Sermon - Wisdom From Above: The Beginning

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Open your Bibles to the book of Proverbs. Our new series, an exposition through the book of Proverbs.

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Wisdom from Above. This is the beginning. Proverbs 1.

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Verse 1. Hear now the word of the living and the true God. The Proverbs of Solomon.

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Son of David. King of Israel. To know wisdom and instruction.

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To understand words of insight. To receive instruction in wise dealing.

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In righteousness, justice, and equity. To give prudence to the simple.

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Knowledge and discretion to the youth. Let the wise hear and increase in learning.

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And the one who understands obtain guidance. To understand a proverb and a saying.

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The words of the wise and their riddles. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

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Fools despise wisdom and instruction. Thus far is the reading of God's holy and inspired

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Word. Let's pray together. Lord, thank You for Your Word. Thank You for Your truth.

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Lord Jesus, You are the way, the truth, and the life. You are the truth.

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You are the embodiment of truth and wisdom. We thank You for Your Word that You've preserved through history to deliver it to us in this very moment, this gift in our hands.

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Thank You for Your Word. Thank You for our salvation. Thank You for the presence of Your Spirit.

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We pray God over this series as we, Lord, open Your Word and hear from You, You speaking.

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We pray that You would renew our minds, that You'd challenge us, that You'd grow us. Help us not learn by mere pithy slogans and have things just suspended in our minds but never come out of our hands.

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We pray that this study that we do, Lord, from You, You speaking, would transform and renew us for Your glory and for Your kingdom, that we'd be light to the nations, that people would see,

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Lord, You and us in this wisdom, and that they would marvel at how great a God You are.

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Lord, we need wisdom in our day. We pray that You would grant to us the grace and the strength,

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Lord, to have it and employ it. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. So here we are, the book of Proverbs, Old Testament.

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These are the Proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel. So this is gonna be very different, very different.

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Actually, it's a challenging sermon series to pick up, to work expositionally through a book that weaves from direction to direction.

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I mean, I have to confess the gospel according to Matthew was so much easier in terms of an historical narrative, picking up on passages that were already proclaimed long before Matthew's day, and you're sort of working through a line, a timeline of history.

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Jesus went here, Jesus said this and did this, and it's because the prophets said that and they did that, and then you're sort of just working along a chain and it's sort of easy to sort of like walk through the life of Jesus, the life and times of Jesus and the apostles, and it's kind of an easier thing to tackle step by step working through something like an historic narrative like the gospel according to Matthew.

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And it's also, I think, a little easier to do something that is more didactic teaching literature because it's more systematic.

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It's step A and then B and then C, like say something like the book of Romans. You're working through not just a proclamation of the truth but an argument and Paul's reasoning through a chain of, okay, step one, here's the foundation.

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Now we're putting the rest of the house up and now we're gonna put the roof on and now we're gonna decorate that house.

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And so he's sort of moving you through this chain of argumentation. It's systematic. It's a little easier than something like the book of Proverbs.

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Not better, just it's a little easier because the book of Proverbs is so weighty and so powerful and so challenging.

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If you read a proverb a day, you'll essentially get through the book of Proverbs once a month if you read a chapter a day depending on the month that you're in.

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And so it's a powerful book but if you've done that before, you know that this is a weighty book. You will find yourself cut and challenged at every single step because this particular kind of literature, this genre, it will get you where it counts because it's not just concerned with the what.

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What is true, right? It's not just sort of abstractions and what and this is true out there.

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And so you're sort of just gathering information. This is taking that truth, that information and putting legs on it, putting hands on it and actually putting flesh on it.

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And so you'll feel the weight of it because you'll see looking right into it that you are not like that, right?

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We're creatures, we're sinners, we fail, we love Jesus, we're new, we're righteous in Christ, we're born again, we're made alive but we're also a work in progress.

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And so you read a book like Proverbs and this is wisdom from above. This is, here it is, this is what

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God is like. This is what God is like. This is what the king is like. I mean, this is

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Solomon, the son of David, the king of Israel but this is what the true king, Jesus, is like in essence and character in so many ways in terms of how he rules.

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And so this is very different than a normal study that you might pick up in terms of a book study, working through an argument, didactic literature or even narrative.

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And of course, it's very different than apocalyptic literature. We're gonna talk about that in a moment but as we talk about the beginning, as we move into the book of Proverbs to ask the question of like why and how do

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I actually do this, we need to ask that question of what is wisdom? We're gonna make a distinction between knowledge, information and knowledge, things that are true and stated, propositions and wisdom.

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Wisdom is, in wisdom literature and scripture and there's a number of examples. Wisdom literature is skill in living or the skill in actually applying

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God's truth. So it's skillful living. It's God's skill in living.

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This is skillful living in the application of God's truth. So this is, so you understand, this is not the question of necessarily what.

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In other words, what is true? I mean, it's there but it's not concerned so much on just the what is true but the how.

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How? How do I actually apply this? How do I live it out? What does it actually look like with flesh on it?

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I was thinking of a way to describe that. I know there's so many ways we can describe the difference between the what and the how and I was thinking back to the time that we had just planted

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Apologia Church. So we're a baby church. Many of you guys know our history. We started at a drug rehab downtown in Phoenix, one of the oldest

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Christian rehabs. It's a hospital, doctors and nurses and I was the chaplain there and so many people were coming to Christ at the hospital, it became clear we needed to care for them and so the elders of the church that I was pastoring at the time laid hands on me and sent me and so we planted this church,

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Apologia Church, in the family building of a hospital and it was amazing because we had to constantly live by faith.

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When you reflect back on the decisions that were made back then in planting Apologia Church, it doesn't make any human sense.

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As a matter of fact, if you look at some of the things we did as husbands and fathers and dads, Pastor Luke and I, some of it looked downright foolish in terms of why would you put your family at risk like that and why would you make such a drastic step like that?

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Why would you do something like jumping off a cliff and just hoping somebody was down there to catch you? Well, thankfully,

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Jesus was down there to catch us. But when we planted, we didn't have a way to provide for ourselves.

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We didn't have a means. All we had was people that needed Christ and to be cared for but we didn't know how we were gonna actually feed ourselves or pay our rent.

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I mean, those things still need to get done even as a church planter. You have to have a home for your family.

