The Call of Wisdom III: How to Treasure

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder, and with me again is Teddy James. Teddy, good to have you.

Thank you, good to be here. And I just want you to know, this episode is brought to you by Vicks Cough Drops.

Oh yeah, because you've had sinus issues.

So if I sound a little off, that's why.

We've been looking at the life that listens to the voice of divine wisdom. How are we to listen to wisdom or to the word of God? And we looked a couple of weeks already at wisdom crying out to all humanity, seeking out man, whether it's the head at the corner of a busy street, at the city gates, in the marketplace, not just once, repeatedly stretching out her hand, when will you listen to me?

When will you respond to the word of God appropriately? And two very different options are given. At the end of chapter one in Proverbs, we find that there's a train wreck life where wisdom is not listened to.

And so whatever else you have in life, if you have not got the word of God setting your feet on that path, then we just find bad choice after bad choice and, you know, and storm after storm comes and the life just begins to fall apart and families fall apart.

Nations fall apart. Churches fall apart because we reject wisdom's voice. Happily, that's not the whole story. There's the other side. And that is those that listen to wisdom or respond appropriately.

There's a life guided and guarded by divine wisdom. But for that, we need more than good intentions. So, Teddy, why don't you read for us again, verse one through verse four in chapter two, because there we find some very practical metaphors of responding to wisdom's voice.

Right. Proverbs two, starting verse.

One. My son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding. Yes. If you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden.

Treasures. Right. So all these very clear pictures. Now let's remind ourselves. These are not talking about six different ways, and you can choose which one suits your personality or your schedule, your time, your intellectual ability, your religious library.

All six are describing, you know, from six different angles, the response of life. So we don't get to pick and choose our favorites. We don't say, I like this one, but I'm not so good at that one. And there's not a particular order here.

It's not as if each one builds on the one that preceded. It's just a general description from different angles of the life that responds to wisdom's voice as it encounters God's word. Last week, we looked at the first, if you will receive my words.

So Teddy, if you could just give us like a sentence summary of that. Yeah. What comes to your mind?

Well, I mean, it is receiving, it is welcoming, appreciating. So I am taking the word of God and I am welcoming it into my life and giving it access to every area of life.

Yeah. Colossians chapter three, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Let it come all the way in, let it fill richly, let it lavishly have access to every corner of the home of your soul and life, every facet.

Yeah. And you mentioned it's very active. It's not a passive thing. You know, are you willing to receive the word of God? Are you willing to sit through a sermon? You know, and you've talked to us before about the difference between kind of passive listening and active listening.

So this is very active, like the other verbs. It is not just saying, well, if you want to give it to me, I'm willing, you can put it in my hands. It's taking. And the Hebrew word is often translated to take.

So take in actively, grab hold of and usher in, you know, don't let the word of God stay on the front porch.

Come on in, come into every room. It's not as though God is reluctant to come inside, but at the same time, pull. Yeah. You know, you're, you're, you know, active participant in this.

So we, we welcome it in. And the New Testament passage in first Thessalonians two, verse 13, that we talked about, Paul uses two different words. He talks about receiving, you received our word as it was the word of God, not just the word of men.

The message comes from God through men. So the word received there is again, take. And then he also says, you accepted it as the word of God and not just as the word of men. And that word, that second word he uses has the idea of assessing something and then saying, I want to welcome that in.

So you listened, you assessed what we said.

And you brought it into your life. And this week we're moving on to the second part of verse one there. It says, and treasure up my commandments with you. Now, unlike any other treasure in this world, um, there, well, the treasure of God and of wisdom is very different than any other treasure.

So how is that? Well, for one, this is a treasure that will not spoil us. It is a treasure that ultimately is for our good and will not ruin us. I mean, we've all seen those stories of people who won the lottery and then five, 10 years later, yeah, they're worse off.

They're worse. Right. And, and, and it's not even just the lottery. It's I've seen people who, you know, my wife and I, before we had kids and we dreamed of a, you know, nice big house, we would watch those, uh, house makeover shows and those houses because these people won them.

