If you remember from yesterday’s post, one of the attributes of Wisdom is ‘good fruits’. One of the things that has always intrigued me is that the statement is “… full of compassion AND good fruits…” Good fruits is coupled with compassion.
The logical implication is that good fruits don’t exist without compassion and the manifestation of compassion is good fruits. I like that. This gives a context to being fruitful (which is extremely high on my personal list of qualities to exhibit/encourage). What it tells me is that apart from compassion my fruits will not be good. But this also gives an expression for compassion – fruitful.
Scripture always proves itself and it really is most elegant in how it defines and describes words and then goes the extra step of providing examples that are understandable. This is true in this case. If you look at ‘wisdom’ as possessing the attribute of good fruit then wisdom becomes a sought after quality in one’s life.
When you consider wisdom as full of compassion then if your goal is to communicate understanding to someone, your words will be compassionate. Notice I didn’t say that you water down wisdom to make it more palatable or that you lie, but you do look at the words you use to declare understanding for the hearer.
Wisdom, if it is wisdom, is always presented in the frame of reference of the listener – for how else will they be able to comprehend? And if understanding is the goal then the words will be compassionate… resulting in good fruit.
