WWUTT 1414 A Wise Son Makes His Father Glad (Proverbs 10:1-6)

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There's a lot of places in the world you can go for wisdom, but worldly wisdom doesn't really lead you anywhere.

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It's more like chasing your tail. God's wisdom is straightforward and to the point and leads to life when we understand the text.

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This is When We Understand The Text, a daily Bible commentary to help encourage your time in the

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Word. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we feature New Testament Study, an Old Testament book on Thursday and our

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Q &A on Friday. Now here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. We come back to our study of Proverbs today and as I've done on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week,

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I'm going to continue reading from the Legacy Standard Bible. We did our study in 1

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Corinthians out of the LSB and I'm going to continue to do that for our study of Proverbs as well.

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Now the LSB has only printed the New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs, but since we're doing

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Proverbs in our Old Testament study, then I've got the Legacy Standard translation for this. Looking forward to the full edition of their new translation, which

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I believe comes out this fall. I'm not positive, but I believe that was their ambition.

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That was their goal to get the full printed version, Genesis to Revelation of the

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Legacy Standard Bible in the stores this fall or order online, however they're planning on doing that.

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We're up to Proverbs 10 now in our study of the book of Proverbs, and this begins the

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Proverbs of Solomon. It goes from Proverbs 10 through chapter 22, 375

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Proverbs of Solomon. You could read one of these a day and only have 10 left over.

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By the time you get to the end of a year, you would have read almost all of the Proverbs of Solomon.

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So let's read through a few here. I won't go through the whole chapter, but we'll, let's see. We've got 32 verses.

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Why don't I just cut it in half? We'll do 16. This is Proverbs 10. The Proverbs of Solomon, a wise son makes a father glad, but a foolish son is a grief to his mother.

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Treasures gained by wickedness do not profit, but righteousness delivers from death.

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Yahweh will not allow the soul of the righteous to hunger, but he will push away the craving of the wicked.

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Poor is he who works with a slack hand, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.

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He who gathers in summer is a son who acts insightfully, but he who sleeps in harvest is a son who acts shamefully.

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Blessings are on the head of the righteous, but the mouth of the wicked covers up violence.

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The remembrance of the righteous is blessed, but the name of the wicked will rot.

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The wise of heart will receive commandments, but an ignorant fool of loose lips will be ruined.

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He who walks in integrity walks securely, but he who makes his ways crooked will be found out.

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He who winks the eye causes pain, and an arrogant fool of loose lips will be ruined.

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The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life, but the mouth of the wicked covers up violence.

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Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all transgressions. On the lips of the one who has understanding wisdom is found, but a rod is for the back of him who lacks a heart of wisdom.

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Wise men store up knowledge, but the mouth of the ignorant fool draws ruin near.

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The rich man's wealth is his strong city. The ruin of the poor is their poverty. The wages of the righteous is life.

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The income of the wicked, punishment. And that's through verse 16.

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So the way that these Psalms are divided up, again, the wisdom of Solomon, the

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Proverbs of Solomon, goes from chapter 10 through chapter 22. The way these are divided up is that in chapters 10 through 15, you have mostly contrasts.

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Like the wise does this, but the fool does this. So these are antithetical Proverbs. And then in chapters 16 through 22, you have mostly similarities, comparisons, things that are being compared with one another.

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So that would be synthetical Proverbs. There is a context in the book of Proverbs, especially when you get to chapter 10, that can be hard to detect because you just think, you know, each verse is its own

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Proverb. But there is a context to these things. The fact that the Proverbs are arranged in antithetical and synthetical.

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That's a certain context. But even as we see Proverbs grouped together, there is a context.

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There's a reason this Proverb was put after this Proverb, even though you may not be able to see that or detect that right away.

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There was a lot of mindfulness in how this was put together. Of course, it was guided by the

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Holy Spirit. What we're reading here, though we call this the wisdom of Solomon or the Proverbs of Solomon.

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This is the wisdom of God. This is the word of God, the Holy Spirit poured out into the general wisdom that we have here.

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This is God speaking to us, even when we're reading through Proverbs, that we may know his ways and follow according to his will, obeying the

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Proverbs, even though we wouldn't call Proverbs law, but obeying the Proverbs would be obeying

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God, following the word of God. Also, think about what we're reading here as we go from Proverbs 10 all the way through 31, where we're going to be reading a lot of these, you know, practical general wisdom

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Proverbs, one proverb per verse. What we read here is very straightforward.

