Wisdom Isn't Lazy

Wisdom isn't lazy. I keep returning to that sentence because I have been on the receiving end of the other kind. Advice handed down by people who never had to live inside it. A man teaching on marriage after his own house had gone quiet. Someone urging me to forgive while everyone around her knew what she had been carrying for years. I nodded and took notes and tried it, and it all came apart the first time real water got in my mouth.

Somewhere along the way I made myself a rule. Nobody teaches me to swim unless they are willing to get wet with me. I thought that was just my own hard earned stubbornness, and then I noticed it is the shape of the gospel, and that the early church built its whole theology around it.

John says the Word became flesh and pitched a tent among us. God moved into the neighborhood. Athanasius, who spent years in and out of exile for defending the deity of Christ, wrote that the Son of God became man so that we might be made divine. He did not mean we become the Creator. He meant grace lifts us into a real share in God's own life. Irenaeus had said something close in the second century, that the Word became what we are so He could bring us to what He is. Gregory of Nazianzus pressed the logic until it hurt, with a sentence I cannot shake: what has not been assumed has not been healed. Jesus knew hunger from the inside before He fed anyone. He wept at a tomb before He ever spoke to one.

Paul calls Christ the wisdom of God. If wisdom has a face, it belongs to a carpenter with calloused hands who walked everywhere He went.

Then there is the word that makes some believers shift in their seats. Theosis. Peter promised that we would become partakers of the divine nature, and Paul describes believers being changed from glory to glory as they behold Him. It sounds exotic, but the fathers meant something earthy by it, a long and costly walk. Gregory of Nyssa pictured Moses going deeper into the darkness on Sinai and concluded that life with God has no ceiling, since God is always more than the last step you took. He read Paul's straining toward what lies ahead as the permanent posture of a Christian. Nobody strains forward from a lawn chair.

Tradition tells us Maximus the Confessor had his tongue cut out and his right hand removed for refusing to stop confessing what he believed. He taught that God joined Himself to humanity so fully that humanity could be joined to God, and the stories say he held to that when it cost him the very tools of a writer. I have read plenty of theology from people with nothing at stake. I read Maximus differently, and I suspect you would too.

The desert fathers kept a quiet test. A seeker would walk for days to find an elder and ask for a word. Sometimes he got a single sentence. Sometimes he was told to go sit in his cell and let it teach him. What they cared about was how a person lived when nobody was watching, and whether the people living nearby were healthier for it. Gregory of Nazianzus, writing about the pastor's calling, insisted that anyone who would guide others had to be cleansed first. He had run from ordination himself at first, which tells you how seriously he took it.

Jesus was blunter. He told the teachers of His day that they tied up heavy loads and laid them on people's shoulders and would not lift a finger to move them. Then He knelt with a towel and washed feet caked with road dust, and afterward told His friends He had given them an example. When He said to take His yoke, He was inviting them into His company. Hebrews says He sympathizes with our weakness, and that word carries a good deal of the argument.

So how do you decide whose voice to trust? Ask whether they have been in the water and whether they are in it now. Ask whether the people closest to them are flourishing. Jesus said you would know them by their fruit, and fruit is slower than volume and far harder to fake. I do not mean perfection. Swimmers swallow water. The fathers wept over their failures and fasted and repented and got back up, and the voices worth hearing are the ones still in the current beside you, honest about how strong it runs.

I include myself in this, and it is uncomfortable. There is counsel I hand out that I have not taken, and truth I press on other people that I have not let touch my own life. Theosis leaves no room for dry spectators, and that includes the ones holding the microphone.

The Word who became flesh never waited on the bank. He has been in the water since Bethlehem and the Jordan, and He went all the way into death, so there is no depth you can reach that He has not already touched. Whatever is pulling at you right now, He has entered it, and what He enters He heals.

I do not have a tidy way to end this. I only have a question. Who is in the water with you right now? If the answer is nobody, start there.

You can give here: Awaken Ministries Donation Page