Total Commitment

I was walking through my neighborhood one spring, and I noticed one of my neighbor's yards was just absolutely pristine. It looked like a golf course. And he happened to be out and about. And so I mentioned it to him and I said, I'm gonna be honest, I really try to keep envy in check in my heart, but I feel really envious every time I walk by your house because your yard just looks so perfect. And I've about decided today, I want a yard like that. Whatever I gotta do to make my yard look like your yard, I'm ready to do it. Just tell me what you did to make your yard look like that and I'm ready to go. And this retired brother looked at me and smiled and said, "Well, it started out by bringing in truckload after truckload of topsoil from somewhere else because my dirt and your dirt will never grow grass like this. And then the next step was to bring in all this heavy machinery that smoothed it all out and tilled it all up. And then I paid a lot of money to bring in all of this grass seed. It's got to be the good stuff too. I brought in a lot of really good grass seed. And then ever since then I've had an irrigation system that I've installed and it's running all the time." And he could tell my blood pressure was starting to rise at this point. "And every year there are these herbicides and pesticides and all these fertilizers, and it's kind of this monthly thing. And it's just a kind of a big part of my life at this point, but I'm able to do that and still be, you know, faithful in other areas. But, I mean, it's a bit of a commitment."

And about that time, I decided I didn't want a yard like that guy had. What looks so good and so attractive and desirable to me when I'm just casually walking by and noticing this green lawn, what I didn't see was the massive commitment underneath, the massive commitment that was required to get that end result that I wanted. And I wasn't willing to pay that cost. And Proverbs 3 is confronting us with a really similar decision today. It's not pointing out a lawn, it's pointing out a life.

Essentially, what the father of Proverbs 3 is doing with his teenage son, with his college age daughter is, he's pointing to a lady in the community or a gentleman in the community, and he's saying, "You see that godly person right there? Do you see how that person's life isn't perfect, they've got their problems and stresses, but they're basically pretty happy most of the time? Do you notice how this person and their spouse are in love with one another, the way that they speak to each other, they hold hands, they want to be together? Have you noticed how their children respect them? And even though they've grown up, they still come back and have meals with them, and speak highly of them and honor them? Have you noticed how the people at the workplace of these folks, how they honor them, how they respect their opinions, how they ask their advice on all kinds of different things? You know how at church, everybody just kind of flocks to these people because they just have a stature and a maturity about them that everyone has come to trust? And you see how that man sleeps great at night because he's got a clean conscience and he's not looking over his shoulder, waiting for those lives to catch up with him? Do you see that person? You see that kind of life? That's the kind of life we all want, isn't it?

But that life didn't just fall out of the sky, that life didn't just happen, son, daughter. There are some massive commitments underneath that life that led to that result. And if you want that kind of life, you gotta make those kinds of commitments. That's what Proverbs 3 is about. Proverbs 3 is God offering you and me the life of our dreams. It's offering you a life that involves long and peaceful years, favor with God and favor with our fellow men, inner healing and refreshment, straight paths that always wind up in the right place at the right destination. God wants to give you that life. God wants to give you that life more than you want to take that life from God. But you gotta make some choices. There are some commitments underneath that life, a foundation that you've got to lay. If you want that end result, you've got to make a total life commitment to walking under the wisdom of God.

You don't have to be really smart. You don't have to be really talented. You don't have to be really good looking. You don't have to be really well connected. You don't have to come from the right family of origin. You just have to be humbly committed to living under the wisdom of the word of God. The problem is we all want a Proverbs 3 life without a Proverbs 3 commitment. We want God and we expect God to make us his priority while we make Him our option. And it doesn't work like that. So what this father is saying to all of us at whatever age or whatever stage of life you may be in is before you take one more step down this road of your life, let's think about the basic commitments that God is looking for from you so that He can give you the kind of life that you've only dreamed of.