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The application is self -evident on the majority of these Proverbs. You don't have to think too hard about what the instruction is that's being given and how you're supposed to apply it and follow it.

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It's very straightforward, practical wisdom. Whereas you listen to stuff that comes from the world and it's often, it might sound good, but when you really think about it, you have to go, okay, what's really being said here?

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Like how does this apply? What's the point? Let me just give you a few of these. Now, what I'm going to read here is said to be attributed to Confucius, but I'm not researching that.

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I don't know if this is true or not, but just listen to some of these comments from, supposedly from Confucius and hear how this wisdom sounds versus what we've just read here in Proverbs 10.

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So Confucius says, your life is what your thoughts make it. Is that true?

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It's really not. I mean, you can, maybe you can hear that and you can go, well, that's true.

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If I think life is bad, then life is bad. If I think life is good, then life is good. There might be something there to that, but not really.

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I mean, if you're in a pretty miserable situation, it doesn't matter how positive you want to think about it. It's still going to be a miserable situation.

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You cannot wish your grief away. Grief is grief. It's because you are dealing with real life situations because the world has fallen due to sin.

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And by the way, often that general wisdom that we get, the worldly wisdom does not have an understanding of the sinfulness of man.

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Often that general wisdom is that people are generally good. So we're going to ignore that people are sinful, selfish creatures going after their own ways and are often going to hurt people around them in order to get what they want.

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We're just going to ignore that aspect of human nature. We're going to take for granted that people are naturally good, and then we're going to deal out this wisdom based on that.

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So we're starting from a faulty beginning anyway, when we think about some of this worldly wisdom that's being given.

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Here's another one. The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute. The man who does not ask is a fool for life.

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What does that mean? The journey with a thousand miles begins with one step.

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Okay, I guess if you're looking at a big project you have to do, let's say you're trying to build a house. Well, it begins with me picking up nails, starts with me picking up a hammer.

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Fine, but you know that anyway, no one in their right mind is standing there looking at a house that they have to build and going, well, how do

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I get started with this? You know how to get started with it. You just need to do it.

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So what good is that quote? How is a person better because they heard that?

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Here's another one. Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life. Folks, there's plenty of jobs you have to do that you don't like, and you have to do them because they need to get done.

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Not a lot of people in the world have the benefit of being able to do a job that they love. A lot of people have to do jobs that they don't love, but they do them because that's how they're going to make money to be able to provide for themselves and for their family.

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Let's see if I can find another one here. Learn avidly, question it repeatedly, analyze it carefully, then put what you have learned into practice intelligently.

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Okay, we have two lives and the second begins when we realize we only have one.

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That's stupid. What does that even mean? Oh, it's going on here.

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I want to keep reading these now. If you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.

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Act with kindness, but do not expect gratitude. See, that one's good.

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I could see that one being good to be kind to everybody, even though people are probably not going to be grateful for the kindness that you show to them.

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That one's all right. Sometimes the world can get some of these things. Okay, but most of the rest of this doesn't make any sense.

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Worry not that no one knows you. Seek to be worth knowing. The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

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Well, that's the same as the other one above. The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Anyway, so you can kind of hear how this worldly wisdom, it really doesn't.

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How is this applicable? How does this apply to me? But the wisdom that we get from Proverbs, the wisdom of God is very practical.

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It's very straightforward, and you don't have to use your imagination so much to understand what it is that God is telling us to do.

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So we begin here in Proverbs 10, verse one, a wise son makes a father glad, but a foolish son is a grief to his mother.

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Now, you have to think of this proverb as coming on the end of the first nine chapters that we've read thus far, and now we're jumping into a new section.

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So this is a good proverb to bridge that gap. We've already read about what wisdom entails.

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The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God, and to not do what

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God says is foolishness. So therefore, to obey the Lord is wisdom.

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That makes a father glad because who is it in the household that gives instruction to the family?

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It's dad. He's the one who's responsible for the spiritual care of his family.

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When we read in Ephesians, chapter five, that the man, the husband is the head of his wife, just as Christ is the head of the church.

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It's because God has appointed the man to be a reflection of what Christ is for the church.

