The Call of Wisdom VII: Dig for Treasure

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Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with me is Teddy James, and we're looking for our last time at Proverbs chapters 1 and 2, where divine wisdom, the voice of God, is personified.

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And we see wisdom seeking out humanity, not just in a church waiting for humanity to come to it, but divine wisdom goes to people who don't want to hear what she has to say, but in kindness and in mercy and pity, she seeks out humanity in the marketplace, down every street.

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And how we respond to what God says. We think of the scriptures. How do we respond to what

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God has said to us in the Bible? There are two very different ways to respond and two very different lives that result.

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The life that says, you know, thank you kindly for all these words on these pages, and yeah,

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I go to church occasionally and I kind of tip my hat to the claim that this is a book that God gave, but you don't really listen to wisdom the way she wants you to listen to her, then that life ends up just a train wreck, we would say.

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And if you think that, you know, after ruining your life and the life of those that love you, you know, ruining those around you, if you think then that you're just going to flip open a

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Bible and, you know, flip to a page and put your finger down and have some magic cure, you know, wisdom warns you that she would mock that kind of treatment.

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If you ignore my voice and then think you're just going to snap your fingers and everything's going to be put right, that's not the way life works.

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So there's not a hopelessness, but there's a seriousness. Be sure not to treat the

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Word of God lightly. If we want the life that is described in chapter 2, verse 5 and following, where we walk in the favor of the

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Lord, you know, you can think of Psalm 119, verses 1 through 3, the people that are happily, enviably blessed, lives walking in an imperfect world, and imperfectly walking, but really walking the path that God lays with God, and there is a real happiness there.

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If you want that, you need more than good intentions. What do you need? Well, Proverbs 2, verses 1 through 4, give us some metaphors, and if we take them all together, they form just really a wonderful, simple picture of how the believing heart must respond to the written

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Word. So I'll read those. Proverbs 2, verses 1 through 4, we read,

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My son, if you will receive my words, and treasure my commandments within you, make your ear attentive to wisdom, incline your heart to understanding.

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For if you cry for discernment, lift your voice for understanding. If you seek for her as silver, and search for her as for hidden treasures, then, and then he describes the happy life.

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So those metaphors, those action pictures there, receiving the Word of God, or welcoming it in, treasuring it, making your ear, bending your ear toward it, inclining, leaning your heart toward it.

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If you cry for discernment, there's prayer, and finally, if you seek for her, if you mine for wisdom, like humans mine for silver or gold.

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So wonderful pictures, and we take them all together. So today we've come to verse 4, this metaphor of mining, because we don't seek for silver and treasures, you know, on the top of our lawn.

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We dig for them. And there's a wonderful passage in the Old Testament. Absolutely. Job chapter 28, and then we're going to read verses 1 through 11.

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Surely there is a mine for silver and a place for gold that they refine. Iron is taken out of the earth and copper is smelted from the ore.

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Man puts an end to darkness and searches out to the furthest limit, the ore in gloom and deep darkness.

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He opens shafts in a valley away from where anyone lives. They are forgotten by travelers. They hang in the air far away from mankind.

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They swing to and fro. As for the earth, out of it comes bread, but underneath it is turned up as by fire.

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Its stones are the places of sapphires. It has dust of gold. That path no bird of prey knows, and the falcon's eye has not seen it.

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The proud beasts have not trodden it. The lion has not passed over it. Verse 9, man puts his hand to the flinty rock and overturns mountains by the roots.

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He cuts out channels in the rocks and his eyes see every precious thing. He dams up the streams so that they do not trickle, and the thing that is hidden he brings out to light."

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Yeah, such a great picture. Now in Job 28, the writer is contrasting the way that humans will go to great lengths to get earthly treasure.

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And nobody blames a person who digs for gold or for rubies or diamonds or silver.

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Nobody blames them for long hours, for maybe isolating labor, maybe being a bit of a workaholic.

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Nobody blames them for kind of the miserable life that the miner has compared to, let's say, a schoolteacher who lives surrounded by other people and has the little children sitting there, if you can think of a pleasant school.

