Wisdom is gained from experience. The wisdom literature in the Bible can often be seen as godly people talking with one another about the practical aspects of life. Charlie says to Frank, "This is how it works best." That's wisdom.

Unless people are free to really investigate their experience, they cannot learn from it. They do not gain wisdom. If you ever hear someone pray for wisdom, send up an immediate intercession for mercy, because wisdom is not something that can be poured into the head of another. It's something that has to be learned, usually by going through some kind of challenge or trial.

Sin is experience of failure ? the experience of not performing up to some kind of standard. In the Bible, that is the standard of the nature of God. People are finite, and we cannot understand all of what God is doing or the ways in which God operates. Even with regard to what we do comprehend, we cannot maintain a consistent pattern of performance with regard to our understanding. We blow it. But do we learn from our mistakes, or do we hold up the garlic, turn our faces away and refuse to contemplate our sin? If we do that, we cannot learn from it, and then we are doomed to repeat it.

The grace of God, the forgiveness, and the reconciliation with God that is possible because Jesus took all our failure upon Himself is the crux of what people call "the gospel." It's as if God picks us up out of a stack of acceptance-based-on-performance and places us in a stack of acceptance-based-on forgiveness. In that new stack, He doesn't count up how many wrongs we've done; He doesn't relate to us on that basis at all, so we are free of a performance-based approach to living.

Most people do not live in that kind of freedom, however. They cannot allow it of others, and they cannot permit it for themselves. They reinforce their lives with rules and the fantasy that the awareness of rules will set them free; it's a tragedy, because the only thing rules do is to create more failure. Regardless, what makes it possible to gain wisdom from failure is precisely this freedom, because it allows a person to dare to peer into the risky picture of his or her own sin. That's where a person really learns about him or herself.

Psychologists call that "insight." Many of my colleagues call it awareness ? being able to pay attention to a more full range of one's current experience.

When people come to me I often tell them that they are not a single person with problems, but a problematic situation that includes other people and a variety of contexts of life, and then I ask them, "What is your part in creating that situation?" A person cannot know that about him or herself unless he or she is free enough to actually examine what they do, think, feel, or want and how they succumb to familiar destructive patterns of doing, thinking, feeling, and wanting.

When a religious person prays for victory over his or her sin, do you think God pours that into their heads, or do you think that God begins the process of corrective experiences that stimulate awareness or insight and result in wisdom? I believe God can heal a broken leg in an instant, but I believe God renews a mind one step at a time. There is certainly a point in life at which a person believes and entrusts him or herself to the work of Christ on their behalf, but then ensues a life-long process of growth in which God walks a person into every corner of their personal space and turns on the lights of awareness. None can do that unless they are free, courageous, and continually drawing on their trust account with God.