They say that with age comes wisdom. Trite little phrase isn’t it? You might as well say “the more you do, the more you know.” Well, thanks for that little nugget, Einstein. As one gets older, as one is certainly prone to do, wisdom is an inevitable by product of having lived. Don’t get me wrong, there are varying degrees of wisdom, but even a 70 year old raised by wolves knows a thing or two about the world that surrounds him that would baffle the most learned scholars. With pain comes wisdom. Mistakes, miscalculations, errors in judgment, failure, all lead to wisdom. And unless God is tapping you on the shoulder and making you king of Israel, wisdom will not be had by osmosis due to chronology. It is with this idea in mind that I write this blog.

As an atheist I debated with Christians and won. As a born again Christian I debated with atheists and won. I rarely lose an argument that’s based purely on reason, logic, and/or personal experience. The reason I defeated so many Christians is because so many Christians fail to read their bible. Most really do not even know what they believe. When I was saved some dozen years ago, I immersed myself in the study of my bible and every apologetic and Christian work I could get my hands on. I could not be persuaded into the kingdom of heaven by the words of men, but I had a very real encounter with Jesus and there was nothing religious about it.

Just like when you fall in love, you become a student of every aspect of your heart’s desire. The same applies to a new love in Jesus. You want to know more. You want to know what He likes, what He dislikes, what causes Him to shout for joy, and what causes Him to chase the enemy down with flaming sword in hand.

So later, when I debated atheists, I was armed with knowledge and experience that could not be contested. And this is where knowledge and wisdom diverge. I was plenty smart enough with sound and logical arguments to defeat my foes, and thusly the foes of Jesus, but did I really win anything at all? Was one soul won for heaven? Were these foes of God really His foes at all? All that earlier reading and study of Jesus promptly discarded just so I could engage in a fight.

Jesus said to love our enemies. Jesus told us we are in a war, but that tends to be where we stop reading. If we bother to read on, Jesus also tells us how to fight. I won these arguments and lost friendships. I stood on heaps of defeated foes…. who looked alarmingly like God’s own children. The tools I once used to serve hell were now being used to serve hell in a whole new way. I am ashamed of myself. I do not walk in shame, because I am free from all of that, but I am acknowledging a fundamental failure to let wisdom dictate what I knew. We are in a war and we are called to fight. But my job isn’t to fight God’s enemies, it is to fight the fight using the weapons Jesus has given me to fight with.

For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places. – Ephesians 6:12 (NLT)

I am not defeating hell by punching an atheist in the neck. In fact I probably just served to add one more to hell’s occupancy. Using my clever intellect to subjugate, humiliate, and defeat people in debate is the exact same thing. If you are like me, you have this fire in your heart and you want to kick a little satanic butt. Knowledge tells us that if you remove a person’s heart he is defeated, but (biblical)wisdom tells us that you defeat your enemies by making them your friend. I can better serve God and defeat the fires of hell by baking chocolate chip cookies for a rival than I can shooting him in the face. A wise friend of mine said this: Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is knowing that you don’t put one in a fruit salad.