And then their tax assessment came up and then they couldn't afford the taxes on their new house that they just won. So things like that, those treasures, those prizes ruined people's lives. This will not, this is unlike anything else.

But the other thing we can talk about a treasure and John, you and I have had the multiple conversations because I like new things and I tend to be a little overexcited about them sometimes. And I can exaggerate just how good these things are.

This is a treasure that cannot be overexaggerated. However great we may speak, however great we may think of this treasure, it is higher, more deeper, greater, and ultimately more value.

Yeah. And it never runs out. It's not the kind of inheritance that is wonderful, but we want to be careful because we could squander it. You know, you could over use it. You could go too many times to the bank and withdraw on that great inheritance.

This is an inheritance that's infinite. You know, we can have as much of wisdom's voice as we want. And it is something that leads to a life without regret. Psalm 119, of course, is a great explanation of this, you know, just, just picture after picture of things that are a value on earth.

And then the word of God is compared to that. It's gold, it's honey, it's light in a dark place, it's shelter in an unsafe or stormy area. So let's think about how we can, in a practical way, how do we treasure wisdom's voice, wisdom's words within our life?

So Teddy, how do you do that on a day-to-day basis? I think that there's several very, very.

Practical ways that we can do it. But one of the things is simply having a notebook. And when you are having your quiet time or when you are listening to a sermon and you write these things down, and it's not just vague things that I want to remember, but one of the things that I have started doing, and I have found it to be so helpful for myself, when I am making a note, in the past, I would write like the general principle, like this is what a Christian does, or this is a description of the Christian life.

And I've changed that from being so general into being I, my. So it's very personal. And in that just very simple change, it forces me to think through, how do I, how will I live upon this reality?

Yeah, I think my general pattern is, while I'm reading through maybe a larger section of Scripture, I always have a notebook and a pen when I'm reading the Bible, or pretty much any good book like that, you know, that has spiritual value.

And I will jot down things that I feel like, you know, are particularly applicable to me. You know, where I'm at in the Christian life, you know, things I'm learning about God from the passage, things that I see that I've not seen before.

And these things need to find a practical application in my life. You know, they can't just stay up and kind of in the realm of appreciated concepts. So I write them down. And then I don't remember every verse I read that morning, but I remember the things I write down.

And so I can think, John, yesterday, it was from Psalm 124, where the psalmist says that, you know, God is our hope, you know, and He is the God who created all things. And then I was reading the opening chapters of Genesis that morning, looking at the Creator, thinking about the fact that everything I'm seeing about Him here, it all has to be, you know, brought down to the level of this is the person I hope in, the person that can do all of this with merely speaking it into existence.

So why would I be afraid of, you know, any lack in my life of something I genuinely need to walk with the Lord or, you know, what the enemy might do next? So just practical ways. I don't remember everything I read, but I remembered that verse and that passage.

And through the rest of the day, I would come back to it, which is another tool, meditation.

Yeah. Well, and before we get to meditation, I think one thing is important to mention is memorization. If we're working on memorizing one piece of scripture a day or, you know, maybe one a week, but you have a regular approachable system of memorizing scripture, it does make meditation much easier.

Oh, yeah. It's almost, yeah. I would say that in many ways, memorization is foundational. Yes. And, you know, if you think about being entrusted with something that's precious, you don't want to take just a few parts of it.

You want to take the whole thing. And I have found that when I go to memorize a passage, which, you know, I did a lot as a younger Christian, then I left off for some period of time, you know, and I've picked it back up.

I have found that verses I thought I knew what they meant, or at least what they said. I found that I do not know what they say. I have a summary of that verse in my mind from the many times I've read it or thought about it.

And my summary is not accurate. My summary is incomplete. There's some things I've left out, or maybe I've remembered it wrongly. There's an emphasis there that I didn't remember. And so my summary that I go back to when I think about what Paul said here, or what Christ said, or what Isaiah said, and I just kind of go back to my summary.

