Make Me Wise

Give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name.

Psalm 86:11

It didn’t take long for me to know that there was a lot that I didn’t know. I couldn’t believe that the nurses let me take this baby home. I knew NOTHING about caring for a baby. I told God during a wee-hour feeding, I can’t mess this up, Lord. This is important….it is a life! Please make me wise. That middle-of-the-night heart cry was heard by my heavenly Father, and thus began a hard, beautiful, exhilarating, terrifying journey in rearing children! Wisdom has been my daily request.

Proverbs 9:10 and Psalm 111:10 say, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is continual awareness of God’s presence. It is giving God proper place in my life…yielding my will to his, living to please him and seeking to love what he loves and hate what he hates. But how is this the beginning of wisdom?

This yielding of self requires humility. It requires a laying aside of desires and plans, expectations and agendas. It admits an understanding of my own inability and insufficiency. This emptying makes room for God’s wisdom in my heart and mind. It cleans the slate of my own knowledge and writes His thoughts and ways on my heart.

Proverbs speaks often of the fear of the Lord:

It is the sum total of knowledge (Proverbs 1:7).

You’ll know it when you seek and cry out for wisdom (Proverbs 2:5).

It adds length to life (Proverbs 10:27).

Thru it, evil is avoided (Proverbs 16:6).

It is pure (Proverbs 19:9).

Its wages are riches, honor and life (Proverbs 22:4).

My children are teenagers now….and my daily cry for wisdom still rings in the wee morning hours, in the dead of night and in front of the kitchen sink. I am still learning the fear of the Lord. I want to be awe-struck every day at his beauty and majesty and presence. I yearn for the courage and the desire to yield myself to his ways.

Lord, teach me the fear of the Lord, that I may learn wisdom.

Jill Hardin