yet been baptized, I still want to encourage you to take that step of faith and I want to encourage all of us to come together as a spiritual family and celebrate those who are taking this step and we are going to have a great weekend next weekend. I will also be wrapping up our One Prayer series and I look forward to a great weekend. But now, open up your heart and mind and you are going to be challenged by what Pastor Wayne Cordeiro has to share today.

Wayne

Aloha! Welcome to Hawaii. This is the place that never sleeps, it’s called Wai Ki Ki. Cacophony of sounds, all competing for everyone’s attention, and people are meandering around without direction, aimlessly. It is like a microcosm of life where people are struggling without direction. It is in the midst of these times, the Bible says that wisdom speaks. In Proverbs Chapter 1, it says: Wisdom shouts in the square, lifts her voice, at the head of the noisy streets, she cries out. Who is she talking to? People who need direction and people who would like a little bit more navigational wisdom when it comes to life and relationships. That’s right, and boy do we need all of that, don’t we? Wisdom. There is one prerequisite though, you gotta be still. That’s right, to hear her voice. That’s why the Bible says Be still and know that I am God. I know about being still. See, I was raised by a military dad, a 1^st Sergeant, and he was a strict disciplinarian. In fact, he disciplined us in the patriotic style. He laid down striped until we saw stars. And when my dad would speak to us, we would listen. I remember once I disobeyed and my dad said, “You stand right there and don’t move a muscle!” I didn’t move for two years! But I waited for his voice to say, “Wayne, at ease.” Boy that was so nice. But when you are still, you learn a lot. You learn how to repent, you learn how to be good, you learn how to confess. You gotta be still. It’s sorta like this guy here. See, this guy must have been disobedient. He must have had a military dad too like me. There was probably a time when his dad said, “You be still and don’t move a muscle.” I’ve been down here in Wai Ki Ki for some time, and this guy hasn’t moved for about five years. You can tell he has been here a long time, look at the pigment of his skin, gone. Could’ve been just an overabundance of sunscreen too, I don’t know, but this guy is galvanized. But I know his name. Maybe if we call his name, he will move? Let’s try it. Lamar! Lamar! Hey Lamar, you can chill.

Well, you can’t go yet, we are not done, so if you would just hang in there for a little while, be an obedient guy.

We want to talk a little bit more about wisdom. We’re going to have to go to a quieter place. A place where God can teach us how we can learn to be wise.

Welcome to a place called Lani Ku Hanua [?], what it means in Hawaiian is - where heaven touches the earth. Fitting in a quieter place as we talk about how God can make us wise. We want to talk a little bit about not just wisdom, but how you can tap into the source of wisdom. You won’t have what it takes when you begin. Nope, you won’t have what it takes. You might have the energy, you might have the passion and the desire, the opportunity, but you won’t have what it takes to finish when you start. You say, “What?” You won’t have the wisdom necessary to be everything that you want to be. The husband that you want to be, the wife that you want to be, the business person that you want to be. You won’t have what it takes when you begin. You’ve got to garner that along the way, you’ve got to harvest it along the way. As you gather bits and pieces of wisdom, you begin to accumulate the wisdom that you are going to need to be the person that you want to be, but you won’t have it at the beginning. It is almost designed that way, you’ve got to harvest it along the way. You say, “Where can we get this wisdom?” There are two places you can gain wisdom from. The first – from personal experience. That’s right, consequences. Yep, you run into the wall full-blast, bang! You break your nose, oh! You say, “Wall hard, nose soft, wall win, nose lose.” What did you learn? “Oh, don’t run into things that don’t move!” So, from one broken nose, you get a little bit of wisdom, so now you are wiser. You don’t run into stuff that doesn’t move. But in order to gain the amount of wisdom you need to be the person you want to be, you don’t have enough bones in your body to break so that you can gain a piece of wisdom enough to accumulate what you are going to need. So let me give you the second way, a better way, to gain wisdom, not from personal experience but from other people’s personal experiences. You let someone else run into the wall. Bang! They break their nose, “Wall hard, nose soft, wall win, nose lose.” Well what did you learn? “Don’t run into things that don’t move!” I say, “Thank you,” and I take that bit of wisdom and I deposit it to my account, so that I have now a little bit of wisdom beyond my experience. You just don’t have the experiences, the bones to break and the time to accumulate what you will need personally. So, you’ve got to accumulate wisdom from other people’s experiences, then you will be able to harness, garner, wisdom beyond your experience.

