The Call of Wisdom IV: Dig Out Your Ears!

Welcome to the

Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with me this week is Teddy James and we're looking again at the question, how do we respond to wisdom's voice?

Looking at Proverbs 1 and 2 and we're in the middle of chapter 2, verses 1 through 4, where wisdom is giving us some very clear, very simple pictures, metaphors, that describe the response of the whole of a person to what

God says in his word. So, Teddy, you want to read us through those? Absolutely. So, starting in verse 1, chapter 2,

My son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding, yes, if you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the

Lord and find the knowledge of God. So, we're now looking at that third direction.

The first was receiving, or the Hebrew word there, really a very active receiving, and so in many other places it's described as taking.

Take my word within you and then treasuring.

So, take or welcome, assess it, invite it in, let it go everywhere, and then treasure it, guard it, protect it, encapsulate it in active obedience.

Make sure that seed of the word, the voice of God's wisdom, gets down into our lives and is not choked out, is not distracted.

So, the third is found in verse 2, making our ear attentive to wisdom.

Yeah, and so that can—what exactly does that mean? Well, it seems to me that in our day we have such a lazy ear, and I think that we've kind of developed this within ourselves, and it is partly because we have so much stuff that comes at us that eventually everything just becomes noise, and so we're overwhelmed with the sheer amount of things that are available to be listened to.

So, one, we have to really learn the discipline of discernment to know what is going to be of great value and spend our time and our focus thinking on those things, listening to those things.

We've talked in a previous series about active listening, and we'll link to that in the show notes for you if you haven't heard that.

But another problem with all of the availability of the stuff is the idea that I can always come back to this.

So, I don't have to listen to it carefully now because I can come back and listen to it carefully later.

And John, that, to me, that one of the greatest lies of the enemy is later.

You know, I don't have to do this now. I can do it later. And so, John, I mean, how does that apply not just in what we're listening to, say we're listening to a sermon, but that even applies for our quiet time?

Yeah. So, those two problems, not discerning between good things and the best thing, so we become cluttered, or as you mentioned, believing that we can always come back.

You know, we can... You and I were talking earlier about... So, you can go... You can listen to a podcast again if you found it helpful.

You could listen to a sermon online again. You could skip church and say to yourself, well, you know,

I can always catch the sermon online. Or you can listen to the sermon in church lazily, distracted by little babies, you know.

I'm always... I always notice there are certain people that sit in our church in certain places.

You know, everybody kind of has their unofficial assigned seat. Everybody sits in the same place.

You know, to get them to move after, you know, a few months in one place, it seems impossible. So, they sit kind of in the same place, and there are...

We have a lot of babies in church, and so there are people that always sit behind babies, and I always see them distracted by babies.

You know, they're kind of smiling at the little kid or the toddler, you know, that stands up and turns around and smiles at them.

You know, and it's not wicked. It's just funny to see. It always occurs sometime in the sermon.

And so, you know, there are physical distractions, and you might think, well,

I could catch that later online. However, I think one problem with that is that it denies the dynamic of communion with God and the speaking

God that is behind this book. So, the Word of God here is on the pages in front of us, but that is not enough.

We all know what it was like before we were Christians to just kind of skim through the chapters of a Bible, perhaps.

You know, I read through the Bible or had it read to me. My mother read each evening to me from the

Bible when I was little, and we made it through. I remember making it through the Old Testament, at least.

And, you know, and later I read the Bible as a kid in Sunday school. You know, maybe there was a chart on the wall, and I wanted all the smiley faces on my name, and I had to beat all the girls in the class, you know.

Driven by my own, you know, pre -adolescent pride, I wanted to be the one that won the prize.

And so, I would read my chapters for the week, and nothing, you know, nothing, no benefit.

And then going to church as a teenager and just kind of lazily enduring it, no benefit.

There is a dynamic when we come to this book. There are the words on a page which are essential, but then there is the

God who takes those words and illuminates our own thought and heart and causes those things to come to us with lasting impact.

And it is not something that you can guarantee. You can't just lazily read through Scripture.