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So if you went to a rough school, don't think of that. You know, little house on the prairie, the one schoolroom, you know, so that's a happy life or lives, you know, occupations that are pleasant.

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But the miner, it says, sinks a shaft into the earth and drops down into the dark.

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He has to take, you know, a torch, a lamp with him, and he doesn't see other people and the animals of the earth don't see him.

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He's isolated and it's dangerous and hard work. But we understand that kind of sacrifice because he brings back treasure that can't be found any other way.

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And the implication what follows is, well, where will you dig for wisdom? Surely, if there is a place where you can find something that's more valuable than the gold and the silver, surely you could give equal effort.

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You could be as earnest in seeking the treasures that God gives in his word, which spend in every part of life, whereas gold doesn't.

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You know, gold can buy you things. It doesn't buy you health. Gold can buy your children things. It doesn't guarantee, you know, that they can make happy choices.

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But following the word of God, there are things that we know that we have. If our children will love and follow the word of God, there are things that we know they'll have.

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So that's a treasure that, you know, fits every one of life's needs, not just some of them.

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And if you could bring back that kind of treasure from the study of the word of God, would you not be as earnest as the miner?

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And so I think, you know, we were talking before the podcast, what this adds to the whole picture there in Proverbs 2 is kind of a doggedness, a determination.

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I will not be kept from the treasures of this chapter in this

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Bible, which is given for me as well as for other believers. I will not be kept from it because of the difficulty.

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Right. And I think there's a couple of things there. Let me go back to what you were saying just a minute ago. That life of the miner under the mountain in the tunnels, you mentioned that's a dangerous life.

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The pursuit of any kind of treasure like that, the pursuit itself could be the destruction of you.

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The attaining of the treasure could be the destruction of you. This is the only treasure where just not only the pursuit, but also the obtaining of the treasure will be for your good, can be for your children's good.

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But so what you were just saying, John, I think another thing that it adds is the idea that don't anticipate and don't expect for this to be easy.

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Mining, digging, beating against, as Luther would say, beating against the doors of the Bible, it's hard work.

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And so we can't approach a study of Scripture with an anticipation that, okay, well, my book is open, my eyes are open, and I know how to read, therefore

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I'm going to know everything there is to know. It's going to take work. Yeah, if you think that because it's a divine book and because you're a believer and, you know, there is the work of the

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Spirit in helping us to understand and apply these things, those are true and those are precious gifts, but that does not, nowhere in Scripture do we read that God says because of the perfection of the book, the author, the teacher that you have, then all of it is just like waking up and sitting on your front porch and a stream of friendly faces come and sit by you on the porch and just hand you riches and then go on.

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Sometimes, you know, our response to the Word of God is like that first picture in Proverbs 2, welcoming in, seeing

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God's truths and saying, those are the truths of my King. Those are

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Christ's truths, and He gives them to me in this book, and I want to wholeheartedly welcome them into every area of my life, and it's like they just come in, and your job is just to make sure you don't, you know, keep any part of the house locked, but sometimes you come to the

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Bible, and it seems like instead of, you know, a river of fresh water, it's like a hard granite wall, and you know that behind that wall somewhere is a vein of gold that you need, and that those around you need for you to have possessed, and so you have to go get a pickaxe, you know, the chisel, the hammer, and it's not going to come easily, but because it is

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God that gave us the book, and because if you are a follower of Christ, it is God who is supporting and supplying spiritual energy and guaranteeing that we will benefit, because of that, instead of saying, well, that means

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I don't have to do any work, what it means is all the work I do, it will be worth it.

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But it also means He's the one who gets to say when we're done. Yeah. We don't come to the scriptures and say, okay, well,

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I've had a morsel for the day, I have had a little nugget for the day, okay, I'm good to go.

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No, we stay, and we dig, and we mine until He says it's time to move on.

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Yeah, so let's contrast, you know, two pictures that we might think of that appropriately describe us and the

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Word of God. So think of a pupil in a classroom, and then we have this picture of the miner seeking treasure.

