Proverbs 6:12-15 (Worthless People)

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Today we examine what it means to be a worthless person, and as people who have marred and destroyed our worth, can we have hope?

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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
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Christ is. May you be blessed in the hearing of God's word, and may the Lord be with you.
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One of the most insulting things that you could say to another person is that they are worthless.
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It's worse than any cuss word in my estimation. It's more painful than the most pointed insult to say that someone has no value whatsoever.
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That there's nothing about them that is worth preserving. To me, that registers as one of the most callous things that you can say.
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In fact, in almost every suicide that happens, there comes a point where someone realizes that I have no value,
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I have no worth, I do not matter. There's nothing about me worth saving.
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And when human ego meets with a thought that dark, it generally ends up in a kind of morbid hopelessness that leads to many people taking their own life.
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And yet, in the midst of how we would agree that that is such a hard thing, the
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Lord himself in his word calls some men worthless. And by worthless,
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I don't just mean bad or evil. I mean that God says that some men, some women have no value, they have no worth.
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They have nothing about them worth preserving, which is what we're gonna read about in today's passage. And yet in the modern church, this sounds scandalous.
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And I think it's because we've been so thoroughly catechized by the doctrines of humanism that have stepped into the church and have made us bristle at statements like this in the
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Bible. We've been told time and time again, every person is basically good, intrinsically valuable, which means that your value comes from within you, and worthy of dignity and respect.
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We've all been catechized by the sentimentalism that says that we're all made in the image of God and we all have value.
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But that's not the whole story, actually. Because there are times in the
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Bible where even though someone is made in the image of God, God says that they are worthless, worthless.
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See, the image of God is not a blank check. The image of God is not an intrinsic value, which means that you look inside of man and see where his value is.
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The image of God, if nothing else, is extrinsic value that God places from the outside onto man.
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Without God actually breathing life into man, man has no value, man is dirt.
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But when God forms Adam out of the dust and he breathes life into him, that extrinsic value comes in, and what
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God has declared valuable is valuable, and then what God has declared worthless is worthless.
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Again, I know we flinch in horror at this language because we like to believe those humanistic tendencies that everyone has some sort of dignity and value.
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But Paul even says in Romans 3, this is not in Proverbs, it's not Old Testament, this is New Testament.
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Paul says, all have turned aside, together they've become worthless. There's no one who does good, there's not even one.
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What Paul is saying is that the image of God in us has been so marred by our sin that we have stripped ourselves of any value that we had.
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And this is what makes redemption so shocking as we're gonna see today.
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Today, I want us to look at what it means to be worthless, basically what it means to be us apart from God.
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And then as we end, I wanna look at how worthless people like you and I can have hope.
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So if you will, let us go to Proverbs 6, verses 12 through 15, as we read and as we study these things together.
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Proverbs 6, beginning in verse 12 says this, a worthless person, a wicked man is the one who walks with a perverse mouth, who winks with his eyes, who signals with his feet, who points with his fingers, who with perversity in his heart continually devises evil, who spreads strife.
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Therefore, his calamity will come suddenly, instantly he will be broken and there will be no healing.
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Let us pray. Lord, we thank you for your word.
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We thank you that your word exposes things that need to be exposed. We thank you that your word cuts and wounds.
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And we thank you also that your word heals and restores. Lord, part of understanding salvation is having a right view of what the state of our anthropology actually was, the state of what our being man and woman is.
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Lord, help us today as we lean into what the reformers called depravity, that we would see that apart from you, we truly are worthless.
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And with you, we have inestimable value. Lord, it's in Jesus' name that we pray, amen.
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What does it mean to be worthless? Well, it doesn't mean to be unfortunate. It doesn't mean to be uneducated.
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It doesn't mean to be unpopular. It doesn't mean to have less than a thousand followers on Insta whatever.
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I know what it is. It doesn't mean underprivileged.
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It doesn't mean any of those categories that we often think. The meaning of this comes from the
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Hebrew word banal, which is a word that is compared to Satan in the
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New Testament. The word banal means a person that is given over to lawlessness, a person who is untamed, unkempt, unhinged, ungovernable, and given over to their rebellion.
