During a five-hour family road trip, my friend’s ten-year old daughter asked him, “If you won the lottery, what would you do with the money?” After the initial surprise that she knew what the lottery was, they talked through choices they’d make if they had unlimited resources. His daughter would fly around the world telling people about Jesus, and still have enough money to fly home every weekend to live with her parents. His seven-year old son had only one item on his list: he’d buy the Minnesota Twins!

For many, our wish lists are longer than our cash on hand lists. People invest time, energy, and planning into how they can get more money. They worry about it and lose sleep over it. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with having money, gold, silver, or things on our wish list. The danger comes when that’s our top priority.

Solomon communicates God’s priorities in Proverbs 16:16. How much better to get wisdom than gold, to choose understanding rather than silver!

Wisdom is better than wealth because in it and through it we find God! God is the source of true wisdom. When we fear Him by recognizing His greatness and approaching Him with a reverential awe that gives Him highest honor, we come to know Him deeply and personally. That’s what God wants! He desires to be known, loved, and acknowledged as God of this world and of our hearts (Hoses 6:6).

From that fear of God and a surrender to His will instead of ours, we’ll experience wisdom’s protection. Wisdom will not guard our lives in the sense that we’ll always be safe and never experience difficulty, disaster, or death. Wisdom doesn’t protect us from bad stuff; it guards our conduct – preserving our lives from sin and its consequences (Proverbs 16:17).

How would your life and the lives of the girls in your club be different if you got wisdom? If we sought wisdom the way our culture pursues wealth, what radical, noticeable difference would there be in our speech, our relationships, our character, our work, and yes, the way we value and handle money? We don’t have to guess at the changes it would make, we can experience the change by applying the book of Proverbs to every corner and circumstance of our lives.