First commitment: 

Now, every family has a culture of things that they do and that they don't do, things that they like and they don't like, places they eat, places they don't eat, where they go on vacation, where they would never go on vacation. Every family's got stuff like that. Maybe your family always did a garden when you were growing up. Maybe your family is always doing a garden right now. That's just what you do in the summer time. Maybe your family always goes to the beach. Maybe your family only goes to the mountains. Maybe, you know, at my house, we always listen to bluegrass music when I'm washing the dishes when we're cleaning up the kitchen at night. We always love to go to National Parks and State Parks because that's what dad does. We've all got family cultures and the kids in that family just kind of go along with it because they have to. This is what mom and dad like. But when they grow up, they can decide what parts of that family culture they want to hold on to, what parts they want to let go of. They may never want to garden again. They may never want to set foot in a state park again. They may never listen to Flatt and Scruggs again. That may be something from the past that they don't hold on to. That's true for every one of us.

But we've also got to make some decisions about whether we're gonna keep the Godly culture, that word-centered culture, that Bible-based culture, if we're gonna keep that, or if we're going to leave it behind too. That's what the dad says to this son or this daughter. He talks really straight and he says, "look, here's the deal, up until now, mom and dad have chosen God for you. Up until this point, we have been pouring wisdom in on you from the outside. We have taught you the Bible. We've talked about Jesus. We've brought you to church. We've required a standard of moral behavior in our home and outside of our home. We've pressed wisdom in on you from the outside. But you're at a point in your life now where you've got to choose it for yourself, you've got to choose if you want it from the inside or it's just pressure coming in from the outside.

And in verse 1 and verse 3, he lays out the options that are available to all of us for our lives. You're gonna do one of these two things. You will either, verse 1, "forget my teaching," or you will "keep it from the heart." You will either verse 3, "forsake steadfast love and faithfulness to the Lord," or you will "choose to bind it around your neck," because you believe it's a beautiful necklace that improves your appearance and does something for you. You will write it on the tablet of your heart, not just have it on a poster on the wall, but on the tablet of your heart. But it's one or the other. It's keep it or forsake it. It's let it continue or let the subscription run out. It's one or the other. And here's the scary part for parents only. You can choose.

It's true for all of us at every age, only you can choose. Mom and dad can't choose for you to hold on to the wisdom of God's work. Old pastor Eric can't choose for you to love the scriptures and to seek to live them out in your lives during the week. No one can choose that for you. But if you do choose to center your life on Christ and his wisdom, look what verse two offers you, it will add length of days and years of life and peace to you. That doesn't guarantee a certain number of years that you'll live. It's not saying that your life is going to be perfect, but it will be peaceful, certainly in comparison to the rest of the world. What it's saying is if you make Christ the foundation of your life, if you are living under his word, you will not be restlessly running from one unsatisfying activity to the next always looking to slake your thirst, never able to do it. You won't be so anxious and so miserable that you have to medicate yourself with alcohol and prescription drugs just to make it just to cope from one thing to the next. It says you will not cut your life short by doing stupid stuff. That's what making Christ the center of your life will do. Why? Because you're following God's design, the one who made the world, you'll be going with the grain of the universe, not against it.

But you've got to decide. You must choose the Lord. And you must choose him not just when you're a teenager, but at every stage of your life. You have got to make the choice not to graduate from God, not to follow Jesus just in bursts and in spasms, but to make him the defining commitment of all your days. Commit all your days to him.

So let's just break this down. When you get to middle school, you've left children's ministry where it's all sweet and happy, and we've got Pastor Brock and we're going to camp, we're going to VBS. And everybody's kind of the same at that point. But at middle school people get mean and hateful and they feed on the weakest, most vulnerable member of the population because that makes them feel strong and powerful and in control and they're kind of surviving the social situation. Hey, it doesn't have to be like that! You don't have to do that. You can continue loving the Lord and living according to his word as a junior higher. You could choose to be a Godly middle schooler.

