Hi! I'm really excited to do this. My hope is this: with so many of us having a bit more time, we want to provide a daily devotional to help people keep the Lord before them. The goal is to give you a short nugget each and every day that not only keeps the Lord before you, but also keeps you before him in the midst of everything. 

What I want to do is take however many days this crisis is going to last to talk about something that's pretty near and dear to my heart, and that's the topic of wisdom. From the wisdom literature, we'll mainly look at the book of Proverbs. Now there is good news and there's bad news with this. The good news is that this is something I've wanted to do for a long time, after years of thinking about how ancient people thought about wisdom and also its relevancy to our life today. I've spent a lot of time, metaphorically speaking, with the Jewish rabbis, with Derek Kidner and other authors like Gerhard von Braun and Tim Keller, who have thought deeply about wisdom. The bad news – which isn’t really bad - is I'm not exactly sure where this is going to go! There's no detailed plan. So each and every day, I'll give you a three to five minute devotional to keep the Lord before you and to help us take a deep breath in all of this.  

Here's the first question I want to answer today very quickly. Why wisdom? Why is wisdom so important? In Proverbs 8:18-19, we read this, 
“Riches and honor are with me,
enduring wealth and prosperity.
My fruit is better than gold, even fine gold, 
and my yield than choice silver.”
And so the proverb is actually written as if wisdom is speaking, and the writer is saying that wisdom should be wanted more than gold or silver. The benefit to a person is that it far outweighs any kind of tangible thing that we could ever accumulate. And so my question you is this: Do you really want wisdom? 

When we find that the way that we have been living life has been peeled back, and we've lost a lot of things fairly rapidly, what's left in our soul? Is there a wisdom that informs our character and helps us become the right kind of person? Well, that's what we're going to discover. Wisdom is something that all of us should want more than anything in our life. 

Jesus shared parables with his disciples, and in Mark 4:10, they asked him about it. He explained that some people just weren’t going to get it. “‘...they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven.’ And Jesus said to them, ‘Do you not understand this parable?’” (vv 11-13). Parables were wisdom stories used by ancient people – Jesus was one – to reveal something. Jesus was encouraging his disciples to think about and decipher what exactly he was saying through the story because “the secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you” (v 11). And so again, my question for us is this: how much do you want to be wise? Do you want it more than anything during this time? 

Prayer for Today 
Father in heaven, in the midst of everything that's going on, we realize that when it's taken away, what are we left with? I pray that you and your Holy Spirit’s work in our lives would make us incredibly wise people so that would know how to handle this circumstance. We ask this in Jesus name, amen.