You can't ignore wisdom's voice in the sermon and say, I can always go back and listen again if I ever want to.

And then think that whenever you pick up the Bible, you can just turn to any chapter in this book, and you can get everything it has to offer, you know, on your own good time.

There is the dynamic of your relationship to the author. How do you know that if you are careless with His Word today, tomorrow

He will not cause the Scripture to have the impacting power that it would have had yesterday?

You know, in the sense that God restrains that wonderful work of His Spirit, and you're kind of left on your own to figure life out, to figure this book out.

And, you know, until you come to your senses and say to God, God, forgive me for my pride.

So we want to beware of those two dangers. Well, and I think, too, that speaks to the sin of self -sufficiency, right, where we can say,

I have enough understanding that I can live today. I don't really have to pay attention for the needs of today.

Tomorrow I may need that. And really what that is saying to God is, I don't need you today. Yeah, I was reading a little book by A.

W. Tozer, and the book is called God Tells the Man Who Cares, and it's a collection of his editorials.

And in one of the chapters that the book's title is taken from, God Tells the Man Who Cares, Tozer says, the

Bible was written in tears. You know, you think of Paul in prison, in Philippians, you know,

I say now, even weeping. You think of the prophets like Jeremiah. How many times the author is writing from the broken heart.

The Bible was written in tears, and to tears it will yield its best treasure.

Then Tozer says this, God has nothing to say to the frivolous man.

And he points out, you know, it's a wonderful little chapter. He points out how much damage is done when parents,

Sunday school teachers, you know, pastors in a church, the one that's preaching this

Sunday, when a man or a mom, an older believer, goes to the scripture and they read something from the and they kind of spit it back out to someone and say, well, you know,

Isaiah says, and they have never read Isaiah the way

Isaiah wrote Isaiah, you know. They give out God's rules with a heart that takes

God's law lightly. They explain some verse from the Psalms or they, you know, they use it like a t -shirt slogan, you know.

It's so easy with the Psalms to just take a phrase out of context and just use it as if it's a light, pick me up for the day.

And they have no concept of what the psalmist was, you know, going through, what the psalmist was gripped by when the psalmist was writing.

You know, they give off statements from Christ, but they are not gripped by Christ. So Tozer just points out over and over, if we are not men and women who are, you know, fundamentally the opposite of frivolous readers, then we can take these phrases, which are biblical, and we can hand them to other people in sermons or Sunday school lessons or a talk with our kid on the side of their bed at night.

And those words can do damage because of how we handle them, you know, how we bring them.

But anyway, it's a great chapter. That's not our topic today. Maybe one day we'll look at it. Now, so if we are to incline our ear, if we are to be attentive, you know, let's say bending your ear toward the

Lord, and there's many wonderful metaphors in the Bible for this. We've talked before about the strange and somewhat gross to us as modern people, you know, somewhat gross metaphor of that the

Hebrews used, you know, in English, it doesn't read this way. In the Hebrew, it says, digging out your ear, you know.

So God opened my ears to hear from Him. That's what the Messiah says in Isaiah chapter 50.

He woke me up. He opened my ears daily to listen. So as a human, though sinlessly perfect, the

Messiah is still depending on the Father through the work of the Spirit to day by day, dig out his ears, not sinful clogging, you know, but just human need.

I'm dependent on God to teach. We, of course, have the human need, the human limitations, and we're dependent upon God, the perfect teacher to help us to hear.

But we also have the sinful clogs. A funny illustration from my family.

I think two weeks ago, we had my older son is getting married, and he probably won't appreciate this illustration being made, you know, public.

But I was in, it was a Saturday night that my in -laws, my future in -laws were down, and they were all together for a, it was a wedding shower here at the church for the young lady, and she's from out of town.

So she and her family came, and they stayed in New Albany that weekend. And they're all there at our house on Saturday night, just enjoying, you know, hanging out and laughing and playing games.

And I was there for a while, then I went to study, finished studying for the sermon. But I could hear, because, you know, everybody's loud.

