SERMON: Wisdom Opens The Eyes

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon. And we pray that as we declare the word of God, that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith and you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's word and may the Lord be with you. Well, today we're in a brand new mini series in the book of Proverbs, because as you know, as we've been preaching through Proverbs, we went through Proverbs 1 through 9.

That took us about a year to accomplish, but that was faster than the Gospel of John, which took us three years to accomplish. And we've been preaching through Proverbs 1 through 9 verse by verse or what's called expositional preaching.

And then after we finished Chapter 9, we arrived at Chapter 10, which is just how math works. But if you know something about the book of Proverbs, you know that Chapter 10 is not expositional. Chapter 10 is a collection of wise statements and sayings that are known as Proverbs.

That Solomon organized for the teaching and for the training up and for the making wise his son Rehoboam. And these nearly 600 Proverbs cover the entire gamut of wisdom from things like worship, wisdom, communication, manhood, womanhood, education, and more.

But they're not arranged thematically. They're arranged in ways that we would wonder what the organizational structure is, almost like Solomon wrote them in order of when he thought of them. So it's been our goal, in a sense, to take all of these wisdom sayings and that are spread out over 21 different chapters and to organize them together into topics and themes to put each one in its own little bucket so that we get a rich and a full view of how Proverbs speaks about all of these various topics.

And so far over the last year, we've covered our first two collection of Proverbs that introduced us to how do we worship. That was the first one. And second one was how parents are commanded to teach and instruct their children.

In a series on worship, we saw that worship is not merely what happens on Sunday morning, but it's the entire life that's lived out before the face of God. We saw that true worship begins with the fear of the Lord.

It's accepted only through Jesus Christ. It's revealed in His Word that affects our plan, our trust, and it leads us even to the fear and worship of God. So in short, Proverbs taught us that when worship is ordered rightly, then everything else in life begins to make sense and to fall into place.

The second miniseries was on education that we just finished, and we learned that education does not begin with facts and textbooks or techniques, but with the fear of the Lord. You see the commonality here?

Both of them begin with the fear of the Lord. We saw that Christ is the authority over all knowledge, that Scripture is the foundation over every curriculum, that children are not merely brains on a stick, which we've said, but their hearts that must be aimed towards Christ and their affections inflamed towards loving Him.

We also saw that wisdom is transmitted through the faithful example and the imitation of a child to his father, that it's protected through loving discipline that's passed down from a parent to a child across generations.

And in short, Proverbs taught us that the goal of Christian education is not merely successful, well-educated children with Ivy League degrees, but faithful households that raise up future faithful households for generations who know Christ, who love Christ, who labor for Christ, for the glory of Christ.

Wisdom as the Third Proverbs Miniseries

And now today we begin our third miniseries in Proverbs 10 through 31, which is a series on Christian wisdom, which is fearing the things of God. And this one may seem a little strange because Proverbs 1 through 9 was entirely about wisdom, but Proverbs deals so much with wisdom, we would be throwing away a massive amount of verses if we don't do a series entirely focused on that.

And there's a reason why we're doing it third, because after your heart has been ordered in worship and after a household has been ordered through covenant education, then how do we live in light of that?

What the Bible speaks about wisdom, it's not merely talking about intelligence, and it's not merely talking about cleverness or craftiness. It's not talking about a high IQ and it's not talking about someone who's quick with numbers or knows a mountain of details about whatever subject you ask them about.

It's not a trivia champion. You ever met those people that when you go to trivia night, they know something about everything and you're like a one-trick pony and you don't know something about everything and you're like, I can't contribute unless they ask a Bible question, hypothetically speaking.

It's not the person who has a clever answer for every question that comes their way. There is such a thing as a brilliant fool. There is such a thing as a highly educated fool. There is such a thing as a highly credentialed fool.

Men whose entire walls, women whose entire walls are dedicated with diplomas and certificates who can't even see the most basic truths in God's world that are standing right in front of their faces because they suppress the truth and unrighteousness.

Because biblical wisdom is not merely the clever ability to think on your feet. Christian wisdom, biblical wisdom is the spirit wrought ability to see God as he is, to see the world as it is, your state of your soul as it is, and how to walk faithfully in light of that biblical knowledge.

Wisdom is the kind of faithful knowing that works itself out in doing. You can have a PhD or postgraduate degree on arthropods, but that doesn't really change the way that you live. But knowing the living God, fearing God changes everything.

