Happy New Year! A lot has happened on here last year. There were many things that I accomplished with different featured guests and topics, while other things were on hold and pushed back to this year. If this is your first time here, or you haven’t been able to check out what’s been happening, I encourage you to!

There’s so much to check out, from mental health, to the healing power of God! Incredible testimonies, as well as personal reflections from yours truly. I’m looking forward to 2018, and the great things God has given me to do with Thoughts Of Redemption. For my first post, I wanted to talk about wisdom and one particular way we overlook when learning and growing in wisdom.

We often hear a statement about how we learn, and it’s always bothered me. The saying is that, “Experience is the best teacher.” I feel this statement truly robs us from gaining wisdom in life more than we realize. It’s not to say we don’t learn by experience, because if we learn from our experiences, we truly will become wiser in life. It’s also true that you don’t understand the depth of certain things in life until you experience them.

However, I feel that when we say experience is the best teacher, we neglect a huge source of wisdom that we receive in our lives. Not only do we gain wisdom by experience, we gain it by instruction.

To gain wisdom from instruction and observation is a blessing, because it allows us to avoid the pitfalls and consequences of foolish decisions. Some of us go through difficulties in life as a result of our bad decisions, and thankfully we learn from experience not to do these things again. But I think we all can agree that if we would’ve listened to instruction before some of the choices we made, we could’ve learned without the heartbreak, frustration, hindrances, and any other consequences that come upon us.

The trick is that receiving wisdom and walking in it has a weight of responsibility to it, so we don’t automatically gravitate to wisdom from instruction. To learn wisdom, which helps us avoid the negative consequences of foolishness, takes more work and humility. If we aren’t humble, even experience won’t be able to teach us. Learning from experience forces us to take heed, but we can still decide to reject the lessons learned from experience and grow bitter instead, and our pride can strengthen our resolve to do what we want in spite of it.

As we continue on in 2018, let us grow in wisdom by receiving instruction, and cherish what we learn from instruction more than we do from experience. Experience has its place in life, but God intends for us to learn from Him and those He has given us so that we can thrive as people of wisdom. We can thrive instead of recovering from bad decisions and mindsets we took on because we didn’t listen to instruction. What areas in your life do you think you need to grow wiser by instruction? I’d love to hear your thoughts below!