SERMON: The Epistemology Of Christian Education

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 you would catch a greater vision of who

Christ is. And may you be blessed in the hearing of God's word, and may the Lord be with you.

Now this morning we begin our second mini -series in the book of Proverbs. If you're new or if you're newer and you don't know what

I mean by that, you'll need to know that we walked verse by verse through the beginning of the book of Proverbs, which is chapters one through nine, which are actually laid out in a kind of sequential verse by verse, paragraph by paragraph continuity that you can preach it in what's called expositional, which means verse by verse.

And quite literally that's often what we do is one verse by one verse. But when you get to chapter 10, the book actually is sort of a different book, or chapter 10.

It's like we've set sail from the shores of one country in chapters one through nine and we've arrived at a new country, new customs and manners in chapters 10 through 31.

In those chapters Solomon is not giving us a verse by verse, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter treatise on wisdom.

He's now giving us a compilation of collected sayings that are wise, or Proverbs, which is where we get the title of the book.

They're not listed in any thematic order either. They're a corpus of wise sayings that cover the totality of the faithful life, that make wise people who fear

God, love Him and obey Him in every arena of our life. And as we have studied these passages, and even before this series began, as I studied these passages, certain themes began to emerge, that there are a collection of verses in these chapters that deal with biblical womanhood, or biblical manhood, communication and how we speak.

I was surprised at how many passages in the book of Proverbs have to deal with how we talk, or money, or worship, or education.

Which tells us that the book of Proverbs, while giving hundreds of particular wise statements in no particular order, is attempting to give us a kind of summa theologica, which is just Latin for a summary of all theology for every aspect of our life.

Which is really important, because if we take all of the verses, for instance, about worship, and then we consider them together, then what we're going to find is that at the end of that we will have a robust theology of what worship is, and that's exactly what we did in our first mini -series, as we talked about worship, and what does worship look like, and how is worship downstream of the fear of God.

In that series we went through eight sermons on what worship is, and if you haven't heard them,

I'd say go back and listen to them, because they give us a full view of what worship is.

But now knowing that, today we begin our second mini -series, and it's on the topic of education.

Because Solomon and the book of Proverbs has much to say about not only what we're educated with, how we're educated, and even why we must be educated.

How we form children, how we disciple even our own Christian mind. And the reason that all of these things are true about education is because like all things, education flows out of worship.

Education is not before worship, it actually comes after worship. It doesn't stand alongside of worship, it doesn't run parallel to worship.

Education flows directly downstream of worship, like a river in the valley is fed from a mountain spring.

What you worship determines what you will learn and how you learn it. What you worship will actually determine how you teach and what you teach.

What you worship will determine what you're going to pass on to your children and your legacy. What you worship is going to be what you accept as your curriculum, what you tolerate in a classroom, or what you accept in a co -op, and what sort of generation that you intend on raising up.

The order matters. Worship must come first. Education always comes second.

And if you reverse that order, then you will produce highly educated pagans that the modern world has created an entire industry of attempting to accomplish.

Now as I've said, Proverbs has much to say about education because the whole book of Proverbs actually, in a sense, is a kind of classroom for Solomon's son.

The beginning of the book is framed as a father teaching his son. So the whole book is a classroom with Solomon being the teacher and his son

Rehoboam being the student and us being now students under the wisdom of Solomon's tutelage, the

Holy Spirit's guidance as well. Solomon writes to his son, hear my son your father's instruction and forsake not your mother's teaching or your mother's

Torah that we heard. Commands. This shows us that the structure of the book of Proverbs is pedagogical in nature.

From the first line to the last line, Solomon writes as a teacher addressing students, training them in the most important lessons that could ever be taught.

All the things that he talks about are things that surpass algebra, Latin, the classics.

Children do not hear me that those things don't matter. They do, but they're things that matter imminently more and are more foundational from which you build your algebra upon, which you build your classics upon.

There's something properly basic and foundation under knowledge to where all knowledge flows and that is the fear of God.

Solomon writes in Proverbs 9, 10, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the

Holy One is insight. So if you do not fear the Lord, you cannot rightly know anything. You could gain all of the factual data in the world and forfeit your own soul.

How? By lacking in the most fundamental and most basic knowledge of all, knowing and fearing

God. Solomon is telling us that there is a way to fill our heads and the heads of our children with encyclopedic knowledge and a wide array of disciplines so as only to prepare them as more educated people to burn in the fires of hell.

