from your Bibles again, then to the book of Proverbs this morning. We begin chapter 3 this morning. In recent weeks, in chapter 1, we heard the call to hear wisdom, to listen to woman wisdom. In chapter 2, the call was to pursue wisdom. And now we're progressing on to what you do with it. If you pursue it and get it, what do you do with it? Committing and keeping wisdom. Committing yourself to the God of wisdom. And then how God blesses you by that, blesses you in it when you commit totally to wisdom. There are four stanzas in the verses we're going to read, verses 1 through 12, that we can't really see in the NAS here, but four basic imperatives in those four commands, and each of those is answered by promises of blessing. In fact, every pair of verses here that we'll read functions that way. So, if you look at the odd verses, the odd verses are a command or a condition, and the even verse is a promise of blessing. So, if you will do this, odd verses, you will experience this. This is how you'll be blessed, the even verses. So, look for that as I read this morning. beginning with v. 1. This is God's holy, infallible Word, so give careful attention as it's read. My son, do not forget My teaching, but let your heart keep My commandments. For length of days and years of life and peace they will add to you. Do not let kindness and truth leave you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart, so you will find favor and good repute in the sight of God and man. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight. Do not be wise in your own eyes. Fear the Lord and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your body and refreshment to your bones. Honor the Lord from your wealth and from the first of all your produce, so your barns will be filled with plenty and your vats will overflow with new wine. My son, do not reject the discipline of the Lord, or loathe His reproof. For whom the Lord loves, He reproves, even as a father corrects the son in whom he delights. Well, this book, again, is God's Wisdom. These first nine chapters that we're going through in this series are all about wisdom. I want to begin this morning just reviewing what is wisdom? What do we mean by wisdom? We talked about that the first week, but I don't want us to lose sight of that, even as we use the word a lot. Wisdom is a big concept. And there are a lot of words that help our understanding of what it is, a lot of roughly synonymous words, and we've read a lot of those already, so understanding, or insight, or discernment, knowledge. And more than parsing out the meaning of each of those words individually, I think we're supposed to just have their cumulative effect. They pile up together and give the sense of the breadth of what wisdom is. So what is wisdom? Briefly, to put it briefly, wisdom is not just that knowledge, it's not just knowing something, but it's applying what is true to every part of life and experience. Applying what is true to every part of life and experience. What we know about God and His Word and ourselves and people in general and on and on. From the biggest questions of salvation and existence to what am I going to have for lunch today? To put it another way, what is wisdom? Wisdom is the skill, it's the expertise of how to walk in the fear of the Lord. How to walk in union with Christ. It's the skill to do that in every choice that you make. So the wise person knows a lot of things, observes. The wise person knows God, knows God's laws. The wise person is a good observer of how things work, of the consequences of one action against another action. The wise person understands the laws of nature, understands sin, understands human tendencies, and so on, and puts all these things together to make decisions that honor God and bless others. And again, we don't want to lose sight of the fact that the very height of wisdom, the very pinnacle if you're picturing a pyramid of wisdom, but also the very base, the foundation of wisdom is a relationship with God. is acknowledging our helplessness, our sin, our lack of wisdom, and receiving the Gospel of Christ who is the wisdom of God. Forgiveness and life and truth through a relationship with Him. Well, in Proverbs 3, Proverbs 3 is full of promises that wisdom gives. If you cling to wisdom, then there's a promise that follows. I want to touch on those generally first. Just ask the question, how do we understand the promises of Proverbs? And the reason for that is because when we read them on the surface, it can often seem like there's too much being promised. It goes too far. It's not really realistic. So how do we understand when it says, do this, get wisdom, and you will have life and health and prosperity? How do we understand that? Some people, because that doesn't always meet reality, right? Some have said, well, the way we should understand Proverbs promises is it's saying this is how things sometimes work. This is how it'll probably work. There's some truth to that. There's some truth because many of the warnings, many of the promises of Proverbs reflect a natural pattern in this world. Just the way that things generally do work by God's design. So for example, Proverbs 23, 21. The drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and laziness will clothe them with rags. We can recognize the general truth of that. Proverbs 22.6, a very famous proverb. Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it. So we can draw some logical lines from those conditions to the results, right? And we can affirm those things from our experience as well. But everyone recognizes that even those ones I just read are not absolute promises. It doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes drunkards do end up getting rich. And kids don't always grow up and remember what they were taught, even in a general way. And what do we make of promises, even the bigger ones, of life and honor and peace and so on? There are many Christians who die in poverty, or in prison. And so to say that these are just probabilities, also, this is how God maybe generally works, I think is not adequate too. That would be to turn the Proverbs into saying, well, if you will carefully follow God's wisdom, He might sometimes be faithful to you, but you can't really count on it. And that's not really what's being said. So we have to look and understand these promises of Proverbs as looking ultimately to a future life with God. Looking to the ideal, the ultimate life with God that belongs to us. It has begun now in a way, but we still await its consummation. What ultimate life is. It's a life that begins in some ways now, and the benefits of wisdom can be validated. We experience them in some measure, even if not perfectly now. But we will fully one day in the eternal life that Proverbs is looking towards for God's people. I just want to look at one example of that, the example of life, the word life. We read that a couple of times, that promise in this chapter. It's a good example of what I'm talking about. So verse two, length of days and years of life and peace, they will add to you. or if you turn over to verse 21, keep sound wisdom and discretion so they will be life to your soul. There's a promise of life in some sense. The Hebrew word is Chaim. If you know The Fiddler on the Roof, you know the song La Chaim, to life, right? In a few places, that word life means what it would usually mean in our English of life. So it means you're alive, right? You're not dead. It's a clinical life. Your heart is beating. But almost always, and we read this word 30-some times in the book of Proverbs, it means something beyond that. Like in the Fiddler on the Roof, that song to life is not just about being alive and not dead. It's about life in its full, abundant sense. A prosperous life as it should be, as God intended. Life with God. Another example of this promise in Proverbs 21. Whoever pursues righteousness and kindness will find life. That promise is not just you'll get more days tacked on the end. or some worldly status. Think about it this way. In Genesis 3, when sin came into the world, when Adam and Eve sinned, the penalty was death. God promised that death would come for sin. And that includes clinical death. Adam and Eve's hearts stopped beating eventually. But it was more than that. It was worse than that. Likewise, life is more than just staying alive, the promise of life in Proverbs. We need to be careful not to read the promises in Proverbs in a very worldly, temporal, sort of humanly selfish way, but to understand the vision of Proverbs. Another point to confirm that understanding of the promise of life is that in Proverbs, the fools are never said once to possess life. Even though they're alive, they have clinical life, but they don't have life. They don't have it even right now in the Proverbs. So let's look at some of the promises of these verses then and look at the four conditions, the four commands to experiencing the fullness of those blessings. And again, in some ways, we have taste of those now, but ultimately in the life to come. So the first command, the first condition summarized with the word keep. or to keep wisdom. V. 1, My son, do not forget My teaching, but let your heart keep My commandments. And again, this is a step beyond chapter 2 where the command was to pursue wisdom. Get it. Actively go and get it. But once you get it, you're to keep it. You're to guard it. When you find the treasure, you hide it. You protect it. When you capture the prisoner, you protect him. You guard him. I hope none of you play the lottery, but what do they say to do if you win big? Don't tell anyone. Sign the ticket and hide it. Get a lawyer. Protect it. V. 3, do not let kindness and truth leave you. Don't let them get away. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart. So just as it takes effort, it takes intentionality to pursue wisdom, it also takes intentional effort to keep wisdom, to practice it. Let it become part of you. Again, it's not just a matter of finding something and then you have it, like finding a document or a list. Wisdom can't be catalogued. You can't write it all down and file it away. It takes knowledge, but it also takes experience, it takes practice, it takes never-ending learning and reflection. It needs to be written on your heart. We talked about that last week as well, the significance of the heart in the Bible. It guides everything that you do, everything that you think and decide. The father here tells his son to tie it around your neck. This is how he images keeping wisdom. I've tied, for example, keys to my person before at a water park or something like that because I tie a good knot, because I know, I'm convinced of the consequences of not having my keys at the end of the day. And I'm convinced of the good of having them at the end of the day. The message of Proverbs is there's nothing more valuable that you could pursue and then hold on to than God's wisdom. And the Father will keep coming back to this kind of language with His Son. So Proverbs 6, bind