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He's the head. He's the control center. He is the provider for the rest of the body.

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And so the man is supposed to be that for his family as well. When it comes to leading and guiding and growing his family, giving them knowledge, building them up, training in the righteousness and discipline of God, this responsibility falls first on the husband than it does on the wife.

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And the wife is supposed to submit to the fact that God has appointed the husband for this particular work.

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So the husband or the father, the man, the head of the household, is the one that is feeding his family with the word and the instruction and the discipline of the

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Lord. So when a son follows that instruction that's come from his father, it makes his father glad.

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But a foolish son, one who will not follow what God has said, which has hopefully been passed on by his father, the foolish son who does not follow that is a grief to his mother.

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He is a grief to his mom. Mom is usually the one that is a little more emotionally sensitive than dad, right?

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There is a certain intimacy there that exists between a mother and her children that is different than the intimacy a father has with his children.

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A mother labored over her children. She carried her children in her womb for we say nine months.

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It's really more like 10. Amen, ladies, right? 40 weeks. That's more like 10 months.

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So she's carried these children around inside of her for 40 weeks, painful labor when this child is delivered, but then she is comforted by this new life that has come into the world.

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And then there's an intimacy there that exists with that mother and child that is always going to be different than the kind of relationship that a father has with his children.

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It's the way that God has made men and women different, boys and girls different. So because of this particular personal connection that a mother has with her children to watch her children walk in the way of foolishness with all the labor,

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I mean, literally quite literally the labor that she's put into raising these children and to watch them go in destructive ways, that is probably a grief more so to the mother than it is going to be to the man.

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And we have something very anthropological even going on here in just a few short lines.

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How broad this is to think about it, that a wise son makes his father glad, but a foolish son is a grief to his mother.

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Now, again, the Proverbs here, the wisdom we're getting from Proverbs, it's very simple. It's very straightforward, but it is also real deep when you want to stop and ponder and reflect on it.

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The word of God is like this. When it comes to salvation, when it comes to following the Lord Jesus Christ, just understanding something like John 3, 16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son and whoever believes in him will not perish, but will have everlasting life.

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To follow what's being said there is a simple thing to do. If the Holy Spirit has convicted a person and changed the heart and they've realized

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I need to follow Jesus if I want to have everlasting life, that's a real simple thing to do.

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But then at the same time, when you want to ponder further what's being said by that verse and the context in which it falls in John 3, the context in which it falls in John's gospel, the context that John's gospel falls in the

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New Testament, the context of the New Testament falls in relation to the Old Testament. All of these things are deep to ponder and consider, and you can continue to feed upon that bread of the word of God for the rest of your life.

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You will never be too full and you will never be tired of it. You will just continue to want to eat at this feast that God has prepared from his word by the wisdom that we glean from any one of these passages in any book of the

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Bible. There's something simple about everything that we read, but then at the same time is deeply complex when we want to look more intimately at the details of what

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God is doing in his work of salvation from beginning to end. Amen. So the

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Proverbs work the same way. We have something that's very simple, straightforward, and easily applied, but we can go way deeper into it when we study each one of these

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Proverbs individually as well. Look at verse 2. Treasures gained by wickedness do not profit, but righteousness delivers from death.

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You want to go about a twisted, wicked way of gaining for yourself? There won't be any profit from that because as we've read leading up to this point here in the book of Proverbs, the way of the fool is the way of death.

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Remember what we read right at the end of chapter 9. The person who goes after folly does not know that the dead are there, that those she called that folly called are in the depths of Sheol.

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You go the way of foolishness. It leads to death. You go the way of wisdom talked about at the beginning of chapter 9.

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That is the way of life. So treasures gained by wickedness don't profit. It's going to end in death, but righteousness delivers from death.

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Verse 3, Yahweh will not allow the soul of the righteous to hunger, but he will push away the craving of the wicked.

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Here's something that I really appreciate about the Legacy Standard Bible where we would ordinarily see the

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Lord if you're reading the NASB or the ESV or the NIV, the

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New King James, okay? Or it might say Jehovah in the King James, right? But what we see in the

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Legacy Standard Bible is the name of God. We see Yahweh. So they've taken that capital

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L -O -R -D, which is the English equivalent of the Tetragrammaton or Yahweh, Y -H -W -H, and instead the

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Legacy Standard translators have put the name of the Lord in this Bible. I love that.