And then when you get to high school, all your friends now are able to drive and so they feel invincible. They've got all this liberty. They can do all of these things and so many of them are going to decide that youth group, which was cool in 6th, 7th and 8th grade isn't cool anymore, because we've got other options. Now we can go other places, we can do other things. And so your friends are gonna get rebellious, and they're gonna party, and they're gonna do keg stands, and they're gonna fool around with the opposite sex. They're going to lower their standards of morality. They're gonna sleep around. They're gonna do all this wild stuff. You don't have to choose that! You don't have to,. You can choose to make the Lord your God the center of your life as a high school student. You could be a teenager who builds your life on the word of God and it'll give you a Proverbs 3 life.

But that's not the end of the choices. When you turn 18, and we have Senior Sunday and then everybody disappears for about six years and blames the church for not having more things for 18, 19, 20, 21. 22 year olds, amen? Well, y'all won't say amen to that. The staff will say amen to that. Everybody's gonna disappear for about half a decade. And during that time, you can choose to do what everybody else your age is doing. You can sleep around. You can get addicted to some kind of substance. You can drift aimlessly through life and be lazy and mooch. And you can live like life the whole universe revolves around you and your desires. And when things don't go right, you can blame everybody else. You can do that if you want to, or you could make ages 18 to 25 the defining years of your life! You could build your life on Christ. You could commit yourself to knowing his word, loving the gospel, serving him, worshiping the Lord on the Lord's day, building relationships with older, wiser, more mature Godly people. You could do it different. You let the Lord"s wisdom continue in your life.

And then when you get a family of your own, you can choose to make money your God and spend every day envying what everybody else has got, the vacations they take, the clothes they wear, how perfect their kids are, whatever. You can spend every day like that. And you can sow anger in your home by the careless words that you use. And you can get so busy doing all this stuff that there's no room for the Lord in your life and you can step out on your spouse. And you can do all this stuff that everybody in their twenties, thirties, and forties thinks that you have to do, or you can choose the Lord. We can live with God's wisdom at the center of our lives at that age. That's a lot of people in this room, but you've gotta make the decision. If you want a Proverbs 3 life, you gotta have a Proverbs 3 commitment to the Lord and his wisdom.

And when you're an empty nester, and finally you got a little time, finally you got a little money, it will be tempting I am sure to say, "You know what, I did my time. I got my kids raised up, I've run and gunned and I've done all the stuff that I'm supposed to do. It's time for me. I'm telling y'all, the empty nest time is the dark horse discipleship time in your life. Nobody thinks that that's where the troubled waters are. That's where a lot of troubled waters are because all of a sudden you got time, and you've got money, and you can make choices. And a lot of times we're making choices not to build our life on the Lord. But those could instead be the greatest years of your service to the Lord because now you've got some seasoning, you've got some maturity, you've got some knowledge, you've got some wisdom, you've got something to offer, and you do have a little bit more space in your life to give it to the Lord. That could be you as an empty nester!

And when you retire, but we don't get godlier just by getting older. Did you know that? The Bible is filled with stories of good people who stumbled badly in the last 100 meters. And so you can stumble your way into being a dirty old man. And you can stumble your way into grouchiness and bitterness and self-pity. You can do that or you can choose to thrive because you plant your life in the house of God Psalm 92 style. And you flourish in the house of the Lord because you're still growing and you're still pressing into him. And you know you still need his wisdom, and you're going after it every day. That could be you! You could be Jim Ramsey! Amen? That could be you. We revere brother Jim because he sets such a standard for us of just seeking the wisdom of God every day in every season. We love you brother for that. And you can make that choice too.

Commit all your days to him and you'll get verse 4: "favor and good success in the sight of God and man." Did you hear that? When you commit your ways to the Lord, people, even unbelievers, even non-christians who don't want any part of the kind of commitments that you're making, they will still respect you. They will know that is the right way and they will honor you. But even better, God will smile on you in every season. There is nothing greater than that. So if you want to have a Proverbs 3 life, it starts by committing all your days to Him. Are you committing these days to him right here?, right now? You can't change your days from the past. What are you doing with these days right now? Friends, those are God's days. They're not ours. He's letting us borrow them. Are you giving him a return on these days he's giving to you right now? Commit all your days to him.