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You have to be able to put food into your kids' mouths. And so we took this big step of faith and God just blessed and blessed and blessed.

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And it was amazing how we would have to care for the needs of our people but we didn't have the means to do it.

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And these are all a bunch of ex -drug addicts. Most of them are still in halfway houses. Their lives have been destroyed.

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They're on detoxification medicine. We don't have the ability to, as a church body, care for one another financially but people had needs to be cared for.

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And so we just said, Lord, if it's gonna happen, you're gonna do it. And so we were living by faith and the church was seeing we were living by faith and then

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God would just show up. He would show up and the money would come, I mean, essentially from the sky.

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It was amazing how God would just show up and provide for our needs. And at the time we were living,

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I mean, it's not even right to call it a house or even an apartment. My family and I were stacked on top of each other at a roach -infested home in Tempe.

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Lots of roaches in Tempe. Some of you guys know that. Woo woo, Tempe, say it. Lot of roaches in Tempe, really, there are.

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I don't mean to be offensive, but it's just a fact in more ways than one. But Candy, I remember

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Candy had said to me at the time, because this is all fresh, God's blessing the church, people are growing in Christ.

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It was really an amazing experience every single day seeing lives transform. But my wife, we're on top of each other in this roach -infested house in Tempe.

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And she says, hey, do you think that if I ask God to give us a house, he would give it to us?

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And some of you guys know, I've told this story before. I'm just trying to be the spiritually strong husband. I said, you can ask God for whatever you want, babe.

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He's a faithful God. And she turned around, I was like, doesn't mean he's gonna do it, you know, sort of thing. But amazingly, she did.

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She prayed for like two weeks. Lord, would you please give us a house that we can actually fit in and it's safe for our family.

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And we had weird people showing up our house like three in the morning banging on our doors and high as a kite. And some of you guys know,

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Tempe, that's, you know, some places that's kind of normal. And I was like, oh yeah, sure, babe.

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You go ahead and you ask God. And next thing you know, I get a phone call from a couple whose son had come to Christ at the hospital and he was staying to be discipled by us.

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He wasn't even from here. And so they got him a house here and they call me and two weeks later after Candy's praying, they say, hey,

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Pastor Jeff, there's a house next door going up for auction next to the house that we bought for our son.

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We're thinking about buying that. Would you live there? And I thought, oh, that's such a gracious invitation.

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Thank you, but we don't have the money to do something like that. They said, no, no, no, we'll buy it. You guys just live there.

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And so foot firmly in my own mouth, but I said, oh, praise

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God. So they said, we don't know if we're gonna win the auction, but we'll do it. And so then they call me and they say, hey, we won the auction.

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You can pick up the keys today. And I said, oh, this is crazy. I said, what is the house?

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What's it like? They said, we don't know. I was like, what do you mean? They said, well, because it's an auction, they can't tell you details, except to say it's like four bedrooms and it has a backyard and a front yard.

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And that's about all we know. And I was like, well, give me more than that. I mean, where is this house?

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And they were like, South Phoenix. I was like, what? So all they could do was just give just descriptions, information.

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They said like room, right? This size. And it has a living room.

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We know that. And so what they were doing is giving information. It was a house. I know that. There were no pictures.

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There were no drawings. There was no architectural stuff. There was nothing except mere descriptions.

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It's a house. Okay, I know what a house is. There's one thing. And it has room. Great, I know what a room is.

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It's got a room and a living room and a kitchen. But all we had was just the bare fact descriptions.

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That's all we had. And so we don't know what we're walking into that day. And so we'll get the key and we go to the house.

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It's one of those things that I was like, walking to the house, I was like, this is insane. This house is beautiful. More than anything

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I would have even imagined we would be able to have right now. And all glory to God. But I'll tell you what, this is around the time of the housing crisis when people were annihilating houses as they were foreclosed on, right?

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So I didn't know what we were walking into. And I slipped the key in the hole. I opened the door and pushed the door open and stepped in and I thought, whoa, it's not destroyed.

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Praise God, right? Everything's basically intact. And we got to walk through the house. And I was the first to see it.

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We went from mere descriptions, truth about the house. It's got this many bedrooms and a living room and a house and a backyard and a front yard.

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And now I was in it. And now I could describe it in much better ways, but not only that,

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I had experienced it. I could touch the walls. I could feel it. I knew what it was actually like.

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I had experience with it. I was now living there. And there was a difference between the what in terms of information about the house and actually now the house has flesh on it.

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Now I actually understand what it feels like inside, what it smells like inside. Now I actually have a better picture more than just a description.

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Now it's real. Now it actually is something you can touch. There's a reality to it. And there is a difference between knowledge, in some sense, knowledge, bare facts, this is true, and wisdom.

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Now I see. Now I understand. Now I can see the beauty of it.

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There's a difference between the mere description and actually experiencing it. An interesting thing about this for us as Christians, as we think about working through the book of Proverbs, why invest so much in a series that's going to be challenging at times, and even at times really difficult to understand?

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And I'm telling you right now, you're going to come face to face with things in this book that are going to kick you in your teeth, spiritually speaking.

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So why do such a challenging study that's actually going to grade against people's accepted values, right?

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In terms of borrowing and lending, going into business with unbelievers, those sorts of things, all those things are inside this book and it's godly wisdom.

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Why do it? Well, I think one of the reasons we need to do this is because we live in a time where there is a wealth of information and knowledge, a wealth of information and knowledge.

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Not just from a Christian perspective, because that's true, from a Christian perspective, we have so much of a wealth of knowledge, a treasure of information that the church has gathered throughout all of her history and has delivered it so faithfully to us.

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Now we have access to things that Christians, at times in history, had zero access to, to gain more understanding and more knowledge.

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Not just from a Christian perspective, we have all that. We have information and facts and studies like nobody else.

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But we also have to think about the world itself as a wealth of information and knowledge. But there's a deplorable deficit in wisdom.

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We are so undeniably poor. We're in poverty right now in our culture and society when it comes to wisdom.

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You see, think about it just in terms of the world and the access of information, the free access of information. We have instant access to each other, to the world at every moment, all the time.

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And the craziest thing about this, and I don't wanna sound like the old person, like in my day, we didn't have, but you sort of have to do that even if you're relatively young, because it wasn't that long ago that we were logging into AOL .com

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through our phone lines. And when someone else in the house picked up the phone, you're like, get off the phone! I'm on AOL!