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A pupil in a classroom, you know, you go there, the bell rings, you go to your next class, you sit, you look at the clock, and you know,

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I have this much time. And if you love the class, you think, wow, that went by quickly.

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If you hate the class, you're like, it doesn't matter how boring it is, that clock will eventually move around as slow as it's become.

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I remember counting, you know, we had, you know, not the digital clock, but the analog clocks on the wall.

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And so I would watch the second hand, and I think that is so slow. And we're never going to, you know, it was the last class of each day, and I'm never going to get home.

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But it's limited. But when we think of a miner, not a student, the miner goes, and if he hits the beginning of a gold vein, a vein of gold in the rock, he doesn't say, well, it's five o 'clock, and I've gotten some gold today,

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I'm just done, you know, he, his heart is captivated by the thought of how much is there, and I can have it.

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It's there for the taking. I've labored long and not found it, and now

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I've found it. And it's not just one day's amount, this is the part of a vein, and so there'll be a streak of gold running through this part of the earth.

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And so he goes and goes, and maybe he goes home and gets supper and says to his wife, I've got to go back, and so he goes back, and maybe he works six days a week.

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Maybe he neglects things that normally he wouldn't have neglected. Good, nice things, pleasant things.

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Days that he normally would have, you know, he would say, this is my favorite day to sleep in. Well, he doesn't sleep in now, because he's right in the middle of the vein, and he works and works and works until he reaches the end of the vein, and he's gotten all that it has to give.

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And it's a very different picture than the student. When we come to the scriptures,

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I remember Jonathan Edwards recommending, and in his own life, exampling, coming to scriptures, and as you see a truth, he would say, well, search it out all the way to the root, or, you know, in other words, study as much as you can to understand what this is saying.

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That doesn't mean you have to be a professor. It doesn't mean you have to know Greek and Hebrew. It doesn't mean that you have all the time that you think a pastor has to study his

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Bible. So, according to your abilities, according to the tools you've been able to gather, according to the time that God gives you, if you have little children climbing all over you from before dawn till you're worn out at night, the

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Lord knows that. But there's, all of us have some time that we can set aside, some things we can sacrifice for a time to really search out a thing in scripture.

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Or maybe be things that we have to set aside for good, things that are not essential, but are distracting.

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And I think we've talked about this a lot in previous series, but we have to be aware of what is distracting to us so that we can focus on this gold.

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You know, one of the things that you just brought up, when we're talking about this work, understand that this is not the work of a professor.

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This is not just a work that's saved only for the pastor or for the church leader.

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This is for every believer. And we'll get into this in a little bit, but keep in mind the aim as well.

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The aim is not for you to become, you know, we love the Puritans here at MediGratia and our church, they've influenced us greatly.

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But what we're not saying is that you're going to study these things so that you have, you know, the mental capacity of a

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Puritan that can write, you know, 12 volumes on the book of Hebrews. That's not the goal.

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The goal is to study, to know scripture so that you can know God. Yeah, to know Him, to have a clear conscience that comes from walking in harmony with Him.

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You know, labor to know what pleases the Lord, Paul commands us. So, you know,

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God says the great treasure is that a man can say, I know Him. And Paul says, labor to know in this life of mine, what pleases the

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Lord at work? What pleases the Lord at home? What pleases the Lord at night when no one else is awake and it's just me and God?

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You know, what pleases the Lord in the way I dress, the way I talk, the way I eat, the way

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I drive, the way I think and spend money? So, that takes hard work, and there are times where we have to really mine it.

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This morning I was reading in, and recently I've been trying to memorize, in Psalm 119 again, but a particular section, verse 129 through 136.

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So as I've been working on that and writing it and, you know, reviewing and writing it down again to try to get it memorized,

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I was looking at the things that are in those verses and trying to simplify it.

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Okay, John, so what does God say to me here? It says this about His Word, it says this about my response, it says this about my hungers, this about my dependence.

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And as I was doing that, I got a text from a man in the church, one of our friends, and he sent me a text with three passages from 2

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Thessalonians, and these were all prayers of the Apostle Paul. And he just mentioned that he'd been reading through Thessalonians that day, and he found them really helpful, so he shot them to me.