Now, verses 5-6 are the most famous verses in the whole book of Proverbs. I memorized them in the 5th grade because I had some teachers who made us do that on Wednesday nights. They may be on a coffee mug in a cabinet in your house somewhere. They are on t-shirts. Hobby Lobby probably made a million dollars off of Proverbs 3:5-6 paraphernalia. But I'm here to say these verses may be even more important than we realize with them everywhere around us. What these verses are telling us is that God in his word is showing us how life works best. I mean all of life, not just salvation, but speech and sex, and work, and time, and money, and friends. God knows how all of it works best. He designed it. He created it. He's got a purpose for it. And in your Bible, God is saying to you, "I love you. I want you to flourish. Trust my way, obey my word, and you will flourish." And every Christian hears that and says, "Amen. That's what I want. I love Proverbs 3:5-6. That's what we say. But we don't love Proverbs 3:5-6.

We want God to guide us on straight paths, but we don't want to commit all our ways to him. We're happy to follow God into church. Sure I'll take my path there on Sundays, maybe two a month, let's not get crazy. But we'll follow God into church on those paths. But what I do on a date, or how I handle my money, or how I structure my calendar, my time, my commitments, just the attitudes of my heart, my marriage, I'll manage that. I'll direct those paths. I'm not really interested in consulting what the Lord has to say there, which means I'm trusting the Lord with some of my heart while there are vast, vast territories of my heart that are unsurrendered to him.

If our heart is like a house, you may have heard this before, there are some rooms that we give Jesus access to, but there are some doors that we keep carefully locked. I'm talking about triple bolted. He ain't getting in there. Nobody's gonna get in there. We're guarding certain territories of our heart and of our lives from him. Now, I'm happy to obey God when he's telling me to do what I've already decided to do, but when his way diverges from mine, if his way in the scriptures, if it doesn't make sense to my reason, or it's just kind of difficult for my flesh to do, or it's unpopular, and so it's gonna make me look weird to other people around me who aren't committed to the Lord, in those cases I'm going to decide that I know better than God. And so I'm gonna go my own way instead of his way.

Now, that is the common Christian attitude, which means we have rewritten Proverbs 3:5-6 to say, "trust in the Lord with some of your heart, lean mostly on your own understanding and acknowledge Him in some of your ways, and trust that it'll all work out in the end. That's how we've rewritten Proverbs 3:5-6. But that means that God isn't really God to us. He's not God in our lives. He's an occasional consultant in our lives. We are God because we're deciding when we obey and when we don't. We're deciding which path to take and which path not to take. When our paths happen to align with God's path sometimes, terrific! And we'll pat ourselves on the back for that. But that's not obedience to God. That's a coincidence with God. Verse 7 calls that attitude of picking and choosing when you'll trust and obey God being wise in your own eyes. That is such an important foundational concept in Proverbs. That means I think I know better than God. We would never say that. We know better than to say that, but we really think that we've got life under control. We know what we're doing 90% of the time. We don't need to consult the Lord. And that attitude of being wise in your own eyes, that is step one in how to blow up your life.

If you want a happy life, a peaceful life, you make this decision. I'm never wiser than God. Does that sound reasonable? I'm never wiser than God. His way actually is always best, even when I don't like it, or don't understand it, or don't see where it's going to end up, his way is always best. And so what the father is calling us to do here is commit all your ways by inviting Jesus Christ and his lordship into every part of your life. Honor him in all of your choices. You want him to be able to sign off and put his signature under every report from every department of your life.

What are you holding back from him today? Is it really working out that great with you in control? I'm guessing no. It may seem to be working out ok right now, but give it a little time and you'll find out it really does work better when it's out of your management and under his management. Every time it proves itself to be true. Have y'all noticed how terribly complicated we make our lives by obeying the Lord some and making our own way the rest of the time. It complicates our lives. We find out it creates this kind of tangled web and we end up living this kind of divided life. We never really have peace. We never really have integrity. It makes our lives difficult and complex. Look at verse 7b at the simplicity it offers us, "fear the Lord and turn away from evil," right? Fear the Lord turn away from it. Let him tell you what's good and what's evil. Trust him. Take him seriously enough that you care more about his opinion in his mind than you care about your own feelings and your own opinion in your own mind. Just fear the Lord, turn away from evil, walk with him.