It goes from your head into your heart and explodes out your fingertips and causes you to have wisdom. It occurs in the hand and the heads and it works in perfect harmony. What we know about God impacts the way that we live for God.

And the thesis that we're gonna be working out is that if you have right thoughts about God and if your life also obeys the living God, then you will be wise. Wisdom sees God above us, his word governing over us, his providence surrounding us, his law defining us and Christ Lord over all that we are privileged to submit.

Therefore, wisdom is not optional for the Christian. It is how redeemed men and women learn to see, speak, think, plan, build and rule and extend his rule over everything that Christ says mine, over everything that Christ is Lord over.

So to summarize all of that, it's kind of a big deal. The book of Proverbs also is gonna tell us about two different kinds of people when it comes to wisdom. There's the kind of person who's a wise man and then there's the fool.

There's the prudent man and then there's the simple. There's the one who fears the Lord and then there's the one who trust in his own eyes. So what we need to understand in the book of Proverbs is that wisdom is a gift from God, but foolishness in the book of Proverbs is not just harmless ignorance.

The fool is not merely someone who has been given enough information. The fool is morally blind. The fool is someone who actually is worse than blind because he believes that he can see. And that's what makes the fool so dangerous in the book of Proverbs.

He trusts in his own heart while he refuses correction. He despises counsel. He confuses his own appetites with wisdom and he walks down a road whose end is death and yet he refuses to consider his own demise.

He often burns down everything around him while insisting that he knows exactly what he's doing. The fool moves through God's world opposite of the wise man. The fool moves in a cavalier and a loud sort of way, ostentatiously certain, profoundly and dumbly blind.

And yet on the other hand, the wise man is the one who actually sees. The wise man has eyes to see the things as they really are. He sees where the road is going before he takes his first step. He sees the trap that is forming in the future before it closes around his ankle.

He sees that his own heart is not a trustworthy guide that he could follow. He sees the value of correction, the necessity of counsel, the power of a restrained tongue, the danger of an unbridled appetite that has been allowed to rule unchecked.

He sees that a household must be built, that a field must be cultivated, that a nation must be governed under the rule of God, and that nothing lasting can ever be produced by laziness, impulsivity, pride, or wishful thinking.

And this is one of the underlying themes of the book, that being alienated from God will lead to foolishness and blindness, but knowing God will lead to wisdom and true sight. And it's this kind of sight, not merely physical vision that happens in your irises and your pupils, but a kind of vision that reaches down into the soul that sees the world as it really is that Proverbs intends to cultivate in us, sight as it really is, visual sight, not physical sight, spiritual sight.

Wisdom Opens Spiritual Sight

So over the next eight sermons, we're gonna follow this concept of wisdom as it opens up our eyes and as it trains our bodies to finally begin living the way that God always intended us to live. And we're gonna begin today by seeing how wisdom actually opens up our spiritual eyes, the eyes of faith, the eyes that see far beyond the retina, but to something deeper, what actually holds the world together.

Today and next week, we're gonna look at that. Week three, we're gonna discover how wisdom warns us against trusting our own natural eyesight. So that'll be the antithesis of these first two weeks. And then week four, we're gonna be looking at how wisdom will help us clearly discern the righteous path to recognize godly counsel, to recognize danger, to avoid those things.

Week five, we're gonna talk about how wisdom guards the tongue. What a necessary message for today's day. Week six, we're gonna look at how wisdom recognizes the fool, also a very important skillset in the modern world.

Week seven, we're gonna see how wisdom rules the appetite, how it governs the stomach, the cup, the wallet, the eyes, and every desire that lies to you and tells you that it will produce lasting satisfaction when only God can give those things.

Week eight, we're gonna look at how wisdom actually builds things, builds houses, it builds people, it builds fields, it builds kingdoms. It builds the church. And then finally in week nine, I tried to get this series down to eight, but the last one was seven, so it all balances out.

In the last series, we're gonna see how Christ is the very wisdom of God and how every aspect of wisdom redounds to him, lives out in you through him. So that's where we're going in this series. Worship taught us how to have an ordered heart.

Education taught us how to have an ordered family. Wisdom is gonna tell us how to have an ordered life so that the people of God can see his word truthfully, live in it faithfully, and build within it fruitfully, all underneath the banner of Jesus and his forever reign.

That's where we're going. And today, we're gonna be looking at how he opens up our eyes. And we're only gonna be covering really one aspect of that today. We're gonna be asking the most foundational question that we're gonna ask in the entire study on wisdom, and that is how does a spiritually blind man ever begin to see?