them on your heart forever. Fasten them around your neck. Proverbs 7, My Son, keep My word. Store up My commands within you. Last week I was driving my car with my bike on the back and my bike rack, well it's a little bit cheap to begin with and it's about 15 years old, all of the webbing is frayed, all of the bike frame straps are broken and so whenever I use it I have to rig something to set the bike on there. And this time, I apparently did it a little hastily. And as I was driving, my bike came off. Just half of it, thankfully, just the back half, the front half stayed on somehow. And so I was dragging my bike down Stony Brook Parkway. Thankfully, not very long. and didn't do any damage, I think, but it's one of my most valued possessions, my mountain bike, and I should have taken more care to secure it, to keep it, and especially if I want it to last, want to benefit from it. If you value wisdom as Proverbs urges you to, and the next passage we'll look at next week is all about the value of wisdom, you'll not only pursue it, Again, last week we talked about the pursuit that begins and especially is listening to and reading God's Word. You and in your family is the highest priority in your life, but you also keep it and reflect it and guard it, practice it. Well, what are the promises attached to this command? Verse 2. Again, length of days and years of life and peace they will add to you. Speaking of that life, that real and full life and fellowship with God that you can begin now to experience in a significant way. be fulfilled one day. Peace, that's the Hebrew word shalom. Again, speaks similarly of all provision and prosperity. Everything being as it should. Experiencing peace and security and so on. Verse 4, you will find favor and good repute or good reputation in the sight of God and man. So the promise is walk in the fear of the Lord and you will receive grace from God. you'll experience God's grace. And not only that, you'll experience grace or favor from others in the sense that we can give each other grace. This is a good example of one of the promises that clearly has a practical outworking in everyday life. If the outworking of God's wisdom in your life is that you treat others with kindness and truth or faithfulness and integrity and so on, you will in many ways receive that in return. Others will be more likely to be kind to you or to be gracious to you in the sense of giving you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe even when your faults and your weaknesses come out. The next aspect of your total commitment to wisdom as described here is summarized with the word trust. Verses 5-7. These are maybe the most familiar words in the book of Proverbs. Total commitment to God is expressed in a few ways in these next verses. Summarized well in v. 5. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Do not lean on your own understanding. So to walk in God's wisdom means nothing less than to trust in the Lord with all your heart. Totally. Trust Him totally. And it's not a faith in a lifestyle or a certain code of behavior. It's a faith in a personal and a covenant God. You've placed the faith in your whole life in existence on God and His wisdom. You're totally, completely trusting His care, trusting His promises. You're literally staking your life on Him. And that's stated positively and negatively in these verses 5-7. The summary of the positive, again, is trust God. Trust Him totally. Lean on Him. And the negative of that is don't trust yourself. Trust God. Don't trust yourself. Don't lean on yourself. The question for everyone is who are you going to trust? Who is controlling your life? Is it God or is it you? Leaning on our own understanding, being wise in our own eyes, putting your wisdom, your desires ahead of God's, takes many different forms in life and in our attitudes. Maybe we most easily recognize doing that in someone who is arrogant and outwardly presumptuous and thinks they have it all together. We fairly easily identify that and say, well, that person needs to humble themselves and admit sin and submit to God. And that's true. But failing to trust God and having pride in our own way and pride in our own desires can look very different than that and yet be the same root issue. So consider this, one of the most common presenting problems in going for counseling and guidance is this, I just, I don't feel good about myself. I know I don't have self-esteem. I'm just not good at loving myself. One counselor says that she eventually gives this illustration to people who describe their general problems that way. I just have trouble loving myself. I don't have self-esteem. She holds up a quarter, and she shows the George Washington side and says, this side of the quarter is the side that represents the attitude, I'm awesome. I'm good at things. Everybody likes me. I'm important. I have it all together. And then the other side of the coin, she says, this represents someone with the attitude, no one likes me. I'm a failure, I'm not good at things. Then she asks, what do we call this coin? Because it appears that the two sides of this coin are two vastly different people with totally different problems. But the lesson is, she says, this is the all about me coin. Both sides of the coin, the root problem is it's all about me. People are consumed with self, what they want, even if it's the side where we wouldn't recognize that as readily. I'm no good. People don't like me. The attitude is I deserve better, God. I wish You had made things