For this reason, Solomon has written a book of what mere education consists of, and I don't mean that as a pejorative.

I mean, what is the basic education? What is the most properly fundamental education?

What is the bottom floor if the tower is called education? What is its foundation? What's the load -bearing wall of education?

What is the foundation? What is the necessity of Christian education? So that if you have that, you will be blessed, and if you don't, you will have a system that will utterly corrode and that moth and rust will destroy.

I'm saying that before you can learn advanced calculus and quantum physics, before you get your

PhD in electrical engineering or pharmacology, there's an education you must know in order to be pleasing to God, which tells me that this book is not going to teach us every single fact about zoology or every single fact about cosmology, but it is going to establish the foundational, properly basic education that we must have or we have nothing.

It's not only going to teach us what we should know, it's going to teach us, and not only going to teach us how to educate our children, it's going to teach us how to be pleasing to God.

And in that way, Proverbs, in many ways, is the original textbook for all Christian education.

And in the next several weeks, we're actually going to sit at its feet and we're going to listen very carefully to what it has to say about the formation of the mind and about the formation of children and about the cultivation of generations who know and who love the living

God. And because that's true, we cannot begin with techniques and strategies and curriculum.

We can't begin with classrooms and methods and methodologies. We can't begin with private versus homeschool debates.

We have to actually begin under that with something deeper. Something that goes beneath every lecture, every book, every assignment, every conversation between a parent, child, and teacher.

We need to begin with what true knowledge is and how we can know it and who can we turn to for those answers.

Those are questions that everybody's been asking since the dawn of time. The Greeks asked it, what is knowledge?

The Romans asked it. How can we know what we know? The medievals asked it.

The philosophers have asked it. There's a term called epistemology, which is,

I complain about this all the time, that smart people make words that are super ambiguous to make themselves feel better about their degrees.

It's true in every category, what a flux capacitator that, you know, you get what

I'm saying. Epistemology just means the discipline of trying to figure out how do we know anything?

How do we know things? How do we come to knowledge? Well, the book of Proverbs is going to teach us what true epistemology is.

How do we truly find real, lasting, living knowledge? Proverbs 1 .7

says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. There it is. There's your epistemological statement. The fear of the

Lord is the bedrock of knowledge. So as we begin today, we're going to look at three things that are going to teach us what the fear of the

Lord being the bedrock of knowledge is. The first thing we're going to look at is the fear of the Lord is our curriculum. Second thing we're going to look at is that pride is a rival epistemology or a rival theory on how we know things.

And then the third thing we're going to show is the consequences of that decision. If you choose the fear of God, or if you choose the pride and sinfulness of man, where will that lead you?

And what will be the consequence? So if you will join me, I'm going to read several passages from Proverbs, then we're going to pray, and then we're going to jump in.

Proverbs 3 .5 -7 says this, trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding and all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your path straight.

Do not be wise in your own eyes, fear the Lord and turn away from evil. Proverbs 14 .26

-27 says in the fear of the Lord, there is strong confidence and his children will have refuge.

The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life that one may avoid the snares of death. Proverbs 15 .33,

the fear of the Lord is the instruction for wisdom. And before honor comes humility.

Proverbs 16 .5, everyone who is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord. Assuredly, he will not go unpunished.

Proverbs 18 .12, before destruction, the heart of man is haughty, but humility goes before honor.

And then Proverbs 28 .14, how blessed is the man who fears always, but he who hardens his heart will fall into calamity.

Let's pray. Lord, help us today to understand what the foundation of all knowledge is.

We can use fancy words like epistemology, the theory of how we know things, but all of us have an approach.

Every single one of us in this room has a approach to how we learn what we learn, how we know what we know.

Lord, I pray that as we speak of these things and let your word shine on these things that we would see that before we can truly know anything, we must know you.

Before we can truly understand the purpose, the meaning, the essence of a thing, we must know you.

We can memorize facts and data, but we cannot see purpose and we cannot see meaning and we cannot see what things truly are apart from knowing you.

So, Lord, would you help us, would you make us fear you, and would that lead to true knowledge and delight?

In Jesus' name, amen. First thing we're going to talk about is the fear of God is our curriculum as a

Christian. It is the corpus of knowledge that is most important in our life. If you have a master's degree in any field, we should have a

PhD in the fear of God. Solomon is saying that he, what he's not saying, he doesn't say that the fear of Lord prepares you for wisdom's instruction.

