Information, knowledge and wisdom
Information, knowledge and wisdom are all different things. I know that sometimes people use these words interchangeably, but they are distinct. We live in an information age with torrents of information being delivered to us every day. Yet not much of that information actually settles in our brains to become knowledge, something we know. And wisdom is something deeper and altogether more useful; it is assessing a situation and using the accumulated knowledge we have well in order to make the right decision. Wisdom is applied knowledge.
Hugh McKay, in his challenging and useful recent book ‘The Way We Are: Lessons from a Lifetime of Listening’, spends some time explaining how little information we really absorb. Surveys of people given only an hour after watching a full news bulletin routinely show that most cannot even recall one item from that bulletin. Much of what we read on the internet would fall into the same category. There is a great deal of information out there, and we don’t retain the vast majority of it.
That’s often fine, of course. We simply do not have the capacity to remember every word we read, every conversation we have had, or every concept we have been taught. I have academic records which say that I achieved high marks in subjects in the past which I know very little about today.
There is a challenge here to those who crave more, new information. (I am speaking to myself just as much to anyone else who might be reading this!). Many people constantly check news websites to stay up to date with such diverse topics as the war in Ukraine and whichever supermodel Leonardo DiCaprio might be dating at the moment. Others constantly scroll Instagram or Facebook to see if any new and important information might come up that we absolutely need to know (even though we know much of this information is, at best, light entertainment). We need to understand that keeping up to date and even knowing a lot about a lot of topics does not make you important. Much of the random information and knowledge we have is of little value in the end, and we know it. It is much better for your mental health and contentment to know less of the kind of information we find on the internet rather than more.
Christians have an extra dimension we should think about here. In our modern age, we are blessed with all kinds of great Bible teaching. If you’re involved in a good church, you might hear a sermon or two a week, be involved in a Bible study, and read the Bible yourself in a form you can understand and afford. Yet, if you are like me, we don’t always absorb what we learn and we don’t always do very much with the new bits of knowledge we gain. We need time to reflect on Bible teaching, like Psalm 1 where the man meditates on the word of God, day and night. We need to discuss it like we were commanded in Deuteronomy 6, to talk about it while we go about our everyday business. Just having that information come to us does not change us. We can even store it in our memory and not have it change us. We need to think about it, pray about it, and try to apply it wisely to whatever we face.
Next time you hear a sermon or read the Bible yourself, take a few minutes to think about what to do with the information you have received. Find a simple way to use it that day. Talk about the implications with those you love. We want to be more than people with much good information about God in our brains; we want to live consistently with what we know.