Just decide right now that no part of your life is off limits to him. It's such a relief to let Jesus be Lord. He's really good at it. When you commit all your ways to him, you get verse 6, "he will make straight your paths." That doesn't mean every path is going to be easy in the moment, but it always ends up where it's supposed to be. Verse 8, "it will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones." That means by just simply placing ourselves under the God of the universe, we save ourselves all kinds of pain and heartache than when we try to be God in our lives. Commit all your days to Him, commit all your ways to him.

I'm going somewhere, ok? Just hang with me. So, last week we went to the Wilson County Fair. That's where Candace grew up in Lebanon. And the Wilson County Fair is pretty epic. It's now the Tennessee State Fair. And so there is all kinds of stuff going on there: rides, food, live music, lots of cool stuff happening. One of the things that I did was I went into a corn maze. This is where the maze part comes in. So the thing is when you step into a corn maze, you kind of lose control. You don't know where it's going to take you. You're just trying to get out on the other side. but it may go this way, it may go that way. It may turn you around, but you're just in the maze following along one step at a time.

And life really is a lot like that. You don't know what the future holds. I've been around here long enough, I've done a number of marriages. I see lots of people whose marriages I've officiated in the house today. That's super sweet for me. Y'all may remember some of those marriage vows that we all recited in front of everybody: For richer or poorer / In sickness and in health / For better or for worse. So we're acknowledging on the front end of this ceremony that we don't know where the path is gonna go from here. Actually, we do know. It's going to go through all of that stuff. You're gonna get your share of both sides of the ledger in your life together. And what the Bible is calling us to do here in verses 9-12 of Proverbs 3 is just to make a commitment that whatever direction life takes, whatever season or circumstance you may be in right now, just decide ahead of time, I'm gonna commit my way to the Lord. I'm gonna commit my life to the Lord in the extreme circumstances of life, whether that's prosperity vv9-10 or hardship vv11-12.  

In your life, you will know times of plenty and you will know times of want. There will be days in your life where everything seems to be going your way and there will be days in your life where nothing seems to be going your way. But right now, commit to walk with the Lord through all of it.

Verses 9-10, when the good times roll, when you're young and healthy and beautiful and you've got lots of friends and plenty of money in the bank. I hate to say it. Most people can't handle this. Most people don't know how to commit those good days to the Lord. Why? Because we feel self-sufficient. We feel like we did it all. We feel like we've got life under control. And so we forget the Lord and we don't humbly acknowledge that it's all from him and it's all for him.

And so what the father in Proverbs 3 is calling us to do is in those days of prosperity is to enjoy the fire out of it. Paul says in 1 Timothy 6, God is the one who gives us all things richly to enjoy. Enjoyment is not anti-god. God is pro-enjoyment, but he wants you to take those things that you enjoy and trace them back to their source, to the good, and generous, and grace-filled God who gave it to you, and then cause your enjoyment of whatever is going on in your life to make you enjoy God more and love him more, and double down on your commitment to him, and use that blessing that he's given to you, that surplus, that plenty, use it to bless someone else like God has blessed you. Use it to be generous in your own life. Learn to live for other people and not get turned in on yourself when you've got so much. That is how you honor the Lord in seasons of plenty. And when you do that, he'll make sure you always have enough. Verse 3 is not preaching a prosperity gospel. It is telling you if you honor the Lord with the plenty that he gives you, he will make sure that you always have enough. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 9 that if you're committed to reaching into your bag to give to other people, there will never be a time where you reach into that bag and come up empty handed. God will always give you what you need to be generous in giving and servant hearted to the people around you. Test him and try him. See if it's not true.

