Invitation to Wisdom

I may have shared this story with some of you before. When I was a junior in college, I helped lead a mission trip to Gulfport, Mississippi. It was in the wake of hurricane Katrina, and there was still lots of clean up to be done. And so a group from Union University went down to assist with various Baptist disaster relief agencies that were working down there. And at this point in the game, I was pretty serious minded. I knew that I was pursuing ministry. I was teaching and preaching on a regular basis. I was very involved in different campus ministries and all that. And so I was helping to lead the trip. And part of that leadership is that they asked me to drive one of the Union University minivans, to take the group around all week to the different job sites. And so it was kind of a big responsibility. I had to take this test, but I was happy to do it. And we got down to Gulfport, and I was driving this group around one day, and my best friend was sitting in the passenger seat. We went over a little hill where a railroad track was. And there was a sign that said "bump" on it. Maybe you've seen those signs before when you've been driving down the road. And I've got this van full of college students. And we went over that and somebody commented about the bump sign. And my friend said, "the next time we go over that, I will pay you $20 for every 10 miles over the speed limit you hit that bump. I mean, no one's ever accused me of being reckless. No one's ever accused me of being fun. I mean, just look at me.

And I knew that behind that dare was his assumption that I would never do that because I was already a boring old man at age 20. And everybody knew it. And I said, "you know what, I'm gonna wipe that smirk off your face, and I'm about to take $40 out of your wallet." And I wheeled that van around, and I hit that bad boy at about 50mph. We flew what felt like the length of a football field. People were screaming, terrified. When we hit the ground, I looked around and everybody was all in one piece. I was like, "Ok, that probably was not my best moment, but I told you I'd do it. Give me my money."

And then I pressed the gas to go down the road. Nothing. It was dead. I wrecked the van actually. As it turned out, the van thought that I had wrecked it. The computer registered that there had been, you know, trauma obviously. And so that there wouldn't be an explosion like in an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, it shut the fuel off to the van. And so everything was just dead. And somebody had to come out and get the van. I'm standing on the side of the road. I cannot remember being more mortified than that. I'm sure I've done plenty of things that I should be mortified about, but that was the most I felt like I'd violated trust. I'd been stupid. I'd been reckless. And all those things were true. What was my problem in that moment?

My problem in that moment was not that I didn't love God. I loved God. My problem in that moment wasn't that I didn't know the Bible. I was tearing my bible up. My problem was not that I didn't have a heart to serve and to help other people. I wanted to do all those things. My problem was I was stupid. My problem was that I lacked wisdom. And here's something that I've found, not just since that day, but certainly since that day, is that it is very possible for us to love God, and to know His word, and even to have good intentions, but to make a wreck of our lives and a wreck of other people's lives for lack of wisdom, for the inability to distinguish how to behave, how to speak, how to make decisions in the very particular moments that come up in our lives every single day.

Would you agree that there are a lot of sweet, wonderful, God-loving, born-again people who every day are making life a whole lot harder than it has to be for lack of wisdom? Would you agree with that? I mean, do you see that person in your mirror when you shave or put your makeup on? Absolutely. What a gift it would be then if God in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden (that's how Paul describes Jesus Christ), what a gift if he would make his wisdom available to us. Well that's just what he's done here in the book of Proverbs.

What is a "proverb" anyway? Well, a proverb is a short, terse, densely packed statement of truth. It's usually pretty vivid because that makes it more memorable to us. And these truth statements are describing for us principles about how life works in God's world. And in this book of Proverbs, God has made this whole treasury of wise sayings available to us. And he invites us to hide them in our hearts, to read them, to think about them, to turn them over and over in our mind. See Proverbs and wisdom from God, it's not like an app on your iPhone. Remember when iphones first came out, and this big campaign was "there's an app for that?" All these very specific little things that come up in your life like, "oh, I need a level," or "I want a sound machine," or "I want to identify this leaf." There's an app for that, right? All these teeny little granular things, the iPhone provided all that. And you can just pull it up when you want it, and then put the app away and not worry about it. And that's how wisdom works, right? No, no, no! If you want this wisdom to change your life, and transform you, and lead you into the life that God designed you to live, you have to read it, and think about it, and meditate on it. It's like a cough drop. You just gotta keep sticking it in your jaw and working that thing over again and again and again. That's what the proverbs are like.

God invites us to receive his wisdom in Proverbs because he cares about you. God does not want to just forgive your sins when you get saved and take you to heaven when you die, and in between, watch you thrash around in foolishness. He doesn't want that. He loves you too much for that. Jesus said, "the thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy." But Jesus says "I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly." Jesus wants you to have an abundant life. And that means a wise life. And that means Jesus wants to help you not just with these huge issues of sin and salvation, which is what we've been talking about in Romans. Jesus also wants to come down at the ground level in your life and help you in all those little gritty details that come up every single day: time management, in-laws, communication, money, all this stuff that's right where you live, and right where you keep tripping up if you're being honest.