different. I wish You had given me different circumstances. I could do this better. If you've been convinced that what you need to feel good is to love yourself or to think more highly of yourself or be more self-confident, or that that's what your kids need, you're set up for massive disappointment. You're setting your kids up for crushing disappointment after crushing disappointment because you will not deliver. You cannot deliver happiness. You're not worthy of that kind of trust. You're not worthy of esteem. We're taught that the beginning of a healthy, confident person is statements like, I can. I do. I will. I am. But the confession of a humble person who is walking in the fear of the Lord with all peace and contentment and trust in his heart, that begins with, I am not. I do not. I cannot. I will not. Listen to how the attitude of wisdom begins in Proverbs 30. This is how the chapter begins. This person who has great trust and peace in God. Surely I am too stupid. I have not the understanding. I have not learned wisdom, nor do I have knowledge of the Holy One who has ascended to heaven and come down, who has gathered the wind in His fists, who has wrapped up the waters in a garment, who has established the ends of the earth. What is His name? Surely you know. Every word of God proves to be true. He is a shield to those who take refuge in Him. So do not add to His words. lest He rebuke you and you be found a liar." So far from the secular concept of self-esteem or the constant encouragements to believe in yourself or be who you are and on and on, is the biblical fact that true wisdom, truly trusting in God entirely that leads to peace and life and contentment, means acknowledging that you bring literally nothing to the table. You contribute nothing to a meaningful, happy, effective life. But for the believer, for one who belongs to God, that's okay. Because God provides all that you need and vastly more. Look at v. 6. The Father says it to His Son in this way as well. In all your ways, acknowledge Him. Acknowledge Him. That's a rough equivalency at best of what the Hebrew says. We don't have a great English word maybe for this. The word really speaks of a relationship. So Derek Kidner says it means having fellowship with Him. Bruce Waltke, knowing intimately, knowing personally. And so the sense is in everything you do, do it in full, conscious relationship with God. Everything you do, every choice you make is for Him, is by Him, is in His wisdom. That also implies that in everything you do, you do it not for yourself. You may be sacrificing your own desires, your own instincts, maybe your own well-being in some sense to acknowledge Him. What is the promise here? To trust in the Lord with all your heart. V. 8 says it will be healing to your body and refreshment to your bones. Literally, that says healing to your navel. Right to your navel, which is a metaphor for your center person, your whole person. This will be healing to you. These are metaphors for overall wellness, and again, security and peace. We'll talk more about security next week. Security is the promise that's elaborated on in the next passage. Back to verse 6, too, is one of the promises here. In all your ways acknowledge Him. He will make your paths straight. The nuance there is probably straight and smooth. Picturing a straight and smooth road ahead of you. That promise is not that life will be easy. That your life now will be easy. You'll experience it as smooth in every sense. Verse 11 confirms that, for example. The father tells the son, you're going to experience the discipline of the Lord. God's path will often feel crooked and rough by our wisdom. But if we're walking with Him, that is the path. There's a Portuguese proverb that says, God writes straight with crooked lines. God writes straight with crooked paths. The promise is that we will always see a way forward. We will always know what path we're on. We always see the end of the path. God will never stop leading you. You will always be on God's path. You will reach His rewards in the end. You're on a straight road to the promises of God with God. And you can have that confidence always if you acknowledge Him. If you're trusting Him. Well then we come to two evidences the Father gives of your total commitment to God's wisdom, to trusting God with your whole heart. What would give evidence of that? First, verse 9, is your giving. Your giving, verse 9, honor the Lord from your wealth and from the first of all your produce. What area are we more apt to place our trust, our sufficiency, our security in than our wealth? The things that we have. So here's a simple, concrete test. You say that you fear the Lord. You say you trust Him. God says, are you giving? Are you giving to others? Giving of your firstfruits is how the Father puts it here. That's symbolic of your first and your best. The first fruits of all your produce. Now, we're not farmers here today, but we have produce, we have revenue, we have income. It's applicable to us in that sense. The opposite of first fruits, giving your first and your best, would be giving of what's left over. Once you have all that you want and you're totally satisfied, if there's a little bit of leftovers, maybe you share some of that with someone else. Someone who trusts in the Lord with all his heart can give without reservation, freely and generously of their best. He can give up front even. If you're walking in the fear of the Lord, you'll want to extend the peace and security that you enjoy from the