How does a fool who naturally resist the things of God reject correction and trust his own judgment? How does that man become wise? Because Proverbs is gonna answer that question even before Paul answers that question by leading us through three great truths.

The first truth is that truth itself has an owner. The second one is that wisdom has a school. And the third one is that sight is only a gift of grace. So if you will, I'm gonna read a few passages in the text, and then we're gonna pray, and then we're gonna dive in and say how fools like us can become wise by him opening up our eyes.

Proverbs 22, 12 says this. The eyes of the Lord preserve knowledge, but he overthrows the words of the treacherous man. Proverbs 15, 13, the fear of the Lord is the instruction for wisdom, and before honor comes humility.

Proverbs 28, five, evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the Lord understand all things. Let us pray. Lord, we thank you that you are the one who gives us vision. You are the one who goes beyond making our sight be able to see the different colors and the different facets of the world in a physical and material sense, but Lord, you have brought us through Christ a kind of sight that sees things much deeper than even eyesight.

Lord, help us today as we look at these things and we see the connection between wisdom and sight. Lord, I pray that if there are areas of our life where we're still blind, that you would open our eyes.

If there are areas of our life where we're still in slavery to sin and chains, would you open and free us, Lord? And Lord, would you convince us more fully maybe than we've ever been convinced before that we need you and we need you in all things.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Now, as we begin this series on wisdom, you'll know that this is the first sermon in a series because there's like three introductions that I have to go through before we actually get to the material.

Series introduction, sermon introduction, that's what we're doing. We need to though begin where wisdom begins. We need to begin where wisdom begins, it's work on us. Before wisdom can govern our tongue, before it can direct our plans, before it can restrain our appetites and before it can even teach us how that we're supposed to build, we have to actually first be able to see.

You can't do anything if you don't see. When scripture speaks about sight, it's speaking about far more than physical eyes that are embedded in our skulls. A man may possess perfect physical vision, 2020, 2015 even.

Before my 40s, I had 2020. In my 20s, I had 2015. Things were looking great for me and then they went downhill. Again, a man may possess perfect physical vision but still be blind to the most obvious realities in the universe.

He may study the intricacies of the human body and see it under the most powerful microscopes and refuse to see the God who's the author of the cell. He may examine the laws that govern the universe and the patterns and the different things that go on out in this cosmos and space and refuse to acknowledge the one who actually set them in motion by the word of his mouth.

He may spend his entire life studying human behavior and never understand the depths of his own heart. He may read the scriptures, memorize the commandments, study the prophets, and still look directly in the face of Jesus Christ without recognizing that he is the wisdom of God standing before us.

That's exactly what happened to the Pharisees, is it not? Jesus said to them, if you were blind, then you would have no sin. But since you say we see, your sin remains. You see what Jesus is saying? He said, it'd be better if you were blind.

It'd be better if you didn't have eyes because then at least you couldn't see the wisdom of God standing in front of you and reject him. You have a kind of blindness that's worse than blindness. The Pharisees weren't lacking information.

They had the law, they had the prophets, they had the temple, they had the feast, they had the sacrifices. They had generations and generations and generations of knowledge. But when the very one that everything that they had been learning about came and stood before them, the one the temple pointed to, the one the sacrifices pointed to, the true king, priest, and prophet, when he stood before them, they could not, they would not see who he really was.

In fact, they had no ability to. That is because there is a particular kind of blindness that's worse than the blindness that sits down into your eyes. There's a particular kind of blindness that disallows you from seeing the things of God.

It's not merely a weakness of the intellect and it's not a disease of the eye sockets. It's a rebellion of the soul. It's a blindness that leaves man unable, incapable, impossible to see the things of God.

Unable to even see himself honestly. Unable to interpret the world as it is. And God, the world that God actually made. Now, I don't want to spoil anyone's, you know, day or burst anyone's bubble. I think being at this church, you know this, but this is not a rare condition.

This is not a condition that only a certain very foolish men or women have. This is the natural condition in which every human being is born into. We are born blind. We are born dead. We don't enter the world as neutral observers.

We're not the equivalent of Switzerland or Canada. Which side are you on? Oh, I don't know, eh? We're not neutral, calmly observing the evidence, waiting to decide whether we'll believe in this God or not.

Waiting to say, you know what? Let me evaluate the claims of Christ and see if that fits in with my life and maybe I'll decide to follow Jesus and maybe I won't, but it'll be my choice, my way. It'll be my evaluation.

