The wisdom of the sensible is
to understand his way,
but the foolishness of fools is deceit. 

Proverbs 14:8

The contrast in this verse is between the wise person who is sensible enough to understand his way through life and the foolish person who believes their own lies which leads to more deceit to others and themselves which eventually leads to the foolish person not being able to discern between reality and fantasy. There is a wealth of that going around in our world today, for sure!

But, for this month, let’s consider some useful methods of staying honest with ourselves and building productive days and a viable future.

Here are just two ideas to help you…

1. Learn how God sees you! This is critical! The only opinion that really matters about you, is God’s opinion about you. And it is easy to get this lopsided. Very often we might swing to the side of ‘God loves you just the way you are’ and that sounds wonderful. It is wonderful! But, God never leaves us the way He found us! Never! We are new creatures in Christ and we should act like new creatures in Christ. So, what is that way? Well, read your Bible. Read valuable books by trusted Christian authors. Attend church and small group of Bible studies. Pray and ask God to show you just how you, as a ‘new creation’, looks in His eyes. He will show! He is not some mean God that tells you something and then doesn’t help you understand it. You wants you to have that wisdom about yourself!

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old things passed away; behold new things have come.

2 Corinthians 5:17

• Be careful about comparisons! Not all comparisons are bad. If handled with wisdom and discretion, comparisons may be helpful to you. For a practical example, if you need to work on organizational skills in your workplace; it will probably help you to observe others at your office or industry to see how they get things done. Or you can dive into the Internet madness and search for ideas, but be careful! There are a lot of fakes on the Internet. They sound great, but they have no real lifetime experience or true wisdom. You will get WAY more than you can fathom or digest, but try to find a handful that resonate with you and seem helpful. Now you need to compare your skill sets and personality, etc…with all you’ve learned and then keep the ones that ‘fit you’ and toss the ones that do not. Don’t compare to the point that you are trying to fit your round peg into someone else’s square hole. That never works and is very frustrating and even harmful.

But encourage one another day after day,
as long as it is still called “Today”, so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

Hebrew 13:3