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They would ruin the whole situation. And just the amazing feeling you had when you would log into AOL .com

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and all you could do was just check messages. It was like, I can talk to a person through my computer. And the buzzing and the beeping and the sound, bing, bing, bing, krrrr.

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It was such a delightful feeling. And there was nothing to it except a messaging system.

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And then we started getting web pages that took you literally 16 hours to load the one page.

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Remember that? You can go make a cup of coffee, maybe barbecue something, you'd come back and check on it, and it was halfway through the page and it was just like, there was nothing to it, just text on the page and maybe a really bad graphic, and it still took forever to load it, right?

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We've come so far so fast where, I mean, if you just consider the fact that,

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I remember when we first planted Apologia, even then, being able to use that media and that content to touch the world in an instant, that was like 12 years ago.

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And there was still limited access and ability to do what we can do right now in an instant. We could just do a live stream that touches the entire world in high definition, high quality, with them conversing with us on the ground in an instant.

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That's crazy. And there's so much information, like if something happens in the world today, you don't find out in two days or five days or 20 days, you find out in 20 seconds.

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In 20 seconds, it's instant information. We have this wealth of information, instant access to the world and each other.

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We have Google Street View. What an amazing thing, right? Kind of intrusive at times when you think about you're one of those people walking on the street like that's permanently fixed in Google Street View.

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But you can go anywhere in the world right now in an instant. Like recently, when we were in Louisiana, we were like, okay, we gotta get there, we gotta maybe do these things and let the public know this thing is happening.

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The people are trying to suppress our bill, they don't wanna talk about it, so we need to let people in Baton Rouge know this is happening.

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So what did we do? The crew, we just got into the studio, we pulled up Google Street View, we went to Baton Rouge, and we went down into the street.

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Remember that? We just literally started walking around the streets. We were like, okay, this street's not gonna work, there's no traffic there.

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What about turn down that road? Okay, walk down that road. And we're like literally walking through the streets of Baton Rouge in an instant.

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And you can do that almost anywhere in the world and find some, at times, some really interesting things, some strange stuff.

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There's also, there's a series, very popular right now, Under the

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Banner of Heaven. Under the Banner of Heaven. It was a book, and in our circles, in Christian circles, as we minister to Mormons and Latter -day

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Saints, we've known about this book for some time. They sell it at Utah Lighthouse Ministry and others. It tells a story of some

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Latter -day Saints who are part of Salt Lake Latter -day Saints, and then they started getting access to Joseph Smith's original teachings on polygamy and Brigham Young and what he said about blood atonement and some sins are so grievous that your own blood has to be shed to atone for them.

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The Christ's blood is not enough for that. And so this follows the real story of some

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Mormons that went into fundamentalist Mormonism, aka real Mormonism, and there's blood atonement and there's polygamy and all those things.

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Well, I remember back in the 90s, I had to carry sometimes two big bags of information.

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I'm talking books this thick. Remember that, the Utah Lighthouse Ministry? Those things were huge, huge, because Latter -day

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Saints had no access to this information. They couldn't get it, and their church would just deny it up and down.

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That never happened. We don't believe that. So you had to have this stuff with you in your backpack and bags.

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I mean, you came out there like you were going to the airport to move in somewhere to set it down. So when someone said, we don't teach that, we don't believe that, you would say, no, let me show you from your own documents, photocopy.

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Here's the page. Now, the Mormon church can't deny these things.

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Why? Because of the free access to so much knowledge and information.

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It's everywhere. My daughter was just telling me, do you know that the Mormon church has to officially respond weekly to every episode of Under the

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Banner of Heaven? That they're seeing it and responding to it. Why? Because they can't hide it anymore. Why? Because there's so much information.

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If you want to learn something today, you can learn from the best, from literally the best, masterclass.

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You ever heard of that, masterclass? It's like the best of the best in every field. The guys who are like the best filmmakers and the people that make the best scores and even the best brisket, right?

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And you can take the class. I did that. I did that. It's the guy who's like the award -winning brisket guy in all of the nation.

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You get to watch him in his backyard all night long, step -by -step, show you how to make the world's most delicious brisket.

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I still haven't done it, but I know how, right?

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I've got the knowledge. I can't do it, but I have the information. But today, it's crazy.

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How many of our homeschool woodpeckers, sharp name for them, how many of them have just learned to play the piano or to play the guitar or to do basic astronomy stuff and they learned it for free on the internet?

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Some other homeschool woodpecker started a channel and was like, hey, here's how you play the piano. And so these kids are just at home with free private lessons.

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They have so much access to information. That's the world that we live in today, a world we have this wealth of information, but very little wisdom.

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Think about this for a second. In just this last generation, the information and knowledge, the facts that we have today about the human genome and DNA, these things are explosive in history in terms of advances in information.

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We know so much today. In medicine, medicine today, we've learned so much just in the last generation in terms of medicine.

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And we've just leapt in one generation with information and it's coming at us faster and faster and faster all the time.

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But there's a problem, is that as Bonson says when he talks about wisdom in this particular chapter, he said, we have lots of information, lots of knowledge, but no wisdom.

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So much information, but we are brilliant fools. We can extend human life, but we have no mastery of it once we extend it.

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Think about that. All this knowledge and this advancement in medicine so we can get lives extended longer.

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But once we extend those lives, we don't know how to live. We have all this information about medicine and science and all these things, but we live in a culture and society that doesn't know how to apply truth, how to live in a godly and a righteous way.

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Think about our own nation for a moment. We are a nation built upon Christian truth in many ways.

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Again, it wasn't a utopia. Always have to say that. It's not like we gotta get back to the utopia. No, we need to get better and better at godly wisdom and glorifying

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Christ the King. But there's no denying the fact that this particular nation that we're in right now, I'm speaking to our nation, to our citizens, our people, we're a nation that was built upon so much

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Christian truth. So much Christian truth was just in the atmosphere. But what do we have today?

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No wisdom, no ability to apply those truths. Not only no wisdom in terms of the ability, the skill to apply these truths, but we don't even know these truths or want them in the first place.

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So we're rejecting both, the knowledge itself, the knowledge of God, the blessings of God, the truth of God, but we're also ignoring the wisdom of God.

