Careful Is Not the Same as Wise

He says he has learned to be careful, and everybody nods, because it is the kind of sentence a room agrees with.

And it is true, in the sense that he is careful now. He checks. He thinks it through. He does not commit to things quickly, he does not put himself forward, he does not start anything he cannot see the end of, and he has not been caught out once in four years.

He calls it wisdom. Out loud, to other people, he calls it wisdom.

Privately, at about eleven at night in the kitchen, he knows it is not.

Here is how he knows, and I think this is the most useful thing in the whole message, so I want to put it near the front where you can get at it.

Wisdom and fear look identical from outside. Both of them say no to the same things. Both of them slow a person down. You could film two men for a year and not be able to tell which one you had.

They are different on the inside, and there is one reliable test.

Wisdom is quiet. It makes a judgment and then it stops talking, because it has nothing to defend. Fear rehearses. Fear explains itself to people who have not asked, and revisits the decision at night, and produces reasons afterwards, and needs the decision to be right in a way that wisdom simply does not.

He rehearses. That is how he knows.

He has explained his carefulness to three people this month who never questioned it once. He goes over decisions at eleven at night that were made and closed weeks ago. He has a small speech about why he does not do things like that any more, and he has given it more times than the subject has come up.

Now I want to say clearly, before anything else, that some of his carefulness is real wisdom and I am not asking him to throw it out. He did learn things. Some of what he does not do now, he should not do, and a man who came through what he came through and learned nothing would be a fool.

The trouble is not the carefulness. The trouble is that one of the two things living in the same coat is not what it says it is.

I am not going to ask you what happened. Not one word. God has it, you have it, and this message needs the coat rather than the file.

The verse puts the old things in the past tense

Everybody can quote 2 Corinthians 5:17 and most people quote the first half.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.2 Corinthians 5:17

Look at the tense on the second half, because that is where the argument is.

Old things are passed away. Not will pass. Not are passing, gradually, as a man gets stronger. It is done, and 2 Corinthians 5:17 states it as an accomplished condition rather than a process, and the Holy Spirit is not administering it in stages.

And this is where the careful man and the verse come into direct conflict, and one of them has to give.

Because carefulness of his kind is a permanent arrangement made on the basis of an old thing. It says: I know what I am now, because of what happened, and I will conduct the rest of my life accordingly. That is a settlement with the past, and it is a settlement the past was never authorized to make.

Here is what the verse puts in your hands instead. You are a new creature and not a repaired one, and 2 Corinthians 5:17 says the old things are already passed rather than still setting your terms, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a man who has been quoting the first half of the verse for years.

New creature is not an encouragement. It is a category. Paul is not saying you have improved, he is saying the thing that is now standing there is not the same thing that fell.

And notice the word at the front of the second half: behold. He puts a look-up word in the middle of the sentence, because he knows perfectly well that a man reading it will believe the first clause and go on living inside the old one.

You have already been made new and you are not waiting for a stretch of good conduct to qualify, and 2 Corinthians 5:17 does the whole thing in Christ rather than in your caution, and the Holy Spirit is not managing a probation that the verse never mentions.

So the question about the coat is now answerable. Take each careful thing you do and ask which of the two it is. Wisdom will let you look at it calmly and will not need to explain itself. Fear will start talking.