SERMON: Proverbs 8:4 - The Call To All

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

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word, and may the Lord be with you. Long before the hobbits walked the green fields of Hobbiton, before the elves ever sang beneath the moonlit forests of Rivendale, before dwarves mined their mithril and moria, and before the dark tower of Barad-dur rose atop the craggy volcanic soil of Mordor, there was a voice.

Tom Bombadil and the Ancient Voice in Tolkien and Scripture

In the world that Tolkien gave us, there's a strange and ancient figure known as Tom Bombadil, who is older than old, wilder than wild, a man who was there at the very creation of Middle-earth, and yet no one knows precisely who or what he is.

I actually had a conversation with a man who wrote a book on J .R .R. Tolkien's world, and he would not indulge me to even give me his opinion on who Tom Bombadil is. But there he was, in the beginning of the creation of Arda, before the world was made, when it was young, the stars were still being sung into existence by the Ainur.

I'm speaking about things that are deep in Tolkien's legendarium at this point. My point is that here you have this most peculiar element, that there's this man who is singing from the very beginning of creation, because the music is in him.

He whistles through the woods. He speaks to the trees. He bids the rivers to run in perfect rhythm. And while others are brooding over power, he almost is ambivalent to it. They hand him the ring of power, and he plays with it a little while and says, oh, how cute, and hands it back.

This is a man who sings, and his voice rings out across the creation of Arda from the very beginning. Now, imagine if that voice wasn't just fiction. Imagine if J .R. Tolkien, perchance, got that from something.

Perhaps maybe it was from the scriptures. Because before the foundation of the world, there was a voice who's been singing the entire time, a voice that's more ancient than Adam, a song that's older than sin, a call that spoke before time and space even began from the mouth of God.

And Proverbs calls this voice, the voice of Lady Wisdom. She is not a late addition to a moral universe. She was there when God drew the circle around the faces of the deep. She danced beside of him as he laid the beams of the cosmos.

Like Bombadil, she's been singing the entire time, laughing and calling out for all to.

Listen.

But unlike Mr. Bombadil, she does not merely delight in the world. She demands that the world respond to her. And it's that today that I want to look at, and I want to look at just one verse. I started out with the best of intentions.

I was going to go all the way to verse 11 today, and we're only going to go to verse 4 today, because there's something very interesting in the way that Lady Wisdom calls. Lady Wisdom calls out an urgent call to men specifically.

Then she calls out a more general call to all people, and that call finds its fullest fulfillment in the call of Jesus Christ. So if you will, join me as we read one whole verse and we examine it together.

We're in Proverbs 8, and we'll be in verse 4. This is the word of the Lord. To you, O men, I call, and my voice is to the sons of men. Let us pray. Lord, we thank you for such potent truths in such small places.

And Lord, we pray that today, that this beautiful voice that's been calling out before creation, as the world and all of its atoms and electrons were finding proper orbit, this voice was calling out to respond.

And Lord, it's so interesting and so fascinating, the planets, the suns, the stars, all of them respond faithfully and in perfect obedience to the will of God, and yet it's this creature made from dust that dares defy the living God.

Lord, I pray that like sons of Adam, we would hear the call of Lady Wisdom this morning. And Lord, like the sons of man, all people, that we would hear the call of wisdom and that we would see where that call actually leads us.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. First thing I want to talk about today is the call to men is urgent, and I want to preface this by saying that there's a war on masculinity, and we know this. We've talked about this.

We live in a culture that hates masculinity, a generation that calls it toxic if you show any level of testosterone, where strength is called toxic, where ambition is called selfish, where aggression is called abuse, where courage is called recklessness.

We live in a world where a man daring to have an unflinching approach to his life, a powerful, courageous posture, a principled, risk-taking, convicted, or commanding approach to the world, he's utterly shamed.

We live in a world where men have been told for a long time to be soft, to be silent, and we've been told to sit down and shut up. Culture demands that we exchange the virtue of masculinity for the vice of passivity.

Our convictions for emotional sensitivity, our drive for hyper-empathy, our authority for consensus, and our chest for cardigans. And this hasn't just affected culture. This has crept into the church in such strong ways.

The tragic irony is that so many churches have joined the demasculization chorus. And I can only speak for myself here, but I think you would probably agree, at least anecdotally, that most of our life has been in churches where masculinity, especially from the pulpit, has not been valued, where men have been cowards, who've been afraid to speak the truth from the scriptures because it might offend someone, where we've been given by men who are purveyors of a therapeutic gospel, nothing but fodder, and passive teachings that don't actually address what the text is saying, who are eager to please, eager to scratch ears, eager to compromise.

