The choice of July 4th as our Independence Day is an interesting one if you think about it. This isn’t the date of the British surrender at the Battle of Yorktown or the end of the Revolutionary War. No, July 4th, 1776, was the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Continental Congress wrote and signed a document to declare independence a little over a year into a war that would last 7 more bloody years. So, as a country we don’t celebrate our birth as a nation from when we won our independence, but when we wrote about it. And our country is defined even more by another document, the US Constitution. We still, mostly, operate the government of our country based on that document. And despite that fact that the rights and intentions of both of these documents were not initially extended to all people in our country, it was these documents that were then later used to extend those freedoms. We didn’t have to do away with those documents to give more people freedom, we just had to finally apply them rightly and fully.

So, it’s interesting that we celebrate a document-based country today, as we in the church are called to be a document-based people. Our founding document obviously being the Bible. We’ve been walking through Proverbs this summer examining what God teaches us about how to live wisely. So I figured it would be the perfect day to look about what Proverbs says about the Wisdom to be found in all of God’s Word, the church’s founding document.

Here’s the Big Idea for today: Not all wisdom is created equal; true wisdom comes from God’s Word.