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This is a person who's like a wild stallion that refuses to be bridled. They will not be governed.
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Not just evil, worse than evil, they're worthless. For instance, evil is something that you do.
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Worthlessness is something that you become. And a man becomes worthless over time as he so debases his own value through habitual sins that mar the image of God, that taint any worth, beauty, goodness, or value that he once had.
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This is the man who has cut himself off from the cord of God, no longer drifting into sin, but prowling after it, salivating for it, a spiritual arsonist who is addicted to his own destruction.
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He doesn't stumble over the truth. He sneers at it like a wild animal sneering and biting at its leash.
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Deuteronomy 13, 13 describes such men, describing a situation where there was men with weaponized charisma who gathered a following around them and led an entire city into false worship.
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And the book says that they were worthless men. There's another passage in the
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Old Testament. Dan, in his article about this topic a year ago, talked about this, the sons of Eli.
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He had two sons who were serving in the temple and in the tabernacle. They wore the priestly collar, or if they were a shepherd's church kind of church, they wore a tie.
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It's a vestment joke, sorry. And the reason that they were called worthless, the reason that they were said that they didn't have a single drop of value is because they were so abominating worship at the temple.
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It even says that they were sleeping with women right outside the temple. They were stealing from God's people.
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They were eating the food that they shouldn't have been eating. They were evoking the ire of God's holiness. They were the original wolves in sheep's clothing.
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They ran the temple like it was a nightclub and God calls them worthless.
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They bore the appearance of religion, long robes, public prayers, ceremonial authority, but their hearts were septic tanks that were polluted with their own wickedness.
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In every instance of the Bible, the worthless man is not just a man who has personal failure.
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It's not just a man who is complex and people don't understand him. It's not just a man who does bad things.
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He's a public threat. He's a menace to godly society. He is the one who erodes the pillars of the nation.
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He's the one who destroys and burns down families and he's the one who corrupts the people of God.
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He doesn't just break things by accident. He corrodes them, acting more like a beast than a man.
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Biblically, worthlessness is the telos of rebellion. Worthlessness is the end that you end up at after a life of rebellion.
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It's the moral condition of a man who knows the truth but suppresses it.
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A man who, instead of building, bulldozes. A man who, instead of blessing, curses. A man who, instead of being governed, deceives.
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A worthless man and a worthless woman cannot be trusted with anything because they will tear everything down.
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You put them in charge of a family, they'll destroy it. You put them in charge of a pulpit, he'll lead people astray.
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You put him in charge of an office and you have 2020 because he's malicious.
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He's not weak, he's calculating. He's not just wounded, he wounds others.
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Again, it's not just that the person who's worthless in the scripture does bad things, they are bad.
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They are evil, they are worthless. Now, the scriptures here give us a sort of a taxonomy of it because it talks about it in general.
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It calls them the worthless person. And so therefore worthless people exist, but now it's going to define it systematically.
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And it's gonna talk about it in very interesting ways, beginning with the mouth of the worthless.
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The first mark of a worthless man is his mouth, which I think is very interesting. Before he pulls a sword or his fist, it's his mouth that makes him worthless.
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A worthless man may lay his hands to anything and corrupt it, but it's his impulsive speech where you first see his worthlessness.
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Where, as James says, his tongue is like a spark that starts a forest fire. The Hebrew word here is ikshut,
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I'm not pronouncing that right, which means twisted, crooked, and distorted.
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He has a forked tongue. He's not speaking accidentally or saying things maybe, ah,
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I wish I wouldn't have said that. It's strategic. And I think it's important here to notice that this is not a man who stumbles into error.
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This is a man who aims to corrupt with a forked tongue. This is kind of like Grima Wormtongue, if you know the reference.
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Where's Brooke Hewitt? Lord of the Rings. His mouth's not accidentally saying things.
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It is purposely trying to mislead, trying to manipulate and distort.
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It's not a Freudian slip. He's using his tongue like a whip, calculating, engineering subversion, like a serpent and his fangs injecting poison.
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Proverbs 4 .24 says, put away from you a deceitful mouth and put devious speech far from you.
