Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment.
I am not the sum of all wisdom and knowledge. I’m not even the sum of half of it, though I try my best to pretend. In point of fact, I represent the sum of only a barest fraction of human knowledge and understanding- and all man’s wisdom and understanding and knowledge is an infinitesimal pittance compared to God’s. Despite this, I, like most people, spend an inordinately large amount of time convinced that I am definitely, unalterably right, regardless of what anybody else says. I want to listen to myself; I want to isolate myself from naysayers and advisors, whether by ignoring their advice or avoiding it. Such is not the course of wisdom.
The impulse to avoid advice, particularly negative advice (reproof), has numerous origins in our souls; among the most prominent are pride, fear, and envy. Pride is our desire to consider ourselves better than everybody else; advise is useless if I’m better than you, and listening to advice risks admitting I’m not as superior as I want to be. Fear, in this context, is the willful ignorance we maintain towards the nagging truths we dislike: God’s nature, our nature, and the smallness of us in comparison to Him. Fear whispers that listening to advice is a step towards admitting what we don’t want to admit (our sin). Envy is an element of sin we too often dismiss but which the Tenth Commandment is particularly directed towards, as much as the sixth commandment towards anger or the first towards pride. Envy motivates us to despise advice because we hate the admission inherent in taking somebody else’s advice. We want to be comprehensively superior to everybody else.
At the root of these three and of all sin, though, is the same blasphemy. The sin of man ultimately comes down to a desire to be god in God’s place. We are prideful because we desire to value ourselves as God values Himself, except that we aren’t God, making that self-valuation a lie. We fear because we know that our self-valuation is a lie, because we know our sin and imperfection, and we desperately wish to avoid confronting or admitting the fact that we aren’t up to God’s standard. We envy because we know and refuse to know that we are not God and do not have His power; when we come to a conclusion, it may be wrong.
The various desires to ‘isolate’ ourselves from wise counsel are thus immensely strong. We must not heed these sins. We must not only receive counsel but seek it out, going to those who are wise or skilled in order to advantage ourselves by their wisdom.
Taking advice, however, does not mean abandoning thought. Human vices are as a rule virtues misapplied, and this case is no exception. The virtue of humility and teachability can become in the fool’s life something else entirely. It can become the vice of letting other people do the work we ought to be doing. I must not simply listen to or obey advice; I must apply it.
Applying advice is a skill and an art. The goal here is to discern what in the advice is excellent and what is harmful. In human advice, both elements will always appear; the soundest tactician will err, whether tactically or in another area, such as morality. Human advisors are just as fallible in nature as we are, after all, and just because he’s better at something than I am doesn’t mean he’s perfect. My responsibility, moreover, is my responsibility. If I undertake a righteous task, I have a duty to God to complete it to His glory (Col. 3:23), not off-load it to somebody else.
We have various tools for assessing advice. We can compare the advice itself to what we know and consider its internal reasoning. We can consider its moral element, both the direct parts (such as ‘Adultery is bad’) and the indirect parts (such as how some advice might appear good until we recognize that it does not foster a life of diligence in the one who applies it). We can (and we ought always to) assess the reliability of the speaker. Does he have authority? Does he have the applicable skill and knowledge? Where does his knowledge end, his skill? What is his previous record, as an advisor and in the role he now advises about?
In the end, only one advisor may be and must be obeyed without any question, save the questions integral to interpreting advice. That advisor is God, speaking in His holy Scripture. All other advice, even that claiming to be from Him, is subject to test (Deut. 13:1-5; Acts 17:11). His Word speaks truly, however, and our questions for it must not be of doubt. They should instead be of inquiry, to avail ourselves to the utmost of this most precious gift of God to us, this advice which guides us to “sound judgement.”
God bless
Written by Colson Potter