But when I memorize a passage, it's as if it brings out so much detail. It goes from being kind of a fog, you know, that's there. And I know the object that's in the fog, but the fog is dispelled and I see all the details.

And I realized there was so much more there than I remembered in my summary. And I've been trusting my summary. So not helpful.

No. And this is so practical. So as a church right now, we're memorizing the book of Colossians. Some people are. Some people are. But I have found that just simply chapter one, and Paul doing this introduction, writing to the church in Colossae, but he explains to them what he has been and will be praying for them.

And that has been such a fuel for when I pray for the church, when I pray for specific people, because you don't want to just, you know, Lord be with them. And not that, you know, that's an inappropriate prayer.

That is appropriate. But you don't want to pray prayer number seven. By memorizing scripture, and by the way, Matthew Henry, I just got this book and I've just started reading it. He wrote a book. He paused writing his commentary to write a book called How to Pray.

And it's great. But all he does through the entire book is he takes scripture passages and turns them into prayer. And it's such a wonderful example. But that's also one way that we, when we're memorizing and meditating on word, on the word, we're going to see it flowing into using it in our prayers as well.

So it's just another way to meditate.

Yeah. So those are ways to take in something that's valuable and to store it, to treasure it, to take the words that God is giving us each day as we're reading our Bible or sitting in a church and hearing it.

And we are finding a place where something that has a lot of value can be kept and it can be kept safe. But another thing that goes into treasuring is we need to keep it from other things in this sense.

Remember the parable of the sower and the soils. So some of the seed falls among the soil and immediately it sprouts up and it looks like it's going to be a healthy plant. But the soil is crowded with other plants, weeds.

And as the weeds grow up around it, they steal the nutrients, they choke it out. And so what looks like, you know, wow, this is going to really produce something that endures and produces fruit, but it doesn't.

And how many times have I read, you know, the scriptures? Have I listened to a sermon, read a good book by someone who's talking about the scriptures, explaining the scriptures? And I wrote it down and I genuinely appreciated it and I wanted it to take root in my life and grow and spread, but it didn't.

Because I did all those positive things. I did, I did, I did. But what I didn't do was the other side. I added a lot of things. I added, I memorized it. You know, I studied it. I thought about it. I meditated, but I didn't remove things that needed to be removed so that there was ample room for the truth of God to flourish.

Or in other words, the cares of life, the distractions that are unnecessary. They're not necessarily sinful things at all, but maybe forms of entertainment and things that have so filled my heart that I now have very little room for anything that God says to me through his word to take root.

I can appreciate it. I can talk about it, but I can't point to significant shifts or changes in my life that came from that truth, because wherever it landed and it flourished for a day and I loved it for a day, and maybe I re-preached it, well, a week later, the cares of life choked it out.

So we do need not just to take it in as a precious thing and make sure we really gather it up and put it in a safe place. We're going to have to weed our life of things that tend to crowd wisdom's voice out.

And a lot of times we're going to have to pray that the Lord would show us those things that are choking, the things that we have filled. Because oftentimes I find my life gets filled with things that are not bad.

They're not evil, wicked things. They're positive things. They may even be good things, but they're not necessary things. And so we must come to all of these things. And as some of my favorite writers have said, be willing to kill your darlings.

And what they mean by that is when you're writing a book or you're writing a story or any kind of writing, you will ultimately, you'll fall in love with a line that you wrote or with a paragraph, or maybe it's a plot line.

And it's your darling, but it doesn't serve the overall purpose of your writing of what you're trying to do. So you have to be willing to kill it. And we have to view our lives in those same things and bring everything we do to Christ and say, the plate is full, but ultimately it's your plate.

Remove anything that...

Yeah. Show us what needs to be set aside so that we can be greedy for something that is infinitely better.

The better treasure. And one of the things that I, in meditating on this, was really thinking about was the fact that we can't overlook the fact that this is a command. It's a sweet command, treasure the word of God.

And, you know, you think why, as a believer, John, why would we need to be commanded to treasure the word of God?

