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Today's talk comes from Pastor Ben Stewart. Well, in the famous allegory Pilgrim's Progress,

John Bunyan pictures the Christian on his

journey towards the kingdom of life, and that Christian must be outfitted for that journey

by three sisters, charity, piety, and prudence. And he was giving us that image and that allegory because he was showing us this is what

the Christian needs to be successful in life, that all of us, if we're going to journey through

life successfully, need to sit at the feet of charity, piety, and prudence, which are old school words

for piety, righteousness. We need to know what's right and do what's right. Charity is love.

We need to know what it is, to be loved by God and to love him and love others.

And prudence is wisdom. That to be successful in life, we need righteousness, we need love,

and we need wisdom. And the book we're in Ecclesiastes is a wisdom book. Now, wisdom is defined in the book of

Proverbs, that other wisdom book, with kind of a pile up of words. Wisdom is said to possess knowledge

and insight. And so to be wise is to have information, to have knowledge, and also have the

insight. That means to understand the particularities of how something

works. But wisdom goes further than that. In the book of Proverbs, it says that wisdom has with it

prudence and discretion. That's not just knowledge of something or insight into how it works.

That's understanding when and how to make precise decisions.

And so wisdom, if you pull those things together,

wisdom is the understanding of how the world works

and an understanding of how to work within the world.

It could be translated skill, competency in the complexities of life. A skillful quarterback doesn't just know

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