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Why? Because that kind of behavior leads you unto worthlessness. The difference is that a worthless man will not repent.
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He will continue like a master craftsman at a construction site, using his tongue as a tool instead of to build, to destroy.
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Like the false prophets in Deuteronomy 13, he seduces people to idolatry.
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He uses his honeycombed words as lies. Proverbs 16 .27
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says, a worthless man digs up evil while his words are like a scorching fire.
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So the man who is worthless doesn't use his words to heal, doesn't use his words to build, doesn't use his words to bind things, build things.
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He uses them to scorch things and set things on fire. He's the man who comes into a marriage and breaks it apart with his wicked tongue.
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He's the man who destabilizes churches with his arrogance. It's the one who detonates in private and yet wreaks havoc in public.
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And yet, another Lord of the Rings reference here, excuse me, I'm sorry. I only have a few things in my life that I'm good at, so I have to pull from them.
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And yet, as Theoden came under Wormtongue's spell to the casual observer in that kingdom,
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Wormtongue was doing him a service. Wormtongue was serving him. You might even call it piety and religiosity in the church where someone is winsome, but perverted.
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And this is so hard to see at times because the tongue is so forked and so crooked.
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Someone who lies not randomly, but strategically. Someone who knows how to flatter. Flattery is a form of worthless speech.
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Flattery is a form of manipulation to say, I'm going to butter you up so that down the road in the future, you will give to me what
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I want. Gossip, little white lies, all a part of this idea of using the tongue in worthless ways.
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In this sense, the tongue is the steering wheel of evil. The mouth and the heart are so connected.
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Jesus even says, Matthew 12, 34, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. The reason that the worthless man speaks worthlessly, the reason that he adds no value with his tongue is because he has a corrupted heart.
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That's what Jesus is saying. So the first sign of worthlessness is the tongue.
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The second is winking. I thought this was so funny when
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I was reading this week because as a child, it conjured up a memory for me. I was reading this passage in my bedroom in my good news
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Bible, which I would not recommend. It's a paraphrase, it's not a translation, don't read it. But that was what
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I was reading. And I remember thinking to myself, my dad is sinning every time he winks at my mom.
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This is what the text says, the one who winks with his eyes. And I was like, I have to tell him.
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I have to tell my dad, he's being worthless. That's one way to interpret the passage.
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Wrongly, it's to overplay this and to assume that this is a absolute forbidding of this little flap of your eye fluttering towards the person you have affections for.
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That's not what this is saying. But there's another way to look at this and to underplay it and to say, it's just a wink.
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It's not that big of a deal. Why is God going on about this? It's just the flutter of an eyelid.
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In this passage, the wink is more than the wink. It's a tell.
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Like when you're playing poker with someone and they touch their ear every time that they have a royal flush or whatever, this is a tell.
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The wink in this passage is someone who his eyes are signaling deceit. Everything on the outside of his body, he's trying to control and bring under control so that he can deceive you, but his eyes will not allow you to be deceived.
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Isn't it interesting that one of the great studies about people who are lying is done through the eyes?
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There are experts actually who can look at your eyes and see if you're telling the truth or not, because why?
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We reveal those worthless behaviors on our eyes. Proverbs 10 .10
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says, he who winks the eye causes trouble and a babbling fool will be ruined. In Hebrew parallelism, this means that the winker causes trouble.
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The one who exposes his worthlessness on his face is the one who's revealing the hidden corruption of his own heart.
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Because the wink is not merely an eye twitch, it is the leaking out of the soul's duplicity.
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Even the smallest betrayal that creeps across our faces tells of the sin within our hearts.
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The eye is a sort of window into a wicked soul. That's why Jesus said, the eye is the lamp of the body.
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So that if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.
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And if then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness? Jesus said, if what's inside of you, if it's supposed to be light, but it's nothing but darkness, imagine how dark you are.
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And Jesus is saying that your eyes are actually the window into seeing those things leak out of your very face.
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The wink, the eyes reveal the anatomy of a worthless heart.
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They reveal the man who trades in deception and schemes and refuses to let his yes be yes or his no, no, preferring the shadows instead of the truth.