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Man, it just gives me the feels. Just to read that on the page here,

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Yahweh will not allow the soul of the righteous to hunger, but he will push away the craving of the wicked.

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Just think of what Jesus said in the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

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And here we're being told the soul of the righteous will not be famished.

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It will not be yearning for food that it never gets. God will satisfy,

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Yahweh will satisfy the craving of the righteous, but not of the wicked. He will push away the craving of the wicked, and that insinuates that the wicked is going to starve to death.

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Whatever they're trying to feed on in this world, whatever foolishness they're going after will never satisfy them, and ultimately in the end will leave them empty and wasting away.

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So he's pushing away the craving of the wicked. They will never be satisfied on those things that they try to feed on in this world.

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Verse four, poor is he who works with a slack hand, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.

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Very simply, we're being told here, if you get lazy, you get nothing. If you work hard, then you will have a reward for that.

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Verse five, he who gathers in summer is a son who acts insightfully, but he who sleeps in harvest is a son who acts shamefully.

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And that goes right with the previous verse. So like I said, there's always a context here. It might be difficult to see right away, but even the way these

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Proverbs are grouped together, there's a context. Let's go back real quickly to verses one and two again. A wise son makes his father glad, but a foolish son is a grief to his mother.

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Treasures gained by wickedness do not profit, but righteousness delivers from death. Both of those verses are really saying the same thing, and it's coming up on the heels of everything that we read about wisdom in Proverbs chapters eight and nine.

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And then verse three, four and five, all of this is going together. We're talking about working hard and being fed for the work that we do.

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Yahweh will not allow the soul of the righteous to hunger. Those who do righteousness are working.

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They're not just sitting around expecting to be righteous. We have been made righteous by God, by faith in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. The righteousness of Christ has been imputed to us.

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And so to demonstrate that righteousness will therefore work. And what is seen in our works is the righteousness of God.

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Peter talks about this in second Peter chapter one. Even when we read in Ephesians two, eight and nine, it is by grace who have been saved through faith and not of works.

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This is the gift of God so that no man may boast. Okay, we're saved by grace through faith and not of our own works.

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But then in verse 10, it says for you, our God's workmanship created for good works in Christ Jesus, which

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God prepared beforehand that you may walk in them. So there is still a call to work there.

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We don't work to attain salvation, but being given the righteousness of God, we will do righteousness.

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That it may be seen that our works have been carried out in God. That's what the scripture says.

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So the righteous don't just sit around waiting for righteousness to come. We've been given the righteousness of Christ.

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So therefore we seek after Christ. So Yahweh will not allow the soul of the righteous to hunger.

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He will push away the craving of the wicked. We have something diligently being sought after. Poor is he who works with a slack hand, but the hand of the diligent makes rich work being done.

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Verse five, he who gathers in summer is a son who acts insightfully. But he who sleeps in harvest is a son who acts shamefully.

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Now we're going to change into a different context when we get to verse six. That's blessings are on the head of the righteous, but the mouth of the wicked covers up violence.

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The remembrance of the righteous is blessed, but the name of the wicked will rot. That's verse seven. So now we're jumping into a different context there.

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Since I've gone 20 minutes now in this particular devotional lesson, let's just stop there. So we've been through verse, how far did

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I go? I lost my place. I already shut my Bible. That was through verse five. So we've made it five verses into Proverbs 10, and then we'll pick up there next week.

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Let's finish with prayer. Heavenly Father, I pray that we would indeed see the wisdom of God in these words that we have read today and that we would be convicted by these things and desire to do them, not living foolishly, not becoming complacent, not sitting around and being lazy.

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But there is something we have been called to do in Christ Jesus. And so we do it in service to our

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God and King, knowing that we have been bought with a price, Jesus Christ, who gave his life, who died on the cross for sins, who rose again from the grave so that who believes in him has everlasting life.

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We have the righteousness of Christ. So let us now do righteousness in service to our

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God and King. These things we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. This has been

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When We Understand the Text of Pastor Gabriel Hughes. For all of our podcasts, episodes, videos, books, and more, visit our website at www .utt

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.com. If you'd like to submit a question to this broadcast, or just send us a comment, email whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

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And let your friends know about our ministry. Join us again tomorrow as we grow together in the study of God's word when we understand the text.