He doesn't say that it makes you ready to receive wisdom's lessons. He didn't even say that it puts you in the right mood for wisdom's classroom.

He says that the fear of God is our learning. It is our instruction. It is the lesson plan.

It's what supremely matters to the believer. Why? Well, the

Hebrew word here is Yerat Yahweh, Musar Hakma, which translated, that's a phrase, not one word, which translated means the fear of the

Lord is the Musar or instruction of wisdom. Now, Musar is a funny word because instruction seems sort of banal or sort of bland because it doesn't just mean that the fear of the

Lord is going to produce academic classroom style curricula driven understanding of what wisdom is.

That's not what it means by instruction. So that you can just learn about wisdom. You can learn to define the word wisdom.

You can learn to differentiate wisdom and folly in a sort of taxonomical classification sort of way without ever learning how to apply or live it.

What Musar means is formative discipline. It doesn't just mean data.

It means formative discipline. It's the kind of discipline that when you think about Michael Jordan is the goat, there is no debate on that,

LeBron James fans. I lived through it, I know.

That's the kind of discipline that made Michael Jordan wake up at 4 a .m. before anyone else was at the court shooting hundreds of free throws, hundreds of shots.

That's the kind of discipline that made Tiger Woods in the year 2000 unbeatable because he was hitting thousands of balls a day on the range.

That's the kind of formative discipline that a blacksmith uses to bend, scrape, and shape a piece of steel into a mighty sword that will be used and engaged in war.

Musar is the linguistic equivalent of a hammer being banged against the anvil in order to shape something into its purpose.

Or the linguistic equivalent of a chisel that is scoring marble in order to shape something into its image.

Musar is the kind of teaching and the kind of education that doesn't just fill the head with information, but it carves a person up and brings them into the shape and stronger frame that God is intending them to be in.

So when we consider that the fear of the Lord is the Musar of wisdom, what we're saying is that fearing God is the bench grinder that's putting

God's holy edge on you. We're saying that the fear of God is the hammer that's beating you, the chisel that's carving you, the fire that's forging you, the discipline that is shaping you.

And this is where this point becomes particularly relevant because the only fundamentally

Christian posture towards education is that it must be and that it cannot be anything other than downstream of the fear of God because everything else is compromised, dressed up in various forms of drag.

And this is precisely what the modern mind has done. Instead of beginning with God, it tells our children, begin by learning mathematics, begin by learning the sciences, begin by learning all of the various courses.

And then if you ever get around to it, after we thoroughly perverted you through our moral indoctrination plan and our ethical perversions, if you get around to it, then you can sprinkle a little bit of, ah, this relates to God somehow.

That's the way that our education system has been working. That's the way the Greeks actually designed it. They said that the education system is to conform the citizen to the polis, to make the citizen of the same character as the state.

And ever since Greece, education has been functioning in that way and the Bible says that way is not right.

It's the exact opposite of what God says. God does not say, learn the facts, memorize the formulas, read the textbooks, and then later, years later, learn how it all integrates with God.

It says you can know nothing apart from the fear of God. And that all knowledge rests upon that point.

And everything else, every other attempt is like building sea shanties in hurricane -prone regions on sand.

Solomon refuses that error entirely. The fear of God is not the paint that goes on after the wall is built.

The fear of God is the wall. And every coat, every stroke, every brush mark of knowledge is layered on top of it and not the other way around.

Let me give you an example. Let's say that a man goes to school to be an astronomist and he learns the names of the planets and he memorizes the patterns of their orbits and the physics and the velocity and all of that.

And he can recite the laws of Kepler and Newton and he can then stand beneath the canopy of stars and he can say,

I know the heavens. But if he has no fear of God in his heart, he does not know the heavens.

Because if you don't know the fear of God, you can't tremble with David when he says, when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?

An astronomer can see objects with no meaning and no purpose, but with encyclopedic data.

That's what they can do. The Christian can look at them and maybe you don't know as much as a world class astronomer, but you know what they're for.

You know what the stars are for, you know what human life bio is for.

You know the most properly basic knowledge to where you know more than they. If you just amass knowledge, you can catalog things, you can telescope things, you can periscope things, you can microscope things, you can measure things, burn things, you can do all kinds of things, but you cannot see what the point of those things are and how everything and all of creation redounds to the glory of God.

What is true astronomy if it has no connection with God?