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Proverbs, sorry, Psalm 39, 19 says, let those who rejoice over me who are wrongly my foes and let not those wink the eye who hate me without cause.
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The wink is also not just a betrayal of your own corruption. The eyes are what show us the internal.
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It's also a gesture of mockery and scorn. It's the smirk of someone who believes that justice will not catch up to him.
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It's the facial expression of one who thinks that he's better and more self -righteous, who winks at you like, okay, buddy.
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I love this passage so much because it talks about worthlessness in very extreme ways and also very common ways.
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It talks about worthlessness as the man who runs after evil and also the one who winks.
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Somewhere in between that is where we are. The eyes, it even says, the eyes and the mouth are what move the feet.
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This is the part, this is the next part. The feet are also an evidence of worthlessness. The feet are what show us that rebellion is actually happening.
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Where your feet walk will tell you where your heart is. That's a principle. Where your feet lead you will tell you where your heart actually is.
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Proverbs 6 .13 says, the one who signals with his feet, he's showing you the state of his heart by his feet.
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Your feet are where your will and reality meet the ground.
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Your feet take you where your heart most want to go. Your feet showcase who you are.
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The Bible's view of feet is pretty clear. Proverbs 1 .16, for their feet run to evil and they hasten to shed blood.
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Your feet follow your organs. Let me make this real practical. If you find it very difficult for your feet to one step after the other on the
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Lord's day, come into the Lord's house to worship, your feet are betraying the state of your heart.
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If you find it quite easy for your feet to lead you to the pornographic website, your feet are betraying who you are.
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Your feet are signaling you. The eyes direct the mouth and the mouth directs the feet and the feet tell you who you are.
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Like the man who first with his eyes lingers on lust, with his mouth speaks a little too much flattery and then before you know it, his feet had led him into a situation that destroys his family.
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You think about a man who's a brawler or a man who's always has to be right, a man who wants everybody to know how macho and masculine he is.
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He wants to be seen as fierce. He wants to speak in such a way that intimidates and his feet lead him into situations where he's in one conflict after another, after another, after another.
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His feet reveals the state of his heart. A gossip, someone who comes up to you and appears with their eyes to notice you, with their mouth they appear to be sweet to you and kind to you and they say, how are you doing only later to use your words as a gift wrap shank right in the back of your back.
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The gossip dances in the blood of the reputations that he or she has bled out. The eyes move the heart or the eyes move the mouth, the mouth move the feet and the feet run unto death.
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Whatever you speak will direct your eyes. Whatever you look at will direct your feet and it will either be unto righteousness or it will be unto worthlessness and death.
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Solomon also tells us that the finger is an evidence of worthlessness. It says he who points the finger and this is not talking about a child that when they see a park says, oh, mommy, look, mommy, look.
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And it's not talking about a mother who sees a Starbucks and says, oh, look, oh, look. We all have priorities.
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Pointing here is a metaphor for blame, for accusation, for mockery and for contempt.
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It's a symbol of a heart that is couched in judgment. Isaiah in Isaiah 58, nine says, if you remove the yoke from your mitts, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, he puts this at the very center of sinfulness, the pointing of the finger.
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And it is at the center of sinfulness. If you remember in the Garden of Eden, the very beginning, the first result of the fall was finger pointing and blame shifting.
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It's the woman that you gave me. It's the man that you gave me. And then for us today, it's the job that you gave me, the kids that you give me.
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It's the desires that you gave me. It's the whatever. All of it amounts to, did
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God really say? And can I trust him? The one who points his finger at others is pointing his finger right back at himself, but he's also pointing his finger at God.
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Because the one who looks at someone else and says, it's your fault entirely, I'm innocent here.
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Listen, I've been in enough situations in my life. I've been in enough situations in other people's lives.
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There is not a single conflict that I have ever witnessed where someone is 100 % righteous.
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There's not a single one. It doesn't matter how awful it is or unbalanced it is.
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There is something in every conflict for someone to own. When you adopt the posture of it's you, what you're actually saying is it's you.
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The reason for all of these things, the reason up underneath the eyes, the mouth, the feet and the finger, the reason that they're decayed is because of the heart.
