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What the World Needs Now, Part 1

Rev. Doug Pratt — October 18, 2009
 

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Introduction
Burt Bacharach was one of the great songwriters of his generation. During the 60’s and 70’s, he and his lyricist partner Hal David cranked out over 60 “Top 40” hit songs. They expressed the moods and whims and emotions of his time. Many of them are familiar to us. One of his most-loved songs was entitled What the World Needs Now, first recorded by pop singer Jackie DeShannon in 1965; it zoomed to the top of the charts.

I’m going to borrow Burt’s title for a pair of messages over the next couple of Sundays. We live in a world filled with problems, needs and seemingly-unsolvable dilemmas. We watch our TVs, listen to our radios, click on websites and blogs, and it seems as if everyone has an opinion about what the world needs. I want to offer you some insights that are not new but rather very, very old: thousands of years old, to be exact. I want us to go back to the Bible and see what it has to say to us about “what our world needs now.”

Our text for this morning is taken from the ancient Book of Proverbs. This is a curious book, one that is filled with little, tasty nuggets of thought. It’s not like a novel, with a unified plot line and characters; in fact, it has no plot or characters. It’s not even like a letter—the form we find most often in the New Testament—with a greeting, a body of logical thought and progression, and a conclusion. The best way to understand Proverbs is to see it as a salad bowl. The ingredients have all been mixed and tossed together. Topics are presented in a random and disconnected way. If you only care about the tomatoes, or the croutons, or the olives in your salad, picking them out one-by-one can be laborious work. But if you’re going to eat it a forkful at a time, those different flavors will mix together in your mouth.

What we’re going to do now is take a big, heaping forkful from the middle of the book, reading the first 13 verses of chapter 3. Don’t worry about dwelling on each individual idea and thought. Just enjoy this taste of salad with its combined flavors.

My son, do not forget my teaching, but keep my commands in your heart, ²for they will prolong your life many years and bring you prosperity.
  &nsp   ³Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. ⁴Then you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God and man.
      ⁵Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; ⁶in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.
      ⁷Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and shun evil. ⁸This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones.
      ⁹Honor the LORD with your wealth, with the firstfruits of all your crops; ¹⁰then your barns will be filled to overflowing, and your vats will brim over with new wine.
      ¹¹My son, do not despise the LORD’s discipline and do not resent his rebuke, ¹²because the LORD disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in.
      ¹³Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding.
Proverbs 3:1-13 (NIV)

Calling Someone “Stupid” Let me take you back a few months to the middle of July—the dog days of summer. It was a relatively slow news season. The President held a primetime press conference to talk about his hopes and plans for health care reform prior to the Congressional recess. At the very end of it, a reporter asked a question about a completely unrelated issue. Just a couple days earlier, a friend of President Obama’s—a Harvard professor named Gates—had been arrested during an incident in Cambridge, Mass. by a local police officer named Crowley. It was a story that had made some local news in New England but had largely been ignored elsewhere; and it had apparently been resolved, the flames dying to embers.

Then the President, with one off-handed and unscripted remark, tossed a can of gasoline on the fire and a media firestorm erupted. It became a terrible distraction to the White House for nearly two weeks, resulting in the silly “Beer Summit” in the Rose Garden. I believe that our new President may have learned a lesson through this minor short-term controversy (that is, to be careful about his words)—and, thankfully, this little controversy does finally seem to be behind us.

But I want to highlight one aspect of what occurred in July, in order to lead us into reflection on a much broader issue. The President carelessly commented that he thought Officer Crowley was “stupid” in his decision to detain Dr. Gates. It was that single word which most fueled the flames. It was perceived by some as an attack on the police officer’s intellectual capacities, and caused great offense. And actually it was ironic that the issue became a debate about “stupid.” A false racial stereotype had been wrongly used for years in America—claiming that people of African-American descent were intellectually inferior to other races. Both President Obama and Dr. Gates have demonstrated how false that stereotype is—and so it was ironic and jarring for them to aim the slur “stupid” at a white police officer. It felt to some like an intellectual “elitism”: an implicit claim that those who have attended Harvard are somehow better than those who haven’t. And that is a form of blind prejudice and discrimination that is every bit as dangerous as judging someone by their skin color.

