Wonderful Counselor

Every December, we pause to consider the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. As Christians, we believe that God became “like us”. He became a man, born under the laws that govern mankind. And if there is one verse in the Bible that we most associate with the Incarnation, it has to be Isaiah 9:6:

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

We’re going to take the next four Sundays, the season of Advent, to look closely at these four names of Jesus starting with “Wonderful Counselor”, which is a title of wisdom.

And to get a sense of what that means, we need to think about how we measure wisdom. There’s a difference between knowledge and wisdom, right? You cannot have wisdom without knowledge, but you can have knowledge without wisdom.

That’s because wisdom is more than having the right information. Wisdom is knowing how to apply that information through experience, insight, and good judgment.

Proverbs 2 describes wisdom as knowledge with understanding. Psalm 111 describes wisdom as something we practice with understanding. Ephesians 4:15 tells us to speak the truth in love. John 1 describes Jesus as being full of grace and truth.

Speaking with wisdom is more than speaking the truth. It’s speaking the truth in love, tempered with grace. That’s how the Bible describes the wisdom that comes from God.

To give an example, imagine someone at work makes a costly mistake and the boss publicly shames them in front of the entire team. That’s truth without wisdom, right? It would be much better to discuss it privately and coach the employee to a better result.

Listen to how James 3:17 describes wisdom:

Wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.

If you think about the best counselors, the best mentors, the people in our lives we most respect – it’s always the people who have information, but they also know how to leverage that information for our good. And most often, they are speaking from experience.

That’s because God built us as humans in such a way that wisdom is relational. It is experiential. It’s interconnected.

In fact, most of us recoil when we meet the “know-it-all” … the person who seems to have all the information with none of the care and concern. The Bible has a lot to say about that kind of person as well.

The Proverbs teach that a man who is wise in his own eyes is worse than a fool. 1 Corinthians 13 says that if I understand all mysteries and have all knowledge, but have not love, I am nothing. James 3 says that boastful, arrogant knowledge is earthly, unspiritual, and demonic.

This is something we need to consider carefully, because we live in the “Information Age”. Almost all the information that has been acquired by humanity is now available to us. And we don’t even have to go searching for it anymore. Artificial Intelligence can provide us with that information in seconds.

But information alone will not make the world a better place. It won’t end wars. It won’t cure all diseases. It won’t solve world hunger. Even in the cases where we have the right information to solve some of our problems, we know it isn’t that simple.

Think of any problem in your personal life. Go home and start a conversation with ChatGPT. Try it. I’ll give you some ideas. Try asking it, “How can I be a better spouse?” or “How can I be a better parent?” or “How can I quit my addiction?” or “How can I get out of debt?”

And you know what? It’s going to give you excellent information. It really will. And I have no problem with you getting the information you need to improve your life. All truth belongs to God. It doesn’t matter where you find it. In that respect, AI is a very helpful tool.

But you know the information alone isn’t the problem, don’t you? In fact, you probably already know most of things AI would tell you to do. We know what we should be doing. We just refuse to do it.

Have you ever known what the right thing to do was, but found it difficult to follow through? I can think of several examples in my own life. I know what I need to eat if I want to be healthier, but I keep choosing the unhealthy options. I know I don’t need to spend so much time looking at screens, but I keep doing it anyway.

You can read every book on money management and still stink at managing money. You can read every book on marriage and still have a terrible marriage.

That’s a problem artificial intelligence has no power to solve. What do you do with a world full of humans who have more information than we’ve ever had before and very little change in terms of solving real problems?

Every year there are conferences where the world’s greatest experts get together to discuss major problems and very little changes. How do we have unlimited access to information, but world happiness is in decline, people are still starving to death, and bombs are still dropping?

The Bible describes our condition clearly. Hosea 4 says we destroy ourselves because we have rejected knowledge. Proverbs 1 says that we hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord. Romans 1 says we suppress the truth, claiming to be wise but instead we have become fools. God has given the world over to that darkness.

And how terrible would it be if all I did for you was just give you more information? And that’s exactly what passes for a sermon in a lot of churches. Self-help. You too can have a better life in three easy steps… but it does nothing to change your heart.

God did not solve the problem of sin and death by sending us a better teacher with better information. God sent the Wonderful Counselor, who lovingly but firmly calls us to repentance.

Jesus knows everything there is to know… past, present, future – Jesus sees it all with remarkable clarity. None of it gets muddled up in his brain. He forgets nothing. He misses nothing.

But the knowledge of Jesus is something more than cold, calculated information. Jesus is not the deistic supercomputer of the universe. Instead, Jesus has intimate, experiential knowledge of what it means to be human.

He has felt pain. He has felt sadness. He has felt hatred and injustice. He quaked with anger, and he bled with grief. He felt the sting of death.

This is what makes Jesus so much more attractive than any other religious figure in history. For me, specifically, it was knowing that Jesus had experienced abandonment because I know what that feels like too.

Jesus is God’s perfect example of “knowledge with understanding”. Unlike us, Jesus had all the information and He did the right thing. He did the hard thing. He did it without flinching and without complaining. Hebrews 4 describes Jesus as a great high priest who can sympathize with us in our weaknesses but remained without sin.

Jesus was the wisest person to ever walk the planet. Repeatedly in the Gospels, we see Jesus demonstrating His wisdom in the way He dealt with real people.

Consider the woman caught in adultery. The religious leaders brought her to Jesus, expecting Him to either condone the punishment of stoning her or go against the law. But in His perfect wisdom, Jesus responded, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’

He exposed the hypocrisy of her accusers while offering mercy to the woman. He cut through the human pretenses, showing He not only had knowledge of the law but a deeper wisdom that upheld both justice and grace.

Consider the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus approached her with deep understanding, revealing personal details about her life that no one else knew. Yet, He did so with compassion and grace.

Rather than condemning her, He offered her ‘living water’—a promise of spiritual fulfillment that required repentance, but also had the power to heal her shame and brokenness.

Jesus is the wisdom of God incarnate. And He invites us to come to Him with our burdens. Come with our grief and our guilt and our shame. Come to Him as the Wonderful Counselor.

The counsel of Jesus is unique because it doesn’t simply point us toward a better version of ourselves; it points us toward Him. In coming to Jesus, we find not only direction but transformation. He changes our perspective, He reshapes our priorities, and He fills us with a hope that is anchored in His unchanging character, not our feeble efforts.

Trust that His wisdom is perfect, even when it challenges your own understanding. Trust that His empathy is real, even as you walk through your most difficult trials.

Approach the Wonderful Counselor with confidence. Seek His counsel daily, not just in times of crisis, but as a way of life. James 1 says that if we lack wisdom, all we need to do is ask God for it in faith. He gives it generously!

This Advent, take time to sit in the presence of the One who knows you fully and loves you completely. He knows you better than you know yourself. He knows your past, your present, and your future. He knows what you need and what you don’t need. Trust Him.