The Memory that Blesses

Amen. Let's take our Bibles this morning and turn to Proverbs 10. We have been in a series this fall called "Wisdom For The Road" from the book of Proverbs. We've worked our way through chapters 1-9. From here on out, we'll be doing a little bit of a thematic study. It's just the nature of the way Proverbs is put together. We will choose a theme each week, and gather up the truth that Proverbs lays out for us all throughout the book on that particular theme or topic.

Today we are going to turn to Proverbs 10, the next chapter in the book that we've been studying. I want to begin by looking at just one verse, Proverbs 10:7. Then with the Lord's help, we will build it out from there. If you're able, let me invite you to stand with me one more time as we honor the reading of God's Word from Proverbs 10:7. What is God's wisdom about leaving a legacy?

One of my neighbors was recently pouring a new concrete slab to extend his driveway. One thing I've noticed about concrete is that once it's poured, everybody doesn't just immediately scatter and go on to lunch or to the next job, they babysit that concrete. When it's freshly poured, it's still wet, and all kinds of things can happen. They want to study it, make sure it's curing the way that it's supposed to, make sure no dogs chase a cat through it, no leaves or pine needles or any debris might get into it. Because once that window of time has closed, and it is a very limited window of time, you can't make corrections, you can't make alterations, you can't push it around and change it and fix it. It's going to set up, and whatever condition it's in when it sets up, that's the condition it's gonna stay in. It is permanent. You've got a little time where you can make some adjustments, but that time is gonna come to a close, and then whatever it is, is just kind of what it is. That's how it is with concrete. That's also how it is with our name and our reputation.

Proverbs has a lot to say about our name. If you were with us last Sunday in Proverbs 9, Solomon under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit brought us to the beginning of a young person's life, to a fork in the road where that young man or that young woman was making that most basic, most fundamental decision of life. Will I walk through my life with wisdom or with folly? From that initial choice, the rest of their lives was going to unfold. That was the beginning of life in Proverbs 9. Then, Proverbs 10 takes us to the end of those paths. If Proverbs 9 is graduation Sunday, Proverbs 10 is All Saints Sunday. Proverbs 10 has now followed that young person through 40, 50, 60, maybe even 70 years worth of choices, and decisions, and priorities, and listening to God or not listening to God, following wisdom or following folly all the way to the end of that road to the destination where the name that they have built over a lifetime is now fixed. And a legacy is now in place.

As we open up to Proverbs 10, we need to be thinking about the 50th class reunion. We need to be thinking about Mt Hermon Cemetery on Decoration Day. We need to be thinking about All Saints Sunday at Sharon Baptist Church in what, 2074, when our name is on the list, and our picture is on a screen, and our name comes up, and our face is visualized, and a memory immediately is evoked in the minds and the hearts of the people who knew us. Because people for at least a given period of time are going to remember us. They're gonna remember the life that we led. We're all going to leave a memory behind. That's one of the great truths behind Proverbs 10:7. The great question is, what kind of memory will we leave? It is possible, and this is the good news and the great bright hope of our text, to leave a memory that blesses. You can lead a life that blesses the people who remember you long after you're gone. As people recall the words that you spoke to them and the priorities that you made, and the love that you showed, the example that you portrayed before them. As they remember that, they are blessed. They're filled with happiness.

That's what blessing means. They are filled with gratitude to God for letting them know you and walk with you. They are filled with encouragement, and instruction, and guidance as they now live their own lives and make their own decisions. That's really what All Saints Day and All Saints Sunday is about. As we've said, it's about Hebrews 12:1, remembering this great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us at all times. These are saints who have finished their race and now are encouraging us to look to Jesus, to lay aside sin that easily entangles, and weights that hold us down, and live all out for the Lord, to trust him no matter what because it is so worth it. We can leave a memory like that, a memory that blesses. Do you wanna leave a memory like that?