Yeah, we were talking about this a little before the podcast. I think, you know, well, the simple answer is because as imperfect people who are still sinful, we are, and we have an enemy that lies. We are so susceptible to not valuing things the way God values them.

We value things, maybe the way our culture values them, the way we ourselves would value them, the way the enemy tells us to value them. So the enemy tells us that the word of God is noble. And it's a good thing that really, really good sacrificial people focus on, you know, nuns and monks and those super, super Christians over there, they do that.

But, you know, but I'm an average person. And so other than the sermon and a few devotional thoughts for the day, you know, that's all I need. And we're like little children who have been given a very valuable birthday present by, let's say, a grandparent, but the birthday present is a little mature for them.

Okay. So they know it's great. They know it's, you know, they're wowed. Like, I didn't think I would get this at this age, you know, so wow, grandma and grandpa gave me this. Okay. And you look at it and you realize, my parents, I don't know about that one, you know, that cost a lot of money.

And I know my kid, they will love it, but they're a little too young to recognize its worth. And so they will likely take it out in the backyard and turn it into a shovel or, you know, so we think of like maybe a collectible pocket knife.

So it has a lot of value as a collector's item. And your kid is like so excited. And you have to say to them, okay, okay, okay. Now this, this is not just a pocket knife and you explain it to them and they take it out in the yard and you're watching and they do exactly what you tell them not to do.

They use it as a shovel. You know, they start to dig in the ground with it. They use it as a pry bar and you can just see within hours, maybe it won't last an hour. There's going to be a snap blade, you know, there's going to be dirt and, and, and, you know, sand all down in the joints.

And you're going to have to take it and put it on the shelf and say, I'm not sure you're old enough yet. You know, this has a lot of value and you're about to destroy it. So they have to be reminded. Go ahead.

Well, I was just going to say, but in that,.

What we're not saying is that this is a treasure not to be used. Right. It's not.

China that gets put on a shelf. It's not art. You know, it's not an antique. So maybe the pocket watch would not be a good illustration. The pocket knife. Yeah. Yeah. The pocket watch. I like pocket watches.

So the pocket knife, it's a valuable pocket knife, but it's not antique. It's not supposed to be put up and left as a collector's item. It's meant to be used. So think about, um, let's say there's a young man who's going into business.

He loves woodwork and he's, he's, he's going to quit his day job and he's going to go full time into woodwork. Um, and so he needs equipment that is not just like backyard guys shop, but, you know, kind of professional level, but that stuff's expensive.

So he buys what he can and for the other things, the bigger items, he thinks, well, I'll just use what I've got. And one day if the business really takes off, I can buy the better stuff. Well, what if his parents say to him, you know, we know you're trying to get started in the business and we'd like to help.

And so we're going to buy a couple of very expensive, big machines. You know, they're going to be used for this. You're going to get a good CNC. Yeah. So they buy it. Now, if the son, he sees the value, he knows what it costs.

He's looked at, he's dreamed about it, but he and his wife have said, we can't afford it right now. You know, so he's willing to do without it. And now there's a brand new one of these in his shop. Now, what if his dad comes back in a month and says, how's it going?

You know, and he walks into the shop, every piece of equipment is covered in sawdust, you know, he's making things and, and his father's really grateful to see, you know, how hard he's worked at it. He's a good craftsman.

It shows his stuff's being bought, but then he looks in the corner and there's a big piece of equipment under a tarp and there's, there's, you know, police tape around it. There's a rope around it. What's that?

And where's the thing we bought you? And the son says, oh, well, that's it. I've, I've, I've kept it safe. I'm not going to let any sawdust get on it. I'm not going to let the kids bump into it, you know, with their bikes.

I'm not going to even use it. Nothing will get dull. Nothing will get worn down. And the father would be disappointed. The value of the machine is, is greatly diminished if you won't use it. So we have to take the word of God and in treasuring it or keeping it, think of the other way we use the word keep.

