I gotta tell you. I’ve had some struggles with this text. No. It’s not the “don’t be drunk with wine part." We’ll stipulate that debauchery isn’t a good long-term life strategy.

What then?

The rest of our passage seems pretty straightforward. Right?

But what I find perplexing is Paul’s admonition to “live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil."

Now, on the surface of things, that doesn’t sound terribly mystifying, I grant you. Pretty sound advice. You don’t even have to go to church to get advice like that. Be smart; don’t be stupid. Big deal, you say.

Besides that, a casual glance at the news confirms that the days are evil.

I understand. But step back from the text for a moment and listen: “Live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil."

See? There’s the real problem, isn’t it? What is wisdom?

Ask someone from the ACLU and another person from the MAGA movement what kinds of things demonstrate wisdom.

Are tougher gun laws wise? How about universal healthcare? Even something as basic as U.S. History divides us.

You see what I mean? Not so easy to pin it down, is it? More or less well-intentioned folks fall down on opposite sides of a whole range of questions.

Wisdom.

It’s a pretty abstract concept. Just saying, “Don’t be unwise; be wise,” doesn’t get you very far down the road.

We tend to think of wisdom as a body of knowledge we need to know our way around—the do’s and don’ts of 1001 different situations. And if we just had an app we could call up on our phones that told us what was right and wrong in any given situation, we’d at least have access to that necessary treasure of wisdom.

But as Aristotle points out, wisdom isn’t only a matter of learning life’s secrets, both the pleasure and the pain; it’s about gaining mastery over them. Wisdom isn’t a list of rules that, if you commit them to memory, you’ll have become wise; it involves a specific set of moral practices.

Being a bricklayer, for instance, involves not only a knowledge of bricklaying but an actual ability to lay brick. In the same way, following Jesus involves not only knowing the faithful thing to do but actually doing it.

Or, in a paraphrase of Aristotle: We study wisdom not to know the wise thing. We study wisdom to learn how to act wisely.

Why is that important? What difference does it make as long as you know it?

Because the world is watching what we do.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “I will believe in the Redeemer when Christians start looking a little more redeemed." Or as Ghandi said, “I like their Christ; it’s Christians I can’t stand.”