There's a dark side to this verse also because the hard truth is not every memory blesses. Many people know that's true. Don't point your fingers, but not every memory is a blessing. Some names, the passage says, some names just rot. They fill us with pain or with regret. They perhaps provide a warning of what not to do, what paths not to take, what choices not to make. Maybe these lives weren't just all out wicked as we might define it, but maybe they were just lived in such a small, self-absorbed way that they didn't make much of an impact on anyone else. And so their lives are quickly forgotten. It's possible to leave a memory like that. Either way, the end is coming for all of us. The memory that we leave is coming for all of us. God cares about the memory of your life, isn't that amazing? The God of the universe who upholds all things at all times, he cares about the legacy you leave and the memories that you make with this life he's given to you. And he wants you to care about it too.

Most of us are not spending a lot of time thinking about our legacy or the memories we leave behind in the busyness of our everyday lives. We're just making decisions, we're acting, we're reacting, we're talking, we're just kind of getting caught up in the flow of everyday life. But on this day, God tells us it is wise to ponder the path of your feet. We're all on a path. That path is leading to a destination. And once we get there all the time for choosing and deciding will be over. And the concrete will be cured. But right now, we can make some decisions that will leave behind a memory that is a blessing to the people of God and that will matter for all eternity. Isn't that amazing? Let's think about that together for just a few minutes. I want you to notice, first of all:

I want to think about these two categories in Proverbs 10:7: the wicked and the righteous. We probably find those a little extreme. 'Wicked' seems like it would just be a very small group of people who are especially evil. On the other hand, 'Righteous' feels intimidating to us. We hesitate to take that word to ourselves or apply it to someone else. But we need to understand these in a biblical way.

The wicked, according to Proverbs 10:7, don't have to just be people who run concentration camps and fly planes into buildings. It's not just that kind of small group. You can be in the 'wicked' category with your life by just following the wisdom of the world, following the course of the world, just making your life all about yourself. John tells us how the wisdom of the world operates. In 1 John 2:15-16, the world just kind of runs on self-centeredness, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the both pride of life. The world's wisdom is, "seek your pleasures, build up your pride, enhance your possessions, try to impress as many people as you can with your good looks and skinniness, with your success, your athletic achievement." And the world will say that that's the right way to live your life, that you're winning, that you are a success. But Proverbs says that you can live a life that does all of these things and leave a name that rots.

God's wisdom says, "if you want to truly leave behind a successful and significant life, you need to look in a different direction than the world will ever point. You need to look in the direction of righteousness. Again, we don't really use that word a lot. I think we find it intimidating. But the Bible uses that word a lot. Proverbs uses it a lot. The Psalmist uses it a lot. And we need to embrace this beautiful Bible word of 'righteousness' because it simply describes a person who is in a right relationship with God.

This person is not in a right relationship with God because they're so good and they're so sinless, but in fact, because they know they're not good or sinless. The righteous is a man or a woman, a teenager, a child who has woken up to the fact that they are a mess, that they are sinful down to the bottom of their hearts, that they need to be rescued from someone outside of themselves. This particular person has come to God by faith in Jesus alone and has brought all of their sin to the foot of his cross. And through his death, Jesus has put that sinful person right with God. That's how you become righteous according to the word of God. That's where the righteous life starts, by faith alone, in Jesus alone.

But that's not where the righteous life ends. Because that first act of coming to God by faith in Jesus leads you into a whole new life that puts you on this new path of living in a way that's not right in the world's eyes, that's not right in your eyes, but leading a life that's right in God's eyes. The righteous are now seeking to live in a way that pleases the Lord, not because we're scared that he's dangling us over the pit of hell, not because we're tense and anxious that we're gonna lose our salvation, or that he's always evaluating us and deciding if he's gonna keep us around or not. No, the righteous are pursuing this righteous life simply because we love the Lord who saved us. We want to do the things that delight his heart. We trust that his way is better than our way. The righteous have just made a decision to ignore the wisdom of the world, to leave the crowded path of the wicked, and commit yourself to the way of the righteous. It's that simple. And you do it one step of faith at a time.

