There are two kinds of people who might read this verse and feel it land somewhere tender. The first is the high-achiever — the one with the credentials, the track record, the room full of people who look to them for answers. The second is the under-confident — the one who has always felt like they were one step behind, one qualification short, one room too foreign to belong in. What is remarkable about this verse is that Paul is speaking to both at the same time. Because underneath the surface, both are wrestling with the same question: Is what I know enough?

The word Paul uses — “deceive” — is not incidental. In the Greek, it carries the weight of self-constructed illusion. It is not merely being wrong; it is the act of building a case for yourself, convincing yourself that your accumulated wisdom, your experience, your instincts are sufficient. It is a trap dressed up as confidence. And Paul’s instruction is startling in its simplicity: stop.

“Do not deceive yourselves. If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become ‘fools’ so that you may become truly wise.”

1 Corinthians 3:18 · NIV

The Underdog’s Journey

For much of my life, I have been the underdog in the room. The youngest. The woman in a male-dominated industry. The immigrant whose English was not her first language — the one with the accent, the one who had to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously. By every measure the world uses to calculate credibility, I was starting from behind.

And yet — from one season to the next, from one country to the next — God kept opening doors I had no business walking through. Roles that stretched beyond my experience. Tables I was not sure I had earned a seat at. Every single time, I carried imposter syndrome like luggage I could not put down. What I was learning, slowly and sometimes painfully, was that God was not waiting for me to become qualified. He was waiting for me to come to Him first.

Time and again, when I stopped trying to outthink the room and instead brought the problem to God — genuinely, humbly, without pretending I already had the answer — He delivered. Not always in the way I expected. But consistently, faithfully, and in ways that left no doubt about the source. The wisdom was never mine to begin with. I was simply learning to access the right one.

He was not waiting for me to become qualified. He was waiting for me to come to Him first.

The Other Side of the Coin

But I have also lived the other side of this verse — and it is a humbling thing to admit. There have been seasons where familiarity became complacency. Where I stopped praying over things because I already knew the answer. Where my track record became a substitute for dependence. And almost without exception, those were the seasons where things unravelled in ways I did not see coming.

This is what Paul means by self-deception. It is not dramatic. It does not announce itself. It creeps in quietly, dressed as competence. And it is just as dangerous in the under-confident person as in the achiever — because the one who lacks confidence can equally deceive themselves into believing that God is not interested in their insufficiency, that they have too little to bring to the table to warrant consulting Him at all. Both responses — arrogance and resignation — are ways of removing God from the equation.

What Foolishness Actually Looks Like

To “become a fool” in Paul’s framing is not to abandon wisdom or competence. It is to radically reorient the source of it. It is the act of walking into the room — the boardroom, the difficult conversation, the season of uncertainty — and privately, genuinely saying: God, I don’t have this. You do. What do You say? It is the posture of a person who has enough self-awareness to know the limits of their own understanding, and enough faith to believe that something greater is available to them.

What has become unmistakably clear across the arc of my own story is this: the more present God is in what I am doing, the more likely I am to succeed. Not because He is a performance strategy, but because true wisdom — the kind that navigates complexity with grace, that sees around corners, that leads well under pressure — flows from Him. The world’s version of wisdom is impressive but finite. His is not.

A Word to Both Rooms

If you are the achiever reading this — the one whose résumé is long and whose confidence is earned — this verse is an invitation, not an insult. Your gifts are real. Your experience is valuable. But there is a ceiling to what you can build alone, and God is not interested in your credentials nearly as much as He is interested in your surrender. The most powerful version of you is not the self-sufficient one. It is the one who brings everything they have to the feet of the One who gave it to them.

And if you are the under-confident one — the one who has always felt like the underdog, the outsider, the one who does not quite belong — hear this clearly: your insufficiency is not a disqualification. It is an invitation. God has never once required you to have it all figured out before He moves. He only asks that you come. The foolishness He calls you to is simply this: stop waiting until you are enough, and start going to the One who already is.

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Whatever you are stepping into today — whether from a place of confidence or inadequacy — pause before you proceed on your own wisdom alone. Not because you have nothing to offer, but because there is an infinitely wiser counsellor available to you. Lay it down. Ask. And trust that the One who calls you to become a fool is the very same One who makes you truly wise.