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And I don't always have time to look at biblical recommendations or passages or listen to sermons that other people recommend, sometimes

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I'm too busy to stop and do that, but I had time. So I looked them up, looked at what he wrote, and then

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I looked at them in their context, and they were just so wonderful, wonder -filled.

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I went back to the psalm, and I used it as kind of the open door.

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The psalm, verse 129, you know, your word is wonderful, your testimonies, what you say, your testimony, is full of wonder.

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And the scripture is, it's a collection of wonders that are true and essential and life -giving.

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Some of them are frightening, but they're good. And so I thought, take that and use it as an open door.

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So I go back to 2 Thessalonians, and I go get some commentaries. I do have some Greek books, and I was working slowly through the first prayer.

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I only made it through the first. Chapter 1, verse 11 and 12. What does Paul pray? What does he expect

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God to do? How do we see the heart of a pastor there, but more importantly, how do we see the heart of the great shepherd that Paul is just imitating, the heart of Christ for his people, what he intends to give and do in and through them?

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And so I just stopped, and instead of merely reading the verse and saying, well, that's a really good prayer, you know,

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I was headed down a different road that morning. I stopped, and I had time to just get out the pickaxe and the chisel and the hammer and to hammer away at Thessalonians.

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And with great happy result, you know, that the Lord opening that up.

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And so Psalm 119 was true. You know, the word of God is full of wonders, and in the unfolding of its truths, there is light and understanding, and you know, and the next thing the psalmist says is,

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I pant for your word, for your commands. Teach me, God.

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And so using those to direct me to Thessalonians, and then digging there.

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One thing that we, particularly in the American church, I think, and in our culture, we're very completist, and so we have this idea that, well, if we're going to read the

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Bible, we need to read through the Bible in one year. And I don't know how many times

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I've started that plan and not finished that plan. So I do just want to offer this encouragement.

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This means you're going to read through slowly. I'm not saying there's not a time for you to just sit down and just read through the

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Bible to see that overarching narrative of redemption of the gospel, to see how God unfolds his character and the person of Christ throughout the scriptures.

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Absolutely a time for that. But there's a time to sit and to dig. I remember we had not been coming to the church long, and I was so bothered because I was just camping out in Hebrews.

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And I had been in this book for months on end, and I was studying and reading, and I was going through commentaries.

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And I think I had been there for, it was well over nine months at this point. And I came to you on a Wednesday night,

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I think it was before service, and we're just kind of talking. And I mentioned to you that I was kind of being bothered, that I thought maybe

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I'm spending too much time in Hebrews. And the counsel you gave me has really stuck with me.

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You said, keep in mind that a weed grows overnight, but an oak takes years to grow.

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So take your time, stay in a book where you're finding gold and continue mining.

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And it might be nine months. It might be 12 months. It might be 18 months. Don't neglect the other scriptures, obviously.

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But if that's where the Lord is meeting you, why would you go anywhere else? Yeah. So the mining, seeking as people seek for silver, these treasures, it does mean that some things are not enough.

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Casual reading of the Bible, though it's not wrong, is not enough. Listening to sermons, it's good.

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It's not enough. Going to small group studies where you read what other people say about the

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Bible. We do that here at the church. We, you know, have been working through this summer, the

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Minor Prophets. Before that, you know, we read a book by a Puritan, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, which, again,

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I saw that was on sale today, Banner of Truth. But I don't know whether it'll be on sale.

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Well, it won't be on sale when you reach this. This is going to come later. So, you know, we read good books.

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That's not enough. There are aspects of being a good listener to wisdom's voice that mean you have to go get the, you know, the pickaxe and the chisel and the hammer.

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And you cannot stop. You cannot let anything deter you. Trust that the

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Lord has given the book for you. And so he will help you. You won't understand everything in a passage, but he will teach you what you need as you study.

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He will teach you what you need for right now. And, you know, it's always good to learn how to be a better student of Scripture.

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That book by R .C. Sproul on studying on Scripture is a good book. There are other good books on how do we study the

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Bible, but do it. Now, let me say that there are countless methods that are offered, especially with the internet.