It's not just been in the pulpit. It's been in the entire culture of the church where worship has become catered to a more feminine body instead of a masculine worship. I remember when I was in the military thinking to myself, there was nothing better than a hundred guys running up a hill singing about blowing up something.

There's like this one song we sang about blowing up a little yellow bird, and I'm going to tell you, it was awesome. You think about the Vikings. The Vikings, what did they do? They didn't sit and twiddle their thumbs.

They sang war songs on their way to this place, and if the pagans can do it, and if the unbelievers can do it, if they see the value of singing as we go into battle, why has the church become so passive in its worship?

There's a quote by a man named David Chilton. He said that the demasculization, I'm paraphrasing, the demasculization of the church began when she stopped singing psalms because look at the psalms. You're singing about David ripping someone's head off and praising God for it.

That's like a church hymn, and yet we've had worship sets, worship experiences, worship movements, where the movements are a group of women on stage swinging their hips and talking about how it feels that Jesus is their boyfriend, and I'm not talking about women.

There.

I'm talking about churches that put that kind of worship in front of us. The 7 -11 ballads where the seven-word chorus is sang 11 times in a row in some kind of rhythmic, sort of Gnostic chanting and incantation.

We've told men, my whole life I've been in churches like this where the real measure of spiritual life is if you sit in a room with other guys in a circle and you talk about your feelings. Is it any wonder why men don't want to do that?

Is it any wonder why men have left the church? Is it any wonder why we took a risk and started a Bible study at a cigar bar and it worked? This has crept into the church. It's crept into society. And I think it's safe to say that when men become weak, women are not well-served.

And when women are not well-served and they, in fact, have to become men in order to lead their families, they become frustrated, children suffer, society falls apart. It's a domino that should not have been touched, but it was.

And I'm so thankful here that Lady Wisdom actually calls out in a very faithful way, beginning with men. She says, to you, old men, I call. This is not a sort of euphemism for all people.

This is men.

This is the word ish in Hebrew. This is, hey, men, I'm calling to you. This is the plural, isham, which means to the men folk, to the males, to the heads of households, to the husbands, to the fathers, to the covenant heads.

She's talking to us. She's talking to the ones who were born to lead and not to compromise, born to rule, born to represent our families before God, born to subdue the wild earth, and born to bring it into submission to Yahweh.

She's calling out to us.

What is she calling?

She's calling for us to have wisdom, which means that if it's a specifically masculine call, then there's a specifically masculine way to be wise, to be strong. Brothers, you are not made for cowardice.

Do you know that it says in the Bible that cowards won't even get into heaven? It's not. I'm not even joking. It says that the cowards and the liars will be locked out. So you weren't made for cowardice.

You were made for strength. You weren't made for effeminacy. You weren't made to be the kind of woman that Bruce Jenner is. And you also weren't made to be the kind of man and womanizer that Andrew Tate is either.

You were made to grow up. You were made to gird up your loins. You were made to take responsibility and you were made to lead a family to the glory of God. And that's what the entire book of Proverbs is actually about.

It's Solomon writing to his young son to grow up and be a man telling his son, I don't want you to grow up in the palace with all of the wealth and the riches and to become lazy and addicted to entertainment and vice.

I want you to grow up and become a king. The book of Proverbs is, it could be retitled Kingmakers because that's what its purpose is, is to take young men and cultivate them and craft them into kingly men, royal men, righteous men, not men who waste their lives addicted to the next television show or game playing or men who drink the unsweetened soy milk and have a higher estrogen level than.

Your wife.

Lady Wisdom calls to the men. She calls to the ones who are meant to initiate. Listen, God initiated in creation. Jesus initiated in salvation. There's something masculine with you initiating in your family.

There's something very masculine with you taking leadership and saying, if anything happens in this family, it's on me. If there's a fight between me and my wife, I'm initiating. I'm initiating repentance and forgiveness.

If something happens with my children, I'm not going to bury it. I'm initiating. I'm pursuing. I'm the one because I'm the man because I'm made to imitate Christ. I'm made to guard, provide, protect, sacrifice, lead all to the glory of God and with wisdom and not the wisdom of the world and not the wisdom of Twitter and not the wisdom of podcast and not the wisdom of society, the wisdom of scripture.

And that's what the book is about.

We've, we've talked about this, that, that God wants us to love what he loves, do what he does, imitate him. That's what wisdom is. So men, she's calling out to you to be masculine in a way that's consistent with holy scripture.