And then in verses 11-12, the other end of the spectrum. When life is hard, when life is stressful, when work is just a grind, when plans don't work out, when you're lonely because you just don't seem to have any friends who really connect with you. Maybe you go through infertility as a couple, or you lose someone very dear to you. In those moments of difficulty, you will be tempted to think God does not love you. God does not care. You'll be tempted to use the word used in the passage, despise. That means to treat as a small, cheap, insignificant thing. You'll be tempted to despise what God is doing in your life and to get bitter, and mean, and discontented, and despairing. You'll be tempted to go independent and just say, "hey, living for the Lord, it didn't get me anywhere. So I'm just gonna do it my own way."

Now, all of these are temptations when life is hard. So the Bible is calling us right now, decide before you get there to keep trusting God. He is your father. These verses in Proverbs 3:11-12, they become so important in the New Testament. Hebrews 12 devotes this whole section on understanding the discipline and the training of the Lord in our lives from Proverbs 3. When the Bible talks about God disciplining us, it's not always talking about your sin. God is the Shepherd who comes after you with the rod to punish you and to bring you back to the path. Now, God does that, amen? I mean, not that you would know from experience but I'm just saying, God knows how to do that.

However, discipline is actually much bigger than correcting your bad choices. Discipline just means training. It's just the whole program of a parent with a child. There's gonna be some of that negative stuff, but there's gonna be lots of positive stuff too. Your whole life is God training you to make you like Jesus Christ, to be conformed to his image, to prepare you for a new heavens and a new earth to reign with Jesus. Your whole life is training. And so even in the hardest times, the leanest times, the most stressful times, he delights in you. He is not looking to drop the hammer on you because of something bad you did a long time ago. That's not how he operates. You know, God is training you to be like Christ. He's your father. He delights in you. He's doing something productive in you during those hard times, working things into your life that you can't get any other way than through hard times, things like perseverance and diligence, tenderness towards other people. These are virtues that we can't find any other way than trusting God through difficulty. You won't understand what God's doing in your life every single moment, but you can always trust him. And in time, you will see your father is wise and he is good. And he delighted in me all the way for Jesus' sake, not for mine. And he led me all the way and made all of my path straight in the end and brought me to him.

So those are the commitments that we have to make. If you want this Proverbs three life that God wants to give you and can give you that you cannot make for yourself, that the world certainly cannot give to you, you've got to commit all your days to him. And you've got to commit all your ways to him. And it's a little bit goofy, but you gotta commit all your maze to him too, whatever direction life may take.

I don't know about you, but I'm not very good at that, but I preached the sermon. I can think about all the many ways I have so imperfectly trusted God, how I've gone off road and tried to make my own path and suffered for it. All the time that I've wasted leaving the narrow road that Christ marked out for me. And maybe you feel that too. And maybe you feel like you've wasted so much time that there's really no future. There's no point in going on. Maybe you'll just come back to church when the Proverbs series is done because it just hurts too bad. But here's the promise that we all have when it says at the beginning of Proverbs 3, that when you walk in wisdom, you have favor with God and man. Did that verse sound familiar to anybody? Favor with God and man. Where have I heard that before? Have we heard that? Does that sound familiar to anybody at all? We're told in Luke 2:52 that Jesus at home with Mary and Joseph grew in wisdom, and in stature, and in favor with God and man. 

What that's telling us is that God, the second person of the Trinity, he came down, became a human being, and at every stage of his life, all of his days, in all of his ways, he trusted God. He lived the Proverbs 3 life, the one that you have not lived, the one that I have failed to live. He lived it in your place. And then he went to a cross. He didn't get inner healing and refreshment and all that blessing and all that stuff because he took places with us. And at the cross, Jesus took the judgment that we should get for rejecting Proverbs 3 and he died in our place. He took our punishment. He rose from the dead. And now if you will trust him, even if you are 79 years old and have never thought Proverbs 3 a single day of your life, if you will come to him right here right now and say, "Jesus, I've blown it all. But I believe that you are full of grace and full of mercy. Would you trade places with me? Would you give me your righteousness? And would you teach me how to live this life? I can't do it on my own," he will hear you. He will answer you and you can spend the rest of the days he gives you on the straight path with him. That's what I want for me. Let's talk to the Lord about it.

Sermon by Eric Smith
Senior Pastor, Sharon Baptist Church