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And so that's why we have to do a study like this as the body of Christ, because it's not enough to simply say,

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I know so dang much. I know so much. I've filled my head with so much theology, so much information.

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Let's be honest. Can I just say this bluntly? Totally unimpressive. Can we just say that?

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To a Christian community of a bunch of reformed folks, it's totally unimpressive. And it should be unimpressive to you to be the kind of person in a reformed community that we see so much of.

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A person that just fills their mind with so much information, so much knowledge. I'm not diminishing the importance of that pursuit in terms of pursuing an understanding of God's word.

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We need to have that rigorous commitment. But let's be honest. How many times have you run into a person that is, theologically speaking, a giant?

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They know a whole lot. They're sharp. They can defend the Trinity.

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They can explain where the Bible comes from and how God has preserved his word through history. They can talk about the deity of Christ.

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And you can talk about the humanity of Christ. They can talk about the spirit of God. They can talk about all these things, justification by faith, this forensic declaration that God makes.

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They can talk about all those things. But you honestly wouldn't want to have them over for dinner.

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You ever met someone like that? I know lots of people like that. They are sharp. They have brilliant theological minds.

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But I would never want to sit at a table with them to eat with them because they're unkind. They're ungracious.

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They're not humble. Those sorts of things we have to consider. We must continue to pursue as Christians a rigorous commitment to the truth of God's word.

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That can't be lost. We need that. However, a detailed knowledge of the law and the word of God is completely inadequate.

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Can I give you exhibit A? The Pharisees. Right? The Pharisees.

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They had this rigorous, intense commitment to study and to the law of God and understanding it, but they had no wisdom in actually applying it.

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Generally speaking, you see so much in terms of the Sadducees and the Pharisees. They had so much knowledge of the

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Bible, but they had no ability to actually apply that knowledge. So we can see it's not a problem just in our day, but it was a problem then as well.

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We are knowledgeable fools at times, and we need to war against that.

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Being knowledgeable fools. People on Facebook. Christians on Facebook.

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Have you ever seen some of the most depressing conversations in Christian communities in these

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Facebook chat groups? People who should know better, and it's just pages and pages and pages of abuse and accusations and mean -spiritedness, all the rest.

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You should expect more from those who actually know the embodiment of wisdom, but we just don't know how to apply it.

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Discernment ministries that will hear a story and just before asking for the other person's side or asking for details and facts, they will just share publicly stories about a person that are accusations and maybe even just brutally slanderous, and they'll do it because that's what discernment ministries do.

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They share information that could sully someone's reputation. Like you can tell today, in most of the online community within Christian communities, let's be honest, we are completely, completely at peace with gossip at times.

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Taking down someone's character, biting a little bit at a time away at their reputation.

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We seem totally satisfied with gossip in Christian community and even slander.

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We are at times, and this is an indictment upon us, it's not that you don't see it in other communities, but just think about this.

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Calvinists, reform folks. We know the doctrines of grace. We can defend those truths, right?

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We can defend those truths. We can defend the condition of men and women before Christ in the fall, and they don't seek

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God, and there is no God seeker, there's no one good, that they're dead in their sins and trespasses. We can go to all the

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Bible verses that teach that. We can go to all the Bible verses that say that it is God unconditionally that chooses to save people for His glory, for His kingdom.

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It is nothing in the sinner, it's what God does Himself. We can talk about the fact that Jesus actually dies in a very intimate, personal way for His people.

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He knows their names, and they don't deserve that. He was doing that before you were even born. You didn't add anything to that.

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There was nothing that God saw in you that made you worthy of that sort of a sacrifice and atonement.

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We can defend these truths as Calvinists all day long. We have all that information, but when it comes to an actual street encounter, where we're face to face with an unbeliever, we're mean -spirited, we're abusive, and then on the other side of the coin, we abuse one another in Christian reformed communities.

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We're nasty. We're mean. We don't act like we actually believe the doctrines of grace.

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We don't act like we believe what the Bible teaches about sanctification and how God does it by His Spirit.

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We're not as gentle as God is with us, but we know a heck of a lot.

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We're knowledgeable fools. This is so important that we actually gain wisdom.

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I would say this. As I've said it before, we need to have an intensely rigorous commitment to what does

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God's Word actually say? We need to care about actually exegeting God's Word properly and not saying ahead of time, this is what you ought to see in the

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Bible. Like believe my story first, now go running to the Bible to see if you can find it there. We need to let

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God's Word speak. We need to have that commitment to say the truth of God matters. We need to protect it. We need to defend it.

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We need to have reverence for God's Word. That's very important. But I think a lot of times, we actually focus so much on being sharp with God's Word and filling our minds with the knowledge of God's Word that we totally neglect wisdom.

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Do I even look like a Christian? Do I even look like I've been touched by Jesus? Is anything different in my life in terms of how

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I handle conflict? How I run my business? How I actually manage my family?

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Wisdom on how a Christian mother looks when she builds a home over and against the average unbelieving mother.

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Does it look any different really? Or how a man treats his wife? Or how we argue with one another?

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Yes, the book of Proverbs tells you how to argue. How to argue. Are we like the world with just a heck of a lot of Christian knowledge?

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Or are we wise? Now let's talk for a moment about the genre. Again, this is the beginning, opening up wisdom from above the genre.

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This is wisdom literature. You'll notice in your Bible, 66 different books and letters.

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You've got Old Testament, you've got New Testament. And as you read different books and letters in the New Testament and Old Testament, you'll note that you've got a lot of different kinds of writing.

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You have different styles. You have different kinds of writing. You have didactic literature, teaching literature, systematic, you have historic narrative.

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You've got, you know, in this year they did this, this guy said that, they went to this place, this guy died, here's how he died, here's why he died.

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You've got all kinds of literature like wisdom literature. Here's how you apply God's truth.

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You have apocalyptic literature. One way to describe it, apocalyptic literature that talks about things that can honestly give you nightmares at times, right?

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You have harlots riding beasts with 10 horns and heads and you've got all of these different, crazy different images in that book.

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You can't actually go to all these kinds of writings and actually interpret them exactly the same way.

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So as an example, as you go to this work here, didactic literature is a line of thought, as we said.