And so when we open to the book of Proverbs, it's almost like we've been told that we've been signed up for some kind of survival trip out in the wilderness. But we have an option to take Bear Grylls with us to identify what to eat and what not to eat, and what to take shelter under and where to sleep. All that. That's what Proverbs is like. It is the maker of the universe, the designer of life, the one who knows you better than you know yourself, offering himself to you, walking with you through every part of your life, showing you the way of wisdom. Who wouldn't want that? We're gonna spend the fall semester with the Lord's help walking through Proverbs together and we begin this morning with this introduction to the book.

Proverbs 1:1-7. I want to look at it three parts. 

What is the aim of Proverbs? What's the goal? What is it offering to you and to me? "The Proverbs of Solomon, son of David, King of Israel." He's just the most famous author of a lot of the Proverbs. There are other authors too. What are these Proverbs doing though? Verse 2: "to know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight, to receive instruction in wise dealing, in righteousness, justice, and equity." I think these verses outline for us at least four gifts that God wants to give to each of us through this study in the book of Proverbs. The first one is wisdom.

Wisdom is not the same as book smart. I think a lot of us kind of know that it's not the same as book smart. It's not the same as having a high IQ. Wisdom is skill. It's practical know-how, like a good carpenter, or like a good caterer who just knows how to bring all this stuff together to a successful result. Wisdom is the skill of living. Wisdom is knowing how to navigate your environment towards success, how to navigate your real circumstances towards success. One of the best descriptions of wisdom is in Proverbs 30 where we're pointed to these four different creatures in the animal kingdom. And all these creatures are really small and weak by themselves, but they've got wisdom. They have figured out how to navigate their environment so that they thrive.

One of those creatures is the ant. It is really little all by itself. You can squash it under your foot. But the ant has figured out if I work all summer long and store up food, then I've got what I need in the winter time. Another example is the rock badger. I've never seen one of those, but they live in the mountains. Apparently, they're easy pickings for eagles and hawks and other predators. But they figured out how to burrow into the cliff side so that they stay safe. Another one is the locust. Nobody's ever been threatened by one locust. But the Locusts are wise enough to know that if they swarm they can wreak havoc and they're safe. Finally, the lizard. No lizard has ever been invited to a state dinner, but a lizard has figured out how to find its way into a king's palace and make a home for itself there where it is cool and safe and really dignified.

And what those examples are giving us in Proverbs 3 are examples of wisdom, creatures who understand their environment, understand their place in that environment, and who know how to adapt to that environment accordingly so that they don't just survive, they thrive. That's wisdom. That's what God wants to give to us. If you've got wisdom, then no matter what your other weaknesses are, you can thrive. And if you don't have wisdom, then no matter what your strengths are, you're already doomed. Wisdom is critical to us. It keeps us from floundering in life. God wants to make you skillful at living. Wisdom.

Proverbs gives us insight. Life is tricky. Appearances are deceiving. That's a huge theme in the book of Proverbs. The best path for us to take is not always obvious to us. So for instance, it can seem like a good idea to take that new job that was just offered to us. It can seem like a good idea to flirt with that married person in your workplace. It can seem like a good idea to stomp and yell and raise your voice just to get your point across to your children at home. It can seem like a good idea to overspend on that house, on that car, on that wardrobe just to impress the people around you. It can seem like a good idea to go to that party where a lot of bad decisions are going to be made. It can seem like a really good idea not to discipline that child that's rebelling against you because you're tired and no one else seems to be doing that anyway. There's a lot of things that seem like a good idea. Are you with me? They seem like a really good idea until you wake up one day and realize you have made a horrible mistake.

Insight is the gift of seeing into the true nature of a situation. Insight: I'm not just seeing the surface, I'm seeing into the true nature of a situation. It's like Solomon who wrote a bunch of the Proverbs when those two women came to him claiming that they were both the mother of this child. You remember that Solomon needed insight to get past the surface appearance and the story that was being passed along to him to get to the truth. That's in 1 Kings 3 if you want to look up what Solomon did about that. Insight is a gift because it saves us from getting scammed, not just by telemarketers, but scammed in life. That's the gift of insight.