And when you do that, you're not a blowhard. When you do that, you're not this kind of thin version of mockable masculinity. You're not the guy who farts the loudest and drinks the most beer. You're not the guy who's a joke.

You're a guy who has gravitas. You're a guy who has something of substance to lead, to give your family, to make them feel secure. That's what masculinity is, is responsibility under burden. That's what it is.

We are made to be burdened, but to take responsibility under it. Responsibility for yourself first, can't lead anybody else. If you don't lead yourself, responsibility for the good of your wife, responsibility for the health and the wellbeing of your children, responsibility for your home, responsibility for your property, responsibility for your legacy and responsibility for your country.

I was thinking about an analogy. Doug Wilson brings this up in his book on reforming marriage, which some of you have.

Read.

And he says that if a naval captain goes to sleep, now, listen, they need sleep. They're humans. They work a lot of hours, but they need sleep. So they put their trusted first mate in charge of steering the ship.

If the captain falls asleep and the first mate crashes the ship and causes millions of dollars worth of damage, he'll get in trouble for that. But the responsibility falls upon the captain. In the same way, men, the responsibility for everything that happens in your life and in your family's life is your responsibility.

You stand before God for those things. You must be holy. Your life must be patterned according to the scripture, or you must quake in fear that it's not. There's a great story here in New England, a man named Giles Corey.

It's a favorite story of mine and Derek's. Giles Corey was a man who was accused of being a witch in the Salem witch trials. And they put Giles Corey on a stone rock and they put a board sort of thing, apparatus on his chest, and they put one stone on top of it at a time and they said, confess that you're a witch.

And the only thing Giles Corey ever said was more weight. They added another stone, and I'm not talking little stones, I'm talking New England stones. And then they added another, more weight, they added another, more weight, they added another till he could barely get the words out of his mouth and he said more weight until they added the final stone that crushed him.

It's such a great analogy for masculinity because we're not made to be cowards and compromisers. We're made to embrace the weight even if it means it crushes us because there's people who depend on us, there's people who rely on us, there's people who need us.

We're made to bear that burden. So what is a man? What are the burdens that we're going to bear? Gosh, there's a lot. We're made to be strong, Genesis 2 .7. We're made to be crowned with glory and honor, Psalm 8, 5 through 6.

We're made to take dominion, Genesis 2, 19 through 20. We're made to work.

We're made to cultivate.

We're made to lead. We're made to act like men. If you want to see all the proof texts for these, go to my Facebook page, I posted this.

Already.

We're made to protect. We're made to take responsibility. We're made to reject passivity. We're made to cleave to a wife. We're made to multiply. We're made to provide for a home. We're made to master a skill, which means that we can't just sit in our underwear and play video games.

We're made to actually master something. We're made to train our body. We're made to lead our wife in the word and wash her in the water of the word. We're made to build up a household. We're made to raise children in the Lord.

We're made to discipline those children and cultivate them in righteousness. We're made to teach and impart wisdom. We're made to rule well in the city gates. We're made to walk in wisdom. We're made to train our own minds.

We're made to not be ruled by our emotions. We're made to do hard things. We're made to wake up early and not waste our time. We're made to keep his word. We're made to act and think with decisiveness.

We're made to control our body. We're made to keep ourselves pure from lust of various kinds. We're made to be slow of anger. We're made to be able to take a hit. We're made to kill our sin. We're made to be forged by our trials.

We're made to repent. We're made to lead by example. We're made to speak truth. We're made to train the people who are looking to us for our leadership. We're made to prepare others so that they will actually go further and do more than we did.

We're made to stand in the gap so that others don't suffer and we take the arrows. We're made to never back down. We're made to seek justice and righteousness. We're made to hate evil and to cling to what is good.

We're made to build a great name for ourselves and our family and for our legacy. We're made to shoulder the burdens of others. We're made to live for that future legacy. We're made to fear God. We're made to worship the Lord publicly and privately.

We're made to walk humbly before our God, serving the Lord without fear, being dangerous to our enemies. Brothers, are you dangerous to the kingdom of hell? We're made to fear no one but God. We're made to bow the knee to no one but Christ.

We're made to subdue the world for His glory. And we're made to in eternity stand before His presence and praise Him. And in the middle of all of that, there's a lot of things in there that also apply to children and women.

You lead the way. You take the initiative. You show everybody how it's done. If there's someone who's leading in your home, let it be you. This is biblical wisdom, I'm telling you. When Lady Wisdom says, listen up, men, these are the things she's talking about.

