Mentored by Wisdom

Beautiful. Let's take our Bibles and turn to Proverbs 8, the text that inspired that song. We are in a long series this fall called "Wisdom for the Road." And the first part of Proverbs 1-9 is a series of talks between a father and his young adult son who is preparing to leave home and move into independent life where he'll be making his own choices. We have said it would apply equally to a daughter who is growing up to young womanhood and about to make her independent choices. We are thinking about someone preparing to go to college, or about to get a job, or about to get their first apartment or whatever the case may be.

And so Proverbs is preparing the people of God to live their lives for the glory of God. But whatever age you are, Proverbs has got something to say to you. It's got something to say to all of us. So whether you're the center of the target, like our youth section over there, or you're playing catch up like I am on a lot of occasions with Proverbs, the Lord has life-giving wisdom to give to us. And here it is in Proverbs 8 this morning.

Like a lot of you, I went out of town this past week for a brief getaway. And when I'm away from home, I don't know why, I do something to unwind I never do when I'm in my own house, I want to watch the Food Network before I go to bed. It's the most pressure-free, stress-free thing that I know to do. I don't cook, so I'm not getting ideas of things that I need to be doing. I like to eat. I like watching food on the screen and just enjoying it there. It feels so disconnected from all my responsibilities and pressures and what I do.

I turned on the Food Network before I went to bed at one of these places where we were staying and I thought I would be watching Iron Chef or something like that, but instead it was more of this reality TV show of a man who had taken over his family's longtime restaurant. He was running that thing into the ground. He couldn't cook, he couldn't keep the place clean, stuff was molded in the pantry and in the refrigerator. He was a walking disaster. What do they do?

They need to call in someone who knows how to run a restaurant, who knows how to cook, who knows how to get things done. They call in the tender mercies of Gordon Ramsey. It's gotta be like the 73rd show that he's been the star of. Anyway, he comes in there and it becomes really evident really quickly that this guy doesn't just have a problem with cooking and managing it, he has life problems in general. He can't communicate with his mother. He's an alcoholic. He has broken promises with his siblings so that now they don't trust him. He's just a mess. But he's gotten this mentor, Gordon Ramsey. Now, we might say that if you're leaning on Gordon Ramsay as your rock to manage not only the kitchen but your whole life and relationships, you may want to open your Bible, but he was a big step up from where this guy was.

He puts himself under Gordon Ramsay's mentorship. He walks him through not only running this restaurant, but how to navigate his life. He sits down with his brother and sister and they work things out. He sits down at a table with this guy and with his mom and before you know it, they're crying and hugging and confessing sin and giving forgiveness. It's amazing the difference that the right mentor made in this really messy person's life.

And a lot of us would say, "man, sign me up for that, maybe not the Gordon Ramsay part, because he cusses a lot, but sign me up for someone who will just walk with me through life and manage things for me." Does that sound pretty good to some of us? I mean, that's why all these self-help books sell in the millions. That's why people go to conferences and take retreats to listen to these experts, because we know deep down that we need help. And we know that we need help not just in one particular area, we need life help. What a gift it would be to have a mentor who would take us by the hand and walk us through life.

Well, that's exactly what Proverbs 8 is all about. It's all about being mentored by wisdom, capital "W" wisdom, the person of wisdom. If you've been with us for this series, you know that a father has been sitting down with his son, walking him systematically through a lot of situations that he's going to encounter in life, things that aren't necessarily covered by the Ten Commandments. For example, if your friend comes in and wants you to cosign with him after he has already failed to pay back three or four other loans, or if you're walking down the street and you see a person who's not your spouse who's married to someone else, who's kind of tempting you into an erotic encounter. He's walking his son through all these really specific situations as he prepares him to step out onto the road of life and begin to make choices for himself.

However, time is running out on this father-son conversation. The sun is starting to come up. They've been talking all night, and it's time for this boy to put on his backpack and walk outside and get in his car. And so the father says here in Proverbs 8, "Listen, I'm running out of time. I cannot possibly rehearse every specific scenario you're gonna find yourself in in this life. I can't do it. As bad as I would like to, I can't walk with you through the rest of your life. For one reason, I'm gonna die at some point. Then where will you be? I can't walk with you through every choice that you make in every situation you can encounter, but I want to do something better for you.

