Being Wise

Today's program contains portions from the following episodes:

"Where to Find Wisdom"

"Building Up, Not Tearing Down"

"Protect Your Relationships"

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Dannah Gresh: What made you say those words you regret? Was it:

• A heated argument with your spouse? 
• Your three-year-old's temper tantrum in the grocery store?
• Maybe your frustration with a coworker?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth says there could have been another way.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: I wonder how much of our craziness in those moments might be diminished or averted if we would just stop and say, “Lord, I really need You right now!

Dannah: Now, that’s a sign of a wise woman. Today I want to talk with you about wisdom, the kind that God gives. 

Welcome to Revive Our Hearts Weekend, I’m Dannah Gresh. 

Now, you may know how to swing a hammer. Maybe you’ve helped build a deck in your backyard or know how to hang a picture without making a hole in the wall—like a really big one. But could you build an entire house? Hmm! I can tell you for sure that if I were in charge of a construction project, it would not go well.

But Scripture tells us that in one way as women are in charge of building our homes. 

Listen to Proverbs 14:1:

The wisest of women builds her house; but folly with her own hands tears it down.

That’s some hard-hitting wisdom right there. Let’s listen and learn how we can become wise women who build our houses well. Here’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. 

Nancy: I don’t know about you, but I want to be wise. My goal in life since I was a little girl—some of you have heard me say this before—has always been: I want to be a wise, godly, old lady. I have found, as I’ve said before, that the old part comes more easily than the wise and godly part. But I have this vision in my mind of this wise, old lady, this godly, old lady and what she looks like.

Set out to become wise, and remember that becoming wise is a life-long pilgrimage and process. We won’t be as wise as we should be until we see the Lord, but incline your heart toward God. Incline your ear toward His wisdom. Develop a heart attitude, a lifestyle that is always listening to God, kind of just on the edge of your seat, on tip-toe.

What’s God saying? What’s God doing around me and in me and through me and through His Word? What is He saying to me? Make it your life goal to be a wise woman. Think how different this world would be if women were wise instead of foolish, and if you don’t know the difference between what that looks like, go back to the book of Proverbs and see the description of foolish women and the description of wise women.

We need wise moms. We need wise grandmoms. We need wise wives. We need wise women who are in the market place. We need wise women in our churches. Set your heart to become a wise woman.

And then number two, and you may think this isn’t that profound, but it is really crucial, ask God for wisdom. Ask God for wisdom. Pray for it. Even as I’ve been working on this series, I have found myself more often just saying, “Lord, please give me wisdom.”

It’s interesting that I’ve been doing this study at the same time that our ministry has been facing a major decision about one of our outreaches, and it’s a real tough decision. We haven’t made it yet. I still don’t know what the answer is. There are pros and cons galore on every side. I don’t know what God wants us to do, and I have been put in a place where I have to say, “Lord, please give us wisdom.”

I think God loves us to be in a place where we don’t know what to do, where we can’t handle it. It may be with that one child you have for whom no textbook was ever written, and you’re saying, “Lord, please, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to parent this child. I don’t know how to handle this person in my workplace. I don’t know how to handle this person in my church. I don’t know how to deal with these issues that my husband is struggling with. Lord, please give me wisdom.”

Ask God for wisdom. The Scripture talks about calling out for wisdom, raising your voice. We call out to God for wisdom for two reasons, first of all because God is wise. God has all wisdom. He created the earth by wisdom, Proverbs 3:19 tells us. “The Lord of hosts is wonderful in counsel and excellent in wisdom,” Isaiah 28:29 says.

Romans 11, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” God knows everything, so when we ask Him for wisdom, we’re acknowledging that we don’t know everything. That takes humility.

If you remember earlier in this series, we said humility is the number one characteristic of a wise person, realizing he doesn’t know everything, that we are foolish left to ourselves. We need to humble ourselves and say, “Lord, I acknowledge my need. I need You. Please give me wisdom.” We are finite. Asking God is an expression of humility and dependence. We ask Him because He is wise and then because He has promised to give wisdom to those who ask.

The Lord gives wisdom, Proverbs 2, verse 6, says, “From his mouth come knowledge and understanding.” Remember reading about Daniel and how he was given wisdom from God to interpret the king’s dreams? All the wise men in the country, all the soothsayers and the astrologers, they couldn’t interpret the king’s dream. You know why? Because they didn’t have a connection to God.