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A, B, C, D, stopping points, it's a progression. You have times where they're making a point and then they actually anticipate a person who would argue with the point and they'll give you their answer to that argument they anticipated.

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You've got a systematic working through a particular truth but you also have something like this that is very different, it's the application of truth.

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It's like, what do you see? What do you actually see?

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One of my, I've said this before, I think, one of my very favorite things to do,

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I mean this, is to sit with a very old Christian, somebody who's been in Christ their entire lives and just sit and listen to them and to watch how they talk and how they act.

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I think I had mentioned this to you before, like one of my favorite memories is when we were first planting

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Apology at Church. Luke and I were doing a lot of speaking and teaching across the country at different churches on defending the faith and at one of the places we went at one point was in his old hometown.

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We visited his grandparents and his grandfather was a missionary to Africa, had built a hospital in Africa that's still there to this day.

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It led so many people to Christ. I mean, there were just amazing stories but when you sat with these

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Christian heroes, I mean, they're old, almost ready to meet

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Jesus. They've walked with Jesus their entire lives. There's just something different about sitting with them than sitting with a very knowledgeable young guy who's got a thousand books on his shelf, right?

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He knows so dang much but this person has walked with Jesus. And you get to actually, you get to sense and taste and see their experience with God and you get to actually see the sweetness of spirit that they have, the gentleness, the confidence that they have in Jesus and just listen to them tell stories about how they walked with God and how

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God brought them through this or that trial and you get to see like, wow, this is what a person is like when they have actually sat in the light of Jesus their entire lives.

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That's wisdom. That's what it's done to them. So it's not just a matter of what is the truth but it's the application of the truth.

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And I wanted to give you one example of it in the New Testament. We've talked about this before, the book of James. Go there just briefly because I want you to see how it's fleshed out in the

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New Testament. James chapter three. Here's an example of the application of God's truth.

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What is wisdom? Let's see how it's saved. This book,

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James is so different than say the book of Romans. James chapter three, verse one.

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Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers. For you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.

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For we all stumble in many ways and if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body.

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If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well.

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Look at the ships also, though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs.

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So also the tongue is a small member yet it boasts of great things.

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How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire. And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness.

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The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life and set on fire by hell.

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For every kind of beast and bird or reptile and sea creature can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind.

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But no human being can tame the tongue. It's a restless evil, full of deadly poison.

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With it, we bless our Lord and Father and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.

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From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.

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Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and salt water?

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Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives? Or a grapevine produce figs? Neither can a salt pond yield fresh water.

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Does that cut you? Do you feel the weight of it? Like you're out of the realm of thinking about history, of thinking about God's dealings with say

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Abraham and Isaac. You're out of the realm of thinking about like, well, how does God like justify a sinner?

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How does God declare somebody who is sinful to be righteous when they are in fact not righteous?

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Oh, it's the righteousness of another. You see what I'm saying? Like you're thinking about in that way conceptually what has

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God done? What's the word say? You're thinking like conceptually about those things. And in this place, it'll gut you, right?

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Like man, that's me, that's my tongue. It's a restless evil. And yeah,

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I've seen that in my own life. I've seen how my own tongue can set fire to an entire situation. Spouses, husbands and wives, you know what

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I'm talking about, right? All it takes is for you to say the one thing you know will start the fire, right?

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And we're so sinful and we're so broken in ourselves, we'll do it, right? And you know the consequences, but it just sets a fire in the house for like the entire day, right?

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And then comes the repentance later. But that's exactly what our tongues are like. Or here's some more.

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He says this. Verse 13, who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct, let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom.

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But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth.

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This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic.

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For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder at every vile practice.

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But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.

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And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.

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And so you see so much of wisdom in scripture is this. What do you see? What do you see?

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What does it look like? It's really, it's a powerful thing.

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We have good friends in a number of churches across the country, some great friends, some godly men and women.

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But one of the things that I think is such a cool experience for anybody, and some of you guys have done this, if you go to Moscow, Idaho to meet with our friends up in Moscow, Idaho, we have so much in common with them.

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We serve together with them in many ways. They've been doing what

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Apologia Church has sort of as a mission, in terms of let's transform the world through the gospel, let's see lives changed, and let's let the communities look like that.

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Everyone goes, oh, that's what happens when people love Jesus, is it starts to do those sorts of things. Well, they've been doing that since the early 90s in Moscow, Idaho, and Doug's dad picked

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Moscow, Idaho because it was a small town, they could reach for Christ and see transformation at like a town level where there was like a university there.

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And it's kind of interesting, because when you go to Moscow, Idaho, you get to see the fruit of like 30 years of that mission.

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What does it look like when people know Jesus, and then they live that out with godly wisdom? You can see it when you go to Moscow and like the businesses owned by members of Christ Church, their businesses are better than everybody's business.

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Like everyone in town, like they may not like Christ Church, but they know that they need to go to those businesses owned by people from Christ Church, right?

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And their families, how inviting they are, the kind of warm welcome you receive when you are in contact with any of the church members, you get to see like how they treat one another, how they lavish gifts on one another, how there's just this amazing hospitality.

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I always feel like that's, for me, such a strong reminder of like what godly wisdom does in a very dark place, because the

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University of Idaho is like five minutes from downtown Moscow, and I'm telling you, you see darkness and light in many ways, but you see like what godly wisdom does to transform the world.

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It looks like light. It looks like love. It looks like peace.

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It looks like accountability. It looks like wisdom. And so when we think about the book of Proverbs, go back to Proverbs chapter one, we tend to think of the word proverb today as a slogan, right?

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Like a quick slogan. We think about a proverb like a one -liner, right?

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A zinger or a meme, right? A proverb's like a quick, pithy slogan sort of a thing.

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But in Scripture, the proverb is actually much more than that. Yeah, it is at times a slogan.

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It could be a slogan. It might seem pithy. It might seem like a zinger or a one -liner, but it's much deeper.

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It's actually an unmovable and objective, righteous principle, right?

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This is the character of God. This is what God is like. This is what God would be like if he walked among us.

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It's an unmovable and an objective, righteous principle. This is what God is like and what he expects us to be like.

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That's what Proverbs gives you. If God was a man, here is what the world would see.

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Here's what they would see. Brightly shining in the world. If he were the king here on earth, this is how he would rule.

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And by the way, that's precisely what you have in the book of Proverbs. What would it be like if God was a man?