It’s Not About Intelligence
More importantly, this incident can serve as a reminder to our society that we must be careful to not miss the point. It’s not really about intelligence. And it never has been. “Smart” people don’t always make the best choices or act in the best ways. Though our world at times has become infatuated with IQ and brainpower, there is no guarantee that being smarter or better educated results in a better life or a better world.

A lot of high-IQ, smart people on Wall Street nearly wrecked the global financial system with their overly-complicated and clever attempts to manipulate the markets for their own profit. With confusing financial mechanisms that no one could understand, like mortgage-backed securities (that mashed together reliable with risky loans) and credit default swaps (which acted like insurance policies but operated outside the accountability of the law and regulators), the disaster of a year ago was largely self-imposed.

A striking confessional was published just after the crash by a man who was partly responsible for it. Richard Bookstaber was a specialist in risk-arbitrage. A brilliant MIT-trained mathematician, he was revered on the Street for being one of the smartest “quants,” or quantitative analysts. He worked for leading hedge funds and designed some of the trading programs that went haywire and triggered a run on the markets. He titled his book A Demon of Our Own Design. If only we had seen on Wall Street a little less intelligence and a little more ethics, perhaps an economic disaster could have been prevented.

It hasn’t been only the financial world that has made the blunder of elevating intelligence above other virtues. With the tremendous strides in science, technology, exploration and invention, the knowledge available to our world has exploded. We have all benefited from it. But we need to be careful not to put all our faith in our human brainpower, for:

• Even the finest medical breakthroughs will not make our bodies immortal;
• The greatest institutions of higher education cannot make us good people, or teach us how to make a marriage work or be an effective parent;
• The smartest people in government can’t solve all of our nation’s problems;
• The smartest generals in Afghanistan cannot instantly fix that messed-up country;
• And the smartest snoops at the CIA can’t soften the hate in the hearts of radical Islamists.

Indeed, Osama bin Laden and his gang of murderers are examples of smart people who have mastered modern technology. The problem is not with their brains but with their hearts: they have given themselves over to an evil ideology, and their bright minds have become warped.

Intelligence vs. Wisdom
The message of the Bible has consistently been that mankind’s intellect is not the most important factor. More education won’t solve our deepest needs. Jesus did not come to the world to rescue it by being a great Scholar; He came to give His life on the cross and be our Savior. What the world needs today is not intelligence but wisdom. And that’s the repeated theme of Proverbs: lifting up the importance of godly wisdom and spelling out what it looks like in every dimension of life.

Wisdom does not mean some deep, indecipherable philosophy. It is not something that only elderly professors with long beards can claim to possess. Wisdom is not found at the top of a Himalayan peak, in some guru’s cave. It doesn’t require a PhD. True wisdom is found in the Word of God. And even people of average or low IQ can gain and live out biblical wisdom. It’s accessible to children as well as adults, to poor as well as rich.

In fact, the wisest people in the world are not necessarily the smartest. Why? Because the key to receiving and living wisdom is not found in the brain but in the will. Being willing to let God’s Word be our guide, rather than our own ideas and pride in our own abilities, is the key to real wisdom.

The Relevance of Proverbs
The Book of Proverbs is relevant to all ages and generations. Proverbs talks about principles of how to make a relationship work. It talks about principles of managing money. It talks about principles that govern success in a career, and about how to handle power and influence in a way that won’t corrupt us. It talks about the use of the tongue, about managing and redirecting anger, about resisting temptation and avoiding dangerous situations. It is intensely (and even, at times, painfully) practical.

And it is also deeply spiritual. The two are not opposites or contrasts, but actually belong together. And that is, in fact, how pastor and teacher Chuck Swindoll sums up what makes the biblical viewpoint so unique and important. The Bible helps us to see life from both the “horizontal” and the “vertical” perspectives, and brings the two into harmony.

The horizontal perspective is how we deal with all the challenges, opportunities and options in our material world. The horizontal includes homes and families, spouses and kids, bosses and customers, politics and economics, caring for our bodies and managing our assets: all the things around us on this earthly plane.