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It all stems back to that. In a sort of a medical situation, we see this with Don.
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I'm gonna make an analogy here. Don is healing from his core out. His feet are gonna be the last things to get feeling back.
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His fingertips are gonna be the last things to get feeling back. Because at the core of who we are, the center of who we are is the heart.
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In this situation, in this sense, now I'm moving on from Don. In this sense, everything stems from the heart.
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And before the fingers and before the toes and before the eyes and before the nose, before all of those things are putrid, they first stem from a dead and rotten heart.
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Solomon says in verse 14, who with perversity in his heart continually devises evil.
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He's not mixing any words here. He's saying that the worthless person is the one who continually is thinking about evil, continually without break, even while they sleep.
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It reminds me so much of the state of humanity before the fall in Genesis 6, where God says every intent of the thoughts of their heart was only evil continually.
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What I find so fascinating is Solomon says that the heart is what corrupts and makes a man worthless.
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Genesis 6 says the heart all over the face of the earth was so corrupt that the entire world was worthless.
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And it's really easy for you and I to look at passages like that and say that doesn't apply to me.
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I haven't used my eyes for sin, oh really? I haven't used my mouth to cut someone down, to lie about someone, to slander someone, to gossip about someone, to belittle someone.
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I haven't done that, really. I haven't used my feet to walk towards evil, oh yeah?
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The last time you send your feet and led you there, your fingers, I've never used my fingers to hurt anyone.
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Okay, see the point that Solomon is bringing up and the point that Paul even brings up in Romans 3 is that all have become worthless, is quite literally that all of us have become worthless.
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And our sin, our value and our worth was so tainted, damaged and destroyed that there is nothing intrinsic about you that can save you.
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There is nothing good about you that you can offer to a holy God. There's no good work that you can do.
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There's no nothing good about you. There's no one righteous, not even one. All have fallen astray, all have become liars.
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The poison of asps is upon their tongue. You look in the
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Bible, it says that their eyes lead them to evil, their tongue leads them to evil. All throughout the scriptures, you see that our faculties have come under such, under such destruction that the hard truth is that we have become worthless.
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And here's the hope though, because I said in the beginning that so many suicides start with a arrival at the concept of hopelessness.
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The difference between that and the gospel is that arriving at an understanding that you are hopeless and worthless on your own is a good thing because it actually points you to Christ.
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Because Christ was the one of true value. Christ is the one who in his perfection never sinned.
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Christ is the one who came and who followed the law perfectly in front of us, never sinned, never wavering, not once.
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And at the end of his life, for the joy set before him, he marched up the hill of Calvary and died on the cross.
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And what did he do? In that moment, the one who never denigrated and never destroyed his value died as if he were worthless.
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Do you get that? The one who had perfect value, inestimable value, infinite value died as though he were worthless.
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What's that mean? He died as if he were you. And he died as if he were me. On the cross, he took our place, the valuable for the worthless.
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And in his resurrection, he gave you his place. I think about this.
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Without Jesus, we not only have no value, we're nothing more than a piece of trash in the middle of a room.
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Depending on how you live, I can be a little bit more on the slobbier side of things, order out of chaos, sort of creative.
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I'm a creative type of person. I could live in that. But my wife, she walks into a room and there's something out of place.
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She notices it, I walk right over it. But if you're like my wife, something that has no value on the floor, you pick it up, you throw it away.
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You get rid of it because it has no value. Not only did
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Christ not pick us up and throw us away, he was thrown headlong into the grave for you.
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And he, in his resurrection, now gave you his value so that when
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God looks at you, he sees the value of Christ. When God looks at you, he sees the preciousness of Christ.
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And do not for an instant let that motivate you unto pride because the only value that he sees in you is extrinsic to you.
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It's not, I'm so good. No, you're not. And no, I'm not. What makes us valuable is
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Jesus Christ. If you have Christ, you have infinite worth. If you don't, you will be thrown away.
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That's what this passage is pointing to. That's the hope of the gospel. And that is why, brothers and sisters, we celebrate.
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And that is why one of the best examples of how we celebrate is the Lord's table, where the one who has true value served us and nourished us.