
Let me toss out for you the first part of some proverbs--feel free to answer me (out loud!) by finishing the line. "Spare the rod . . . spoil the child." "When the going gets tough . . . the tough get going." "What goes up . . . must come down." "A fool and his money . . . are soon parted." "If you give him an inch . . . he'll take half a mile." "The grass is always greener . . . on the other side of the fence." "With friends like that . . . who needs enemies." "People who live in glass houses . . . should not throw stones."
How about these ones from Proverbs
As a door turns on its hinges... so a sluggard turns on his bed....I used this one as motivation for my fellow students in school!
Guard your heart for it is.... the wellspring of life
For the lips of an adulteress drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil;....but in the end she is bitter as gall, sharp as a double-edged sword. Her feet go down to death.
What we learn about wisdom literature:
· Right and wrong are hard wired into creation. There is a moral core to his creation that we will either align with or crash against
· The pitch is always the same...with get rich quick schemes. What is the pitch...no one has figured this out, we have the formula so that you will live forever...your skin will never age with this cream...
· Sexual liberation always leads to more slavery
· The teaching is the teaching of persuasion not command. The desire is to win you over, convince you, not force you, but just lay it all out for you in full view. It invites you to make good choices early on,
· It doesn’t speak about final judgment as much as it speaks to the consequences of present actions. The bottom line is that choices do have consequences. An example of this in the NT is you reap what you sow.
· We live in a world that wants to make the negative consequences go away instead of making choices that don’t lead to negative consequences
· Your children learn much more from your life than your instruction or teaching
· Proverbs do not all stand alone...13:21. They don’t always come out exactly like they are told and that is why they are inadequate in and of themselves. There is one who know that life is mysterious and that it is not simple. We know that there is not an explanation for every form of behaviour. We know that not everything can be boiled down into an equation or a formula; however proverbs are meant for our good
There was once an intern here who many just thought he just drank too much Coke and played way too many video games into the night....He had health issues and it was easy for us just to look no further than his habits; however, it wouldn’t be too long until we realized more was going on here than we realized. As it turned out there was a blocked passageway for proper breathing into his nose and it had to be broken and reset. I think all too easily we are quick to make judgement calls on situations and people and wisdom keeps telling us to not make the decision in haste and lose the way. Wisdom can give us those insights if we let her.
The interpretive key to the book of Proverbs is essentially built on one verse, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline’. The fear of the Lord is foundational to how we approach every situation in life. When we have a healthy fear of God in our lives, it will shape our thoughts, attitude and direction. Wisdom is gaining a proper perspective of God and responding in how we ‘do life’. It has been said that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react or respond to it. Reacting speaks to a knee jerk response, one that has taken in little or no thought and responding is something that I believe only time and the Holy Spirit can teach you.
While most everyone can gain insight from Proverbs for everyday life, the goal of this book is not to make us better neighbours, make us more financially stable or morally upright. The goal is to make us holy and sensitive to the Lord. It is my prayer that you will discover that today.
The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel:
2 for attaining wisdom and discipline;
for understanding words of insight;
Whenever you pick up a newspaper and read a columnist be it the Star or the National Post or watch the news on CBC vs CTV or Global for that matter you know you are going to get a different spin on every story because each person, each anchor, each station will focus on different aspects and each one will have their people’s opinions and thoughts just laced through everything you read.
So, how do we begin, we begin with the source, King Solomon, who’s one request from God was the very thing we are in search for, wisdom. 2 Chronicles 1:7-12
Nobody wants to be ‘taken for a ride’ or seen as a ‘sucker’ or easy sell. We all want that kind of savvy, follow the advice of a Dave Ramsay on finances and James Dobson on families. We have to be people of discernment, have the ability to cut through what’s true and reject what isn’t.
The fact is that we never stop learning.
Wisdom is personified to us as a woman.
Wisdom – Where She Originates v1-7
v6 prudence – wise decision in your daily life...street smarts
the fool – morally deficient; simple – morally inept; naive, without moral direction, inclined to evil
v7 is repeated in 9:10 and mentioned in the Psalms and Job as well.
Wisdom – Where She Flourishes v8-19
Wisdom – The Cry of Her Heart v20-33
The city is such a noisy place, so many people seeking our attention. Advertisers, films and friends. Lots of voices with advice on how we must live. How to be popular, how to get the right job, how to make money, how to look good. So many voices the noise can be deafening. It is the same in the area of religion- go into the bookshop and you see all the options, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, New Age, Scientology, or a mixture of them all? So many choices, so many options. It is no surprise that lots of people are fooled into thinking there is no one right way to live. Above all the noise of the city, above all the lifestyle options and advice, above all that, the voice of a woman is shouting at us tonight.
“People reject God’s Wisdom for all kinds of reasons. We know friends who are able to ignore God so easily. Perhaps they refuse to come to a meeting with you or refuse to read a book you offer them. Proverbs 1 lets us see how the heart of God views people ignoring Him. We are watching a tragic movie scene. The beautiful woman in the busy city street. She is calling out to passers by, begging them to listen to her. Grasping at their coats and shouting after them as they walk on. She has such vital things to say- but nobody cares. They are just too busy; work, family and things to do. The pain and frustration this woman feels is the pain and frustration of the God who begs people to listen to Him. Understand that the heart of God is pained by people ignoring Him.”
In all things she points beyond herself. As much as we can benefit from all of her warnings, inspiration, encouragement, correction, she goes beyond a life well lived to the delight of God in us. She makes us hungry for more, more of the life of God in us. There is a verse in Jesus’ ‘Sermon on the Mount’ that I absolutely love....they that hunger and thirst after righteousness shall be filled. It is not those who have achieved it but those who long for God to intervene on their behalf, who aren’t there yet and know it, who long for God to bring wholeness to their life.
She points to the suicide and self destruction of the simple.
How long will you fight the facts
The simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them.’ Do you get the shock of it? People kill themselves by being complacent. By not bothering to make the effort to listen to God’s Wisdom we commit suicide.
Wisdom is like taking on one of those 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles where the ultimate attempt is to piece together a portrait of the living God. There is a grand design here, there are no random pieces and together they form the whole which is where v7 begins. It entices us to begin the journey, to walk along the road
The only place of safety is to listen to her.
There are a few different ways that we learn....demotivational posters...MISTAKES...it reads,’the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others!’
learn by experience, learn by advice, learn by intuition and inner sense of the Spirit
Close with Colossians 2:1-10
Jesus is the wisdom of God personified, the fullness and perfection of wisdom.
My daughter Brynley was really struggling in primary school no matter how much she studied. It was really frustrating for her to learn and we just thought that she just needed to grasp concepts quicker and work harder until we took her to hearing tests and discovered something else that was going on. The problem for Bryn was that she could not discern the voice of her teacher over all the other noises in her class. We learned that for her the voice was just a murmur and she couldn’t zero in on it. We would learn that she had CAPS – central auditory processing disorder and that she needed an ‘edulink’ that would be an earpiece that she would receive that would be hooked to a mic on the teacher. In the process, the edulink would drown out all background noises and allow her to concentrate. This is the very thing that wisdom is crying out to us and the question is can we hear her voice above all the other voices going on inside of us. For this very reason we need the Holy Spirit to put us on God’s edulink system! My prayer is that God’s voice of wisdom would become more clear and strong in our lives.