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There are just countless methods of how to read through the Bible or how to study the Bible. And I think that most of them have value.

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The problem is this. I prefer in most life, like say hobbies,

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I prefer to buy specialized gear, better gear, newer gear for something than to actually go out and do the work.

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So if I want to learn a guitar, I don't buy the basic guitar. I go buy this.

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I spend a month on the Internet reading reviews and then I listen and then I then

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I read more reviews and then I narrow my focus. And then then I watch for the sale when somebody is selling one of these guitars, you know, like clearance sale, because like most musicians, they get poor and they're like, man,

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I got to sell this to pay for this. And bam, I get this thing. And then I play it a week and I quit because I like doing all the research and you can you can wake up every week and go to the

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Internet and find a newer, better way to study your Bible. And you think, oh, the way

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I'd started last week, this way that I thought was the newest, best way, that's actually not the best way.

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There's a newer, better way. And I'm missing out. So I need to just retool.

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And so you go buy new notebooks. And, you know, if you're me, you go buy new pens and new Bibles, maybe, and new books and you you get everything set up and you start this new method that's just going to be the end all of Bible study.

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And then a month later, you're on a totally different method and you never make it very far because you're always thinking there's probably a better method.

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It's not the method. If you just read from Genesis to Revelation over and over and over, that's good.

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There are good ways to study the Bible. There are different ways to study the Bible and different ways may be beneficial to different people in different degrees.

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But I want to say, do not spend all your time at Lowe's spiritual, you know, at the

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Lowe's spiritual warehouse where you're always buying a new chisel, a new hammer, a new pickaxe, a new lantern to help you mine.

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You know, get started and put in the hard work, depending on the Lord, setting aside, as we said, making special time for scripture and dig and dig and dig.

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It's not the pickaxe you're using that's going to make the difference. It's the earnestness of soul.

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That's what I was going to say. It goes back to it's not about the method. It's about the God you're meeting in the scriptures.

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And that's why, I mean, as we've said before, these are not, you know, individual things that the writer of Proverbs is giving us here.

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It's one response to wisdom, but it's in different facets and different aspects.

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The digging must be part of the praying. And if we're only digging and we're not praying, you could have the best method in the world and it's going to be ineffectual.

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So as you dig, pray and trust that the Lord will speak, will meet, will show you.

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Here's the vein. This is where you dig. This is where you'll find more treasure. And then you do it.

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So if we go back to Proverbs 2, as you mentioned prayer, that's just one of the other activities. So let's think of them as a whole.

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A man can buy, a woman can buy, study guides, you know, can go online, can use online resources and can really, let's say you come to Colossians and you just get down into the nitty gritty of grammar and history.

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And what was Colossae like? And what was Paul saying here? What were the major errors he was fighting against?

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And so you do all that work, but like you said, if it's done with a great library, but you are not wearing out your prayer bench, you are not talking to God while you're studying, there's no sense of dependence upon God and need for God to teach you so that these things take root in the right way and don't just make you have a large, proud brain, then the hard work is not enough.

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But then it's not just prayer. What happens when the Lord begins to show you things through prayerful, hard study?

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Well, are you going to welcome those truths in? Do you see them on the page? And you think, you know what, if I let that truth into my life, it's going to be costly.

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I know where it's going to go. It's going to go right to that place that I think I have a right to. And what do

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I do? Well, it's the King's truth. For love of the King and because I trust the

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King, I open the door and I throw everything open and say, come in, you're welcome. What about treasuring it, guarding it, not letting it get pushed to the side by the next notice on your telephone?

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How are you going to listen to the voice of God as you're studying hard and praying and welcoming the truths in?

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How are you going to listen carefully to what he's saying rather than just casually and losing what you learned the day before?

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How are you going to turn your heart to these things and not just your intellect?

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And so all these things are taken together. This is the response of a person who wants to know what

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God says because we want to live on what God says. And it's not as if we wake up every morning and we have to remind ourselves of these metaphors, although that would be a great place to start.