My son was saying something. He was kind of going on a little rant, and, you know, kind of tongue -in -cheek, but he was ranting.

And his future bride gently said to him, and I'm always wondering, how long does the gentle last?

You know, I'm trying to remember, how long did the gentle last in my relationship? That honeymoon phase, right? Yeah, like, you know, oh, he's perfect to, like, oh, that can be frustrating, you know.

So she kind of gently said, well, I don't know. I mean, I think that that may not be the way

Christ would have us think about something. And he kind of undeterred went on a little rant again, and his future mother -in -law said in such a nice way, and in a funny way, but in a way that if I were him,

I think I would have thought, oh, I guess it's time for me to shut up. She said, do you have brownies in your ears?

I've never heard anybody use this phrase. And we all thought that that was just perfect.

Like, that's perfect, you know. Can you not hear? Have you got brownies in your ears? And wherever that came from.

We are men and women and young people who often have spiritual clutter in our ears, and we need the

Lord to open them. But that's not all there is to listening. Wisdom says to us, not just you need

God to open your ears, but you need to bend them. You need to make, to intentionally cause your ear to be attentive to what

God is saying. So there's some practical things that we need to do for that. Yeah, and that's what

I was going to say. So this is not just a...

It is a spiritual practice. It is a spiritual discipline. But it is also an extremely and essentially practical thing.

It does not take the monk to do this. This is the life of the everyday

Christian. And so, you know, for me, and I am very much a gadget and a tech guy, but that does mean that when

I am having my quiet time, I have to shut my phone completely off, turn it upside down, put it away in another room.

My computer, I actually use the desktop light of my computer, but I don't actually log into my computer.

It's just like the screensaver that's there. Because I have found if I even log in, if my phone is face up,

I am going to be distracted. Now, John, there is one thing that I have found, even with all of that,

I will still have these internal distracting thoughts. And, you know, I'll think, oh,

I need to do this today, or I need to send this email. What we have to keep in mind is that we have an enemy who would love nothing more than to have us distracted while we are spending time with Christ.

And during our quiet times, his ultimate objective, if he can't stop us from having a quiet time, is to distract us during the quiet time.

So there is a legitimate battle that is taking place daily. And because we do have an enemy who would love to distract us, and he uses thoughts that are not evil, wicked thoughts.

They're, hey, I really need to make sure I take the trash down to the road this morning before the trash runs.

It's things like that. What I have found in a very practical manner, you've talked a lot about having a notebook open when you are doing your quiet time.

I actually have two. I have one that I take notes in. The other may not be an actual notebook.

It's often just a scrap piece of paper that I'm going to throw away at the end of the day. But that is where I may take that note.

Hey, I need to send this person a text. Hey, I need to take the trash down to the road. Hey, I need to do this or to do that.

And so I'm just going to allow myself to write that note out. And then

I come right back. Because now that doesn't have to be stored in my brain. That is put somewhere else where I will see it.

I know it's there. And then I can focus back on the word. That is such a freeing, practical discipline that I found helpful.

And I hope our listeners will as well. Yeah, I do the same thing. But I do use my phone for that. And I can see how that has at times caught me.

With your smartphone, you can tell it to remind you of something. Remind me to call so -and -so today.

Remind me to email so -and -so back today. So with wearing a few different hats, occupationally, there's always a list of small little things.

And none of them are necessary for today. None of them may be very significant, emergency kind of things.

It could wait till tomorrow. But if it always waits till tomorrow, it never gets done. And I'm bad to let little tiny things kind of get forgotten.

So I have to remind myself. I put my phone on, do not disturb. Actually, I tell it

I'm asleep. And then, you know, so nobody but like a few of my family members can get through to me. And that helps.

But, you know, sometimes the text will pop up on the screen and then disappear. And I think, oh, that probably was terribly important.

And so I start to read it and then I'm off, you know, and running. And even once you get off track, it's so hard to get back on.