What is mathematics? It's the music of God's order, and to know mathematics without bowing down to the conductor of that symphony is to count without knowing what you're counting for.

History is the unfolding of God's providence in time, to know history without trembling before the

Lord of history, which it is his story. To read a story without knowing its author, that's what that is.

Biology is the catalog of God's living workmanship all the way down to the cellular level and is fascinating and glorious.

To know biology without knowing the creator of the cell is to dissect the sacred with profane hands, and actually there is a movement among biologists who are now learning so much about the cell that they can't even persist in their atheism.

There's a movement in biology, there's a movement in cosmology. Just this morning

I saw that in Oxford University or Cambridge University, or one of those famous universities, long -standing professors renounced his atheism because the truth is there.

It's been revealed to every man under the sun. Do you understand what

Solomon's doing in these passages? He's not adding the religious parsley on top of the plate.

He's telling you that in order for you to even do the work of education, to even do the work of educating, you must first know and fear the

Lord. And that's the first and most foundational principle of all education is that you cannot do it without fearing

God. The second thing that I want us to talk about is that pride is the rival epistemology.

It's the rival theory of how we know things. And what I mean by that is that every single rival claim that has ever been conjured up by man that tries to explain how we get knowledge, whether you read

Kant or whether you read Rene Descartes or whether you read any other person on this topic, all of them are doing the same thing.

All of them are ultimately building a system of knowledge that is not built upon the fear of God, but on the intelligence, wit, and machinations of man, on the scaffolding and edifice of pride.

If your foundation of knowledge is anything other than the fear of God, then it will be the fear and honor of something else, namely yourself.

That means that there's only one rival curriculum in all the world. I don't care if you're talking about feminism and gender studies or if you're talking about Darwinian anthropology, every one of these curriculums can be reduced to the same error, which is elevating the self over God.

I know it's true. I can see reality. I will be my

God. Now, Solomon names that for what it actually is in Proverbs 3, 5 through 7.

He says, trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him and he will make your path straight.

Do not be wise in your own eyes. Fear the Lord and turn away from evil. In these three verses, Solomon is actually setting out that there's only two possible ways of knowing what you know or of knowing anything.

There's only two fundamental epistemologies in all of the world. And Solomon tells us which one to choose and which one to reject.

He tells us to choose the way of trusting the Lord with all of our hearts, which leads to blessing, and to reject the way, however it manifests itself, of leaning on and trusting on you.

Because the only thing that will actually hold you up is the fear and the knowledge of God.

And we can know that down to the very grammar of the Hebrew. This is so fun. I love it.

The Hebrew word there for lean is a word, sha 'an, which is already fun to say.

Like I thought about it, I was like, I'm going to start calling Shannon that, sha 'an -han, just to be weird and dumb like I am.

That's the word for lean. It's the same word that you would use when you're talking about leaning on a cane.

It's the same word that you would talk about with a walker, where you're throwing your body weight on a device in order to keep you standing upright.

It's the same verb that shows up in a very interesting passage in 2 Kings 18, where the

Assyrians are coming to destroy the Judeans. And the Assyrians mock

Hezekiah in this way. Behold, you are trusting now in Egypt that broken reed of a staff which will pierce the hand of any man who leans on it.

In that moment, the Assyrian captain, the officer, is mocking Judah for her crutch and leaning on a treaty that they had with Egypt, hoping that Egypt would make her upright, hoping that this political treaty would secure her and keep her against the rising threat of Assyria.

That word leans, sha 'an, is the exact same word that Solomon uses here in Proverbs 3.

And the same way that you can't lean on Egypt to give you national security is the same way that you cannot lean on you to give you security in your life, education and knowledge in your life.

Solomon is telling his son that propping yourself up on the walking stick of you is the cognitive equivalent of trusting

Egypt instead of God to save you. It's the same sin, just sung in a different tune.

The soul saying to Yahweh, I found another power to trust in, another power to lean on, and that power is me.

My discernment, my judgment, my facts, my education, my knowledge, my interpretation.

And as the Assyrian promised the Judeans, that reed won't hold you or as we say in Moxville, that dog won't hunt.

It will break, that reed, and it will splinter and it will pierce you.

Leaning on you is like leaning on a needle and thinking that it won't pierce you.

Leaning on you is like leaning on a pool noodle and thinking that you won't face plant against the sidewalk.

Leaning on your understanding without the fear of God is a wet noodle with no load -bearing capacity.

In that way, pride is not a personality flaw, it is not a quirk, and it's not a good thing.