When I first began in ministry, I had about four good messages in me and I uncorked all the bottles of wisdom I had and I was depleted after about a month, I didn’t have anything else left to share. But I had heard about a man named Titus Coan who was a missionary in Hawaii back in 1837. He had written a book and in it was like a journal of all the mistakes he had made and what he had learned from them. I thought, uh, I need that book. But when I went to the library, it was copyrighted in 1882 so it was sorely out of print, but the lady said, “We have one in the archives.” The archives is like Fort Knox, you have to leave your credit card, your driver’s license, your first born child, in order to get in, and when I got in there, she got the book and she said, “Don’t you dare copy it on the Xerox because it will break the back of the book, and be very careful turning the pages,” and it was yellow and old. So I said, “How do I copy this thing?” She gave me some yellow pads of paper and a pen and said, “Do it by hand.” So I started reading this book and I was so amazed at the amount of wisdom that I could garner from this, and I began to copy page after page after page, and over a period of six months, I filled six yellow pads of paper, over and over again. I would review them, and the wisdom of this man’s life back in the 1800s began to be deposited to my account. After about six months, I realized that this one book probably saved me 25 years of mistakes. I would have easily paid $1,000 for that book. I went to the librarian about six or seven months later and I was moving to Honolulu to begin another branch of our church and I said, “I’m moving and I want to say thank you for allowing me to go into the archives.” To that, she said, “You know, we heard that you were moving and I talked to our board and we happen to have another book, the same, so we want to gift you this book, this ancient book.” I said, “You’re kidding!” Tears came to my eyes and I started to cry and the only thing I could say was, “Why didn’t you give me this sooner?” Really, I would have paid $1,000 for this book. If I had four or five of these, they could save me a lifetime of mistakes. I would have paid $5,000 or $10,000 for it in a heartbeat.

God knew that we would need wisdom beyond our personal experiences, so He gave us not one book, not two, but He gave us 66 books. It’s called the Biblios, or a library of books. This thing is filled with raw, unedited accounts of men and women who have gone before us, and every mistake you’ll ever make will be already have been made in this Bible. And if we will sit at these people’s feet, divine mentors I call them, because they have been assigned to tutor us, we would have the wisdom of the ages. Some of my best friends are in the Bible. How often I’ve walked with Solomon and talked to him about wisdom. I’ve walked the back sides of the desert with David. I’ve talked with Moses about leadership, how to handle grumbling people. I even talked with Sampson and asked him how he could be so dumb with women! But all of these still speak. That’s what Hebrews says: Abel, though dead, he still speaks. In Romans 15:4, it says: These things that were written in earlier times are written for us so that through encouragement, perseverance, we can have hope. I Corinthians 10:11 says: These things are written as examples for us upon whom the ends of the ages have come. Did you know that God will give us the wisdom of the ages? They are all waiting here for our audience. That’s why Psalm 119 says: I am wiser than my enemies because I have followed your statutes. I have more insight than my teachers because I followed your precepts. I have the wisdom of the ages because I followed your testimonies. It is here, all waiting for our audience. By the way, your best friends are in the Bible too. Jeremiah saved my ministry. Joseph saved my life. And if you will understand what God has placed in here for you and me, you will begin to understand the source of wisdom. If you take a look at great athletes or great musicians, they will do certain things, very few, over and over again. For example, if it is an athlete, they will do certain core exercises every single day, a certain regimen that keeps them in shape for whatever contest they are going to enter. Also, if you take a look at great musicians, like a concert pianist, they will do certain things again and again and again, just a few, what is that for a musician? Scales. Do re mi fa so la it do, again and again, a major scale, a minor scale, other scales, not because they are going to play a scale in concert, no, but it builds dexterity, it builds muscle memory and speed so that when a Chopin or a Beethoven score is put in front of them, they will be able to navigate through the notes more fluidly. Otherwise, if they hadn’t done scales, they’d look at a score and say, “Man, there’s a lot of black dots on that piece of paper!” But if they’ve done scales, they can figure out the composition, they can play it.