I want to hand you off to someone who can go the distance with you for the rest of your life. I want to hand you off to the same mentor who my father introduced to me when I was 18 years old. This mentor has taken me under her wing and brought my messy, dysfunctional life under her management. Life hasn't been perfect since then, but it has been a heck of a lot better under the care, and the guidance, and the counsel of wisdom, capital "W" wisdom. It's made all the difference in my life. "I can't make you choose wisdom for your mentor," the dad tells his son, "but I'm pleading with you to do it." And then the dad hands the mic off to wisdom herself.

Now, one of the most striking elements of Proverbs 8 is wisdom personified. We tend to think of wisdom as an abstract quality, but wisdom is talked about in Proverbs 8 like a person. English teachers, you know what this is called: personification. It's when you take something that's not a person and you talk about it like it is a person. It's talking about having a relationship with God and his word. It's living under the authority of God as your Lord, listening to his word, and applying it to every area of your life. That's what it means to "walk with wisdom."

And I want to encourage you, because like it or not, our time is running out. I don't know how many Sundays we're all gonna have together. I don't know how many opportunities we'll have to open up this part of God's word and talk to each other about these matters. I don't have plans to do anything different, but none of us knows what the future holds. Like this father, I feel a sense of urgency. When am I ever going to get to preach Proverbs 8 to you again? I don't know. Let's make the most of this day. Let's have a sense of urgency as we listen to this offer to come under the mentorship of wisdom.

First, I want you to notice:

I'm calling it repetition because the first part of Proverbs 8 sounds a whole lot like the end of Proverbs 1. That's where we first met this person that Proverbs refers to as "Lady wisdom." Back in Proverbs 1, the father was introducing her to the son and Lady Wisdom was doing all the same stuff, calling out to this young man, offering her mentorship and her guidance through life. Now she's doing it again. Here's what the point of this chapter is, the window of opportunity is closing. You don't know how many more times you're going to hear the voice of wisdom calling to you. You don't know how many more times your heart is in a state where you're even open to listening to wisdom. You may be kind of open to it today. Six months from now, who knows? The brass ring only comes around one time. Here it comes around two times and wisdom is repeating her offer, "Listen to me, come under my guidance before it's too late." 

The first thing that Lady Wisdom emphasizes in this repetition is in verses 1-5, "I'm available." Wisdom says, "I accept anybody. This is not this elite program. You don't have to have a certain ACT score. You don't have to come from the right family. You don't have to have money. I accept anyone under my guidance." In fact, she is chasing you down, following you, taking her stand at all these crowded places where you go, these high traffic areas to get your attention. She's saying, "It doesn't matter what your story is this morning. If you're young and naive and you've not made any choices yet, but you don't know what you don't know and you're scared of the future, wisdom's for you." "If you're someone who's already made foolish choices and you've been stubborn, and stiff-necked, and now you're full of regret, wisdom says, 'I'm for you too.' You can come under my mentorship as well. Your life can change now. Your life can change today forever." If at this moment, you see that you need God's wisdom, that's all you need is need. You don't have to be smart. You don't have to be talented. You don't have to be good looking. You don't have to be well-connected. You just need to see that you have need and come under the guidance and the mentorship of wisdom. You can start walking with her today.

Nothing is stopping you but you. There's nothing between you and a wise, Godly, joyful life, not a perfect life, but a wise, Godly, joyful life that ends in heaven. Nothing is keeping you from that except you and your unwillingness to come under wisdom. Wisdom says "I'm available, come to me."

What we've seen in Proverbs is that our world is full of seductions, and tricks, and lies, and empty promises. Everything in this life is not "as it seems." For instance, you see this person who wants to be your friend. They invite you places and they bring you into their confidence. It seems like a great thing. You think to yourself, "what a gift I've gotten in this new friend!" But then that friend turns out to be toxic and they ruin your life. Can that happen? Absolutely.

Proverbs has told us about that and we can multiply examples. Things aren't always what they seem in this world. If you go out into this world just relying on your own understanding on the road of life, you are going to get scammed, and you're going to get hurt. You're going to trust the wrong people. You're going to set the wrong priorities in your life. You're going to form the wrong habits. You're going to invest in the wrong pursuits. And you're going to end up embarrassed, and beat down, and cheated. That's going to happen to all of us. If we're just kind of going through life, "la, la, la, everyone's wonderful," we're gonna get hurt. We've all experienced that.

You can come under wisdom's mentorship! In verse 6, she will lead you into a noble life. Noble means excellent, elevated, uncommon. How can you live an uncommonly wise, and joyful, and dignified, and Godly life? How can you live a life like that? Because in a world of lies, wisdom always tells you the truth. If you listen to wisdom, if you listen to the word of God, you will be grounded in reality. A lot of us are really grounded in our culture. We're really grounded in our feelings and our emotions. We're really grounded in our peer group, but we're not grounded in reality. That's why we keep getting hurt and keep stumbling over the same things over and over again.