I've used this illustration before that I learned reading the two -volume Hudson Taylor, where Taylor, not as a young Christian, not as a young missionary, but as a retired older man, as a godly older man who had walked with the

Lord all those decades. He was in Australia, staying with a friend. He, you know, this is like the last years of his life.

And he is not extremely busy like he was when he was younger. So he has time to meet with the

Lord, to pray for the missionaries, you know, that he's no longer the official, you know, director of, but he's obviously concerned.

So he's praying for the missionaries in China. He's studying his Bible for his own soul. And he said that he found, even at that stage in his

Christian life, if he sat down with his Bible, looked across the room, and he saw the blinds in the window, and one of them was crooked, if that bothered him, you know,

OCD, and he gets up and straightens it, he said, I never made it back to the time with the

Lord. There would always be another thing, oh, that's out of place, or oh, I need to remember to do that.

And I find that it really is the way it is with a phone or, you know, a computer. If I give in to the first text, which, you know, it's not essential that I look at it in the next 20 minutes.

If I give in to that text, the temptation to read it, just in case it's an emergency, what

I find is that I'll give in to the next and the next and the next email, and I find that I never really made it back to my soul and God.

Now, there's two things that I think really help us here to be attentive. One is humility.

And humility is that we say to the Lord, there are many things that you have given me to do today, and these texts, these emails, you know, these phone calls probably are all part of that group of things

I need to be taking care of today. And out of love for the Lord, I want to do those things at the right time with all my might.

But I am too needy to skip my time with him and rush off and do a bunch of things for him, so to speak.

So Luther's classic statement to his barber, I am so busy today, I cannot afford to spend less than three hours in prayer.

You know, classic Luther, you know, big, bold statements, but they stick with you.

So forget the three hours versus two versus one. That's not the point.

The point is the busier Luther got, the more he realized his need for God so that the events of the day would be filled, you know, with the aroma of Christ in his life, wherever he went, and he would be given, moment by moment, what he needed to do the good pleasure of the

Lord, and those opportunities would not be wasted. We tend to think, of course, the opposite way.

I have so much to do, I don't have as much time to be alone with the Lord. I have nothing to do today.

I have plenty of time to be alone with the Lord. Humility says, I need you,

God, more than I need to get busy doing these things. And sometimes that's what needs to be the prayer, right?

God, show me my need. Because I think, oftentimes, and it goes back to what we were saying earlier, the sin of self -sufficiency is so rampant in,

I think, particularly the temptation for Americans, because we are so self -sufficient in every other way.

Why would we not be when it comes to this? But we are, of all people, needy. Yeah, and really that, you know, what we call the sin of self -sufficiency, it's not that we're self -sufficient, it's that we think we're self -sufficient, we hope to become self -sufficient, you know,

I'll do better tomorrow, and we don't say, I don't need God, but we kind of say to God, God, if you'll give me another chance tomorrow, you just watch and see,

I'll make you proud. You know, I'll do better. You know, instead of saying, I will never be a better, stronger, more capable individual,

I am coming up out of the wilderness of this world, leaning on the beloved.

That is always the metaphor, you know, Song of Solomon, wonderful picture, the Christian leaning on Christ, her husband, walking out of the wilderness.

Or as I think J .I. Packer said in one of his short chapters on obedience, he mentioned humility.

The progress in the Christian life is not becoming better and better and stronger and stronger. It is not climbing up.

Real progress in Christianity is stepping down, is becoming more and more and more aware of how needy we are, and at the same time, how sufficient

He is. So there is spiritual growth, and there is strength there, but it is accompanied by an increasing awareness of our need.

So yeah, the prayer, God, show me my need of you. But second, there is the issue of value.

Some things are good, and some things are great. Some things have a lot of value, and one thing has most value.

You know, Christ dealing with Mary and Martha. You know, Mary has chosen the best. You have chosen good,

Mary chose best. There is the pearl of greatest price that is worth leaving everything for in conversion, and there is the ongoing awareness that He is still the pearl of greatest price, and continuing to leave behind things that are of good value, but not best.