You're gonna slip, and you're gonna fall, and you're gonna wander off that path. But by the grace of God, you are going to keep getting up and following Jesus down the path of the righteous. Here's what you need to know: if you today are very imperfectly, but sincerely seeking to live for the Lord because you love him, if you are chasing down a righteous life by God's help, you need to know God is so pleased with that. The Lord loves this.

Proverbs 5:9, "The way of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord, but he loves those who pursue righteousness." Isn't that a comfort? I love that it says he loves those who pursue righteousness, not those who have attained it, not those who are perfect, but those who are simply with all their born again hearts, pursuing the life of Christ, the life of righteousness. The Lord sees that and he loves it. He is moved to help you and provide for you as you seek to follow Jesus down paths of righteousness. But it starts with one step of faith in the direction of Jesus Christ that will lead to a life and a memory that will matter for all eternity.

But some of us have got to get decisive. If you think about the memory of some of the righteous people who you have known and loved and who have helped you, there came a point in their lives where they had to get decisive, and they said, "I'm not gonna love the world. I'm gonna love the Lord. And however lonely it may be, whatever it might cost me, I'm gonna live for him. And I'm gonna trust him to write my story." They had to make that choice. You've got to make it too. It's the Lord that the righteous love.

Now, we all want to leave this kind of legacy that Proverbs 10:7 is talking about. We all want our memory to be a blessing, to be sweet and helpful to the people who knew us, but it's not just gonna happen. We can't just wish for a memory like this. Those lives are made up of decades of tiny, little, out of the way choices to live for the Lord and not for self.

I love to run, and my little running route in the morning often takes me through Mt Hermon Cemetery. And so this is a typical preacher thing to do. I run through the cemetery and I look at all of these headstones. I've had the opportunity to officiate at a number of funerals and graveside services right there at Mt Hermon Cemetery. Many of the headstones belong to people who I never got to meet and I didn't get to know. But what I've seen is, and what you've seen too is, that there's a birth date and there's a death date. And in between, what is there? There's that dash. That's exactly right. That little dash is one little stroke, one little pound of the chisel and the hammer that represents an entire life, a whole life of innumerable choices to trust God or not to trust God, to go his way or to cling to your way. And it's those choices, one step at a time, one day, at a time that build a life. That's what leaves behind this kind of legacy that we're talking about in Proverbs. The rest of the book is going to sketch out for us what that life looks like, what kinds of decisions we need to make, that we want to make, that we want to pursue, if we want to leave behind this memory that is a blessing.

I did this big survey of Proverbs earlier this week. I compiled verses that talk about what the lifestyle of the righteous looks like. This is not a complete list, but it's a little pencil sketch of some of the categories that you'll find in the life of the righteous. As you listen to this, think about some of the saints who you know, who are with the Lord now, who embodied these things.

One mark of the righteous life is integrity. Proverbs 15:3 says, "The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good." Now, that's the key to integrity. Integrity just means you are a whole person. You are undivided. Your life isn't divided up into all these categories. This is for the Lord, this is for me. No, you understand that all of your life is lived out before God. There's not this gap between who you are in public and who you are in private, who you are when you worship on Sunday morning, who you are when you go to work on Monday morning, and who you are when you come home on Monday afternoon. You're seeking to be a person of integrity, a whole person, living out your life before the Lord.

Proverbs is filled with all of these promises of God's blessing and God's help on those who seek to simply live with integrity. People who are honest in business use honest weights and measures. You don't have to wonder if they're trying to crook you or cheat you. People who are straightforward in their speech don't have some hidden agenda behind what they're saying. People who are faithful to their commitments are gonna do what they say they're gonna do. People who say the same thing to your face that they say behind your back. All of this goes into what it means to be a person of integrity. The Bible says this is key. It's central to that righteous life.