I'll think through it and I'll decide, no. We're not neutral beings. We are beings that have been born dead. We enter into this world as children of a fallen Adam who died instantly in spiritual death, even as his body followed years later.

In that way, our hearts and our minds were darkened. Our affections became disordered. Our wills were hell bent away from God. We don't merely lack information. We suppress the truth, as Paul says. The evidence of God is all around us.

It drives me crazy, but I know, I know that I was the same way. When you talk to an atheist and you have a conversation and you say to them that you have faith too and they're, oh, no, no, I don't have faith.

Yeah, you do. You believe that at some point in the distant past, nothingness exploded into somethingness and then by some imaginary force that just so happened to organize that nothingness into somethingness and make it special so that you could sit here and say you have no faith.

You have more faith than I. That would be like an airplane crashing in the middle of a desert and in the explosion, all of the little elements just so happened to form together into a fully functioning iPad.

Must have been a coincidence. There is a mathematician who said, you could stack quarters high, a mile high over every single square inch of Texas and on one coin, you paint it red and you blindfold a man and you tell him to walk through the state of Texas, which is a small state, and you tell that man to pick one random coin, there would be an infinitely higher probability that he would pick that coin than if the world arrived by natural chance.

This is the world we live in. The truth is plain. You can't look around at anything and see that God's fingerprint isn't on it and yet they can't see it because their minds have been darkened. It's not that they just don't believe.

It's that they can't believe. Again, we don't merely lack information, we lack righteousness. We lack eyes to be able to see it that God has already placed before us. That's why we're guilty because we've rejected God billions of times every time that we do anything in a world that he has created and we presuppose that he didn't.

In our unrighteousness, we mistake our appetite for wisdom, our confidence for clarity, our information for understanding, our strong feelings for sound judgment, our mistakes and loudness for our opinions, truthfulness for our conclusions.

We congratulate ourself on how clearly we all think and this is what makes the fool so profoundly dangerous. He's not merely lost. He's lost while insisting that he's not, that he alone knows the road.

He's not merely blind. He's blind while correcting everyone else that he's the only one who sees. He walks towards destruction with absolute confidence and he resents anyone who would ever dare tell him that he was wrong.

That's who all of us were in our sin. Man's blindness does not erase the reality of who God is but man's blindness does not allow him to see who God is. That's the state by which all of us were born into.

In the same way, you can't, if you deny a mountain, it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. If you redraw the map, it doesn't mean that you found a new way to reroute the river. Man may refuse the truth.

Man may suppress the truth. Man may rename the truth. Man may make laws to overturn the truth and yet it does not overturn the truth. The truth is still there staring him down in his self-righteous rejection and this means before Proverbs shows us how a blind sinner actually begins to see, it has to establish something even more properly basic underneath that which is whose world are we actually living in?

Who determines what is real? Who determines what is true and what is good and what is beautiful? Because if truth begins with man, then wisdom is nothing more than man deciding whatever he wants to believe but if truth belongs to God, then wisdom must begin by receiving the reality from the one who made it.

This tells us that before we can even ask how the sinner comes to understand, how the blind man comes to see, we have to first ask who owns the truth. Solomon answers that in Proverbs 22, 12 which is our first point that truth actually has an owner.

Where does one, where does true understanding actually begin? Solomon answers it in Proverbs 22, 1 or 22, 12 where he says, the eyes of the Lord preserve knowledge but he overthrows the words of the treacherous man.

The eyes of the Lord preserve knowledge but he overthrows the words of a treacherous man. Solomon does not begin with the eyes of man, what man can see, what man's opinions are, what man's thoughts are, he doesn't begin there.

He says that if you understand anything, you have to first understand that God has already understood everything. Before you even begin searching for the truth, the Lord has already possessed it fully.

Before the scholars ever opened a book, before the first scientist ever examined creation, before the first judge ever heard a case and the philosophers started quibbling in a room by themselves. God already knew every fact, every relationship, every cause, every meaning, every purpose that could ever be known.

Nothing ever occurred that God needed to investigate. Nothing has been discovered that God did not already understand. No fact has ever surprised Almighty God. No event has ever forced his hand to revise his conclusions.

Huh, we didn't see that one coming. No way. Solomon says the eyes of the Lord preserve knowledge. The Hebrew translation for preserve there is notzar, which means to guard, to protect, to watch over, to keep.

It actually goes even further. It means to keep something so precious and so valuable that you would never allow anyone to destroy it or corrupt it. So Solomon's point is not merely that God knows what is true.