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But those do show up in a life, even if you didn't read the book of Proverbs, you in a wholehearted love for the king, you would have those things.

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Proverbs 2 just helps by putting them all in one little spot. And it's a nice, clear, well -rounded picture that keeps me from saying, well,

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I do, I study my Greek or, well, I do, I pray a lot. And forgetting there's many facets to an appropriate response to the voice of God.

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So when we come to the word and we use Proverbs, you know, you can write you could write the metaphors here, these action words, you could write them in the front of your

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Bible. You could write them on a on a piece of paper and stick them in your Bible. And that's what I've done. Just write them on a note card.

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Then I stick them into my Bible. I open my Bible the next morning for my own personal reading, not for the church or for anything else, but my soul in God.

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And I see those action words there. They're very simple. And it reminds me, you know, don't be half -hearted in this.

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Don't be neglectful. Be careful. And I do that.

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But if I'm discouraged, it's always good to remember those are the same words that Jesus of Nazareth read.

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And he perfectly welcomed his father's word, treasured it, inclined his ear, bent his heart, prayed, dug, minded, and he did it without any flaw.

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Now, we're not flawless, but as a true human, he did that. Can he not hear your prayer?

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God, my Lord, teach me to put my feet in your footprints.

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You came in as a true boy and teenager and young man and as a son, as a friend, as a minister, as a servant of God.

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In every situation, these descriptions of a right response to the voice of wisdom, you walk to this path.

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Teach me, even though my steps are much shorter and, you know, my path is wiggly and crooked at times, teach me to walk this path that you walked and that you have taught every believer since the beginning of believers from Genesis until the day when he comes and all the kingdom is complete.

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This is the path for the believer. And don't be discouraged. Other believers' footprints are there, too, and they were just as needy as us.

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That's one of the reasons that we so appreciate biographies. You know,

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I'm going through the Hudson Taylor biography, volume two right now. And one of the things that has been so encouraging to me is to see not just how he studied scripture, which means it doesn't really go into, but what it does go into is how he applies it and how he lives upon the scriptures.

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And so, you know, I know the same thing is true with Amy Carmichael or George Mueller. These men that we read their stories, we can see how they wrestled with God, how they dug for treasure and then how they lived upon it, how they prayed it.

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And so I would love to encourage you, especially in seasons of discouragement, grab a solid biography because it can be such a sweet friend to walk alongside you.

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Yeah. And in the first and second Behold Your God studies, we have a lot of biographical illustrations for that purpose to help us know we're not alone.

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We want to close this section with a hymn and just the first verse.

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It was written by a man in the 18th century, one of the Great Awakening or the Evangelical Revival in the

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UK. It's called that one of the Evangelical Revival leaders named John Berridge, quite an extraordinary, colorful character and wonderfully used of the

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Lord, who agreed more with the theology of George Whitefield and the reformers than John Wesley did, though I think

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Wesley loved the Lord, but was mistaken. Berridge writes a few hymns.

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He's not the poet that Charles Wesley and others were. But this is a really good one.

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I just want to read the first verse. And it's also the hymn that we get our the name for this ministry, media gratia, the

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Latin phrase for means of grace. What in the world are we talking about? Well, listen to the first verse of Berridge's hymn that starts this way.

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The means of grace are in my hand. The tools, the tools for for cultivating my soul and a walk with the

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Lord. He's given us these. The means of grace are in my hand. The blessing is at God's command.

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Who must the work fulfill? And though I read and watch and pray, yet here the

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Lord directs my way and worketh all things still. So Berridge is reminding people you can we if we were to apply it to some to Proverbs two, you can do all the things that Proverbs two, one through four mentions.

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But we're doing them with all of our strength because we know there is a

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God on the other side of this relationship. Who is guaranteeing that for all who follow him, he will teach them.

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He will help them. He will make his word effective in them. So it's it's never a wasted effort if we come to him.

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Honestly, we come to him through his son. And so we work like crazy.

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We take all those metaphors as essential. But at the end of the day, even praying is not what guarantees that it will matter.

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It is that there is a living God behind this book who is at work in us for his glory.