I want to talk to you about the scales of a Christian. It doesn’t matter if this musician is going to play blues, jazz, classical, they all do scales, and so is true with every Christian. There is a scales of a Christian. Every single one of us must choose to do that. Luke 10:38-42, Mary is seated at the Lord’s feet listening to His words. Now Martha is scurrying around doing a host of things. Jesus enters the room and Martha says, ‘You tell my lazy sister to come here and help me in the kitchen.’ Jesus smiles and says, ‘Hey Martha, you are bothered, worried, distracted about so many things, but there’s really just one thing that is necessary, and Mary has chosen, she has what? She has chosen the good part which will never be taken away from her.’ There is going to be a lot of stuff you are going to do in life, lots of things, but the Lord is going to say, ‘In order to be successful, there is just one thing you need to do – scales.’

I want to talk to you about the scales of a Christian. It’s one of the most important things you must do, but you’ve got to choose it, just like Mary. You say, ‘Well when do you start this?’ Well, remember, wisdom’s source will come when you still your heart and you begin to draw from it daily. Wisdom isn’t built in a day, but it will be built daily. So you’ve got to choose a time daily to sit down and do, as it were, your scales. When is the best time to sit in front of the Word and begin to do daily devotions? That’s the scales of a believer. When’s the best time? The best time to do your devotions is when you are at your best. That’s right. If you are a morning person, that’s when you do it. If you are an evening person, that’s when you do it. But you have to choose a time to be in His presence and sit at his feet. Now, some years ago, I took a jazz class, it was at a community college, it was one hour a week. We all brought our guitars and played some scales and did a few things, and I learned some, but it wasn’t much because it was an hour a week. What if, what if the instructor was a great legendary guitar player? Let’s say he came to me one day and he said, ‘Hey Wayne, I see promise in you, I see so much promise that I’ll meet with you an hour a day and we’ll play jazz together and I’ll teach you jazz.’ An hour a day or one hour a week, from a legendary jazz guitarist, I’d take that anytime! I’d say, ‘You just tell me the time, 2:00 a.m. in the morning, I’ll be there!’ If I spent an hour a day with a legendary jazz guitarists, you know, it wouldn’t be more than a year before someone would hear me in concert and they’d stop me and say, ‘Where did you learn to play jazz like that?’ I’d say, ‘Well, I went to a community college and I took a class an hour a week.’ And they’d say, ‘You might have but you didn’t get this from there, no, I hear the way that you play. It’s like a legendary jazz guitarist, no, you didn’t get that from a class one hour a week, you’ve been with a master haven’t you? You’ve been with the master, I can tell the difference.’

See the same is true. We can go to church one hour a week and that’s good, but the scales of the believer have to be an hour a day seated at his feet and you’ve got to choose that. It won’t be more than a year that would go by until someone would go by and say, ‘Where did you get that insight? Where did you get that wisdom?’ You say, ‘Oh, I go to church an hour a week.’ They say, ‘You might, but you’ve been sitting with the Master haven’t you? For flesh and blood did not reveal that to you but my Father which is in heaven, the Source of wisdom.’ And how many of us know that the Holy Spirit knows what you are going to face next week, isn’t that right? We all know that the Holy Spirit knows what is going to happen in our lives next month. Now, we don’t know but He does. And as you’re reading and God is speaking to you through His Word and you are being tutored by the Divine Mentors, they are depositing wisdom to your account. And there will be times when a Scripture is going to be highlighted from the Bible, grab that, because in it will contain the wisdom that you are going to need next week, because the Holy Spirit knows what you will need next week. You don’t, but you are going to come across something and you will think, hmm, that’s good, but what you don’t know is – that’s what you are going to need next week. Before God can make us wise, we’ve got to break a famine. That’s right, it’s what Amos 8:11 says: There will come a day when there will be a famine, but the famine won’t be of bread or of water, it will be of hearing the Words of the Lord. And there is a famine even among Christians. A famine of hearing God’s Word. We will take fodder from other areas, books, tapes, but we are not feeding on the Word of God. There is a famine and it’s time to break that.