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Well, he'd look like this. What would it be like if God was a king ruling over his people? Well, this is exactly what he would look like.

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Here's the principles he would be holding to. Here's how it would actually play out. Dr. Bonson, when he was speaking on Proverbs 1,

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I thought this was good. He said, think of the book of Proverbs differently than you think about other books in the

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Bible. Think about it like medicine. Like you might have a medicine cabinet where you've got different pills for things that are going on with you.

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You've got the pills, you've got maybe a lot of them, or maybe even supplements, right?

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You've got them in your medicine cabinets. Well, you don't go to that medicine cabinet with all those pills and take the whole bottle and swallow it at once, right?

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Some of those pills might make you a little loopy if you did something like that, or you might just die, right?

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Like, how are you supposed to take medicine? Well, one pill at a time. What do you do? You take the pill and you let it do its work.

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You gotta let it go into you and actually start working, take its time to work its way through your body.

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Dr. Bonson said you had to think about the book of Proverbs like that. Think about it like you're taking your pills.

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You don't take the whole bottle at once, right? So simply sitting down and trying to read through the book of Proverbs to master the entire book is like taking that bottle and trying to swallow it all at once.

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What would be more beneficial is as we take ourselves through this study step by step, is you think about it like taking a pill.

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Take a pill at a time. Think about it, digest it, meditate on it. Think about the ways that you're not like that, right?

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Think about the ways that you're not like that. Or think about the ways that it's actually challenging maybe principles that you've held to your whole life.

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Like I thought we were allowed to live like this and you're gonna have a proverb that you swallow that actually cuts you.

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Oh no, that's not the way God called you to live. That's not how we should run our businesses. That's not how we should be parents.

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That's not how we should actually talk to one another. That's not how we should live in community with each other. And maybe you've embraced it your entire

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Christian life and you might come up against a proverb that you need to swallow and let that pill do its work in you.

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But not the whole bottle at once. But let's talk about it. Again, this is today just the beginning, the opening, laying the foundations of how we approach this kind of work.

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It says in verse one, the Proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel.

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Now Solomon, I was tempted to do like an entire study on Solomon to say like, well maybe no one knows who

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Solomon is. Like maybe we need to focus on Solomon and like his life and life in times of Solomon. And I thought to myself, not overly important in terms of the man himself.

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I'd like to know some stuff about him and what happened here, but not overly important in terms of the divine wisdom given to us through Solomon.

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Because in the end, where does this really come from? Holy men of God, Peter said, spoke as they were, what?

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Carried along by the Holy Spirit. So ultimately this is revelation from God. So Solomon and his life, not overly important.

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And by the way, if we talked about Solomon a little too much you wouldn't read this with any confidence at all.

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Because you'd be like, wisest man in history, ha! Laughable, right?

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But that's what we call him. And let's just do one point of contact here to talk about Solomon, the king of David.

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If you would, turn to the left to 1 Kings chapter four. 1

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Kings chapter four, verse 29, about Solomon in terms of his wisdom and the renown of Solomon and how he was known all around the world for his wisdom.

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1 Kings chapter four, verse 29. It says, and God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore so that Solomon's wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the

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East and all the wisdom of Egypt. For he was wiser than all other men, wiser than Ethan, the

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Ezraites, and Haman, Chalcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahal. These are obviously heavy hitters in their day.

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And his fame was in all the surrounding nations. He also spoke 3 ,000

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Proverbs. 3 ,000. So obviously what we have in the book of Proverbs is what

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God wanted us to have in terms of divine inspiration. But this man was just popping out Proverbs daily.

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He was like always memeing, right? Here's a meme, here's a meme, here's a meme. His meme game was strong, right?

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Trying to make it understandable for the modern audience. 3 ,000 Proverbs. Quiet, Daniel.

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And his songs, here it is. And his songs were 1 ,005.

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He spoke of trees from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts and of birds and of reptiles and of fish.

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So he had this wide array of knowledge and wisdom. And people of all nations came to hear the wisdom of Solomon and from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom.

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So that's what you're getting with Proverbs. Not all of this was written just by Solomon, but you're getting wisdom from, in history, one of the wisest men who ever lived in history.

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And this is divinely inspired wisdom. Now, in the first seven verses, now the sermon's starting.

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I'm just kidding, okay. In the first seven verses, we're actually gonna spend next Sunday on seven because I think it's that important.

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So today we're doing the introduction in terms of let's let this book of wisdom explain to us what wisdom is.

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So beyond my explanation, background, what does this book say about wisdom?

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There's an introduction. And I like how one of the commentaries did this. It's called Christ -Centered

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Exposition. It's a commentary that lays out the first six verses like this.

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It's common to do it this way. In verse one, it says the Proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel.

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So in understanding what wisdom is, wisdom is at the start in this book, it's royal, it's kingly, it's from above, it's authoritative.

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Wisdom is royal. And in verse two, to know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight.

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So the second point, what is wisdom? Wisdom is correction and understanding.

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Verse three, to receive instruction in wise dealing, in righteousness, justice, and equity.

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So the third point is, wisdom is the knowledge, fundamentally, of good and evil.

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Think about that. Righteousness, justice, and equity. Like, think about this just for a moment in terms of just that one verse.

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Verse three, what if the leaders, the kings of the earth, took from Solomon this royal wisdom, this work, and they actually had to live as a leader, as a king, as a president, with their eye on this book constantly in terms of how to actually be righteous and to uphold justice and equity.

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What kind of world would we be living in if our leaders actually had at their feet daily this work on wisdom?

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It would change the world. Of course, we'd need regenerate leaders, people who knew Jesus, but if they lived according to this book of wisdom, they would see so much fruit, so much blessing in the world, along for the day when the kings of the earth actually do that.

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They say this is the standard for leaders, righteousness, justice, and equity.

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The fourth point is that wisdom is discernment. So in verse four, it says to give prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the youth.

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The fifth point, the fifth verse, is that wisdom is obtaining guidance.

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It's being guided. Verse five, let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance.

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And the sixth verse is that wisdom is only possible. Sorry, that's verse five and six.

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And the sixth point is in verse seven, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

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Fools despise wisdom and instruction. So clearly, in us having explained to us what is godly wisdom, wisdom is only possible with the fear of God.