But the vertical perspective is every bit as real and vital. It deals with our relationship with God and with our own internal thoughts and emotions. It deals with what is right and wrong, true and false, good and evil: not just what might “work” or be “profitable” in the short term and horizontally. A person who ignores or neglects this vertical perspective may, for a time, seem to prosper and succeed in worldly ways … but, ultimately, will be considered a failure in God’s eyes. No matter their intellect, the Lord will pronounce the final verdict on them as having been a fool. That is the judgment we want to avoid at all costs: for the God of the Universe to evaluate our lives and find that they were ultimately wasted.

The Storms of Life
Let me return to the issue of the economic and financial challenges we have faced in the past year. There is no question that many of us have been impacted. For some here, the past 12 months have brought a significant decline in retirement funds—causing new worries about the future, or forcing us to cut back on our lifestyle. For some, the economic recession has resulted in the loss of a job, or a cutback in hours, income or benefits. For some in businesses and professions, the economic squeeze has caused a decline in revenues. For some, the past year has brought to you (or to a family member or friend) the loss of a home to foreclosure or short-sale. There has been a lot of pain and discomfort, as well as a lot of emotional anxiety and worry. Is it over? While the economists and bureaucrats debate when a recession “officially” ends, for many individuals and families the disruption looks like it will continue for awhile.

I overheard an analyst on one of the cable channels labeling the events of this past year “the perfect storm.” That phrase entered into our lexicon twelve years ago with the publication of Sebastian Junger’s best-selling book by the same name. The phrase “perfect storm” refers to a rare hurricane that whipped up in the Atlantic in 1991, formed by three separate and independent weather systems colliding. The result was a deadly combination of rain, wind and waves that capsized and sank a large commercial fishing boat named the “Andrea Gail” that had sailed out of Gloucester, Mass.

While the economic expert on TV was using the term “perfect storm” to refer to something that could never be predicted or avoided, in fact his reference to the book was more appropriate than he realized. In the bestseller (and the film starring George Clooney) we learn that the disaster of the Andrea Gail’s loss was not just a story of an unavoidable calamity. While a number of innocent people suffered (including many of the crew—who died—and their families—left bereft and grieving), there were plenty of warnings the captain failed to heed. The shipwreck was actually an avoidable disaster. But a deadly combination of greed, pride, denial, wishful thinking and stubbornness kept them from returning safely to port in time.

Learning from Mistakes
It’s much more comforting to our egos to be able to blame all our problems on external events and “perfect storms” and things we couldn’t possibly avoid. But the painful reality is that some of our choices and actions may have contributed. And when we refuse to honestly look at mistakes and learn from them, we simply set ourselves up to repeat them.

My hope is that our economic leaders, bankers, Wall Street whizzes, and politicians won’t delude themselves about the events of the past year by blaming everything on a “perfect storm.” Our nation has been chastened, and we need to learn from it. As Proverbs 3:11 says: “My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline and do not resent his rebuke.” People who are wishing and hoping that everything will just get “back to normal,” so that we can resume our national life just as it was, may be missing the message from the Lord.

And it’s true personally as well. Some of us failed to learn the principles of the Bible. The society around us was caught up in a pursuit of wealth, an excessive lifestyle of consumption, and a leveraging of too much risk and debt. And without realizing it, maybe we were caught up in the spirit of our times. Maybe we spent foolishly, invested recklessly, or failed to save enough. Maybe we made choices without weighing their consequences. And the Lord is now giving us a gracious opportunity to learn from our mistakes and grow in our wisdom. Instead of just wishing for a return to “normal,” perhaps we need to move on to a “new normal,” a wiser, humbler and more disciplined life.

Conclusion
The Burt Bacharach song asked what the world needs now. Everybody’s got his or her opinion. Experts weigh in on health care reform and economic policy and military policy and foreign policy. The leaders of the 20 largest nations gathered in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago to debate “what the world needs now.” Egos and competing visions clash; and talking heads and news reporters join into the loud debate. Meanwhile, the greatest source of truth the world has ever known is so often ignored.

But God tells us that what the world needs most right now (and always has) is the wisdom that comes from the pages of Scripture. To find our way in confusing times we need to know God’s wisdom. And we also need to choose, every day, to humbly apply that wisdom to every area of life.