Philippians 3, where Paul says, you know, I count all. Today, as a believer, today in prison,

I count everything that looks like it has real value. As nice as it is, as much as it is a gift from the

Lord, I'm thankful. But compared to the Lord Himself, the giver of the gift, and knowing

Him, this gift, I treat it like it's garbage. It's of no comparison. Chuck just preached

Sunday a very wonderful sermon, and it was talking about that, the man who sold everything for the treasure that he found in the field, and it went into all that.

It was wonderful. So one of the things, because I know there may be a listener who is saying, okay, that all sounds great for you.

You're Dr. John Snyder. You're a pastor, and for T .J.

who gets to work in Christian ministry, that's great for you guys, but that's not my life.

I don't know that I'm actually going to be able to focus and be able to bend my ear in this way.

What encouragement do you have for that person? Yeah, well, we noticed that in the passage,

Proverbs 2, there's no mention of how much time, how frequently, how big the library, how keen the intellect, how good the memory.

The point is that aware of our need of God's voice, aware of the privilege of having a

God who speaks to His people through this book, we make ourselves pay close attention when we have the opportunity, whether it's 15 minutes in the morning after the kids have climbed on you, and you've gotten them fed, and you've gotten them to a corner.

You think of John Wesley's mom who, with a lot of children, let the children know, and the older ones eventually, of course, would have had to help the younger ones, that when she sat in the corner with her apron pulled over top of her face, she was there praying, and they weren't to interrupt her, you know, unless it was an emergency.

And so, that, it's hard to imagine a lot of children paying attention to that, but, you know, to slowly but surely show them, in practical ways, meeting with God is the most important thing.

It's the most precious thing. Lloyd -Jones had something similar when he was sitting in his office, you know, with his hands on his knees.

You would know we don't go in to Lloyd -Jones's office, and I forget what, he was a grandchildren, you know, and this was later on in his years when he was living with his daughter, but they knew, you know, he's in his study, and when he's in this posture, he's praying, and we would walk by quietly so as not to disturb him.

Yeah, when I was in Wales, I had a much less kind, and I don't recommend this way. We had our oldest boy who's getting married.

It was a two -year -old, and he has always been the biggest talker of all the children, you know, he's more like me.

So, he was just constant. You always knew where he was in the house, all right, he's never quiet. His sister could murder people, we wouldn't know because she was so quiet.

He would want to come into the study where I was trying to work on the PhD or studying my Bible, you know, and he would just keep coming, come, come, and I worked at home much of the time in the

UK. And so, we bought him little, very realistic looking, kind of expensive, little hard rubber plasticky animals, you know, for Christmas.

We'd buy him lions and things, and he would play with them. So, there was this lion, and it was so realistic that it scared him.

So, I just took his toy and stuck it at the entrance of my study, and he would walk up to interrupt me, and he'd see the lion, and he'd turn and go back down the stairs, you know.

So, you know, you can buy that lion. I think I'm going to have to get some of those since I work from home.

There you go. So, we want to remove distractions, but that's not enough. There is the positive side, and that is really being attentive.

Now, as with the other six directions for the listener in verses one through four of Proverbs 2, this is something that will not happen automatically.

We won't kind of just drift into it. We won't stumble into it. We must remind ourselves frequently of the value of the

Word of God, and I want to read a hymn that talks about that, and then make yourself be attentive.

It doesn't matter if you have to do this 20 times during a sermon. When you notice you're drifting, pull yourself back, and, you know, in a quiet prayer that you shoot to the

Lord, God, help me to turn my ear attentively to you, or in your quiet time, as you drift, stop, turn back.

God, you know, I trust that you're in your love, and you're not rejecting me because of my being a poor student, but I am asking you, help me to keep my attention here.

I need to know what you have to say. It's the difference, again, between, you know, pre -recordings and post -recordings and sermons.

If a very famous preacher was in town, and, you know, let's say like a

Lloyd -Jones was coming through the area, and you were going to get to hear him, and he doesn't live in America, so you would probably never get to hear him again.

If there weren't recordings of that sermon available, you would sit on the edge of your seat trying to make sure you didn't miss a phrase.