Lead, take initiative, take responsibility. Bless your family with your biblical life because the stakes are too high not to. Because the world is full of weak men, let it not be so here and let it not be so in your home.

Amen?

Amen. Amen.

Wisdom’s Call to All People in Proverbs 8:4

But it doesn't end with men. This passage doesn't just end with men. It ends with all people. Solomon says, to you, O men, I call and my voice is to the sons of men. And the temptation might be there to say, well, it's to the sons.

It's to focus on fathers and their children, their male little boys, who will one day become men. But here, Lady Wisdom is not excluding women, children, or anyone else. She's not referring to males only.

She's actually referring to all people because this phrase, sons of men, in the Hebrew is sons of Adam. And the phrase actually in Hebrew is a very common idiom, which means a turn of a phrase. It's a way of speaking in Hebrew that in many passages actually refers to the entire community.

It refers to all people under the sun. It's every child of the human race. If you are downstream of Adam, if you're genetically connected to him, this applies to you, which means that she's not just talking to men, to husbands, to fathers, to leaders.

She's talking to everyone. Lady Wisdom is calling, and she's calling you. She's calling men, women, children, young and old, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, slave and free. She's calling all of us to have our lives conformed to the Word of God because where else can we find greater joy than in being conformed to the will of God and the Word of God, to the glory of God?

Where else can you find joy? Can you find joy in the world and in sex and in pleasure and in money and in every other pursuit?

No.

And listen, she's talking to us. And I love this because Wisdom is not an elitist. Wisdom doesn't operate by the categories that we operate by. She's not a respecter of pedigree. She's not a gatekeeper of class.

She doesn't only talk to those who are the high and mighty or the well-to-do or the wealthy. She talks to all the children of Adam, to all the race of men, to all that who are downstream of the disaster of the fall.

She calls out to us. She speaks to the immigrant and the aristocrat. She speaks to the illiterate mother and she speaks to the one who lives in the hills. She speaks to the professor in the ivory tower.

She speaks to the tradesman. She speaks to the one with calloused hands. She speaks to the newborn and to the newest among our ranks. She speaks to the little girl raised in pagan temples and to the little boy baptized into a covenant household.

She speaks to the ones who've heard a thousand sermons and she speaks to the ones who've never heard a single psalm. And in that, she's like Tom Bombadil, crying out and calling out to the world through song, come to God.

In that sense, her call is universal. Her call is not only reserved for the ones who are already wise, but her call is for all people to heed, to turn, to repent, to come to what God says in his word.

And that's also what makes her voice so shocking because she knows that all of us, from the tallest to the smallest, from the oldest to the youngest, from the lightest to the darkest, whatever category you want to place on us, she knows that we are but cracked cisterns and broken vessels who do not obey, who do not submit, who do not give glory to God.

Every week we learn in our law homily how we failed again. I'm a silly person at times. Every week I come to church and I think about the law homily and that song comes in my head. Had a bad day again.

Failed again. Failed again. Failed again. So in that way, wisdom knows that all of us are failures. Wisdom knows that all of us have fallen short. Wisdom knows that all of us have broken covenant with God.

And this is actually what's so beautiful about it is that she's still speaking. I want you to think about how important this is. When God made the world and fashioned it and made it perfect according to his design plans.

And we ruined it,.

God could have very justly said that I'm not speaking any of you. In fact, I'm gonna strike you down Adam where you stand. This is the scandal of the gospel in that while we were sinners and rebels and covenant breakers, God still speaks.

God still calls out. God still says, turn to me.

We don't deserve that.

Every time we sin and we spit in the face of God's commands, we don't deserve lady wisdom to call out to us and to remind us to turn to him.

We're broken.

We're rebels.

We left.

We, when God told us to show up, we disappeared. I want so badly for my own heart and I want this for you as well to really understand the depth of it. Human language is not enough to even communicate it.

The depth of the depravity and the sickness of our own hearts, the disgust we have for God, the hatred we have for God and yet lady wisdom keeps on singing. Have you ever thought about how much grace God has given you and that while you are still rebelling against him, her voice still sings on and on and on?

Have you ever thought about how much grace God has given you that while you're still sinning and sinning royally at times, that he still fills your lungs with breath? That when you go to sleep at night, you don't have to think about making sure that you take a breath.

He's programmed your body to do it for you because he loves you. He loves you even in your rebellion. We don't know that kind of love, do we? If someone's mean to me, it's real easy for me to be like, I don't care.