Instruction is also translated discipline in a lot of your translations. And here's the truth that both those words confront us with: None of us is naturally wise. Nobody comes into this world wise. Proverbs 22:15 says, "Folly is bound up in the heart of a child." Amen? It is bound up in the heart of a child. And it's not just talking about kids though. It stays with us throughout our lives unless God intervenes. So here's what Proverbs will help us understand: the sin that we are born into as descendants of Adam and Eve, it doesn't just make us unclean before God. Sin also makes us unwise in our lives. It skews our perspective about everything. It messes up the way we think about the world. Sin makes us foolish because it makes us think that we're always right. Sin makes us think that we deserve everything that we want. Sin makes us think that we always have a good reason for the selfish stuff that we do to hurt other people. Sin can twist things in our minds so that we always are the person who is good and pure and clean in every situation. That's what sin does. This is how it makes us foolish. And to undo that deeply ingrained, self-destructive, stupidity that's in all of us, we've got to submit to God's instruction. We've got to submit to God's discipline, God's training program.

James 1 talks about this. Sometimes we quote it here. "Receive with meekness, the implanted word that is able to save your souls." That's what God is calling all of us to do right now, to meekly receive what he has to say to us, no matter what he has to say to us. That means we've got to stop justifying all of our decisions. We've got to stop interrupting God and explaining why we did what we did or why our way is actually right. We've got to just zip it and let God through his word correct us, and rebuke us, and train us in righteousness, and redirect us to what is actual abundant life. If that sounds painful, it is. You know what's more painful? Ignoring God's instruction, resisting God's discipline, and blowing your life up. It is a gift for God to give us instruction.

There are plenty of ungodly people out there who are very good at getting what they want in this world. Would you agree with that? There are lots of skillful manipulators, and really good liars, and really crafty thieves. So that's a certain kind of wisdom. It's what Genesis 3 says about the serpent. He was the craftiest creature in all of the garden. But James 3 helps us understand that there are really two kinds of wisdom. There's wisdom from above which comes from God and submits to his rule and his character. But then there's this wisdom from below, and it will teach you how to get your way, and get ahead, and get what you want in this world for a time, but it will not help you on Judgment Day.

Proverbs wants to steer us away from wisdom from below, the wisdom of the world, to the wisdom that comes from God. Real wisdom is always shaped by the character of God. That's what verse 3 is talking about: righteousness, justice, and equity. So something that comes up in Proverbs is there are going to be times where it seems wise to just do what all the sneaky bad guys are doing because they seem to be getting ahead. They seem to be doing better than you are. Why not just play by their rules? But we're reminded here that real wisdom always conforms to the heart of God. And real wisdom will always be vindicated in the end. So if your brand of wisdom isn't making you look more like Jesus, it's not real wisdom, and it will not hold you up in the end. So wisdom, insight, instruction, character. God wants to pour all of this and more into my life and into your life through the book of Proverbs. Man, I want some of that. That's the aim of the book.

Who is Proverbs for? Who can benefit from it? Well, verses 4-7 give us some categories.

Now to say that you're simple, that doesn't mean that you're dumb. It means that you're a beginner in Proverbs. It means that you're a beginner. It means that you're green, you're a rookie. So that means you're a little naive. It means you don't know what you don't know. You understand life at a superficial level, but don't grasp the complexities of life.

I understand electricity at a very superficial level. As in, when I flip the switch on the wall, it gets bright. And when I flip the switch down, it gets dark. That's about the limits of my knowledge of electricity. That's simple. You want to talk to Jeff Parish or Gary Smith or some of these professionally trained electricians. They understand the complexities of electricity, right? You want them wiring your house, not me. The simple person understands life at a superficial surface level, and that makes them dangerous because even with good intentions, if you're simple, you're going to blunder into trouble all the time.

Proverbs 22:3 says, "The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it." So in this case, the simple person, they're not trying to be rebellious, they're not trying to be bad, they just don't know that they're in danger. And so they charge ahead. But do they still suffer for it? Absolutely. And that's all of us at some level. I mean, even if you have the best of intentions, we can be totally oblivious in our marriages, and we can be clueless about handling money or dealing with certain kinds of people. We can just kind of follow the herd when it comes to sex and dating, or parenting, or alcohol, or whatever the case may be, which means even if you are just as sweet as you can be, you are blowing past all these flashing orange signs that say "stop, turn back, dangerous waters, you could get killed." We blow past all of that straight into a minefield so that we end up getting a leg blown off. We wonder why, and then do it again. That's the problem of the simple.

Proverbs then offers us a great gift. He wants to give prudence to the simple. Prudence means caution. Isn't there an investment firm called Prudential? You don't want an investment firm called "Reckless." You don't want a financial investment firm called "Lazy," or "Careless," or "It'll be ok." You want an investment firm called "Prudential." They are cautious in the way they handle your wealth. Proverbs wants to give prudence to the simple, to get you home safe through life.

