SEEKING SELF AND WISDOM

Genesis chapter 1






Today we are walking in: Seeking Self and Wisdom








Job 34:16


If now thou hast understanding, hear H8085 this: hearken to the voice of my words.









UNDERSTAND



Today we look to the word-UNDERSTAND- H8085 shama`--to hear with attention or interest, listen to understand (language)








The Torah testifies...............


Genesis 11:7


Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand H8085 one another's speech.








The prophets proclaim..................


Nehemiah 8:2


And Ezra the priest brought the law before the congregation both of men and women, and all that could hear H8085 with understanding, upon the first day of the seventh month.









The writings bear witness...........................


1 Kings 3:9


Give therefore thy servant an understanding H8085 heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?







Chapter 3


Seeking Self and Wisdom


When people limit what they can be, they limit what they will be.


Deep within each person is a yearning to become more—more successful, more content, more intelligent, more healthy, more loving, more handsome or pretty—always more. But over the years of various attempts and failures at improving our lives, we finally convince ourselves that we are worthless, rotten, incapable people. We become satisfied with life as is, and abandon having more.


Although there may be family, friends, or even spouses who say things or do things that hold us back from becoming “more,” the only one who really has that power is the person who looks back at you in the mirror. No one else can steal our potential—only we can keep it hidden, sometimes for a lifetime.


You Are Not Ugly!


The deceiver within us distorts our self-concept. We don’t like ourselves for a variety of unfounded reasons, and we become professional “cover-ups.” We don’t like our physical bodies. Yuk! I don’t like how skinny I am, how fat I am, how my hair grows, how my eyes are shaped, how my lips are. I don’t like my black, brown, red, yellow, or white skin. So we try to cover up what we don’t like. It is strange how we work on things. If our hair is curly, we straighten it. If our skin is too pale, we tan it. We don’t like what we see in the mirror. Nobody is satisfied with themselves. We all walk around thinking, Why can’t I be more like him? Why can’t I look more like her?


We have become professional “cover-ups.”


This self-depreciating attitude is unhealthy. Our potential has been distorted so that we don’t want to be black or tall or fat. We don’t want to have curly hair or fat lips or small eyes. We have accepted this ploy to destroy our esteem for the beautiful people we really are.


Because we do not like ourselves, we do all kinds of dumb things to ourselves, including limiting our opportunities. If you love yourself, you are not going to lower your standards. You will not sell yourself to anybody or sell yourself short. You won’t allow anybody to buy you—you are too expensive.


You Are Not Dumb!


A self-depreciating attitude also destroys our confidence in our true intelligence. Wisdom and intelligence can be two completely different things. Someone may be full of common sense wisdom but may have never completed college. Someone else may have a Ph.D. but is unable to balance their checkbook. Intelligence and wisdom are doled out according to how a person comprehends the importance of both. This is not learned. It is discerned. This knowledge isn’t found in any book; it’s a deeper knowledge. Your real intelligence is not studied; it is discerned. Wow!


Your real intelligence is not studied; it is discerned.
Many have become victims of education. We look to books and movies and the words of others—what we can see, hear, taste, feel, and touch—to gain knowledge. Those things became our sources of information. When we forget to discern our own real intelligence, we look outside ourselves to find knowledge.


You Will Become!


Always looking to others for approval or acceptance sometimes limits our life potential. Many times they, knowingly or unknowingly, destroy any possibility that we might have to become more than we already are: Teachers in our classrooms call us stupid. Brothers and sisters call us dumb and “no good.” Parents tell us, “You’ll never be anything.”

Sometimes we set ourselves up. We chop up our self- confidence and slam the door on our potential by convincing ourselves that we really are nothing: “I’ll never rise above my family’s status. I’ll never go beyond my neighborhood. I’ll never be any more than my mom or dad. I don’t stand a chance.” When we think and speak these types of negative thoughts, they keep us down; it’s deceptive thinking.


Seek an Abundant Life


We must free ourselves of those things that retard, distort, and short-circuit everything we are capable of being and doing.