When you listen to wisdom, wisdom tells you the truth about how things are in God's world. Wisdom will always point you past those misleading appearances to the way things really are. Wisdom will help you understand how your choices today will turn out tomorrow, and next year, and even 10 years from now. What a gift! Wisdom can give you that.

You know, the only problem with this though, the only reason why everybody doesn't sign up for the "wisdom mentorship program" is because we don't like what wisdom has to say to us. I don't either, because wisdom doesn't sugar coat the truth. Wisdom's words have an edge to them. We've already felt that edge a little bit in Proverbs, haven't we? Sometimes, wisdom hurts our feelings and offends us, because it tells us we're wrong. It tells us we're dumb. And we kind of get in our feelings and we want to shut out Proverbs and say, "I don't want to listen to that," or "I want to give you 15 explanations of why I did what I did." But wisdom is not apologizing. Wisdom is not here to flatter you, or coddle you, or listen to your excuses, or make you feel better about yourself. That's not wisdom. That's not what wisdom is about in your life or in my life. Wisdom is about spitting facts. Wisdom is about helping you get out of the mess that you got yourself into. Wisdom is about helping me get out of the mess that I've gotten myself into. When I say you, I'm talking about me too!

Wisdom is all about telling us the unvarnished truth that will help save our lives. Sometimes wisdom is going to say, "hey, you're annoying, stop doing that."  Wisdom will say, "You know why you don't have any friends? Because you can't keep a secret, or because every time you talk to someone you just vomit all this negative, critical stuff and nobody wants to be around that. Quit doing that!" Sometimes wisdom will say, "Hey, honey, why are you wearing that? I mean, this ain't the bedroom, ok? If you're with your spouse, then read chapter 5 and have at it, but we're going to a job interview today." Sometimes wisdom will say, "You know Eric, you can get a tattoo on your forehead that says, 'I love Travis Tritt,' but it might affect your employment opportunities." Sometimes wisdom is going to say, "Hey, you know why you're not moving up at work? It's not because everybody's against you. It's not because your dad wasn't born in Hardin County. It's not because it's all politics. It's because you're lazy. You just don't hit a lick at a snake. And so people who actually do show up for work and do their jobs, they get promoted over you." Could that be an option? Wisdom says things like this!

Wisdom says, "Look, you're so worried about your kids all the time. You're always worried about how they will turn out. Yet, you constantly make decisions to steer them away from being under the word of God and in the worship of God with the people of God, on the day of God, on the Lord's Day! You're constantly deprioritizing the basic means of grace for knowing God and growing in God. How's that working out for you?"

Wisdom says, "You say you want this really intimate relationship with your spouse, and that's great, but if you're a wife, you disrespect your husband all the time. You talk to him like a child. You talk about him like a dog. If you're the husband, you're not loving your spouse like you love yourself. You're supposed to love your spouse like your own body. Let's be honest. You haven't missed any meals. I see you always put on that little cozy north face jacket when you go outside on a chilly morning. You take care of your own body, but you're not taking care of your wife like that. There's a reason why your marriage is shabby and sorry, because you're not listening to truth in God's word." That's how wisdom talks.

Actually, we say in the office that this Proverbs series just gives me an excuse to let "Bad Eric" out of his cage, because "Bad Eric" gets to say what he's been wanting to say all the time. I could just say it's wisdom, but it's really true, isn't it? None of us like to hear any of those things that I just said. So, honey, we're getting a few fewer Christmas cards this year. But how many people know we need to hear truth like that?

The reason a lot of our lives won't change and get better is because any time wisdom brings truth into our lives, we can't handle it. We can't deal with it. We always want to excuse why our behavior isn't exactly right. We want to run to these friends who will tell us, "Oh, honey, you're fine just the way you are. You did the right thing. You said the right thing. You felt the right thing. Keep doing what you're doing." That is our way of coping with being confronted with unpleasant, unflattering truth about ourselves. And so we never change. That story is repeated 1 billion times over every single day.

However, if you're ready to hear some hard truth about yourself, then you're ready for your life to start getting a whole lot better under the mentorship of wisdom.