God is the one who gives wisdom and understanding, and when Daniel interpreted the king’s dream, and everybody was singing Daniel’s praises, Daniel said, “Oh, wait a minute. It’s not me. That wisdom didn’t come from me. God gives wisdom.”

God gives wisdom, so that’s why we ask Him, and that’s what James 1:5 says, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given to him.” So ask God for wisdom. Then number three, and again, I want to say, these aren’t all that profound, but they are profound. They’re so simple that sometimes we miss them.

Make sure that youlook to the Scripture to find your wisdom. God has revealed His heart, His ways, His Word in the Scripture. We have the Word of God.

Let me especially point you to the book of Proverbs as a great source for wisdom. Proverbs is a book that shows how the principles of God’s Word can be practically applied to every aspect of everyday life.

When I was in my early twenties, a friend challenged me to memorize the book of Proverbs, and my eyes did what some of your eyes just did. They got real big, I think. I thought, “Oh wow! I don’t know that I can do that.” But you know what? I set out to memorize the book of Proverbs, and over the next several months, as I recall, I did, one verse at a time.

Now, it was a lot easier for me to memorize when I was in my twenties than it is now. I could not quote the book of Proverbs to you today at all, but I want to tell you, God used that season of time in my life of just meditating on God’s Word and hiding it in my heart and getting it into my system that to this day has produced huge blessing and benefit in my life.

Dannah: That's Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth reminding us where we find wisdom. It's really pretty simple: ask God for wisdom.

Have you done that today? You would if you thought your home and family might cave in without it, and that’s what Scripture teaches us.

Listen to Proverbs 14:1 again:

The wisest of women builds her house, but folly with her own hands tears it down.

Lord, give us wisdom! One sign that you are growing in wisdom is that you will also grow in your desire to build others up.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth sat down with Dr. Venessa Ellen to ask about being a wise woman. Dr Ellen teaches, counsels, trains, and mentors women at the College of Biblical Studies. Nancy asked Dr. Ellen for specific ways we women can wisely build up our home, our church, our relationships. 

Dr. Venessa Ellen: Well, one way I would think is that the Scripture also talks about taking every thought captive (see 2 Cor. 10:5). Sometimes we think on things too long. We create these belief systems in our mind that either: “She doesn’t like me,” or “They don’t like my clothing,” or there’s something.

We start to have these belief systems and, before you know it, we’re acting on them as if they are true.

Nancy: So this is a foolish way of living that actually ends up being destructive and tearing down our relationships.

Dr. Ellen: Yes, exactly.

Nancy: I must say, (I don’t want to over-generalize here, but) I think it’s hard for a lot of men to understand how women’s minds work. We’re always thinking about seventy-two things at once, and when you think about something negative, it snowballs.

We mull it over, and if it something that’s not true and it’s not rooted in truth . . . It can be just pondering or something that we heard or something somebody said to us two years ago, or twenty-two years ago! We’re stuck. Like the old records with the needle; it’s just gets stuck and makes an annoying noise!

If we’re thinking things that are not true, we really can get way off track! How does that affect not only us, but the people around us?

Dr. Ellen: It starts a snowball effect of disorder, chaos, every evil thing, basically. We were talking about wisdom and what is it? I would say it’s the opposite of that. I would say what we need to do is to start to take every thought captive. Begin to ask, “Is this really true? How do I know this? Where did I get this thought from?”

And that can apply to what I believe my husband is or is not doing, what my boss is or is not doing. We get caught in this mental space that we sometimes have a hard time working ourselves out of. Wisdom is, one: Getting into the Word and asking, “Is what I’m believing true? What I’m telling myself, is it truth?”

Nancy: These thoughts that are threatening to capsize me and threatening the people around me, are they true?

Dr. Ellen: “Are they true?” Many women will spiral down out of control into depression and other things based on a single thought that may not have even been true. 

Nancy: And then sometimes, the thought is true but it’s not something we need to let control us. “Let all things be done in love.” (see 1 Cor. 16:14). 

Dr. Ellen: Yes, and even if it is true, now ask the question: “What is God allowing in my life; what is He trying to teach me? What is He walking me through, in this moment?” Because sometimes it is true that your boss is not great, or he’s trying to convince you to do something immoral or illegal.

Nancy: No matter how great your husband is, there are things about him that are not fully sanctified yet. 

Dr. Ellen: That’s right, and your children, oh, my goodness! Children or grandchildren, there are things that they could be doing . . . But now, how am I going to handle it in a God-honoring way? How am I going to love them?