Being young is wonderful. I think I remember that far back. Being young is wonderful. When you are young, you've got energy and strength and beauty. We've had all those beautiful young people up here this morning. And you're so hopeful and expectant. If you are young here today, we love you so much. And we love the student section. Church, don't we love the young people of our church? Man, we love them. Goodness, if you are young today, you have so much going for you. It's incredible. There's one thing that you don't have going for you though, and that's experience. 

Now, you can't help that you haven't experienced life like a 70-year-old person has. That's not your fault. You're young. God doesn't intend you to have had that kind of experience. But what that means if you're young is you are flying blind in all kinds of brand new situations all the time, new stuff that you've just never ever faced before, just because of your lack of experience because of your age. And so that means you're probably going to learn a lot of hard lessons by trial and error. You might learn hard lessons about credit card debt and the tender mercies of Visa when you forget to pay on time. You're gonna learn hard lessons about toxic friends, procrastination, over-committing yourself, all kinds of things. You can end up learning a lot of hard lessons simply because you lack experience in those areas, or you can let God teach you about life ahead of time.

Proverbs in the word of God is like a cheat code for life, because God will download into your heart and into your mind the wisdom of an experienced person while you're still in that young body. That is epic. That's like Psalm 119 when it says, "Because of your word, I know more than my teachers." That can be you! You can go through life with all of the zeal and fire and energy and strength of a young person, yet with the wisdom of God in your soul! Man, we want that for y'all! And whatever your age is, now's the time to dig into the wisdom of God. It can give discretion to the youth.

Discretion means the ability to distinguish, to differentiate between two things that look real similar. A lot of people can't tell the difference, but you've got discretion so you can tell the difference between those things. So if you have discretion, not only will you be able to tell the difference between a good choice and an evil choice, you'll be able to tell the difference between a good choice, a better choice, and the best choice. What a gift that would be! So the youth can benefit from Proverbs.

"Let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance." So maybe you're here today and you've been reading Proverbs all your life. Maybe you've been a Christian for decades. Maybe you're already mature spiritually and you understand a lot of the things that God says in his word. That is wonderful. But none of us is as wise as we think we are. Every new stage of life brings challenges that we've never faced before. And God wants to increase your learning all through your life with him all the way to the end. So the challenge to those who are mature in the Lord as we come to Proverbs is don't get proud, too proud to think that you don't need this. Don't get stale in your walk with the Lord. Don't get lazy and leave it to some other generation to grow in the Lord and serve him and make their lives count. Don't let your heart drift in older age like Solomon did. You can read about that in 1 Kings 11. Instead, what if we all ask God to do a fresh work in our hearts and in our lives, whatever our age is, so that the next season of life would be the wisest we've ever lived and the closest to the Lord that we've ever been. I think that would be a good prayer.

So what do verses 4-6 tell us? They tell us that God's life-changing wisdom is available to everyone. That is such good news. You don't have to be really smart. You don't have to have formal education. You don't have to have all these good connections with powerful people. You don't have to climb Mount Everest and talk to a guru, right? You just have to be humble and teachable. The only thing today standing between you and an abundant life is your unwillingness to listen to the Lord. That's really good news. It tells me if I just come in a posture of humility and teachability, the sky is the limit with the Lord as my God. Do you believe that?

Well, there's the aim of the book, the audience of the book. And finally, we need to talk about: 

When we go to the beach, they've done this really thorough job of fencing everything off. So if you're riding your bike down the street, you can't just decide, "I'm gonna go to the beach and swim in the ocean." They've got it all totally restricted. But if you are staying in a particular hotel or a condo, there is one particular access point to the beach, right? You can swipe your little hotel card and you can get through the gate. You can get through the walkway and then it opens up to a fun day at the beach. There's one access point. And what Proverbs 17 tells us is there's really only one access point to a wise life.

Everything that we've been talking about this morning, if it sounds good to you, if you want more of that in your life, there's only one access point. And it's here in verse 7. It's called the fear of the Lord. The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge. The fear of the Lord is the foundation of a wise life. It's where everything starts with the fear of the Lord. There is no limit to the rich life that God can lead you into. Without the fear of the Lord, you're already doomed. That's what verse seven says. So what does it mean "the fear of the Lord?" It means simply that you take God seriously. You take God seriously as God. It's not exactly terror before God, but there's a little terror component when Jesus says in Matthew 10:28, "Do not fear the one that can kill the body but cannot kill the soul, rather fear the one who can throw both body and soul into hell." So there's a little terror when you realize there is an eternal being who made me, who upholds me from moment to moment, and then he decides my eternity. At the end of this thing, there's a little terror there. You take that seriously. That's part of the fear of the Lord.