Just for a moment, if God could turn our eyeballs inside out, I think that would do us well. Not physically, but what if we could see with our eyes, just for a moment, not as people physically are, but really as they spiritually are, so you would see in their physical visage their spiritual condition. Now, what if you ate just once a week, and snacked on tidbits the rest of the week? And you did that for 10 years, what do you think you’d like? Pretty emaciated huh? Pretty skinny, pretty bad. Several years ago, a staff person came to me in my office and said, “I’m leaving the church.” I said, “Why?” He said, “I’m not getting fed here.” Heard that before? I said, “You’re not?” Then I said, “How old are you?” The staff person said, “28.” I said, “Oh, that’s the age of my son.” I said, “When my son was a young baby, I would pour food in one end and it would come out the other, and I’d clean it up, and put food in one end again and it would come out the other, but the result was, he started to grow. And after a while, as a part of growing up, he started to feed himself. Now what if around 28 years old, he came to me and he was gaunt and emaciated and pretty skinny and I looked at him and said, “Aaron, what’s going on?” And he said, “I’m leaving this family.” “Why?” “Because nobody is feeding me.” You know what I would say to him? I’d say, “Feed yourself!” You see, it’s a part of growing up, and one of the things we need to do is to learn to feed ourselves. That’s our responsibility, and as you do scales and as you sit before His feet on a daily basis, you begin to feed yourself with wisdom.

Now, there are going to be four tools that you need as you gather. You choose a time of day, set it aside, and Jesus had a habit of being with the Father, the Bible says: As was His custom. So there needs to be a custom of every single believer doing scales because that’s where the wisdom of the ages will be poured in, not in a day but daily. You are going to need four tools, like picks to mine out wisdom. Let me give them to you. As you gather to a certain place, here is the first thing.

Number one. You want to bring a Bible. That’s right, a Bible. The B-I-B-L-E, yes that’s the book for me. I stand alone on the Word of God, the B-I-B-L-E. People bring My Daily Bread or My Utmost For His Highest or all kinds of great things, but there is only one Book that God promises to inspire. That word ‘inspire’ means God-breathed. In other words, the same wisdom that He gave David, when you read the Psalms, He will breath that into you. Bring the Bible. And the same wisdom that He gave to Solomon, when you read Ecclesiastes or Proverbs, He gives you the same wisdom He gave to Solomon, that’s pretty cool. But you have to take the Bible. Now, when you read the Bible, it’s not just to take a look at what you are going to say to others, or if you are an elder or a pastor, what you are going to use to preach, no. You don’t use the Bible in order to find something to give to somebody else first, you read the Bible so that you can eat; it is for you. Some years ago, a friend of mine was living a lifestyle that was pretty inconsistent with the Bible, and he was actually a preacher, and after a while, he had to leave the ministry because of his incongruent lifestyle and I called him and I said, “How can you be preaching from the Bible but living so inconsistently from the Bible?” And he said, “Wayne this is what I was doing, I was taking the Bible and giving it out to people. But what I should have been doing was this” [hand motions?]. See this, is just called the art of preaching, this is called the making of a disciple. Big difference. Bring the Bible, it is the only book in the universe that God promises to inspire.

The second thing is, not only bring the Bible, but bring a pen. That’s right, a pen. Because you want to underline those phrases and Scriptures in the Bible that, as you are reading, something will get highlighted. The Holy Spirit will highlight something. Remember, in it contains the wisdom you are going to need for next week. You don’t know it but He does. Underline it, because you intend to do something with that.

The third thing you bring with you is a reading program. Read with a reading program, something that will take you through the Bible systematically. Because if you don’t, you are going to be hopping around in what I call roulette reading, where you just kinda spin the wheel and find some tidbit that you’re gonna read. No, get a reading program. We have one year called Reading through the Bible in a Year, and it takes you through the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice. It is like a GPS, it takes you through the whole Bible. You know who the loneliest people in the Bible are? The minor prophets. That’s right. They are hidden in the back allies, you know, Zechariah, and Zephaniah, and Obadiah, like they are saying, ‘These Christians never come to our house! Just because we live down the alley doesn’t mean we aren’t people that you should visit. We put out food, you don’t come to our house.’ The loneliest people in the Bible are the minor prophets. But when you read with a reading program, it will take you all the way down through those back alleys and you will find that there are major messages in the minor prophets. Read with a reading program.