Nancy: How am I going to be building them up rather than tearing them down?

Dr. Ellen: Yes. So when we look at “a wise woman builds up her house,” she has to stop and ask, “How do I do the opposite of what my flesh would want me to right now?

Nancy: Because usually the right thing to do is the opposite of what my flesh is telling me, right? 

Dr. Ellen: It is. “How do I get into the opposite game? Which is really, “How do I love them? How do I seek their highest good? How do I agape them?” Sometimes we just want to be in the touchy-feely love stage, not really the sacrificial, agape love stage.

Nancy: Which is absolutely what it takes to get through the hard patches. 

Dr. Ellen: Yes! So wisdom, in order to build it up, I’ve got to seek truth, live truth, think truth, believe truth vs. tearing it down and acting in my unbelief systems!

Nancy: Or my wrong belief systems. Lack of faith, lack of truth, lack of love. So it’s really just continually counseling our hearts according to what is true, not what my emotions are running away with.

Don’t you find that our emotions, if they’re not girded up with truth, they can become a torrent, a hurricane, a storm that devastates the people around us?

Dr. Ellen: Oh, yes. We are quick sometimes to say, “Well, it’s just my emotions; I wasn’t thinking anything!” as if emotions are out there by themselves. No, they’re driven by the thoughts from the heart: “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matt. 12:45). So your emotions are rooted and grounded in what you’re thinking.

You think so, believe so, you act so. Before you know it, you’re out of control! It is a little harder sometimes for us, as women, because we do have estrogen. We do have hormonal imbalances—we have all these things—and we’d like to blame it on that. 

I’m in a menopausal season. I love to blame my craziness on, “I’m hot, I’m tired, and I’m bothered! All the above!”

Nancy: That’s not a good combination! So in those seasons—they’re very real!—how do we manage? How do we walk in the Spirit rather than letting our flesh just run over everything and everyone around us, pulling us down, and them, too?

Dr. Ellen: First, take responsibility. It’s not just this thing that’s happening outside of your control. I can’t say, “Well, you know I’m menopausal; that’s why I cussed him out.” We take responsibility, because the Bible calls us to self-control. It doesn’t say, “Unless you’re pregnant, unless you’re PMS-ing, unless you’re menopausal . . .”

So I would say first let’s take responsibility for our thoughts, our emotions, our responsibility, and then, sometimes you need to remove yourself. Sometimes, for me, I have to step away and have a conversation with God. I think that’s okay. Remove yourself until you get self-control!

Now, I’m not saying leave the home. Some people take it to the extreme. But take a moment to pray.

Nancy: Pause.

Dr. Ellen: Just press “pause,” talk to the Lord, allow Him to center you and then go back and try to do it in a more loving way.

Nancy: I wonder how much of our craziness in those moments might be diminished or averted if we would just stop and say, “Lord, I really need You right now! I cannot handle this child!” And there are some seasons of a woman’s life . . .

I think of some of my friends who are young moms who have a lot of little ones, and they are always tired. I mean “they,” the mothers. The kids have limitless energy, it seems! But that’s a season. And to say, “Lord, I can’t do this without You!” That’s humility, which is wisdom. 

Dr. Ellen: Right, it is wisdom, and it helps, too, to have support. If it’s your husband or a best friend or a neighbor, because sometimes you really do have to say, “Mom’s going to take a bubble bath. I just need fifteen minutes to gather my thoughts and come back, and we can talk about this ‘D’ that you made.”

Sometimes you just really need to separate yourself so that you don’t respond in unloving ways.

Dannah: I remember those days when my kids were younger. There were times when I just needed a minute. A second. A millisecond!

But did you grab that little nugget of wisdom from Dr. Ellen? “Just press 'pause,' talk to the Lord.”

Go ahead and put that in your toolbox for building others up.

Nancy and Dr. Ellen also discussed how accountability and having a mentor can help you grow in wisdom. 

Listen to their entire conversation by going to our website, ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend. Look for today’s episode, called "Being Wise," and we’ll have a link to Dr. Venessa Ellen chatting with Nancy about building up . . . not tearing down. 

Now, women aren’t the only ones who need wisdom. We all do! Nancy’s younger brother Mark wrote a book titled, The Little Red Book of Wisdom. It's one of my husband's favorite. In it, Mark shares: what time of day wisdom flourishes (I’m intrigued!), and what the wisest decision anyone can make is. One thing Mark does to gain wisdom is to seek out conversations with people who are a few years older.