Pride is a covenant treason where we're trusting us instead of Him. Every classroom is built on the knowledge that originates from pride instead of the fear of God.

Any education built on any foundation other than Yahweh is teaching children to lean on Egypt to save them, to lean on themselves to save them, and it won't.

Now where did this rival epistemology begin? Did it begin in Egypt? Did it begin in Babylon? Where did it begin?

It actually all goes back to the garden, to where the wing -clipped dragon called a serpent said this to Eve, you will be like God, knowing good from evil.

He's teaching her a rival epistemology. He's teaching her that pride, you making your own moral discernments is the way that you actually be like God.

He's not offering her facts. He's not saying I can teach you everything there is to know about physics.

He's not saying I can teach you everything there is to know about the fruit on the tree so that you'll know exactly why that it makes you live forever.

He's not doing any of that. He's giving her a rival morality. He's not offering her data or information.

He's saying that you, Eve, can be the source of your own moral understanding. That you can be the one who determines what is right and wrong in your life.

That is the rival epistemology in its purest form. You can know things without God.

You can be the standard bearer of what is true and right. You can fill your head without the fear of God.

That is what every single secular school, every academy, and every homeschool, and every parent, and every child, and every person on earth is doing.

When they teach wormholes without worship, when they teach Socrates without sovereignty, when they teach

Homer without holiness. If you're not rooting everything that you know on the foundation of the fear of God, you're advocating for an entirely false religion.

Remember, the first false curriculum, the first attempt at knowing God, or knowing how to be

God outside of the fear of the one true God produced the very first school shooting in Eden.

In a sense, the very first school shooting was when the serpent fired the lion, sunk it into the heart of Eve.

She was there to learn the fear of God, and he gave her a rival religion with a bullet of self.

And Paul tells us that this tragedy did not die in Eden, it began there and continued on.

He says, although they knew God, all the children of Adam, they did not honor him as God, they honored themselves, or give thanks to him because they believed in themselves.

But they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened, darkened, professing to be wise, they became fools.

Paul is not saying that the proud fail to know facts, they're very smart atheists who are smarter than us.

Paul is saying that knowledge fails to have true meaning if it's not rooted in God.

If it is rooted in you and the love of you, it will decay and you will deform, actually, and you will fall apart into utter futility.

This is why men like Nietzsche, at the end of his life, became a nihilist. What's the point of the world if God is dead, as he said?

Voltaire, I think it's a funny story about Voltaire, Voltaire said

God was dead as well. After he died, they bought his house and sold Bibles out of it, which is pretty epic.

That is Christian, that's what we do. But all of that is a rival religion in one word, futility.

Brilliant, credentialed, peer -reviewed futility, and that futility is detestable to God.

Solomon says in Proverbs 16 .5, everyone who is proud in heart is an abomination to him.

An abomination! Proverbs 18 .12, pride comes before destruction, or the way that it says it here, before destruction the heart of man is haughty.

Proverbs 29 .23, a man's pride will bring him low. God is saying that pride, thinking that you know better than God, puts you on the same playing field as a mother who throws her baby into the fires of Moloch, also called an abomination.

It puts you on the same team as those who worship idols, puts you on the same camp as those who produce, or perform homosexual acts, which is a detestable thing to God in the

Old Testament, and forever. Pride is so serious that Solomon uses the word abomination.

That's used everywhere else for the most revolting sins and disgusting sins to God. He's saying that your pride is that to him.

Because what you're saying is that you know better than him. What you're saying is that you don't love him, you don't trust him, and that you can run the universe better than him.

You who cannot keep your heart beating while you sleep. You who cannot keep breathing without it automatically happening, because who here actually has to think to breathe?

You here who decay, you here who wrinkle, you here who sag, you think you can run the world better than God.

That is what pride is saying. It is taking the beauty and grandeur and majesty of God and is reducing it down to whatever level you exist at and saying,

God, I'm one up than you. What a detestable and disgusting thing to say. And pride is actually underneath every sin.

The man who worships Baal, an abomination to God, first worshiped Baal because he thought that Baal was worth worshiping.

That's a prideful statement to say, I know what my worship is. Imagine that. I know who

I'm supposed to worship, so I'm going to choose this God. I am now the one who's in charge because I chose this

God, I'm going to worship this God, I now have power over this God, I'm going to use this God to manipulate my circumstances, which is exactly what happened.