Do you keep the word of God? Well, like, do you take it in and keep it safe? Yes. Do you keep the commands of God? Do you do them? So we might say, bring the word of God in knowing its value, put it in a safe place, wrap it in the most expensive thing you have, your heart, your mind, your life, wrap it in the skin of you so that it is not fancy, antique, you know, valuable thing that's that's, you know, lifted above where kids can reach.

But it's a tool that is implemented in a way that's appropriate. And it brings great happiness to the life because it's being kept or it's being sheltered in all of your choices, your plans, your imaginations.

And the reality of this treasure is that the more that it is used, the more scars, if we can say, that it gets, the more valuable it becomes. And it's not just a value and it's not just a treasure to us, John, but as we live upon this, we are being a testament.

You know, we talked several weeks ago about being a person with weighty words. That is how we reach that and how we pursue being a person with weighty words is they look at us and see, no, we are truly living upon this treasure, upon the wisdom of God.

But John, speaking of other people, what are some practical ways? Because this is not just a treasure for us. We're not, you know, on an island all by ourselves, but we live in, you know, hopefully in community and a healthy church with other believers.

So how do we help other people really live on this treasure?

Yeah, I think that it's not rocket science, you know, and you don't have to be preachy. So you could go around, you know, we have lunch after every Sunday church morning church service. So we have the prayer meeting, then the main service of preaching, and then we have lunch together.

Well, so you could become the most obnoxious church member and every table you sit at people think, oh no, it's Teddy. Teddy has gone from being a friendly, godly, you know, earnest Christian who would naturally talk about the things of the Lord, but now he's become policeman Christian because he did a podcast on this.

And so now he's doing it to all of us and we all suffer. He sits down and turns to us and in kind of an artificial way says, so how are you going to live on what we just heard? And the person next to that, so how are you going to live on it?

No. And how did you live on last week? Tell me, you know, and so you could do that, but that probably isn't very helpful. I think people are very responsive to the power of example and also, you know, explanation that goes along with it.

So it's not just they admire us, but they're, they're able, we let them see into our life enough to see a pattern and then maybe then they want to know. So how, how do you approach that? So we were talking about, let's apply it to family.

Dr. Joel Beakey last week at a conference, the family church and family life conference. Yeah. I had to cancel being there because we had a funeral of a pastor here. And so you went and you heard Dr. Beakey speak about how to use sermons in, you know, evangelizing.

And discipling your own children. Yeah. Yeah. It was a wonderful sermon. If it's, if they've released it publicly by the time this episode airs, I'll make sure to put it into the show notes. But one of the ways that he talks about helping your children treasure the word of God, and he was talking primarily about the sermon on Sunday, but he said, as you are doing family worship, every opportunity that you have from Sunday night until Friday night, you point back to that sermon.

You point back because that's what, that's what the Lord gave us on the Lord's day. That was our meal. And so we keep pointing back to it. One thing that it does is it shows the kids that what the Lord does say on Sunday is not just for Sunday.

It is for us to live upon for the rest of the week. But if you noticed, I said from Sunday night until Friday night, the reason for that is because Saturday night, Dr. Beeke, I think very wisely said that we should read, if you know, read the passage that will be preached on Sunday morning and teach your kids a little bit about it, kind of prime that pump and then pray and pray over, you know, the, the, the man who will be preaching, whether it's your pastor or maybe a visiting minister, pray for your own souls, that it would be a treasure that is not quickly choked out and pray for the church, that it would be receptive.

Yeah. I mean, there's just such, it's a world of difference between a child that's gone to church and, you know, heard his parents appreciate, genuinely appreciate the truths that have been preached. And then nothing changes in the home.

There's a difference between that and a child seeing that, but added to that is a parent reminding the family, perhaps through the week in natural ways, just as they go, perhaps, hey, don't forget what we heard on Sunday.

You know, we want to live on that. And that's good.