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Why? And I would just pause there for a second. Why do we live in a culture that seems so hell -bent on running straight forward into darkness and destruction?

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There is no fear of God before their eyes. We don't fear

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God. Like, it comes down to that in so many ways, in so much that is broken all around us.

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Whether it's broken families, whether it's a broken justice system, broken businesses, whether it's gender questions, sexuality, whatever the issue is, fundamentally at the core of all that is broken all around us in the world.

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Of course, we're sinners. We need to be reconciled to God. But in terms of the direct outworking of it, what does it look like every day when it's broken?

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It looks like people do not fear God. They can't live. They can't love.

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They can't plan. They can't be in community with each other. Why? Because ultimately, they don't fear

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God. They don't want to yield to his truth, to his word. And just think about the powerful nature of this statement.

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Just, we're gonna do more next week on this one verse because it is so foundational to everything.

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Think about what that claim is in terms of wisdom in the world. The fear of the

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Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Like, that's where it starts.

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If you want to know things, if you want to actually have wisdom, being able to have skill in applying knowledge, it starts with reverent submission and awe before God.

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If you don't fear God, ultimately, you can't know anything. If you don't fear

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God, you won't be able to live skillfully in God's world. And so, where do we start with wisdom?

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Fear God. Fear God. And I think that's what's broken today in so many ways.

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But we're gonna unpack that verse next week and talk about its implications across philosophy and the world around us.

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But what are we gonna get from this study? This word from God is gonna speak to all of us throughout all our lives in so many ways.

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It's gonna speak not just to us, but to the world out there. Some examples, this particular revelation from God tells us how to handle our courts, how we should behave as kings, as leaders.

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This particular revelation from God gives us the application of the law of God.

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Not just facts about the law of God, but how do you apply the law of God in our daily relationships with each other?

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How do we actually live it out? Not just what's it say, but what's it look like with one another? This particular word from God is gonna tell us how we actually handle conflict with each other.

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Let's face it, we're sinners. We're a mess, amen, yes? It was like two people that thought so, okay?

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We're in the wrong room. We're gonna start a series on total depravity one more time, okay? But let's face it, we're in Christian community.

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We love Jesus, we love each other, but we blow it. We do, and you're gonna blow it. Like accept the fact that you're in Christian community and you're gonna blow it.

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I think one of the main reasons that you have like church splits and like broken relationships and those sorts of things is a lot of times

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Christians walk into Christian community with sort of this la la land perspective in their minds like all's gonna be well.

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I love Jesus, you love Jesus. It's gonna go perfectly. So at the first moment of conflict, people just get so rattled, they blow up.

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Like how dare you behave that way and Christians can't do that and I'm out of here, right? And they abandon and maybe they take six or seven people with them because they never would have imagined that Christians can be so awful to each other, that we could just totally fail each other, that we could totally blow it.

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This wisdom from God teaches us, okay, how do you handle it? Like not how do you quit and abandon one another or how do you continue perpetuating the sin, but it tells you here's how you're supposed to manage those conflicts.

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Here's how you're supposed to handle when you hear something about another person. Here's how to handle it. Here's how you're supposed to handle someone actually offering you correction or discipline, instruction.

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This is gonna teach us about all of that. This particular revelation from God is gonna teach us things about borrowing and lending money.

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It's gonna teach us about money, wealth and savings. It's very capitalistic, let me tell you.

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In other words, it's not Marxist wisdom, okay? It's gonna teach you wisdom about how do you determine the will of God for your life, right?

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Questions about do I go left? Do I go right? What do I do about this opportunity versus that opportunity?

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How do I know what the will of God is for my life or how do I walk in such a way that I can have understanding of what the will of God is for my life?

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This book gives us that wisdom, how we're supposed to actually pursue that. This book teaches us about preserving our own nation that we live in and by extension even our own communities and our families and avoiding judgment.

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There's actually a lot in this book about God judging nations and about nations rejecting

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God's wisdom and then being destroyed ultimately. This book tells us about so many things, so much wisdom on even something as simple as this, avoiding adultery by being sexually satisfied with your spouse.

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Didn't know the Bible did that, did you? But it does, talks a lot about that. Practical godly wisdom on how you can actually have a satisfying intimate relationship with a husband and wife and what you can do to avoid the adulterous woman or by extension the adulterous man.

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This word from God talks to us and teaches us and ought to cut us men about hard work and it's

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God ordained blessings. Working hard. It is funny, how many of you guys saw that leaked video?

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It was like a Twitter guy, it was like a Twitter engineer. Do you see that this week, anybody? Was it

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Veritas that did that? Yeah, we've been talking to them about some stuff. It was them, but they had like a hidden camera with like a

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Twitter engineer, wasn't it? Like an engineer of like their Twitter feed and like what people see, what people don't see.

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Like it's as dark and deceptive and nefarious as you thought and probably worse.

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But they have like a hidden camera. I love that, I love those guys. They do such a good job of exposing stuff. They had a hidden camera and it was amazing to like sit and see this person like, you really wanna live like that?

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And if you saw it, go watch it if you don't know what I'm talking about. Look this footage up.

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But one of the things that he was saying is like when Elon Musk bought Twitter, like there are so many like Marxists and socialists who work for Twitter that one of the things they were so worried about was like Elon Musk could come in and that he was gonna change the whole culture of Twitter which the guy was saying, our culture now,

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I don't remember word for word what he said but it was something like, our culture now is if you need to take like a mental health day, you just take it.

01:00:05

Or like a mental health month. Or a mental health like season, I guess.

01:00:11

And you come back like sort of like when you're ready. And he was worried that like when Elon Musk or they were worried if he comes in, he's gonna turn it into like a place where people actually have to work.

01:00:22

And they were like all like worried about that. If he comes, we're gonna have to start working and doing our jobs so that this is successful and bears fruit.

01:00:30

Like we love our mental health months. Like just think about it for a minute. If I ever like came on a

01:00:37

Sunday, I was like hey guys, I'm gonna take a mental health six months for now. I'll be back or not, we'll see.

01:00:45

Right, but I expect you guys to keep paying me for the next six months. And when I get back or not, we'll see.

01:00:51

I think you guys would be like, it's nice knowing you Pastor Jeff. Okay, right, breaking is good, taking vacations and resting, please do that.