Of course he does. His point is actually that God is actively guarding the truth, guarding it against every lie that would ever distort it, suppress it, or overthrow it. God himself is the one who's safeguarding truth, which means that if you wanna have truth, you have to go through God because God's the one who's holding it down like Fort Knox.

If there actually is gold in there, I don't really know. God's the one who's holding, keeping, guarding truth. So if you want truth, you can't get it anywhere but from him, which means that knowledge is not ownerless property, lying abandoned in some open field waiting for us to discover it, waiting for the cleverest man or the most intelligent man to come along and claim it.

Nor is truth something that human beings by agreeing with one another, by some kind of base herd instinct or socially advantageous situational ethic can come to and say, that's my truth. What a ridiculous phrase.

My truth. All truth is God's truth, which means it's not your truth. How silly. My truth is just an excuse to sin. My truth is just an excuse that I'm gonna believe whatever I want. I don't care what you say.

I'm gonna reject reality. I'm gonna reject things as strong as the laws of gravity in order to inflate my snowflake personality. All knowledge belongs to God. God holds fast guards and keeps knowledge beneath the banner of his sovereign protection.

That means that truth has an owner and it is not us. Every fact is God's fact. Every law woven into creation is his law. Every moral obligation that is written on every single one of our hearts reflects his character.

Did you know that every single society in human history has had basically the same code of ethics? Not mores and forays. Those are things that are unique and specific at each society. But every society said, hey, you know what?

I think murder is wrong. Our society is pushing the limits of that. Every society has basically said, whether it was polygamous or monogamous, you know what? Cheating and adultery is wrong. Lying is wrong.

Cowardice is wrong. When your country is fighting for its life, it's probably bad to run away like a coward. In every society in human history, Benedict Arden and Judas and Jezebel would have still be seen as morally evil because law is written on our hearts.

Why? Because there's a law giver. Every creature receives its nature, its purpose, its origination, and its meaning from the one who made it. Which means we don't create truth. We receive truth from the God who already knows it perfectly, defines it completely, preserves it faithfully.

Man does not assign ultimate meaning to anything. Imagine if man were as random as they say we are, just random atoms colliding in motion. How random would ethics and morality actually be from one society to the next?

And yet it's not. Man discovers meaning. He doesn't create it because God's already placed it within the fabric of reality which means that man is not the landlord of reality. He is a tenant. He's living inside a house that God already designed, who God built, God owns, God governs.

He's a tenant. That's it. This is why Solomon immediately follows that statement of God preserving truth but he overthrows the words of the treacherous man. The treacherous man does not create another reality by his treachery.

He can only lie about reality that God has already made. He can rename evil if he wants. He can redefine justice if he wants. He can call darkness light if he wants. He can say that a man is a woman if he wants.

He can fill libraries and universities and courtrooms and newsrooms with all of their gender study degrees and everything else. And yet it doesn't change the reality that all truth belongs to God no matter if they are treacherous with it.

He can't make a single one of his observations through in any sort of absolute meaningful way. He can rearrange the jars, man, woman, tall, small. This person deserves to live, this one doesn't. But he can't actually change what's true.

God preserves knowledge and God overthrows every word against it. It may not be in this life. For those who would disobey, defy, reject the living God, they may not find their judgment in this life. But God will overthrow the treacherous temporally and eternally.

And the eternal one is far worse than anything that we could experience here. I remember John MacArthur once said that Christians, the only hell you'll ever face is when you live on this side of heaven.

And for you who are not believers, the only heaven you'll ever have is here. It's an astounding thing to think through. God will overthrow the treacherous, those who play fast and loose with his word, those who attempt to manipulate his truth that he has written into the very fabric of reality.

And lies may become very fashionable in societies. They may be published in like the greatest peer-reviewed journal. All of the scholars that look down their nose at everyone else may say a certain thing.

Well, you know, gender is socially constructed. Governments may do similar things where they spend millions of taxpayer dollars to put tampons in men's bathrooms. It still doesn't change the fact that they're not for men.

A child knows this. It's so funny how crazy our society has become. Truth does not survive because of the permission of man or the allowance of man. Truth survives because the eyes of the Lord preserve it.

That's it. And this means that wisdom never begins with a man looking inward. Wisdom always begins with a man looking upward. It begins with a man recognizing that truth doesn't belong to him. It belongs to the only one who owns truth, which gets us down the road a little bit, doesn't it?

Because fallen man may receive sight, but that immediately now begs the question if God is the one who possesses truth, guards the truth, keeps the truth, possesses truth, and if truth were a kind of cosmic vending machine that only belonged to God and that you have to go in and you have to put something in it in order to get wisdom dispensed out, then how does that happen?