I think there are so many ways where if we're, the things that we meditate on, I mean, John, you and I spent three hours going down, driving down the road to Puxco, Missouri for a conference and much too, well, none of my wife was not surprised at all when we came home and you told her that we had talked about a chicken tax, because that was a thing that for a long time, I had thought about.

The things that we meditate on, the things that fill our mind are the things that will just naturally come up in our conversations. And if we are meditating on these things, if we're treasuring them, when it's time to, when there's opportunity to talk to our kids, we will just naturally say, do you remember what we read in family worship?

Do you.

Remember what we heard on the Sunday sermon? Yeah. And so that's much, that's a much greater help than just a parent appreciating a sermon. And of course, that's much greater than a parent enduring a sermon.

And the kids never see that dad loves what is being said about God. You know, maybe mom is the more religious one, or maybe mom and dad, neither of them are really thrilled by wisdom's voice, but let me give you an even more impactful approach.

The child sees you love what's preached or love what you're studying in the Bible. The child hears you talk about it, not just on Sunday, but through the week, like you said, in natural ways, because your heart's been dwelling there.

And so you just go to that naturally. But what if, as Dr. Beeky mentioned, what if each evening or whenever, you know, you gather with the family, what if you just simply said, guys, you know, we heard some wonderful truths and you know that, you know, we've talked about it some, but let's be very practical.

Mom and I, how are we going to live on this? Kids, how are you going to live on this? You know, whatever age they're at, appropriate to their age so that they learn week after week, every week they live with us.

What if they were learning by our intentional application and walking them along with us, like this is how I'm applying it so they can see, oh, this is how a grownup applies the word of God and helping them understand how they might apply it in their situation.

Week after week, the thousands of weeks they have under our roof, every one of them in gentle but consistent ways saying the word of God must be lived on or we're not finished with it, you know, and it's not finished with us.

And I did not do that with my kids growing up. You know, we talked about it. I appreciated it. Sometimes, you know, I appreciate it so much. I talked about it all week, but for like being intentional and saying, so how the word of God must be taken or welcomed in or received, and now it's going to have to be kept treasured, but that's going to mean being treasured in the way we're living, not just in our thoughts.

So how are we going to do that? Because we're not done with the sermon until it is found a place to be practically applied. You know, it's like beautiful, expensive work boots, all right? These are great work boots.

These are $350 work boots, but do not put them in the closet and say, well, I don't want to get dirt on the nice work boot. Well, then you wasted it. You know, whoever gave you those, complete waste of their time.

Use them, use them appropriately and find the real value in them. So, you know, just simple ways to help our kids be reminded of how valuable God's word is and how to treasure it. So it doesn't just stay conceptual.

And finally, let's close with this. It's not just that the word of God is valuable and it must be protected from harm or, you know, from being stolen away, like the picture in the parable, the bird pecking away the seed that wasn't, that landed on a hard surface and wasn't prepared.

You know, whenever we travel with our cameras, it's your job, Teddy, to make sure the cameras get from place to place in their pelican cases, you know, it gets there safely. And they never leave my side.

Yes. You pack them, you pack them right. So they're not jostled and scratched. You make sure that you've got them with you. We don't leave $30 ,000 cameras sitting in the back seat of a car.

Okay, real quick. Not that we have $30 ,000 cameras, but yes.

Yeah. So we don't leave expensive cameras sitting in the back of a car where someone could break the window and grab it. So you guard those because they have value, but that's different than the word of God.

The word of God, there's something added here. Treasure. You don't really treasure the cameras. You know their value and you guard them and you treat them appropriately. So that takes a lot of thought and care and work.

But when it comes to the word of God, treasuring has the idea also of love. It's not just that what he says in this book has great value for my life. And so I want to be careful with it. I want to be careful to invest it and not to lose it.

It's that the one that gives it to me is the one who my soul loves. And I love what he says, not just because it's a value for practical everyday living, but because he said it to me and I want.

To treasure it and guard it and live on it for love of him. It is the letter from our beloved.

Yeah. Next week, we're going to look at the next description of how we respond wholeheartedly to wisdom's voice.