Wise Living: Receiving, Reflecting, and Returning God’s Love
I’m at CMS Summer School again — a place my family and I have been coming to for fourteen years now. It’s become a familiar way to begin the year: opening God’s word together, listening, thinking, and allowing ourselves to be shaped before the year gathers pace.
This year, Dan Wu is teaching on Proverbs and wise living. What follows are not polished conclusions, but reflections and notes I found myself jotting down as I listened — thoughts that stayed with me and are still working their way through me.
One of the first things Dan named was how the Bible is both shallow and deep — accessible and yet endlessly rich. Proverbs captures this well. There is a simplicity to it, a sense that here is what you need to live, and yet there is depth that invites returning, re-reading, and growing over time. Wisdom, like Proverbs itself, is something we step into slowly.
At the centre of true wisdom is the fear of the Lord. Not fear as anxiety, but a life anchored in God — built on His love and faithfulness rather than our own competence. Wisdom, then, is not primarily about outcomes or success, but about where our life is grounded.
There is a lot of repetition in Proverbs. Dan suggested this is intentional — God wants us to be basted in His wisdom. We forget easily. Wisdom needs time and repetition to soak in. It’s not just information to learn, but a way of being formed.
Proverbs uses both metaphor and direct instruction, engaging not only our thinking but our emotions and imagination. Wisdom is meant to draw us toward living more fully for God, not just knowing the right thing to do, but wanting it.
Again and again, wisdom is described in relational terms — love and faithfulness. And importantly, God’s wisdom is meant to be passed on within relationships, with warmth and care for the other person. Wisdom is not cold or detached.
Proverbs 3:1–2 speaks of peace — of life being reconfigured under God. Peace not as the absence of difficulty, but as life ordered around God’s plans and purposes. This challenges thin ideas of blessing. The prosperity gospel is far too limiting in its understanding of what blessing looks like from God’s perspective.
Proverbs 3:3 stood out: bind love and faithfulness around your neck. Dan spoke about clinging to love and faithfulness the way a child clings desperately to their father for safety and security. Faithfulness in Scripture is more than consistency — it is deep relational trustworthiness, expressed in justice, truth, and integrity.
That raised questions for me:
Who are the people who are genuinely committed to my wellbeing?
Who am I committed to — determined to do good for?
And why is this so hard?
Because we cannot do this in our own strength. We need God’s strength and capacity, not just our own resolve.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”
Dan named how real the struggle is here. Trust sounds simple, but it is deeply difficult. Why? Because sin constantly turns our eyes inward. He used the image of a shopping trolley with a bad wheel — always pulling us in the wrong direction, no matter how hard we try to steer straight.
Our world is saturated with distrust — and churches are not immune. The challenge is to turn our eyes inward honestly, to notice where we are quietly relying on ourselves for answers. Naming this before God and praying against it is part of learning wisdom.
Trust becomes especially hard when we keep praying and the answer is “no,” or “not yet,” or “not that way.” And yet we are reminded of who God is: compassionate and gracious, slow to anger (Exodus 34:6).
Proverbs also speaks of wisdom as a woman — someone to be sought with desire and attentiveness. Dan described it as seeking wisdom the way a young man seeks the peace he finds with his new wife. Wisdom is relational, something we pursue, not control.
One image that stayed with me was this: from God comes love, wisdom, and faithfulness — toward us, in our direction. Like a mirror, we receive it, reflect it back to Him, and return it to others. But the order matters. If we try to reflect before we have received, it quickly becomes distorted into legalism: because I’ve done this, I will get that. Dan compared it to trying to start a car before putting oil in the engine. Receiving comes first.
C.S. Lewis captured something of this posture when he wrote about turning every innocent pleasure back into praise. Wise living receives God’s gifts and returns them as worship.
Dan ended by pointing us to the cross as the ultimate display of wisdom. In Jesus — full of grace and truth — love and faithfulness meet. At the cross, God does the impossible: sin is judged, mercy is poured out, and the world is re-made through self-giving love. This is wisdom the world could not imagine.
Christians, then, are not people of confidence because we are strong, but because God is steadfast. We can send things up in prayer before they come out in sin. God can handle our worst — unfiltered and unsanitised.
As I sat with these reflections, these questions stay with me to reflect on:
Where do I distort the order?
Where am I currently trying to reflect love, faithfulness, or wisdom to others without first receiving it from God myself?
What does “trusting the Lord with all my heart” feel hardest to live out right now — and what might that reveal about where I am leaning on my own understanding?
As this year begins, what might it look like for me to slow down enough to receive God’s love and faithfulness before responding, acting, or striving?
