You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan concludes a series about the nature of wisdom by discussing how we might

wisely engage conflict and difficult bias in relationships.

Dan invites us to consider that a life of wisdom is not marked by conflict

avoidance, but rather by the willingness to engage difficult binds in a way that leads to deeper

goodness for ourselves and others. As we conclude this final series on wisdom, I want to talk about

how wisdom engages the incredible complexity of interacting with human

beings. In some ways, there's wisdom with regard to how we plane a piece of lumber, how we shape

marble into something of beauty. So wisdom is how we apply skill

to life. But the ultimate wisdom, of course, is how we bring the life of God into our own and

therefore offer it as a gift to others.

And so to engage wisdom, you have to engage conflict.

And that is what we've been speaking about as entering the binds in relationship with knowledge,

but with the wisdom of applying that knowledge to the unique situation of that person,

that situation, and your own unique role in their life.

So if we start with an obvious beginning point, again, binds are inevitable.

They are simply part of living in a fallen world. And as Jesus is confronted by those who are asking,

who's coined does this belong to?

And as David drools down his beard and scratches or crawl,

or literally brings his fingernails into the wood,

he's suggesting to Abimlech, I'm not somebody who want to kill because you don't want to mess with the gods that inhabit me. There's wisdom as we deal with the unique binds that

we live in in life. And so to start by saying that there's always this intersection between intimacy

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