Wisdom says, "Listen in, I know that you want many different things right now. You want more money. You want a nicer house. You want to be more popular. You want to be 20 pounds skinnier. You want honor. You want achievement. You want all kinds of things." "Listen to me," wisdom says, "I'm gonna offer you something even better than all those things. I am offering you God's perspective on life." That's wisdom: God's perspective on life.

Think about this with me for just a minute. Do you know people who have plenty of money who are a relational wreck? Do you know people like that? Do you know people who are skinny and good looking, but set their lives on fire because of their choices? Do you know Christian people who are saved and are on their way to heaven, but their life is gonna be a drama fest every day until they go to heaven? Do you know those people? Do you know people who have every earthly reason to be deliriously happy and yet they are incurably miserable because they all lack wisdom? And that's what wisdom is trying to get through to us. It's what Solomon learned as a young king: if I just get the wisdom of God, I'll get everything else that I really need thrown in. If I can just have God's perspective on life, I can carry that with me everywhere I go. That's gonna fix a lot of these other things that I think I need so much.

Verses 10-11 of Proverbs 8 inspired that song that Maggie sang a few minutes ago. It was this really popular praise chorus in the 80s and 90s. "Lord, you are more precious than silver." That's so true. And Jesus is the true wisdom of God, but I would encourage you to start thinking about God's wisdom in his word like that. Wisdom is more precious than silver. There's nothing that you desire in your heart right now at this moment, sitting in your seat at church, whatever you think that you've got to have, I'm telling you, the word of God is telling you, the truth of God is more precious than that. It really is.

That's wisdom's repetition. This is her offer.

What rewards will wisdom bring into your life if you make her your mentor? She's asking for a lot. You have to listen to her a lot. You have to submit to her a lot. What do you get in return? Well, first, you're gonna get some skills.

If you don't hear anything else from Proverbs, I hope you're hearing that you can love God, and have good intentions, and yet destroy your life by lacking wisdom in small daily decisions. Is that a category for you? That is the key category for wisdom. I can love God, and want to do right, and have the best intentions, but simply by lacking wisdom in my daily choices, I can destroy my life. Wisdom is calling to you and offering to you in verse 12 skills for navigating life into your heart.

Notice the people that wisdom dwells with: prudence. When you get wisdom, when you come under the word of God, you get prudence. That doesn't sound real exciting to us, but that means you can identify dangerous destructive situations before you rush into them and get hurt. That would be a really good skill to have, wouldn't it? You can also get discretion and knowledge. That means you understand the true nature of a situation instead of just following the crowd, following your feelings, making your own best guess in every decision. In every situation in your life, you can have discretion. Discretion means you see subtle but crucial differences between options.

My brother worked in the coffee industry for a long time and he could detect all these really subtle flavor notes in coffee. To me, it was just coffee, you know? It's all the same. I didn't have the discretion, that trained skill like he had. So discretion is having the ability to look at different choices in your life, different opportunities, different decisions, and you can sift between them. You can see the fine distinctions of whether this choice is ok, whether this choice is better. If I make this choice, it will lead to this outcome. What a great gift to have discretion and discernment like that. You can get these life skills, these survival skills for your daily life.

When you get wisdom, you also get standards (v13). The world has its own version of wisdom. It's a counterfeit of God's wisdom. The world's wisdom teaches you how to get your way and get what you want by lying, manipulating, cheating, and bullying. Now, if you do all that stuff, you'll probably get your way a lot in this world. You'll look kind of successful. It will look like worldly wisdom is working out for you. But in the end, God judges you and you go to hell forever. So, were you wise then to live that way? No, you weren't really wise at all. You missed the big point. You missed the fact that God made this world and God made you. God is the one who's going to evaluate your life in the end. God is the one who sets the rules of the game.

Here's what's wonderful about wisdom. It's not just going to make you smarter like brainier. It's going to teach you how to have a right relationship with God, your maker. It's going to prepare you for eternity. Real wisdom, these verses say, are going to teach you to obey His word and align your character with his character. It's going to teach you to love the things that God loves and hate the things that God hates. If you have real wisdom operating in your life, you're gonna hate evil. You're gonna hate pride. You're gonna hate arrogance in yourself. Even though in the world those are the things that get things done, right?

The most successful people in our world just from an earthly standpoint are evil, proud, and arrogant, amen? You're gonna really want to buy into that and think, "Well, I wanna be successful, so I'm gonna be evil, proud, and arrogant too. The true wisdom of God says, "that's not gonna end well, because you're gonna have to talk to the man on the other side of all this." Instead, true wisdom will teach you to walk in the way of righteousness, and justice, and obedience to God, even if you suffer for it a little bit in the short term. Even if you seem to fall behind the pack a little bit in the short term, in the long term, I promise it will work out. Wisdom will give you the standards that you live by.