Number four. Bring a journal. A journal. Everyone should have a journal. Where, when you take one of those Scriptures and you find that it’s for you, then you start to journal it. There’s a little acrostic that I use called soap, s-o-a-p. S stands for Scripture. When you get that Scripture that is pregnant with that gem, you write the Scripture down. After the Scripture, O stands for observation. Just make an observation. For example, Matthew 10:27: What I tell you in the dark, speak in the light, and what you hear whispered in your ear, proclaim from the housetops. Write that Scripture down. O observation. The question is not is God speaking, the question is am I listening, for indeed God is listening but I’ve got to still my heart in order to gain wisdom because He is going to whisper in my ear and speak in the darkness. Be still so that you’ll hear the wisdom that God has. Then A stands for application. Make an application. Today, I’m going to still my heart so that I can harvest some wisdom, some wisdom from the Bible, from those that God has allowed to go before me. Then P is for prayer. Write out a prayer. Lord Jesus, help me to have ears that hear so that I might have eyes that see. Speak Lord, your servant is listening. Then there is a place in the your journal for a table of contents. I put a title to it, Marching Orders, for example. And at the beginning of the journal, there is a table of contents, I write the date, Matthew 10:27, the title and the page. After about four or five months, I’ll begin to incrementally increase the table of contents and if I want to know what God has been speaking to me over the last three or four months, all I have to do is turn to one page, the table of contents, scan it, and I can find exactly what God has been saying to me. I flip open to that page and everything that He said returns, and I begin to receive the wisdom of the ages.

Four tools to mine for wisdom. First was, the Bible, then bring a pen, and read with a reading program, and record it in a journal, and you’ll begin to tap into a daily source of the wisdom of the ages, the very thing that you’re going to need next week and next month, and when you speak, people will stop and say, ‘Where did you get that wisdom?’ and you’ll say, ‘From the source of wisdom, the B-I-B-L-E.’

Solomon had one prayer and his prayer was – God make us wise. And he and many others left for us the source of wisdom that all of us can tap into.

Some years ago, I went across the ocean to China. There, we met with many underground pastors. They all filled the room, un-air-conditioned, hardwood floors, three days. And when you teach in China, you start at 8:00 in the morning and go to 6:00 at night. There were about 20 of them in there and I asked how many people they oversee, they all oversaw networks of underground churches. They counted it up and they said, “We oversee 22 million.” I said, “Million!” We forget that there are over 1.3 billion people in China. They had taken a train 13 hours to get where we were, met in a cramped room for three days, I asked what happens if we get caught. They said, “You’d get deported and we’d go to jail for three years.” I said, “How many of you have been in jail for your faith?” 18 of them raised their hands. I was amazed. I had 15 Bibles with me and we passed them out and I said, “Could you turn to II Peter Chapter One and we’re going to read the first chapter.” And when I said that, one of the ladies handed her Bible to the next person and I wondered why. Well, then I understood why because when we began to read, she began to recite from memory the whole chapter. And when it was done, I took her aside during one of the breaks and I said, “You memorized the whole chapter,” and she said, “Yes and many more.” I said, “Where did you find the time to memorize so much?” She said, “In prison, you have lots of time in prison.” So I said, “Don’t they confiscate the Bible when they find it?” She said, “Yes,” so I said, “How do you memorize it?” She said, “Friends will bring to me pieces of paper upon which Scripture will be written.” I said, “Don’t they confiscate that?” She said, “Yes, that’s why I memorize it as fast as I can, because although they can take the paper away, they can never take away what has been hidden in my heart.” I thought that was fantastic.

We fall in love with these people after three days and their vibrant worship and their dedication to God and their willingness to go to prison. When it was done, I asked how could I pray for them, what one prayer could I pray for? They looked at me and said, “In your country you can gather at any time you want to and study the Bible and have prayer. Would you pray that we become like you?” I said, “I can’t pray that way.” With big incredulous eyes, they said, “Why?” I said, “Well, you know, in your country, you’ll ride a train for 13 hours to gather. In my country, if you have to drive more than a half hour, they don’t come. In your country, you’ll sit for three days on wooden floors, in our country if you have to sit for more than an hour, people don’t come. In your country, you sit not only on wooden floors for three days, but without air-conditioning. In my country, if there is no air-conditioning, forget it! And in your country, you memorize the Bible from scraps of paper, in mine, we have an average of two Bibles per family and we don’t read any of them. So, no I won’t pray that you become like us, but I’ll promise you that we, one day, will become like you.”

May it be so so God can make us wise.

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