01:01:00

But like you don't get to just walk away from your job and your work and your responsibilities and expect to keep the job or expect any fruit.

01:01:08

If you don't work, you don't what? Eat. If you don't invest in your business and labor diligently, you don't get to grow things, right?

01:01:19

Like think about it in terms of even farming. Like farmers have to constantly be working and like planning and thinking about seeds and how much time and all the rest and they're constantly putting it in, why?

01:01:30

Because if they're not there for the work, if they're not putting into it, they don't get any fruit. Nothing grows.

01:01:36

It's the same with the world and business. But this word from God will teach us about hard work and it's

01:01:44

God ordained blessings. This word from God is gonna teach us about spotting and avoiding gossip and slander.

01:01:53

God hates it. God hates it. We had a conversation recently about this in terms of us as a church body, like firming up our commitments to love one another and just how do we do this in godly wisdom and receive accusations?

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Because it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. You're gonna hear gossip. You're gonna hear accusations. It's gonna happen.

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But how do you handle it? Like how do we actually wade through that conversation where we hear an accusation?

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This is wisdom from God. It tells us how to do it, how to heal even. This word from God tells us about accepting discipline and correction.

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It tells us even about something we don't even like today because we're so arrogant, we're so pompous. It tells us about listening to advice from the wise and the elderly, like respecting our elders and what they have to say and receiving wisdom and instruction from them, correction even.

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It talks to us about walking in integrity and despising a lying tongue.

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This work from God's gonna tell us how to build our home, how to build our business for the glory of God.

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It tells us about enjoying the fruit of our labor and enjoying the fruit of God's world.

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So here's what I'm gonna challenge you to think about. Think about what we have in scripture at least in two ways.

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At least in two ways as we move through this book. Think about God giving to you truth.

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We need that. We have to protect that. We have to defend that. We have to have rigorous commitments to protecting the truth and teaching the truth and telling the truth.

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But in terms of like, you can just have God tell you this is the law and you can know that truth.

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You can have the facts and have it done well. But we need also to have this other leg and that's the skill of actually applying that truth.

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Right? Like having a deep knowledge of the law of God by itself is completely inadequate.

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You can know the law of God and have no real understanding of how to actually apply it. And so my hope is in this series that I'm changed and you're changed.

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You understand that? Like, yes, there's a pastor gift and responsibility in the church but we're handling the words of God.

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And so this book is intended to change me as well as it changes you.

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This is, we're asking the Lord as we open up this series and work through something that is so powerful and so glorious.

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We're asking him to actually transform us to be wise like Jesus, to be like him.

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This is what it's like. And my hope is that what God does here through a study of this book is he actually transforms us personally.

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He transforms our marriages. He transforms our relationships with one another. He builds such an awesome light through this wisdom that the world can look in and say,

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I want that. Like, I want that. I think one of the things that I'm gonna end on this, one of the things that I think is,

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I'm not a prophet, but one of the things that I think is gonna be so obvious as the future unfolds is that we live in a society today that's abandoned so much truth.

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It doesn't want it. It doesn't want God's definitions of marriage. It doesn't want

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God's definitions of relationships, of sexuality. It doesn't want

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God's definitions of justice. It doesn't want God's story of creation.

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It doesn't want God's anything. And so what it's doing to itself is it actually is eroding the image of God to the degree that it's destroying everything else around it.

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And so what I think is gonna happen is it keeps playing out is that when that perspective of a hatred of God's truth and wisdom, when it plays out in the world, at a certain point, it's going to actually look as dark as it is in the heart.

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And the world around us is gonna look like that. If you live opposing

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God's word and God's wisdom, your world is gonna collapse. It's gonna destroy itself.

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It has to because it despises God. This is God's world. And if you don't live in God's way, loving

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God's truth, ultimately you will be destroyed. So what will be left?

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What will be left in the remains of that destruction is hopefully a lot of Christian communities that love

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Jesus, that love God's truth, and love his wisdom that are shining like bright lights in that darkness.

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Because you cannot, listen, you cannot unravel God's foundations for the world in terms of what is a woman, right?

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You can't unravel that and destroy that without real consequences.

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Because women are some of the most gifted and important things in God's entire creation.

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And so if you destroy what that actually is supposed to be, you will reap the whirlwinds.

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You'll destroy it. If you destroy what the woman's role is in the home and what that's supposed to look like and how it actually raises up little heroes, right?

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And little image bearers of God. If you destroy that, then you're gonna feel that in the future.

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And we're seeing it today. Think about just our world we live in today in terms of the children of the last generation.

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One word on this. Did you guys see the video we put up this week at LSU, anybody see that video?

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Where we were, and I don't wanna take down their dignity in any way. The people that we talked to,

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I prayed for them. I prayed for them all this week when we put the video up. I'm still praying for the people we talked to. But one of the things you should see in terms of wisdom, what does

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God's knowledge and truth and wisdom get? What do you get? Well, if you looked two generations ago when

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Christians were controlling education, let's be honest, sometimes you read those people from the past, will you be as honest as me?

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And you have to take 20 minutes to read a page because their vocabulary, their ability to explain themselves, their ability to actually create an argument and follow through that thought is so deep and so profound when the

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Christian church was in charge of education at every level, we gave the world Oxford, Yale, Cambridge, Princeton, Harvard, Brown, like we did that to the world.

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We gave the world like Jonathan Edwards. That's what we did. And then we go to the campus of LSU and you can just see the people commenting even, these people can't think.

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They can't follow an argument. They can't reason. And I don't say that to take down their dignity,

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I say that to make a point. This is what happens when you abandon God's truth and God's wisdom, is what does it produce?

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It produces brokenness, the inability to think, the inability to argue, the inability to contemplate, the inability to meditate, the inability to actually look at your own feet and say, am

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I right? Or am I wrong? The lack of humility, the pride, the hatred of God, the lack of fear of God.

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And so what we need in our day desperately is not just theological knowledge cast out at the world, we need godly wisdom because we also want to be light to the world, but we want to glorify

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God in our lives and in our communities and produce in our lives and communities what godly wisdom is intended to do to show what the true image of God is in the world.

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Let's pray. Father, I pray that you'd bless this series as we pray ahead of time for it. Bless this series for your glory and for your kingdom.