We think life is what we have now. No! In the Greek, the same word is used for abundance as is used for fountain. You need to take the cap off your well—to unclog the true you—to open up the capacity of who you are and who you can be. You are going to have an unprecedented oil spill. This thing is going to explode. The potential within you is welling up and when it blows, it will never stop spilling out!


You are finally going to meet your real self. All you have done for the past ten years that made you think you were somebody is but a trickle. You haven’t changed the world, friend. You haven’t done anything yet! But there is a fountain, an abundance of life, welling up in you so you can do and be something. It begins when you realize that you are an amazing person, created to do amazing things.


Uncapping the Well


No one in the world stifles and clogs up and caps your potential like you do. Unknowingly, you think up schemes to make yourself believe that you can be nothing more than you have already been. You have the power to destroy this scheme, to unclog the well and become your true self.


Daily you must convince yourself about who you really are. For example, you are meant to use all the gifts and talents and skills that are uniquely yours. You were not meant to live in poverty and hunger or sickness. You were meant to live an abundant life. Speak that into your mirror each morning. Believe it.


The Cap and the Crowbar


When others tell you that you aren’t going to amount to anything: You aren’t going to be anything. You can’t do anything. You will always be what you now are. You must pull from deep within to undo those negative claims. You can be anything you think. You have the power to rip the top right off your capped well. Go ahead, gush forth!


Thus, a tremendous struggle goes on within us—one destroyer uses a cap to hold in our potential, the other uses a crowbar to yank off the top and allow the wealth within to pour out. Every time the one with the crowbar yanks off the top, the other runs around with the cap in hand. The minute we give him a chance, he covers up the well again. The struggle is continual. Each day we experience the tension.


What’s Clogging Your Well?


Are there things in your life that have been holding you back from the things you should be doing? Are you a potential leader in your community but you’re full of alcohol and you’re lying in the gutter? Has cocaine stolen your potential to be the top student in your class? Is your brain all messed up so you can’t even think any more? Are you in danger of being kicked out of school though you were an A student before you took the stuff? Have you run off with a dumb guy and gotten pregnant? Do you have to drop out of school and give up your visions of becoming a doctor, lawyer, scientist, teacher, or an agricultural expert? Have you clogged up your potential because of unwise choices?


Did you have a business that was going well, with limitless potential, until somebody said to you, “I want you to sell drugs for me. You’ll make a lot more money than you do in this lame business”? So you became greedy. You went ahead and sold the drugs—only you were caught and now you have a criminal record and your business is destroyed.


Unclog your well and release your potential.

Greed and pride clogs our potential. This duo messes up the plan for us to reach our destiny. It takes away the “And they lived happily ever after” and replaces it with “And they struggled but didn’t make it through the day.” Don’t let that be the last chapter in your book—know that you are flowing within with potential. The problem is that you don’t know your potential. You have been destroyed by greed and pride, which is stunting your growth.
You can destroy the works that are holding you down.


The Wrong Place


One afternoon a mother took her son to the local elementary school for soccer practice. She returned an hour and a half later to find an angry, tearful child. When she asked him what was wrong, he said, “My practice wasn’t here today. It was at the park. We must have read the schedule wrong. So, I had to sit and watch the other teams practice. It was so boring! Now I’m afraid my coach won’t let me play in the game on Saturday because I missed practice.”


Most of us have had the experience of being at the wrong place. We’ve waited at one entrance to the store while our friends were looking for us at another. Or we’ve waited at a customer service desk to exchange a purchase, only to find that we had to go to the department where the purchase was made. Such experiences are disturbing because we cannot achieve what we set out to do.


Such frustration is minor compared to the turmoil created by our competition to excel and reach a position of prestige and honor. This desire to get ahead is a compelling passion in our world. Every person has been bitten by this aspiration to rise in status. We are preoccupied with the status quo, and we seek to gain status symbols. We want the best for ourselves with little or no concern for those we climb over in our pursuit for a position of power. The desire for status is an age-old problem. From the time we are very young, we learn to do the things that enhance our status and bring us prominence and prestige.