Listen in on this brother/sister conversation between Mark and Nancy. 

Mark DeMoss: I ask a lot of questions. I want to know what it was like to lose a child or to be fired from a job or to be slandered in a newspaper article. Whatever I can learn from somebody who’s twenty or thirty years past me is valuable information. We don’t know it all; we can’t know it all.

That’s a great thing about life, actually, being placed here beside people who have been down this road. I have a special affinity for older people. I really do. We seek them out, April and I. We’ll talk, oftentimes, about, “Let’s go to dinner with so-and-so because their kids are already married, and now their kids are having kids. Let’s see what we can learn about how they handled their kids’ dating, going off to college, bringing a new family into the picture with an in-law, and so on.”

It’s a valuable resource that’s available. Again, this isn’t complex or out of reach. The wisdom of age is available to every person listening here. We all know older people.

Nancy: You know, learning from older people implies that you have a teachable spirit and that you’re willing to listen. I know you love the book of Proverbs. You read a chapter from the book of Proverbs every day. I’ve read through Proverbs many, many times over the years myself.

To me, one of the huge takeaways of the book of Proverbs is this: If I had to say what is the number one quality of a wise person in the book of Proverbs, it would be somebody who is a learner, somebody who has a teachable spirit, someone who listens to counsel.

Mark: I realize that in my entire life I’ve never learned one thing while I was talking. When I’m talking, I’m saying what I already know. I can only learn something while I’m listening or reading. My style and my demeanor is very low-key, and I speak slowly. April, I think, a lot of times wishes I would just spit it out and speed it up a little bit.

Speaking slowly for me is really not just a result of my style or my demeanor. I speak slowly because I choose my words. I hopefully avoid saying something that might be hurtful or that I might regret having said. It’s a great principle to listen before you speak. It’s a challenging thing for me in my line of work. I’m in the public relations business. We really get paid to speak quite often.

Nancy: To give counsel.

Mark: To give counsel, to give advice. Many people in our profession are very quick to give advice. But what I’ve learned—from years of being in meetings and settings where advice was being sought—is that oftentimes people are giving the advice so quickly, they haven’t even really heard the problem or the question or the dilemma.

So by listening and delaying my speech and delaying counsel and advice, I have the benefit of more information—more time to have thought through and processed what it is I want to say. We’re in an age where we have talking heads everywhere we turn. Television is full of talking-head programs. You have interview programs where the interviewer is talking instead of asking the guest questions.

That’s the society we live in. I’m a good listener, and I think people like a good listener. Sometimes it’s not easy, because we want to speak. We want to put our two cents in, and listening takes patience.

Nancy: I’m thinking of that verse in James that says, “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19). It’s interesting that when we’re not so quick to hear and we’re too quick to speak, we tend to be more prone to also get more angry, to get hot under the collar, or to spout off or mouth off.

Then there are all the regrets, and the words that come out that can’t be retrieved, and the damage that is done to children, in marriages, in relationships—the things we wish we could take back and can’t. So there’s a lot of wisdom in that matter of learning to be a listener, having a teachable spirit, and learning from people who have something to offer. As you said, every person can be our teacher.

Mark: This principle, Nancy, would prevent an awful lot of strife and arguments and stress in our homes. So many times, I could respond to something one way, which might even be what I’m thinking, and it could have a very explosive result. Or I could just hold my thoughts a minute and then speak something differently, and it can have a calming effect or a totally different result. Literally, in the span of thirty seconds, the result of speech could be remarkably different.

Dannah: I love that insight from Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth’s brother Mark DeMoss. Stop and listen, and listen some more. And when you speak, be mindful of what comes out. 

I’m not ready to take over as a foreman on a construction site. But I am ready too use the wisdom that comes from God’s Word, to build my house up. Do you feel a little more equipped as well?

One way you can build up your house is by joining me for Revive Our Hearts’ three-day event, True Woman '22. It's not too late to join us in Indy, but you can plan a watch party online. Invite your friends, your Bible Study group, your church friends, or just you and me and Nancy and Mary Kassian. You can do so by calling 1-800-569-5959, or go to ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend and click on today’s episode. 

Thanks for listening today. Thanks to our team for making it possible: Phil, CJ, Rebekah, Justin, Michelle, Katie, Erin, and Hugh Duncan, our creative and genius Audio Director, who keeps us all in line. For Revive Our Hearts Weekend, I’m Dannah Gresh

Revive Our Hearts is calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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