Today, with the recordings, you don't even go to the conference, you just say, well, it'll be online afterwards, you know.

So, we want to listen with that attentiveness that sometimes, at the end, we're tired.

We think, that was hard work, but it was worth it. And it's worth it because of the great value of God's Word and the value of wisdom's voice.

I want to read a hymn in our hymn book. This is by one of my favorite 18th century writers, a lady named

Anne Steele, and she's writing about the Word of God, and she says this, Father of mercies, in thy

Word, what endless glory shines, forever be thy name adored, for these celestial lines, these lines on this page, here in the

Bible, here may the blind and hungry come and light and food receive, here shall the lowliest guest have room and taste and see and live.

You can come to the banquet. Next verse, here in the Scripture, springs of consolation rise to cheer the fainting mind, and thirsting souls receive supplies and sweet refreshment find, here the

Redeemer's welcome voice spreads heavenly peace around, and life and everlasting joys attend the blissful sound.

Then she turns in prayer to God, O may these heavenly pages be my ever dear delight, and still new beauties may

I see, and still increasing light. Divine instructor, gracious Lord, be thou forever near, teach me to love thy sacred

Word, and view my Savior there. So, John, in talking of all of these things, what

I don't want us to do is to come across as though we are being legalistic, and we're saying, okay, if you're going to have a quiet time, if you're going to listen to a sermon, we're going to just tell you how you have to listen.

We're going to tell you what you have to do. What about the person who says, well, you know, I read my

Bible, and maybe it's lazy. Maybe it's, you know, I couldn't walk away from a quiet time having written a hymn like Ann Steele, but I'm covered under Christ, right?

I'm covered under this, you know, the grace of the New Testament. So, even though I may have a little bit of a lazy approach, maybe

I can confess that, it's okay, because that's all that I need.

Yeah, it's easy to think that these directions, especially if you're reading them from the

Old Testament, well, these are old covenant burdens, the law that was thrown on those poor people, and we're free from the law, and so these are great suggestions, and if you want to have all and be all that you should have and be as a

Christian, well, by all means, study the Scripture a lot, but you don't have to. It's optional because of the cross.

Well, the truth is that the cross does not make a receptive ear, a receptive heart to the wisdom of God in Scripture optional.

The cross does not prevent the train wreck life that we saw in Proverbs 1, when a person ignores what

God says in His word and neglects what God says and, you know, doesn't welcome it into every area of life, doesn't grab it, take it, treasure it, or make their ear attentive to it.

If we refuse to do what Proverbs 2 is telling us to do, then we can expect the train wreck that Proverbs 1 describes, or that Matthew 7 describes, when

Jesus says there's two types of lives, like two houses. They both look the same. A storm comes to both houses.

One house is destroyed, and the destruction is terrible and complete, and one house stands in the storm, and the difference between the two houses is that one house represents hearing

God's word lazily but doing nothing about it, and the other is the right hearing of God's word and really responding, doing something about it.

So, the cross doesn't remove the danger of a flippant approach to the word of God.

What it does is it guarantees that every believer will have everything they need, every moment, to come to God and to have access to the

King Himself and to say to Him, as a child does to the parent, I'm listening.

And for that God to turn His eternal eyes toward this speck of dust on planet earth and say,

I am willing to teach you, and that the word of God will impact.

So, it is never a waste of time for a believer to come through the finished work of Christ, depending upon the

Spirit, to the word. It will be all that it says it is, Psalm 119.

It will be food. It will be honey. It will be shelter. It will be a path. It will be a light to our lives because the cross guarantees that we have all we need through these wonderful means of grace.

Now, we're going to close up today. So, remember, we've hit the third of the six responses that, taken as a whole, describe the entirety of a person responding to God's voice, to His wisdom, to His word.

There's receiving His word, there's treasuring it, and there's making our ear attentive to it.

Next week, we're going to look at the end of verse two. And there we find direction for our deepest longings, our deepest desires.

What do you do with your heart when you are hearing the voice of God through His word?