“PRAY: Ask for wisdom and discernment about the candidates and the issues.” So reads item #1 in advertisements for Franklin Graham’s “Decision America Tour.” He’s giving advice to Christians who are faced with an almost impossible choice: To abandon their conservative values or to embrace a candidate who is the living antithesis of Christianity in both word and deed.
I understand this advice. I was religious for a very long time and I said and believed this very same thing myself. It was a staple request in our prayers—at least the public ones. It shaped how we tackled difficult decisions. These two requests, for wisdom and discernment, and the mindset that inspires them is, for many, at the very heart of their walk of faith.
Believers who pray for wisdom and discernment are, first and foremost, trying to align themselves with the will of God. Who can fault them for this? If there is an all-knowing god who can communicate with us and who takes an interest in our lives, then asking it to weigh in on our difficult and perplexing issues makes perfect sense. It springs organically from any such theology, but for Christians it is also supported by an abundance of scriptures. “The Lord gives wisdom.” “The fear of the Lord is wisdom,” the Bible says. The New Testament speaks of gifts of wisdom, knowledge, and discernment flowing from the spirit of God. To the believing mind, asking God for wisdom makes sense, but is it a practical strategy for living one’s life?
Like so many other religious ideas, this sounds good when measured by scriptural or theological standards, yet falls short when put into practice in the real world. The flat earth, the geocentric universe, the “sin and judgement” theory of disease, the morality of slavery: many things which make sense within a religious worldview can’t find verification in reality. Thoughtful believers freely reject these ideas because it is more practical (and ethical) to live according to the rules of reality than it is to occupy a fiction.
Receiving wisdom and discernment from God is another one of those fictions that do not work in the real world. Yet, many otherwise competent believers continue to petition God for wisdom. Why? Susan B. Anthony once said, “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” Praying for wisdom gives people permission to go ahead and do whatever they wanted to do anyway. If you pray for wisdom and discernment, then whatever you do automatically gets the “God” seal of approval. After all, if you pray for wisdom and discernment, then either you’ll automatically know the right thing to do or God didn’t answer your prayer—and what are the chances of that?
Well, as it turns out, pretty much the same as chance. There have been a number of studies showing that prayer doesn’t actually work. Further, listen carefully to the prayers offered up in public by even the most devout and you’ll hear indications that they don’t think it does either. No one wants to get caught praying for something that doesn’t happen. Usually when healing is requested or an intractable problem arises, the first section of the prayer may ask directly for direct intervention for that thing. The next section though, always grants God a “Get out of Jail Free” card. It comes in a request for wisdom and discernment. “Lord, please grant the doctors wisdom and discernment to work your healing on [insert name here].” “Lord, we don’t know why this is happening, but grant [insert name here] the wisdom and discernment to receive your guidance.” Standard, boilerplate clauses in any public prayer.
Why shouldn’t we expect wisdom and discernment to come from God in response to our prayers? Well, let’s think about what those things actually are. I’ll start with discernment, which is the ability to see that which is obscure. If we were talking about purely theological truth, okay, maybe we’d expect that to come from God. But it doesn’t.
If God directly granted people the understanding of hidden things, then there wouldn’t be the diversity of opinion we see. Instead of consensus, or even general agreement, we see that nearly every aspect of religious belief is questioned and rejected by somebody. Now, it may be true that some people are simply not willing to accept what God has declared. But if the problem were limited to them, then the variant beliefs should be statistical outliers, and not spread throughout the spectrum of believers.
This is even more pronounced when you move from theology into the real world. Every believer has his or her own ideas about how things should work and are almost universally convinced that they have arrived at those conclusions through the guidance of God. Yet there is an objective standard to which those ideas can be tested: whether or not they work in the real world. Once again, we don’t see any evidence that all of these various opinions are inspired by one single, all-knowing entity. Rather, they always reflect the experience and cultural norms of the idea holder.
This is exactly what you should expect if discernment were a wholly mundane process without any supernatural component. To see what is obscured in the real world takes careful observation, not just of the immediate issue, but also of related and unrelated items, often over a long period of time. In other words, you need a deep pool of information from which to draw connections. Creative thinking then reveals those connections. The whole process can certainly feel magical or inspired. So much of the connected information remains hidden to us, though we experienced it directly at one time or another. The creative process itself also seems like a mystical thing because most of it occurs in our subconscious, away from our conscious thoughts. Finally, some people are just better equipped to do this kind of work, which makes it seem all the more magical to the rest of us. Still, that’s all there is to it. Whenever I see anything that I could call discernment, these are the only necessary components.
Wisdom is the same. Believers assume that for things to go well, they must be done in accordance to God’s plan. Again, this makes sense given the starting point to their thinking. Obviously, then, if you start with God’s plan, you’re already halfway there in finding a workable solution. This explains the Bible’s assertion that focusing on God is the beginning of wisdom. That—and that it was written to keep people coming back to religion when things get tough.
Once again, we dare not look too deeply into it if we want to maintain our faith. Look at what the Bible advises. Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, for example, is widely lauded as an inspired source of wisdom, yet if you literally gave your shirt to anyone who asked, how soon would you be shirtless with a line of takers at your door? How would a society work where no one will resist an evil person? “Do not worry about tomorrow,” Jesus says. Don’t save for the future. Don’t buy insurance. Don’t concern yourself with food or clothes. Why even go in to work? I guarantee, anyone who heeds this advice does so only by the indulgence of those who do not. These, of course, are not the only examples. While the Bible does contain some good advice, it also contains much that is useless and even harmful.
In the real world, one who has wisdom is able to make consistently better decisions than one who does not. As we have seen, God’s advice doesn’t always lead to good outcomes. Some might argue that they do follow God’s advice and they have had great success. That may be true, but their success is actually the result of carefully choosing which of God’s pronouncements to follow and which to ignore. They are not obtaining wisdom from God. Rather, they are filtering God according to wisdom.
Wisdom is the ability to take effective actions and make good decisions. We obtain it through experience, knowledge and sound judgement. Additionally, as the old saying goes, sound judgement is acquired through the use of poor judgement. This means that mistakes are also a critical component. This is what wisdom is, but what is it good for? The real value of wisdom is its reliability. Anyone can have a failure and anyone can have a success. An action is not wise just because it was successful. True wisdom increases the odds in its favor.
So those with greater knowledge and deeper experience will be able to exercise sound judgement, resulting in better decisions and more effective actions. It should be clear, then, that given the same experience and the same knowledge, Christians and non-Christians should be able to make equally good decisions and take equally effective actions. No matter what endeavor, no matter what issue, this is the heart of wisdom.
Why pray for wisdom and discernment? There’s nothing supernatural required.
Disclaimer: This post should not be considered a claim that I am wise.