Finally, wisdom will give you success (vv 14-16). These verses describe how wisdom equips kings and rulers and those who are in authority to successfully govern. Now, the original context of Proverbs is that it's written by Solomon. He's not just preparing his son for college. That's the image I've been using. He's preparing his sons to rule over Israel. And to do that, to have that kind of responsibility, they are going to need the wisdom of God. Verses 14-16 teach us that wisdom is gonna supply you with counsel to make tough decisions. It's gonna give you insight to see past appearances. It's gonna give you strength of character to stick by the right, hard call. When a leader has wisdom, everything else flourishes. Isn't that right?

Now, you may say, "that's great for Solomon, but I'm not a king." I know you're not, but you were created in the image of God (Genesis 1:28). This is page one of the Bible. God made every one of you to have responsibility over something. He made you to manage, to rule, to lead something, even if it's just a nine-year-old boy who's supposed to keep his closet organized. Even if it's an 11-year-old girl who's supposed to feed the cat every day. Whatever your responsibilities are, you have some kind of responsibility in this world, and God wants you to take dominion over that environment and what has been entrusted to you.

It may just be managing your schedule. It may be managing your health. It may be your role in your family or taking care of your house. It may be an actual job that you get paid for. It may be a business that you own. It may be a ministry that you're a part of or that you're leading. God has given you something to manage and to lead. You need wisdom for that. And if you submit to the wisdom of God, you will have success in those areas. You really will. I'm not saying you'll get rich and famous over it, but what you oversee will be fruitful and it will be blessed, because you're walking in the wisdom of God.

You know what happens when you do good work and it's successful? You get more work, and more responsibility. You may say, "I would like a little bit less of that." I don't make the rules. God makes the rules. And just like Adam was supposed to be fruitful and multiply in the garden, to have dominion, to expand and cultivate, that just gave him more work to do. It's gonna be the same for you. When you wisely manage what God has put you over, it's gonna expand your responsibilities. It's gonna expand your territory. That's the way it's meant to be. That's what human beings are for. Were created in the image of God.

Well, anyway, those are some of the rewards of wisdom: skills, Godly standards, success in your life and your leadership. After all those rewards, verses 17-21 bring us back to another appeal by wisdom, "Look, I love those who love me." Wisdom says, "If you make me a priority, I'll make you a priority." It will show up in your life.

The question we should be asking ourselves by now is what really qualifies wisdom to be your life mentor. Why should you put your whole life under the management of wisdom? Well, verses 22-31 are sort of like wisdom's resume. She's sliding it across the saying, "Here's why I'm qualified to run your life." There are only two items of qualification on the resume.

Wisdom says, "Look, I've been around for a while." I don't want to offend all of our insurance people, but it's like the Farmers Insurance commercial, "We know a thing or two because we've..." ok, I realize that it's competition and I don't mean to get us into all that, but their whole motto is, "We know what we're doing because we've been around a long time." That's the pitch.

Wisdom says, "Hold my sweet tea, I can top that. I have been around since before the creation of the world. Before there was a mountain, before there was a speck of dust, before there was such a thing as a horizon, I was there with God. I have seen it all strictly by observation." Wisdom is gonna know how human life works. Would you agree? Wisdom has watched, overseeing every human life that has ever been in the history of the world. Do you think that that is someone who could teach you something? I'd say so. But wisdom has another qualification.

In these amazing verses, wisdom describes herself as God's foreman at creation. As God is creating the entire universe, who is God's master workman? Who is God's Jeff Parish? It's wisdom, capital "W" wisdom. That's who God is using to get the job done, to design it, to work it, to carry out the plan. Wisdom was God's master workman. As God is separating light from darkness, and sky from land, and setting the boundary limits of the sea, and creating human beings, Wisdom was there creating the world! In verses 30-31 she says, "I was daily his delight rejoicing in all that he made."

Now, at this point, if you're a Christian, this is kind of reminding you of somebody, someone who was in the beginning with God, somehow distinct from God, and yet doing things that only God can do, designing, creating, carrying out the Father's will. Does that sound familiar to anybody? Who do you think that sounds like? It sounds just like Jesus! Now, God is revealing himself progressively through scripture. He's not yet shown all this light on who He is as the eternal Trinity. By the time Solomon is writing in Proverbs, he is just writing about the person of wisdom, but once Jesus comes on the scene and God floods the full spotlight on the Trinity, all the New Testament writers say, "Man, I think Jesus is the fulfillment of this person. The shadowy figure of wisdom is Jesus, the eternal Son of God.

