Think of the world of psychology. Truth changes in the world of psychology every ten years or so. It is not truth if it is changing. There are literally hundreds of entirely different schools of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and most of them are quite different from each other. And how can you possibly respect a school of discipline, which is so divided, so inconsistent, which is as fragmented as that? That is not scientific. Modem psychology, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, behavioural psychology – evaluation of how people think, what makes them function and tick, how you can improve them, why they go wrong – this is not science today. Maybe you thought it was. Maybe you think of medicine, chemistry, physics, or mathematics and you think this is another one. This is based upon things you can be certain of, a school of thought which is logical and consistent. Do you know it is a complete exception to all that? And yet these are the folk that people are turning to now to explain the present situation. Everything has gone wrong. Small boys can kill an even smaller boy with such barbarity. What has happened? How do we explain this? Quick! Call up the psychologists! But what do they know? One thing you may be sure of, their successors in ten years’ time will have an entirely different explanation from the present lot. This is not truth. It starts from the wrong foundation. Truth says, human beings are depraved, human nature is depraved, human nature is sinful. As soon as anyone says, ‘I reject those standards of morality revealed in the Scripture. I believe we have got to draw up our own for the times’, nothing you say will have any stability or any truth or any relationship to reality.
Here it is put in this way, if you seek wisdom it is like coming to a talk. It is not receiving an injection. ‘Lord, give me wisdom,’ and you get an immediate infusion of wisdom, and you understand. No, ‘Lord, give me wisdom. I will sit patiently, and I will listen to the talk.’ I am referring to our general attitude before the word of God. You go to a lecture, let us say it lasts forty minutes. You cannot cut it down; you have got to sit through it. It is something that is gentle and progressive. You cannot rush it. It is true that when we are converted we do get an immediate infusion of wisdom. Conversion is wonderful. We understand things almost overnight that we did not understand before. But it is not by any means everything. And now the process of learning begins and it is going to be gradual. Sometimes we can be very proud, and we can decide, ‘I do not need that course. I do not need to listen carefully, and see wisdom building up, and read the word of God. And so we rush off and take the most sophisticated and difficult book off the shelf we can find. I am a special person. I will tackle the most difficult things straight away. But no, we need to take it humbly and slowly, learning out of every trial, making gradual progress.