The fear of the Lord means that you accept the facts that God made this world and he sets the rules, and you don't get to set your own. The fear of the Lord means you recognize that God is the one who has made this universe in an orderly moral way. That is as inescapable as gravity. There are consequences, causes and effects in this life, and none of us gets to skirt around that. And so we can either fight against God's moral order and suffer for it, or we can get on board and have a much easier life. That's part of the fear of the Lord.

The fear of the Lord also means you know that this holy creator God loves you! Even though he knows all of your foolishness, all of your silliness, all of your stubbornness. He knows all of it, but he loved you so much, he made reconciliation with you through the death of his own son. And so you can trust him when he wants to talk to you about a wise life, a good life, a happy life.

So the fear of the Lord, it brings such humility into our lives, because it means we stop leaning on our own understanding. I know that I don't have it figured out. I know I always make the wrong choice when I do what seems best to me. I'm gonna lean on God's word and God's understanding, that's humility.

The fear of the Lord brings integrity, because it means that you're not just doing the wise thing, the right thing when you're at church, you know that God is with you all the time. He always sees you. He sees you at home. He sees you at work. He sees you at play. He sees you. So you are always seeking to walk in wisdom because you're always before the face of God. That brings you integrity.

The fear of the Lord also brings liberty. How does it bring liberty? Because I can stop doing the foolish stuff that I've done many times in the past to impress other people because I'm afraid of other people and because I'm so desperate to please other people. The fear of the Lord says there's only one person I have to please. There's only one person who I should care about and that's the Lord. So it gives me such freedom to just walk in the wisdom that he gives to me. Once you settle this issue, who you will fear, there is no limit to where God can take you.

But you can also go another route. Proverbs 17 also identifies the one person who can't benefit from Proverbs. What is that person called in verse seven?

What is a fool? A fool is not a stupid person. A fool is someone who's convinced that they're a really smart person. A fool is the person who thinks that he or she can live in God's world on their terms, making up their own rules. They get to decide what's best. They get to do what they want. They get to make their own rules and they can always evade the consequences that God has revealed in Scripture. So a fool may say, "I believe in God," a fool may be a member of a church, but a fool lives as his own God. A fool goes through life as if she is God. And so of course, the fool has no time for wisdom or for instruction. Verse 7 says, "the fool despises God's wisdom." When you despise, you view it as small and cheap and irrelevant and unworthy of your time. And so the fool hears wisdom like you're hearing it today and they smirk and laugh and scroll their phone and wonder when I'm gonna shut up so they can get back to their really smart wise life. And if that's you, I got nothing for you. Proverbs has got nothing for you. Life is gonna have to kick you in the groin, and even that often doesn't do it, because typically the fool suffers for ignoring God, then blames everyone else including God, goes right back to what they were doing, learning nothing, and then he dies and goes to hell. And some of you may be on that road, but Proverbs offers you a new beginning.

Proverbs offers you an invitation. This Proverbs 1:7, this access point, it can be your access point to a whole new life with God as your God, life with God interpreting reality for your life, with God teaching you how to love life with God, teaching you how to prioritize life with God, ordering yourself with God, getting you home safe, making your life beautiful and useful to other people, making you a blessing. This could be the first day of the rest of your life!

I think of one person in the Bible who exemplifies that new beginning. The Bible says there was one day on a hill where three men were dying. They had been executed and were hanging on crosses. And one man decided that he was going to spend the final hours of his derelict life spewing curses at Jesus Christ. And after a while, the other man on the other side of Jesus said, "do you not fear God?" Do you think that you're gonna live forever when it looks like we got about 15 minutes left? And yet you are still using your life to curse God himself. Do you not fear God?! And in that moment, God did a miracle in the life of that second thief and gave him the fear of the Lord. And he looked to Jesus and said, "Jesus, there hasn't been one wise day in my entire sorry history. I have ignored you. I have despised you. I have lived on my own terms. And I am suffering for it. I'm getting what I deserve." He says in Luke 23, "But Jesus, you're innocent, you're the son of God. And I believe that you've got a kingdom for guilty fools like me who trust in you. So Jesus I've given you no reason to do it, but would you remember me in your kingdom?"

And the wisdom of God, the creator of the universe, the author of Proverbs, the crucified savior loves to answer prayers like that. He answered that thief's prayer that day, and he brought that thief home to heaven. He brought that fool into the kingdom of God. He did the same for this fool and he will do it for you too. Let's pray.

Sermon by Eric Smith
Senior Pastor, Sharon Baptist Church