Think about John 1:1, "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. Through him, God created all things. Apart from Him, not anything was made that was made." That's Jesus! You can read Colossians 1. You'll read about Jesus, the eternal Son, being the wisdom of God through whom God creates the entire world. We should make a connection between Proverbs 8 and Jesus, the Son of God. Don't try to press every detail of the poem. It's a metaphor. It's a poem. Wisdom is a woman. Jesus is male. It sounds like God almost created wisdom in Proverbs 8. The Son is uncreated. He's eternally begotten of the Father. Don't try to press every single little detail, but if you're hearing echoes of Jesus here in Proverbs 8, you're exactly right.

Jesus is the wisdom of God. He fulfills and surpasses this person of wisdom. Jesus is inviting you under his mentorship. He's saying, "Come unto me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, who've been foolish, who've made a mess of it, come to me and take my yoke on you. Let me teach you, learn from me, get in this yoke next to me and we'll pull together all the way to the end of the line. And I promise you my yoke is easy and my burden is light. That's who is speaking to us in these pages.

We return to the practical point. In verses 22-31, Jesus Christ, the wisdom of God, is offering you his resume as your mentor. Listen, folks, you're gonna be influenced by somebody this week. You're gonna listen to somebody's voice as you make decisions and as you set your priorities. Why not listen to Jesus Christ? Why not listen to the eternal Son of God who made the world you live in? He is the designer.

Matthew and Bethany Van Neste set up an escape room in the library for a youth retreat several months ago. They asked Brock and I to pilot it to see if we could solve the case. Spoiler alert: we didn't, we couldn't. But when we got stumped, we called on Bethany. We called and said, "Hey, we've gotten to this place we can't figure it out. Tell us what to do next." Immediately she told us what to do! Why? She designed it. She set it up. And that's what it's like to walk with. Jesus. You are literally listening to the voice of the person who created you, and created the world, and created speech, and human relationships, and leadership, and everything else that you deal with in life: money, time management, the whole thing. He's the Lord of all! He could be your mentor. Why would you listen to someone else over him? Why would you ignore him? Why would you think, "No, I think I've got this on my own. I'll figure it out myself." Why would you do that? Jesus Christ wants to be your Lord, your savior, but also your shepherd, your God, and your mentor. Why not listen to Him? He delights in you. When God created human beings, the father and the son were thrilled. They said, "someone made in our image, who can reflect our glory. This is something we are overjoyed about." He's overjoyed with the idea of you reflecting His glory in your life. He can help you rejoice. He can help you be what God made you to be instead of living so far below what he made you for. What are we thinking not listening to him? Why are we holding back? Why do we give him 7% of our lives? Why don't we go all the way and make him Lord of our lives and let wisdom guide us until he brings us home.

That leads us to the very end. Wisdom only has one requirement. You've gotta get decisive. I wish I could choose this for you, but I can't. I can't choose it for my kids. I can't choose it for y'all who I love like my own blood family. I cannot make the choice for you to get under the yoke of wisdom's mentorship. I cannot do it. Only you can do it. Your parents can't make that choice for you. Your pastor can't make that choice for you. You cannot simply come to church Sunday after Sunday and say, "Man, that wisdom, that's some really good stuff. There's a lot of great stuff in that Proverbs. I need to do something about that one day." That is not going to get it done.

You have to do two things. It's really two sides of the same coin. You have to repent and believe. You have to turn from living according to your own wisdom or the world's wisdom. You've got to turn to living under the wisdom of Jesus Christ. You've got to make some changes. You've got to get humble, and open, and honest. You've got to stop holding back from the Lord and let him speak into every part of your life. That's the only way this wise way of life is going to work. But if you do, oh my goodness, blessed are those who wait daily at my gates. Blessed are those who wake up in the morning and say, "wisdom of God, speak to me, lead me, show me how to live today." That person is happy. I promise. I have obeyed this very imperfectly in my life, but to the extent that I have obeyed it, it has made me so happy. I am so happy. We may not look very happy, I promise I am. I am so happy walking with Jesus. The only unhappy moments in my life are when I quit listening to him. He has made me so happy and he offers himself to you too. Let's pray."

Sermon by Eric Smith
Senior Pastor, Sharon Baptist Church