Gaining Wisdom

At the BYU Forum address on Tuesday Mark DeMoss, an evangelical who founded the DeMoss group which is a public relations firm serving Christian organizations, gave a wonderful talk on how incivility and Christianity are not compatible. That’s a basic feature of Living in Truth. When you are uncivil to anyone you immediately cast yourself into the Pit. As I said it is a wonderful talk and if you’d like to read it or hear it for yourself, go here.

In the course of the talk, Mr. DeMoss spoke about wisdom and said something that I really liked. He said that every day he reads a chapter from the book of Proverbs—one of the books of wisdom literature found in the Old Testament. There are 31 books in Proverbs and so if it is the sixth day of the month he reads the sixth chapter or on the tenth day the tenth chapter of Proverbs. By doing this he has read the words of wisdom found in Proverbs every month since he began the reading.

So I decided to try it. I won’t do it all my life, but for a month or two at least I’m going to read Proverbs as he does. I know the value of repetition. I’ve experienced that before when I studied King Benjamin’s great sermon found in Mosiah 2-5 every day for four months. That’s what led to the writing of my book Spiritually Centered Motherhood. It was surprising how much I learned from that experience, and so I am excited to read Proverbs the next few months.

But it also made me think about how valuable it would be to define 31 of the great sermons in the scriptures, the sermons that really speak to my own heart and then read those sermons one a day each day of the month. It would be another great way to learn and study. Maybe I’ll try that next!