Status literally means “the state of us.” Webster1 defines it as a “condition or position with regard to the law.” Thus, status is position. Webster also describes status as “the position of an individual in relation to another”—showing that status has to do with rank—and “the state or condition of affairs.” Status is not just a random ordering of things, but a careful positioning that reveals the relationships between people or the parts of a whole.


When I went to junior high school, I wanted to become an A student because A students are respected and appreciated. Everybody speaks to you, and the teachers love you. In other words, my purpose for trying to attain the A student status had nothing to do with a desire to help others. I was out to grab all I could for myself.
Similar things happen in the workplace. Perhaps you are part of an office where fake games are played. Somebody’s always making the coffee, vacuuming the floor, or making copies. Now all of these are necessary tasks, but the motive behind the action is of primary importance. Are these things being done as a service to others, or are they a way to gain special recognition and advancement?


Humility and consideration for others occurs most easily when you value your position as well as the positions of others. A visible position does not equal greater value. Each is to do his or her task to the best of his or her ability to benefit the whole. Those with leadership potential or who are in leadership receive that status to strengthen everyone.


Wisdom Protects


Wisdom protects us from the dangers of knowledge. Potential is dormant ability. (The word dormant means what is just lying there below its full strength, unused.) It is also reserved power, untapped strength, and unused success. Potential is everything that a thing is, that has not yet been seen or manifested.


Everything in life begins as potential. All things have the potential to fulfill themselves. There is no fulfillment in life without understanding the reason for being. If we want to know the real potential of something, we first have to know what that thing was created to do.


So if you have a seed in your hand, a kernel of corn, or a pea, you will never get the seeds complete fulfillment until you know that there is a plant inside that seed. It is only as we look beyond the seed to the plant that we understand its true potential.


Too often, however, we look only at what we presently have. We look at our last dollar and say, “All I have is one dollar.” No. That is not all you have. If you only knew the potential of that dollar. If you take that dollar and put it into a certain condition, it will multiply.
The potential of everything is related to its purpose for being.


Before we can understand the potential of a thing or person, we first must know the conditions under which it was meant to exist. Thus the most important thing for you and me, as human beings, is to try and find out for the rest of our lives what the purpose is for everything in life. That is our main goal. Unless we ask ourselves, “What is the purpose for everything in life?” we will die without having experienced the potential of everything. We will miss the ultimate wisdom.


When somebody tells you they are wise, don’t get carried away. Although they may have wisdom, it might not be the right kind of wisdom.

The World’s Wisdom


Some wisdom is corrupt. Any wisdom that does not fulfill its original purpose is foolishness. So if you are wise and you can really figure things out, but you use it to steal, you are foolish. If you are a very skillful musician, but you use your gift to create lewdness and sensuality, and to cause people to go into perversion, that is foolishness. If you know that the power, talents, and gifts you have are yours to use for good or evil, your wisdom becomes foolishness if you chose to destroy rather than build up.
Any wisdom that does not fulfill its original purpose is foolishness.


Although much of the wisdom of the world is foolishness, it is still wisdom. It’s a perverted wisdom used by perverters to blind us to its very foolishness. The Internet, 3D movies, smart phones, and all the other amazing technology available these days took much intelligence to invent, but how many lives have been destroyed because of the criminal and perverted ways some have chosen to use them.


Your Secret Wisdom


You have a secret wisdom that was placed in you before you were born—a potential something—a wisdom to know who you are and what you were created to be and do. That potential something is a hidden understanding that follows neither the wisdom of our society nor the insights of our leaders. Unlike the wisdom of the world, which is worthless, this secret wisdom is the key to understanding your potential.


Many people die without unveiling their wealth of wisdom. They die in total foolishness, without experiencing the life that dwells within. What a pity! They have missed discovering their secret wisdom. Secret here does not mean to be withheld from. It rather has the meaning of to have never known existed. There is a difference. This secret wisdom is something we never knew existed within us.