If my children have a bad week, it's very easy for me in my flesh to start opining, telling them how they've fallen short of the standard, beating them over the head. It's very easy and it's easy for all of us because we think that we've earned some kind of standing to where people must be kind to us or else we punish them because they've fallen short of our standard.

Praise God, he's not like us. If God were like us, none of us would be here because all of us would have had a lightning bolt thrown at us at some point because of something we said or did, right? I was captivated this week by the grace of God.

That lady wisdom keeps on singing when we keep cursing. She keeps loving us and forgiving us even when we ought not be forgiven. And the only reason that that's the case, the only reason that God could put up with us and continue to be patient with us and not pummel us is because before the foundations of the world, God planned for his own son, the true voice of wisdom to come.

While lady wisdom cried out in the streets, even before foundation of the world, God planned for his own son, who is the wisdom of God to come and to walk our streets. Lady wisdom cries out from the hilltop.

Well, God planned before eternity that Jesus Christ would be murdered on the hilltop. From the very beginning before the first star was hung in the sky, before you and I were ever even imagined by our forefather Adam, lady wisdom cried out knowing that there would be one who would come who would cry out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

She knew her screams would not be in vain. And in that there's something satisfying for lady wisdom. If you've ever been in a game where you knew you were gonna lose, you're likely to give up. This is why communism doesn't work, because it's a game you can't win.

But if you're in a game where you're against a really difficult foe, but you know that in the second quarter, your champion is coming back out of the medical room that he was in, and he's gonna lead us to the championship.

Uncle Rico's coming. Then you play, even though you're losing, you play with guts and tenacity and courage. I think that this is why lady wisdom song was so sweet. I think this is why lady's wisdom song was so constant, because she knew her voice was not gonna be the only voice.

Because in due time, Jesus Christ was gonna come for all of us sinners. And he was gonna die for every shame, every brokenness, every lie that we've uttered, every relationship that we've butchered, every sin under heaven that no one saw but God.

Lady wisdom knew that Christ, the wisdom of God would come. And that is the beauty of the gospel. And that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. While we should have been cursed, Christ was cursed.

While we should have been thrown away, Christ was thrown in a tomb that was not even his own. That's the scandal. That's the beauty. That's the glory of the gospel is that the one who perfectly obeyed wisdom, the one who perfectly obeyed every command, every precept, every thing that God ever said,.

Jesus said, I don't do anything.

Unless the father himself tells me. He modeled for us what a life of perfection looks like.

He earned freedom. He earned the blessing. He earned it.

And yet he treated places with us who spurned it. Jesus was treated like you and I should have been treated so that you and I could be treated like Jesus deserved to be treated. Whatever sin, whatever failure, whatever brokenness, whatever pain, whatever sorrow, whatever shame, whatever guilt, whatever it is, and you know it right now as I'm speaking, you know what it is.

I don't know it for you, but you know what it is. You know that point, that part of your heart that still hurts and still bleeds and still is broken. He died for that. He traded places with you for that so that you would never be known as a failure.

How will you be known? You'll be known as faithful. You'll be known as pure. You'll be known as clean. You'll be known as son. You'll be known as daughter. And not because of you, because of him. So when Lady Wisdom calls out, I want you to remember two things.

Number one, I want you to remember men and women. You can't live up to it. But I also want you to remember that he already has. And what that means for you is not that you can throw your hands up and say, oh, good.

Now we're done with that. It means that because he's made you clean, now you can listen to the voice of Lady Wisdom. Now you can obey. Whatever it was that had stopped up your ears with a thousand layers of scabs has now been freed.

And now you can hear the voice of Lady Wisdom because of Christ crucified. And now you can obey. And now you can do it joyfully. And now you can do it to the glory of God. This is what your Lord and Savior's done for you.

And let us do likewise for him, amen? Lord, we thank you that Lady Wisdom calls and she acknowledges the responsibility to men. She acknowledges the responsibility to all of us to obey your word, to love your word, to keep your word.

And yet, Lord, we understand very clearly that we do not. We understand in a myriad of ways how we have not. We understand even in many various and sundry ways how we would not and could not, and even times said we should not.

And yet, Lord, by your precious grace, you have forgiven obstinate, hateful, scornful people like us, and you've turned us into trophies of grace. You've turned us into people who are no longer known by our sin and identified in our shame, but people who now can be called the very righteousness of God.

Lord, make us wise, make us obedient, and make us joyful. Lord, let us never forget the acrid, sour taste of sin. And Lord, let us also never forget the sweet, and savory taste of grace. Let us hold those two things in tension, and let us be a people who plunder your word, who love your word, who obey your word.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Amen.