They worshiped Baal in order to get rain. They worshiped Moloch in order for their fields to grow. They were the

God in the equation. The statue was a manifestation of their pride. Every false

God ever erected in human history was first erected in the heart and the mind of man who crowned himself as Lord.

That is why pride is to 'evah, abomination. It's not like idolatry, it is idolatry.

It's the foundational idolatry that makes all other idolatry possible. And that is why the root of pride is the only other epistemological system that is available to us.

You will either be founded on God or you will be founded on you, and you cannot stand.

You are the wet noodle, and so am I. That's the second and most foundational thing that we need to learn.

The fear of the Lord is the only way to true knowledge. The pride of man is the only counterfeit and rival theory.

And now we need to look at the consequences of those who choose. Fear and pride is epistemological outcomes.

Proverbs 28, 14 says, whoever hardens his heart will fall into calamity. Proverbs 14, 26 says, in the fear of the

Lord, one has strong confidence and his children will have a refuge. Proverbs 31, 30 says, charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the

Lord is to be praised. You have two pathways discussed right there. The first one is pride.

What does pride do to you? What is the consequence of pride? It hardens you, and it ultimately will calcify you, petrify you, fossilize you, and destroy you.

The proud knower does not stay where he plants himself.

Pride matures, pride compounds, and pride will eventually lead to the fossilization of your soul.

The Hebrew word here is makesh libo, which means a kind of hardening and calcification like concrete being cured.

That's what it's saying. It's wet only for a moment, and then it's fixed. It's a stone a chisel can't cut.

The Bible has a name for this kind of pride, which hardens, and that person actually has a name.

His name is Pharaoh. He's the textbook case of what pride actually does to man. Ten plagues.

Ten times God speaks to him. Ten times Pharaoh leans on his own understanding.

Ten times he calculates, bargains, blame shifts, and reasons his way around the obvious.

And six times in the passage, Pharaoh hardened his own heart. And then the terrifying transition is the final four times the

Lord hardened his heart. Pharaoh hardened himself until God hardened him beyond the point of turning back.

Pharaoh leaned on his own understanding, and it pierced him through. It became the noose by which he and Egypt were drowned by.

That's the destination of every pride, of every system of epistemological pride.

The road begins with leaning on you, and it ends at the bottom of the

Red Sea. Solomon names this in a single word, ra 'ah, which means calamity.

Personal calamity, domestic calamity, civilizational calamity. Pride leads to the fall, and the fall is calamity everywhere.

Which, by the way, we are all watching happen to our country in real time. Because we've turned away from the fear of God, and now we've turned to the fear of man.

The right kind of fear builds, though. Pride destroys, pride calcifies, pride hardens, but fear builds something.

Solomon uses the word mi 'bach az, which means strong confidence. The man who follows

God and fears God has strong confidence. He's the kind of man that when he stands inside of a stone, he's the man who stands inside of a stone keep, is what

I'm trying to say. He's the man who stands with walls that are 10 feet thick. He's the man who, when the storm is raging outside, he's not afraid.

Mi 'kesh means a roof for the next generation. An example of this is the great men of old who built the cathedrals in Europe.

Today, because of the state of our culture, Christian churches meet in office buildings with hospitalites.

But in the older times, men who feared God, who didn't have modern education, but yet they feared

God, men would grab their tools, and they would grab their chisels, and they would grab their hammers, and they would work on walls that they would never see finished.

And they would hand their tools to their sons, who would also never see them finished. And over hundreds of years, because they feared

God, they would build cathedrals that still stand today. They sang the tam daum into the walls that would not be enclosed for 200 years after they hammered and chiseled.

They were not pouring their reverence into teaspoons. They were pouring it into a riverbed, and that riverbed was

Christ. The way you know God this morning becomes the roof that your grandchildren are going to sleep under 50 years from now.

The way that I and you fear God in our study is the way that our great -grandchildren will drink from the fountains of living water when we have become but dust.

Where pride hardens, the individual fear of God builds generations.

And the fear of one generation will become the safety and the structure of the next.

We are one generation away from both collapse or the rebuilding of America, depending on what we will fear and who we will chase.

Will it be us or will it be him? The true test of all of this is Proverbs 31 .30.

It's a verse for women, a beautiful verse for women, but it's actually a verse for all of us. Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain.

Vanity, pride, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Time is the great unmasker of what you fear.

I heard this by a pastor long ago. In the moment, you cannot tell if a person corresponding to you is sincere.