Another theme that comes up a lot is humility. Proverbs 18:12, "Before destruction, a man's heart is haughty, but humility comes before honor." Proverbs 27 2, "Let another praise you and not your own mouth, a stranger and not your own lips." The life of the righteous is marked by humility because the righteous person is no longer impressed with themselves. The righteous person knows just how much help and how much mercy and grace they need. That's why they came to Jesus Christ in the first place. They have given up trying to look impressive to other people. They are not preoccupied with their position, and their applause, and their appreciation. They don't think they've got all the answers. They're not stubborn. They're not entitled and wanting. Instead, they are teachable. They are grateful for all that God has given to them. They're seeking to just serve you rather than get something from you. Their desire is not to be famous, but to be faithful. Humility is such an important mark of the righteous.

Another key theme that comes up a lot is kindness. Proverbs 21:21 says, "Whoever pursues righteousness and kindness will find life and righteousness and honor." Proverbs 16:24, "Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body." Our world is so selfish, and so hateful, and so cruel. Isn't that right? It's just the atmosphere that we live in. In that kind of an environment, the righteous stand out because they're being shaped by the kind heart of God, who uses his power not to crush, but to care. and is kind to the evil and to the unjust, as Jesus says. This kind person, who is being shaped by the Lord himself, is marked by the way they treat other people. They don't despise. They don't put down with their words. They don't use their strength to exploit or take advantage. Instead the kind and the righteous are marked by the desire to lift up, to serve, to speak encouraging words. The Bible says, "The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life." The lips of the righteous feed many. They give generously. They're gracious. They're forgiving. It's their glory to overlook a fault. They're marked by kindness in the way they treat other people. That's part of the righteous life.

Another part of this righteous life is contentment. Proverbs 10:3, "The Lord does not let the righteous go hungry, but he thwarts the craving of the wicked." Proverbs 13:29, "The righteous has enough to satisfy his appetite, but the belly of the wicked suffers." Once again, the way of the world is so restless. It's always craving. It's unhappy. But the righteous learn to trust God's provision. God doesn't promise that you're going to be fabulously wealthy or that you're gonna have everything that you ever desire. He's not gonna promise that you will be able to keep up with the people around you and what they at least appear to have. But he is going to provide for you so that you have enough. And he's gonna free you from the miserable life of craving and comparing and competing. And he's going to bring you into a life of contentment. Paul says there is great gain in Godliness with contentment. The righteous enjoy this blessing of a satisfied life in the provision of God.

Another key theme is boldness. Proverbs 28:1, "The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous is as bold as a lion." Why is boldness a mark of the righteous that might kind of surprise us compared to some of the other items in the list? Well, the righteous can live with boldness because they've got a clean conscience. The righteous are able to sleep at night. They're not worried that the secret is gonna come out. They're not always looking over their shoulder to see if somebody's chasing them. They're not always scared that something that they've tried to keep hidden is gonna catch up to them wondering when the other shoe is gonna drop. You can't live a bold life if you're tangled up in knots like that. No, the righteous instead, by the grace of God, have a clean conscience. It's not that they don't ever sin. But when they do, they keep short accounts. They take it to the Lord. They get forgiveness. They get mercy. They keep moving down the road. And that enables them to lay their head on their pillows at night and then to wake up refreshed, ready to live with the Lord with bold purpose.

They're available to him. This is one of the great gifts of integrity. Proverbs 10:9, "Whoever walks in integrity walks securely, but he who makes his way crooked will be found out." You don't want to live your life like that. No, you wanna live with a boldness, fully available to whatever the Lord calls you to do. 

Another mark of the righteous is stability. Proverbs 13:6, "Righteousness guards him whose way is blameless, but sin overthrows the wicked." Proverbs 10:27, "The fear of the Lord prolongs life, but the years of the wicked will be short." One thing that we find in Proverbs is that sin complicates life. Life can be hard enough when you're trying to walk with the Lord, but sin just invites chaos. You're always having to manage some new crisis that your choices have created. On the other hand, simply submitting to the Lord's way, trusting him, obeying him, brings peace and stability and safety. Stability is a great gift of the righteous.