You were born rich with wisdom.


I know you may find that hard to accept—perhaps you think I am a mad man. But the truth is you’ll be shocked when you understand who you really are. You don’t know what you have inside that you are selling so cheaply. You have a secret wisdom, a wisdom that you should be using to discover your potential.


None of the rulers of this world understand it, nor have they ever understood it. If only we could understand who we are. We keep thinking that the life we left behind is better than the life toward which we are headed. We are constantly dipping into the ways and wisdom of the world to try and solve our present situations. But the world does not know the wisdom and potential destined for us. They don’t understand it and sometimes they resent that we have a secret wisdom that carries us forward toward our unique destiny.


Your eyes can’t see, your ears can’t hear, neither can your mind imagine the future that awaits you. It’s totally beyond what you can understand. If you could see through your eyes what you were created to be, you’d change your life. If you could hear through your ears or perceive through your mind what you were created to be you would, but unfortunately you can’t. Your situation sounds hopeless: No eyes have seen it; no ears have heard it; no mind has conceived it. Your eyes and ears and mind cannot help you understand what was prepared for you before you were born. If they could, you’d shape up!


The Deep Things


Most people have not seen their secret wisdom, nor have they heard about it. They have never even thought about the stuff because there are certain things we cannot understand. They are so deep within our potential that we need help to drag them out.


Deep within our wells, a clog has formed and blocks the entryway. There is wealth within the well—there inside your being. There is wealth in your personality; wealth in your smile; wealth in your mind and spirit. But it has been clogged up and capped off by greed, pride, selfishness, and lack of self- esteem.


When you were born, the cap over your potential was firmly in place. You may never know what is buried beneath that cap. I believe that billions of dollars of wealth are buried within you, but you are not aware of it. You’re walking along cool, but you don’t know who you are. You don’t understand that what you see is merely the shadow of your potential.


Your capped potential is like a new battery. You came into the world full of the ability to run the whole thing. But you’re just sitting there. Your stored power isn’t being used. Like a battery that needs acidic water inside it before it can really fulfill its purpose, you need something to unleash the potential locked inside you. You have the key that allows all the dormant power within you to come to life.


You have the key that allows all the dormant power within you to come to life.


Forget what others have told you about who you can be. That’s a joke. Don’t even consider what they have said. That is not all you can be, because the deepest things you can know about yourself are not in your mind or your emotions or even in your body. They are in your spirit. The deepest things you can know about yourself are what you get from your spirit.


Only you can capture the wealth of your potential. Until you take a deep look within yourself and stop the negative talk coming at you and coming from within you, you will only walk around confused, thinking, There’s gotta be more. There’s gotta be more. When you hunger for the deep things, you will not be satisfied until you realize the secret wisdom. You will never be satisfied, because there is something inside you that continually calls out for more.


Do you want to know how cute you can be? Do you want to know how smart you are? Your potential is buried. We may think having regular people go to the moon is great—but wait until you see what even greater things are going to be announced. There is so much potential within all people!


Uncapping the well unravels the knots that have bound your thoughts, removes the streaks that have blurred your vision, and clears the debris that has hidden your potential. Working like a sculptor, you can bring out the beauty hidden deep within your being, because that is the real you.


It is my dream that you will see with your eyes and hear with your ears things you have never seen or heard before. Conceive with your mind thoughts that never before have occurred to you. Live the rest of your life building an atmosphere of hope and confidence that permeates deep into the wells of your potential and pulls it to the top of your senses. Drink deeply, growing in the knowledge of who you really are.


Principles


1. Greed and pride clogs your potential.


2. You can experience abundant, refreshing, new life.


3. The potential of everything is related to its purpose for being.


4. The wisdom of the world is a foolish, corrupt wisdom.


5. Uncapping the well unravels the knots that have bound your thoughts, removes the streaks that have blurred your vision, and clears the debris that has hidden your potential.