The flatterer will come and they will tell you all sorts of beautiful things. This church is the best church

I've ever been to. This church is one I've been praying for. This church is one that is an answer to my prayer.

Pastor, you preach such great sermons. And then you start to believe the hype and you're like, man, this really is a great place, which

I believe that. And then when you end up with a knife in your back a year later, time revealed what the man feared.

Was it fear of man or was it fear of God? Time strips us down to a single thing, the posture of the soul.

And the fear of the Lord does not erode. And it's the only credential that God ever recognizes.

So that if you watch a person over time and they're growing harder, more hateful, more bitter, then they do not fear

God. And I'm not talking about over two days. I'm not even talking about over two years.

I'm talking about time, sometimes decades. You will see what the heart fears over time.

And if it does not fear the Lord, it will decay. But if it fears the Lord, though the body dies, it will live and it will grow and it will become bigger.

I remember when I was a kid, I used to go with my mom to work sometimes because I just wanted to be close to her.

And she worked night shift at the nursing home. And I remember the smell of a nursing home.

Like even right now, I still remember the smell. And I would walk with her and go on her rounds with her.

And when I was bored, she would let me go into the rooms and talk to the patients. And there was this little elderly woman with like fluffy hands, you know, that are worn from years.

As an eight -year -old, I had more grip strength than her. As an eight -year -old, I could run faster than her.

As an eight -year -old, I probably knew more about math because she had forgotten so much over her years.

But that woman was a giant standing or sitting, body broken in front of me.

That woman was bigger than herself. That woman was more potent than herself because she had been meditating and simmering and being stewed in the fear of God for a lifetime.

So that when I walked into her room, I felt the palpable reverence of God on her in a way that touched me profoundly.

What you fear will be revealed over time. It will either be revealed into corruption or it will be revealed into transformation.

Every other credential other than the fear of God is scaffolding that will be torn down.

It's a reed that you can't hold yourself up on. Every diploma, every graduate certificate from the

Academy of Pharaoh is a stepping stone credential that will not outlast the fire.

So the fork in the road is clear. As the poet said, two roads diverge in a yellow wood.

And sorry, I could not travel both. Do not be sorry you could not travel both. You travel one. And it's to the fear of God because everything else corrodes.

Now here's the point that we have to wrestle with because you and I don't do this. We don't fear God in everything.

When we walk out of here today, we're going to step on ground that we take for granted.

We're going to sit on chairs that we take for granted. We're going to do all number of things that we don't even consciously say, thank you,

God. I stand here today not even remembering that it is

God who holds me and who keeps me. So what do we do?

Because it just said that the fear of God leads to life and the fear of everything else leads to life.

And I know for myself, I don't fear God consistently. I don't fear

God maybe even the majority of the time. So my path is leading to death.

What are we supposed to do? This is where the gospel comes in because Christ is the very wisdom of God who came and he feared

God on our behalf in a way that we could not fear. And he loved God in a way that we could not love

God. And he served God in a way that we could not serve God. And his righteousness, as we read earlier, became our righteousness because he took upon himself our foolishness and folly.

Not so that we could go on living the way that we once lived, but so that now we can have a kind of education and a kind of posture towards our knowing that roots everything in him.

It is now not by duty, but it is by delight and by gratitude that we strive to make everything we know and everything we see and everything we touch redound to him.

It is by Christ and Christ alone that we now strive that he would be

Lord over all. And that now is our prayer as we close that if we are in Christ, that by the spirit's power, we would grow to fear him more, to know him more, to love him more.

So that the world would see that this way does not lead to death. So the world would see us as that elderly lady in the nursing home who was bigger than she was and whose life will redound forever.

Let's pray. Lord, the fear of God leads to knowledge.

There is no knowledge apart from it. There is no understanding. There is no interpretation apart from the fear of God.

Lord, would you make us people who fear you, revere you, are in awe of you, that all of our life would be wrapped up in Christ.

That there would not be any of us here today who could honestly say that Christ is a part of my life.

That Christ is my Sunday morning. That Christ is my Monday morning devotion.

That Christ is my car ride listening to worship music. That Christ is a portion of my life.

Let no one here be able to say that, Father. But instead, let us say that Christ is my life.

That Christ is my all. And Lord, for us who still fall short of that, would you, by your spirit's power, grow us so that we can, as we stand in eternity before you, sing with honest, joyful declaration, you are my all in all.