Lord. Extend that materially in practical ways to others. You can do that in confidence that God will care for you. He will provide for you. And that's applicable to generosity in general. It's perhaps most particularly applicable in giving to the local church. In giving of our tithe that God commands. We have many opportunities to give to others, but the first one that is equally our obligation The starting point maybe you could say is giving to Christ in His work in the church. Giving 10% of your produce. Giving of your first fruits. That's an expression of total trust and devotion and love of not leaning on yourself. Not leaning on your own sufficiency, your own wisdom. It's really a test of that. Whatever your circumstances are, There are many people who say, well, I'll give or I'll tithe once I get that raise or once I pay off my student loans or once I build up my savings. If you're waiting, for example, to give of your tithe to the Lord until it's easier, if you're waiting until you have some leftovers to dump out, you're not only disobeying God, you're communicating clearly that you don't trust Him. We don't trust His promises here. Consider the promise that you're forgoing. V. 10, so your barns will be filled with plenty. Your vats will overflow with new wine. Honor God, including with your wealth, He says, and He will provide for you richly. More richly, in fact, is His promise. Now, that's not a promise like we see with televangelists and so on that God will give you all the earthly treasure that you want. But He will give you what you need in abundance. He will give you far more than what you need. You as a child of God, you inherit from your Father with Jesus Christ all things. You are inheritor now of all things. And even now, God uses giving of our tithe or setting aside the Lord's Day, things like this, to teach us to trust. It uses suffering this way too to teach us contentment and joy in Christ. And what richer blessing is there than that compared to the promise in Malachi 3 where God says, bring the full tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in My house, and thereby put Me to the test. So you who are waiting to build up the savings or pay off the loan, Go ahead and test me, God says. It's not only a matter of obedience. He says, test me if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need. And finally, another evidence of loyalty, an evidence of total commitment to God's wisdom, is that you receive. That you receive the Lord's discipline. Look at verse 11. My son, the Father says, my son, do not reject the discipline of the Lord or loathe His reproof. This is further evidence of total trust in God and His wisdom of acknowledging Him in every circumstance, especially when you're being sanctified through suffering. A total commitment to God and His wisdom does not look like running away in fear or in anger when things are difficult. It's knowing that God's allowing difficult things is not an evidence of His neglect of you. It's not an evidence of His unfaithfulness or His disgust in you, but actually of His love and His delight in you. And that's the implied blessing here in v. 12. For whom the Lord loves, He reproves, even as a father corrects the son in whom he delights. In other words, a father who doesn't love or doesn't delight in his children doesn't do this. Wisdom teaches you can actually experience character-shaping hardships in life as the love of God, as His delight in you as children, that He cares enough to sanctify you. C.S. Lewis put it this way. He used the illustration of an artist. An artist might not put much work at all into a little sketch he makes for a child that he doesn't know. But he might put massive time, and this would be parallel to God's actual care and love for us, massive time and effort into a masterpiece. Erasing and retouching and redoing and so on. And you experience that sanctifying care of God, all the erasing, the retouching, the scraping, as painful. In fact, it reflects God's loving will for you. So be encouraged this morning to grab hold of wisdom, to bind it to your heart, to trust God's wisdom completely in everything, to live out that trust in giving generously and receiving from the Lord whatever He brings into your life for your good. And God will reward you. I want to close just with the words of Jesus from Mark 10. The disciples were Concerned about what they were going to get for giving their lives to following Christ. And he says, truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the gospel. In other words, there's no one who has completely devoted themselves to walking in the wisdom of God, walking in union with Christ. who will not, he says, receive a hundredfold now in this time. Blessings from Christ now and in the church. Houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands with persecutions. But in the age to come, eternal life. Let's pray. Our Father in Heaven, we thank You once again this week for Your wisdom. the call to wisdom revealed in Your Word. We thank You that You take the weak things of this world and the things that are not seen as wise and turn them on their heads. You exalt the humble. Lord, this is what You've done for us. We are not wise. We have nothing to bring or offer to You. We thank You for teaching us. Trust in You with all of our hearts. teaching us to lean on You with our understanding and not our own understanding. We pray that You would sanctify us in that today and in the coming weeks. Holy Spirit, we pray in the name of Christ, Amen.