The Divine Mentor: Growing Your Faith as You Sit at the Feet of the Savior

by Wayne Cordeiro

I thought, Even stalwart and venerable trees that have lived for hundreds of years can’t survive when there is no protection—no sacred enclosure around their root systems.

One was Joseph, who, while doing his best for God, was summarily forgotten for two years in prison. Another was Elijah, who was depressed and despondent. Furthermore there was David, who after returning from battle, found that his family had been taken captive and all his belongings stolen. It was then that he and his men wept until they could weep no more. Ever felt that way?

Originally speaking to the Lord, Jeremiah said: ‘‘But as for me, I have not hurried away from being a shepherd after You.’’

I wonder: How many people feel weary, fed up, and ready to cash it all in? How many, like me, have allowed heavy foot traffic to damage their roots? When we do, we’re in danger of crashing to the ground.

It was a sacred enclosure around my roots that saved me from falling. It was not an absence of stress or of challenge. It was not an absence of problems. It was a sacred enclosure that guarded my foundation and allowed me to keep standing.

I want to challenge you to develop a lifelong habit that will place a sacred enclosure around the roots of your soul. You can’t afford to neglect this, for, as David asks, ‘‘If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?’’5

Will we choose to spend quiet, reflective time alone with the Lord? Or will we allow life’s pressures to work us into a frazzle? Will we build a sacred enclosure around our roots, or will we allow frenzied foot traffic to erode our spiritual roots and send us crashing to the earth?

Protecting and cultivating your spiritual root system is not a pill to swallow that automatically will bring you health, wealth, and a perfect family. But it will give you wide-open access to an all-wise, all-powerful God who will personally walk with you step by step.

If you make Mary’s choice, then you will find Mary’s reward.

Stepping into my first senior pastorate at the age of thirty-one,

In 1837, God used a man named Titus Coan to bring a great revival to Hawaii. Coan loved these brown-skinned people so much that within three months of his landing he preached his first sermon—in Hawaiian!

As the missionary neared the end of his life, he wrote an autobiography that contained unedited accounts of his activities and accomplishments.

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gained his wisdom without having to endure the same experiences that wounded him.

Since that time I’ve come to realize that it’s more than young pastors who need help. None of us has what it takes when we begin! And what is it we must garner along the way? Wisdom.

Life has given us two very effective teachers. Both are topflight instructors, but neither comes cheap. While both are effective, both require something of us. We have to choose one or the other, and if we choose neither, the second will be chosen for us. The teachers are Wisdom and Consequences.

If Consequences has a back-end price, Wisdom has a front-end price. It requires discipline, obedience, consistency, and above all else, time. Then it gladly pours on you its promised tremendous riches.

Wisdom teaches you the lesson before you make the mistake.

Consequences visits you in the hospital when you’re in traction . . . after they’ve scraped you up from the cliff’s bottom.

The two pains have names. They are Discipline and Regret.

You don’t want to reach the end of a ten-year stretch and realize you were way off the mark or that you frittered it away.

But the point is (and I can’t emphasize this enough), I didn’t have to repeat his mistakes. I didn’t have to wade out of the mire of his failures. I didn’t have to spend the years and the tears learning the lessons that he learned.

Again, he saved me untold years of suffering in my ministry. As I said above, by absorbing his words, I gained his wisdom without having to endure the experiences that wounded him.

But consider the grace of our God! He took about four hundred of His top people and put their raw, unedited stories into a whole library of books. He gathered sixty-six of these books—books about men and women, kings and slaves, soldiers and prophets, housewives and prostitutes, fishermen and courtiers—and put them into one. The Bible records it all, the good parts as well as the bad.

Suppose I had found a dog-eared paperback copy of Life in Hawaii for a dollar fifty at a used bookstore on some street downtown. Let’s say I’d just tossed it into the backseat of my car, intending to flip through it someday. Then let’s say it found its way into my home, where I stuffed it into the bottom shelf of my bookcase, along with old road atlases and some back issues of National Geographic. Would the book be any less valuable? Would it contain any less potential to transform my ministry and save me years of wasted energy and grief? No, of course not. The words would be the same, whether they were in a cheap paperback or a locked vault. The difference would be in the value I assigned to that book.

Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, For they are ever mine. I have more insight than my teachers, For Your testimonies are my meditation.

If you are willing, the Bible will give you wisdom beyond your years. It will save you from heartache beyond your imagination.

Only you can keep yourself spiritually healthy by feeding yourself. No one can do it for you by proxy.

Sodium can be destructive to humans . . . until it gets converted into a higher form: sodium chloride, or table salt. In the same way, knowledge is never an end in itself. It must be converted into a higher form—wisdom—for it to become useful and beneficial to us.

You won’t survive without God’s insights and wisdom.

Wisdom is contagious. It’s something you catch more than something you comprehend.

I weighed in. ‘‘Andrew, why don’t you take the next two weeks and commit to one thing. Don’t come in till ten each morning. Take the first two hours and do your devotions. Make them rich and meaningful. We will pay you to spend that time with God, one on one. Then I promise, after two weeks, if you still want out, I will give you a nice severance and my blessing.’’

(I’ve discovered that whenever you need to change something, always start small, but start now.)

Neglecting devotions will cause you more problems, more quickly, than just about anything you can name. Spending unrushed time alone with God in His Word releases a fountain of refreshment from the very core of your being.

And yet . . . if you know Solomon’s whole story, you know that in the end he wound up a colossal failure. Why? How did it happen? How could he go from being the wisest man who ever lived to one of the Bible’s most shocking failures? Apparently, Solomon forgot where his wisdom came from.

The Holy Spirit knows all about the looming gray clouds that will descend on you next month. You don’t, of course. But He does, and He will prepare you for what’s just over the horizon. As you receive His wisdom, you deposit it into the archives of your heart, and it will bear fruit at exactly the right time.

What’s the secret of achieving a successful and fruitful life? It all comes down to what you do with God’s words.

As you dry up, you become more vulnerable to temptation.

And how do sheep know the shepherd’s voice? They know it because they hear it so much.

If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking. But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind.11

‘‘No,’’ I said, ‘‘but you sure were unwise.’’

Do you know what my friend’s real problem was? Although he wasn’t operating in the realm of right or wrong, he failed in the area of wise and unwise.

Wisdom cost Samson his marriage, his family, his ministry, and both of his eyes. The wisdom he garnered from that pain he holds in trust for you and me. We have only to visit with him for those gems to be deposited on our behalf.

Someone once said to me, ‘‘The secret of growing in divine wisdom is to come to God stupid. Tell Him you don’t know a thing. Tell Him you need to know how to think, how to tie your shoes, how to win friends and influence anybody!’’

‘‘One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.’’

It’s just one thing. Getting back to the Source.

Why would someone of Paderewski’s enormous talent insist on playing scales for three hours daily? He had a ready answer. ‘‘If I skip one day of scales,’’ he explained, ‘‘when I play in concert, I notice it. If I skip two days of scales, my coach will notice. And if I skip three days, the world will notice.’’

Wow, love this!!

When you miss your devotions one day, you notice. When you miss them two days, your spouse and kids notice. And when you miss them three days, the world notices.

Furthermore, we get spiritually weak. If we go without food for several days, how do we start to feel and act? We get cranky, suffer headaches, become abnormally edgy. Starvation causes us to make chaotic choices. Every action is imbalanced; every motive skewed. Neglecting to feed our spirit and ignoring the hunger of our soul causes spiritual weakness; this results in desperate decisions and stinking thinking!

When the dejected young man told his boss about the discount store, the foreman replied, ‘‘Well, that’s your problem. You bought a cheap tape measure. It’s wrong. Son, in the future, don’t skimp on the basics. When those are wrong, everything you do will be wrong.’’

Gradually they would have escalated into a full-blown fiasco.