Another mark of the righteous life is perseverance. Proverbs 24:16, "For the righteous falls seven times and rises again." That's an honest verse. It says if you're seeking to live this righteous way, it's not that you won't ever fall. You may fall a lot, or you may fall in a catastrophic way. That may be what the 'seven times' is referring to. You're gonna have your share of failures, and disappointments, and troubles, but they're not going to be a game ender for you. You're not gonna get down. You're not gonna get defeated and embittered because you trust in God, and you know that he has made you great and precious promises, that He is with you, even in those stumbles. With his help, you're going to rise again and you're gonna keep going. There's such a holy grit about the life of the righteous. That leads to this last one.

Faith in God, trust in him, is the foundation of this life and how we're able to live in the way that we've described, because we know our lives are in God's hands. Proverbs 16:9, "The heart of a man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps."

Now, I realize there's a danger in just listing out a bunch of virtues, a bunch of good qualities from Proverbs. But what I want us to see is if we want to leave behind this body of work, this legacy of Godliness, it's not just gonna happen. There is a shape to the righteous life. It looks a lot like the character of Jesus Christ. He calls us by his grace, with the help of the Holy Spirit, informed by his word, to pursue this kind of life every day, the kind of life that leads a blessed memory.

When you set out on this righteous path in the company of Jesus pursuing this kind of godly life, it won't always be obvious that you've chosen the right way. Proverbs 4:18 says, "The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn. It grows brighter and brighter until full day." Now, that verse has a happy ending, but think about the beginning part of it. It tells us that the path of the righteous at points can be dark, and cold, and lonely, especially when you start out, but stay on it, because Jesus is there with you on that dark path. And if you walk by faith with Him, that path will get steadily brighter and brighter and brighter until your life shines with the glory of God. And when it's all said and done, you will leave behind a beautiful memory of faith, hope, and love that will guide the people who you love and leave behind. Hebrews 13:7 says, "Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith." That can be you. You can leave that kind of life behind.

Proverbs 22:1, "A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold." If you could pick one, pick a good name, a name that's associated with trusting the Lord and living for him, and serving others. That is greater than any riches. You could compile all of those little out of the way choices that you and I are making every day. They are building a name. They're going into this legacy that we're leaving behind. And with the help of the Lord, you can leave behind a heritage, a legacy for your own family, especially that is more valuable than any amount of money that you could leave in their name.

Proverbs 14:26, "In the fear of the Lord, one has strong confidence, and his children will have a refuge." We all want to give our children a leg up. Those of us who have kids want to do whatever we can to make them successful, to smooth a way for them. There is literally nothing that you could do for them more valuable and of greater lasting impact than to just live for the Lord, and to pursue this path of righteousness.

And apart from all that, at the end of this life, you will stand before the Lord Jesus himself and receive his commendation and enter into his joy. "Well done good and faithful servant." Proverbs 12:28, "In the way of righteousness is life; and in its pathway, there is no death." Can you imagine the moment you take that first step by faith to Jesus Christ? You are on a path that leads to nothing but life, life, life, life!

So the question as we reach an end and prepare to go to this great feast, as we think about the memory of the righteous men and women who are now with the Lord Jesus by his grace, how their memory blesses us and helps us, is what kind of memory will we leave behind. What kind of legacy will there be following us? If you're like me, thinking about your life in those terms brings up a lot of regret. You think about a lot of wasted time. You think think about a lot of poor decisions, about a lot of negative examples that people might be able to look to.

Here's the good news, the concrete hasn't cured yet. If you're breathing, then you got hope in the future. And the gospel of Jesus Christ says that when you put your life in the hands of Jesus, he can give you a name that is better than any you could build for yourself by your own strength. The Bible says that for the saints in heaven, they rest from their labors, and their works do follow them. Paul says in Ephesians 2, when you are saved by grace, God makes you a new creation in Christ. He's prepared good works for you to walk in. All you've got to do is show up with a heart of faith and he will lead you into a life that will matter for all eternity.

Let's take just a few moments as we pray to commit that to the Lord.

Sermon by Eric Smith
Senior Pastor, Sharon Baptist Church