Do you know what your first, most important possession is? The Bible tells us it is wisdom (Proverbs 4:7).Â
But do you know what your second most important possession is? I’d like to suggest that it is information.
Without wisdom we would be doomed to use whatever information we have wrongly, mistakenly, or sinfully. But there is no denying that information is our second most important possession. Whether you are rich or broke, male or female, black or white or anything in between, information is critical to every area of your life. And without the right information, even wisdom may falter.
You and I live in the information age. All of our greatest advances have been wrought through the acquisition and implementation of information. With information we make all of our most important decisions of life, how to parent, how to be a spouse, how to perform at work, express ourselves in relationship, decide our politics, who to vote for, and what religion to follow. Except for wisdom, there isn’t a more important commodity in life than information.
The most important kind of information we need to possess is religious information. All other classes of information pale in their importance and urgency.
Your education can help you get a good job. Understanding things about your relationships can help you in marriage, or parenting, or other relationships. Knowing the law can keep you out of trouble (or perhaps get into it). Information about morals can also keep us out of trouble or help us to honor those we love.
But religious information is by far the most important. Religious information will help us for eternity. Based upon what we know, and the wisdom in how that information is exercised, we will either receive eternal life or eternal damnation. No other kind of information can do this for you.
The wrong information can kill you. A misdiagnoses can result in a patient’s death. So too, wrong religious information—a spiritual misdiagnoses—can lead to eternal death. Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, Watchtower, New Age, atheism, and a variety of other non-Christians religious have wrong information about eternity, the state of man, the nature of God and reality, and so on. Following these systems of information will take you on a journey down a path that leads only to doom. But when the right information, specifically, about Jesus Christ, is exercised with wisdom, it brings eternal life. By wisdom I mean the following of Jesus and obedience to his word.
Jesus Christ made claims about himself that are higher than that of every other religious leader. Our task, exercised with wisdom, is to discover if that information is true. If so, then we will be held accountable for the information we knew and what we decided to do with it. If we reject it then we forget wisdom and stray from the truth. But if we embrace it for the rest of our lives, our lives will transformed, forever.
What kind of religious information do you have? Are you acting upon right information or wrong information? Have you even explored religious information in the first place?