Solomon answers this question in Proverbs 15, 33. He says, this is wisdom has a school. The fear of the Lord is the instruction for wisdom and before honor comes humility. The fear of the Lord is the instruction for wisdom.

So if you wanna have wisdom, you have to have fear of the Lord. That's what he's saying. So if all knowledge is contained by God, how do you get that knowledge? The fear of the Lord. And this word here for instruction is musar.

We've looked at this word before. All of you remember, I know. I'm belaboring the point to even explain it to you. I get it. Because every time I say Hebrew word, it's just, it's there. I don't even remember it when I was writing the sermon this week.

The Hebrew word for musar means discipline, correction, training, and formation. It's the kind of word that you would use in the gym when you were going hard and working out and lifting and training to make your body your slave.

It's not merely information that's placed in the mind. It's training that begins to mold and shape the entire person. Where the person is being brought into order instead of disorder. Solomon is not describing a lecture that you attend at MIT.

He's describing the bootcamp in which you are made and even remade. I was telling my son about this yesterday. When I went into bootcamp, I could do 10 pushups and I was so proud of myself. I was like, I can do 10.

They're gonna be so proud of me. The drill sergeants are gonna bask in my awesomeness. By the time I left, I was doing 70. Just from several months of just doing lots of pushups. That was that discipline that remade me into a kind of new man.

A man who could do things that I could not do before. That's what Musar is. It's making you into something, shaping you into something through discipline. And what is the discipline that it's giving us?

The fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord is not an orientation session that you attend. It's where the real education actually begins. It's how you get access to knowledge is through the fear of the Lord.

It's not an introductory course that you complete online or correspondence course that you send in your mail to. I don't even know if they even do that anymore. But it's something that you can eventually hold onto that will change everything about you.

The fear of the Lord is the school itself. It's the atmosphere in which every subject must be learned. You don't spend several years gathering neutral facts and then you come along and you say, I wanna know whether this God is real or not.

Education's not neutral in that way. There is no human mind that stands outside of the authority of God, examining his world independently and then deciding at the end whether the Lord deserves our acknowledgement.

Every act of knowing takes place either in reverence toward God or in rebellion against God. Every man studies the world either as a creature receiving truth from his creator or as a rebel attempting to create meaning and value outside of himself.

The fool wants knowledge without a king. He wants treasure without ever entering the palace. He wants a map without acknowledging the one who surveyed the land. He wants to live in a house while denying the builder, ignoring the owner and rewriting the rent laws.

When a man admits that he is not merely the measure of reality, when he confesses that his mind is not capable enough to actually understand anything, when he stops treating his own judgment as the Supreme Court over his life where there are no more appeals, when he finally understands that God is the one who's the teacher and that he's the one who's the student and he humbles himself before this God, then he can understand and then he can have knowledge.

It's that humbling process of coming to God as a base creature that knows that we have no ability whatsoever in ourself. It's that coming that positions us to actually receive knowledge because the fear of the Lord is understanding that you are not him.

That's why Solomon then adds, before honor comes humility. Before honor, you have to be humble. Before the fear of the Lord comes, you have to be humble. And humility, I wanna say this, humility is not thinking of yourself, not thinking less of yourself, not thinking, oh, I'm so stupid.

I have no abilities. I have no knowledge. I have no gifts. I have no, I have nothing. That's not humility. That's arrogance by a different title because you're still thinking about yourself. Humility doesn't mean thinking less of yourself.

It means thinking of yourself less. That's what C .S. Lewis said. Humility means thinking about yourself less and thinking truthfully about where you stand in the world because you know that you are not him.

God is the creator. You're the creature. God defines reality. You're the one who receives it. God is the one who speaks. You're the one who listens. God is the one who commands. You're the one who obeys.

God is the one who corrects. You and I are the one who repents. The fool enters the classroom, throws the teacher out, removes the chalk, rewrites the textbook, and gives himself an A because he's special.

The wise man takes his seat, opens the book, listens to the teacher, receives correction, admits that he knows nothing in comparison to God. And how does this work itself out? Here's an example. When you wake up in the morning and you open up the scripture and you say, what does the word of God say?

Instead of saying, what do I say? That's humility. Instead of having the Bible confirm all of your presupposed beliefs, you let the law of God correct you, shape you, tell you, teach you. Even if you don't agree with it, you submit and bow to it, that's humility.