Working as a referee, I remember one particular game where the coach came over angry at the call I had just made. He chased me down the side line shouting about the call, angrily and accusingly. During half time he made a point to make the call a bigger deal than it should have been. Walking up and shouting to grab the whole gyms attention, he told me (in not so many words) that I was the worst and dumbest official he had ever seen, and that I needed to learn the rules.

Patiently I waited to let him make his point, before pulling out the official rule book, and providing him reference to the new rule on which the call was based. After all of the excitement, anger, and yelling, the coach humbly turned away and walked back to his bench. For the rest of the game he didn't mutter one word, and at the end thanked me for the job I had done, and apologized for his comments earlier. After all was said and done, it turned out to be him who was the fool, who fell to his pride and arrogance.

Today there are a lot of people throughout the world that fit Isaiah's description of a fool. And I think as Christians, we fall in the greatest danger zone for being, or acting like fools. Because as Christians we claim to serve Christ, and we claim to love God. Christ said that if we love Him, and if we want to serve Him, then we have to obey His commandments (John 14:15).

These commandments include keeping a pure mind, and a pure heart. We are told not to focus on sinful or worldly things, but rather to keep Christ as the center of our focus. Yet, I think its fair to say we all fall to sinful thinking and sinful deeds.

We want to share the Word of God, and to share Christ's salvation with others, but sometimes we do so incorrectly. We claim something to be in the Bible, or claim something to be right, even when its not. Just like the coach we can easily make false statements... and we need to be careful in our research, and in our words to make sure that we are serving God and not our own desires.

Least but not last, as Christians we are told to love our neighbors (Matthew 22:39). This is a commandment that many of us (including myself) fail time and time again. We as Christians try not to boast about the works we do, but at the same time we hold a prideful feeling, or a feeling of how good we are to do these things. And yet, how often do we turn people away who need help? How often do we let people struggle simply because we do not have the "time," the "energy," or the "resources" to help them.

Perhaps the greatest danger with being foolish is that we only end up tricking ourselves. We try to convince ourselves of how good we are, or that we have done enough already. We try to tell ourselves that we are right in our thinking and that contradicting verses are simply a translational error, or interpreted incorrectly.

Someone once said that "the greatest folly of the fool, is that he doesn't know he is one." The saving grace for the coach was that he was willing to realize his error, and accept the reality of the situation. Are you willing to examine the areas of your life that make you look "foolish," and if so are you willing work at correcting them?