Sketches of a Fool

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Matt McAlvey; Proverbs 26:12 Sketches of a Fool

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to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches his series in the
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Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in. Well, good morning, welcome to Recast Church.
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As Dave said, I'm Don Filsak, I'm the lead pastor here. And I just wanted to start off by welcoming you and saying
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I'm glad that you're here on this strange week between Christmas and New Year's. How many of you had a good
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Christmas time? Was it good? How many of you are ready to get back to routine and schedule? Anybody with me on that?
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Some of you are not and some of you are, so it kind of depends on your personality a little bit there. Glad that you've taken time in this week to gather together.
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That's one of the things that God desires of His people. We can't quite be the people and even the individuals that God wants us to be without community.
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He's designed us that way and He desires for us to gather together with others in worshiping
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Him. And so glad that you're here. And ready or not, here comes 2019, right? It's on the way and here we go.
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So this next year, we are gonna be taking on the Book of Romans starting next week. And so we'll be jumping into that and starting right at Romans one and working our way through.
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But this week, a very good friend of mine who is also my brother -in -law is gonna be opening the word for us.
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I've known Matt since I was a counselor at summer camp way back in 1993 up at Camp Barrichal.
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And he's been on staff with Parkside Church in the Cleveland area, really southeast of Cleveland, where he was on staff with Alistair Begg there for a dozen or so years.
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And then a few years ago, they sent him out to Lakewood on the east side of Cleveland, rather the west side of Cleveland, to plant
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Parkside Church west side in Lakewood, Ohio. And so Matt's gonna be opening up for us this morning the
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Book of Proverbs, giving us a portrait of the fool this morning. And I'm not gonna steal his message, but I would like to point out that before we read the text together, the
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Book of Proverbs is a different kind of book. How many of you have read through the Book of Proverbs? You've read through portions of that or most of it or all of it.
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The Book of Proverbs is different in that the first 10 or so chapters really kind of follow themes. And there's paragraphs and there's ideas that kind of hold together.
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And then once you get past chapter 10 -ish, the last 20 or so chapters really just kind of take a verse at a time.
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And it follows kind of, it doesn't follow themes. It'll be like two proverbs right up against each other that aren't necessarily related or you have a hard time figuring out how they relate.
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And so preaching through the Book of Proverbs can be a bit challenging for a pastor because really instead of just reading a chunk of it and then diving through, you'd have like, if you read 20 verses, you'd have like a 20 -point sermon.
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So it would just be, how many of you, you're like, wait a second, is this one of those? No, it's not necessarily gonna be that way, but it's what we're gonna read.
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And the reason I'm even saying this is I'm about to read a chunk or parts of the Book of Proverbs. And don't think that we're just picking and choosing what we want you to hear.
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It's following themes. And so I'm gonna read to you some of the verses that Matt's gonna explain to us this morning that come from the
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Book of Proverbs, really following the theme of the fool. So he's gonna be talking to us about a portrait of the fool and we're gonna be digging into that.
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And so let's listen in to the reading, what God desires for us to hear this morning. Recast, we're gonna read this together and listen in.
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It's gonna be, it would be hard for you to jump around. It's gonna go from Proverbs chapter 10 all the way to chapter 28 and a handful of verses in between.
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So you don't need to open up there. It's gonna be hard for you to follow along. I just encourage you to listen and think deeply about these things as you hear them from the word of God this morning.
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So a reading from the Book of Proverbs. The lips of the righteous feed many, but fools die for lack of sense.
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The tongue of the wise commends knowledge, but the mouths of fools pour out folly.
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A foolish son is a grief to his father and bitterness to her who bore him.
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Precious treasure and oil are in the wise man's dwelling, but a foolish man devours it.
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Do not speak in the hearing of a fool, for he will despise the good sense of your words. Like snow in summer or rain in harvest, so honor is not fitting for a fool.
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Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly.
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Crush a fool in a mortar with a pestle along with crushed grain, yet his folly will not depart from him.
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Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool, but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered.
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Let's pray. Father, what an apt text to read as we are wrapping up a year and launching out into a new year.
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Father, an opportunity for us to reflect on the foolishness of our own hearts, the foolishnesses that we have embarked on and taken part in in 2018.
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Foolishness that we can bring to you and confess and let go of. And a way for us to meditate and contemplate on what you desire in wisdom for us in this next year.
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Father, I pray that you would be present with us as we get an opportunity to sing praises to you for the one who has taken our folly upon himself, really even deeper than our folly, our sin on his shoulders,
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Jesus Christ our Lord. And Father, I just thank you for the salvation that we have in his name, that those who are here who have given their lives to Jesus Christ and accepted his sacrifice on their behalf,
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Father, I pray that we would raise our voices up in thankfulness and in gratitude for a year that has passed, a year that is coming.
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And Father, that we would sing our hearts out to you, that it wouldn't just be an exercise of our vocal cords that we take part in here over the next minutes, but Father, it would be an exercise of our hearts and our minds, recognizing that you are high, you are exalted, you are the glorious one, and we owe all to you in Jesus' name.
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I'm a little fearful this morning, fearful that having been introduced as a resident of the state of Ohio, that you would think that I have some, yeah,
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I have no commitment to the team from Columbus. I never have, I never will.
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Beth and I are both from Battle Creek, Michigan, and are proud Michiganders.
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One of my favorite gifts I got this year was a hooded sweatshirt that said four out of five Great Lakes prefer Michigan. I would have worn it today, but I thought maybe
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I should go with something at least a quarter zip -ish, so I went with it for those reasons. But we're glad to be here this week, visiting family ourselves, and as Don said, family together.
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He was very kind in the way he introduced me, making the connection initially back to Camp Baraka in the 1990s, when he was actually my camp counselor, which is hilarious to me, and I think even more hilarious to him.
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It was one of those instances where I was at a high school camp, and then he was a college student, so the distance was far, but not that far apart in terms of years.
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And so that was the start of a relationship, which then rolled over into a friendship, and then which has now rolled over into family, and then which still continues on in friendship.
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And so I'm very glad to be with you today as we look together at the Proverbs. I appreciated
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Don's little introduction to the book. It's an unusual book within the larger landscape of all 66 books of the
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Bible. And the great challenge is whenever we work through the Proverbs together is to try to ask ourselves, how does this lead us forward in time to the anticipation of the
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Lord Jesus, who would come as the Savior that we've sung of this morning? If you think back to the
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Hebrew writer, later on in the New Testament, he says at various times and places, God has spoken through the prophets of the past, but now he's spoken to us through his
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Son. And that's a big cue to us, that whenever we read the Proverbs, we want to say, how do these things anticipate the
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Lord Jesus, who was to come? And the Old Testament very much does so. The anticipation of Jesus as the prophet, the priest, the king, the wise one to come is all throughout it.
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I was thinking about the fella who was playing the keyboard this morning, and if he were to only play the white keys, we'd have a sense of the melody, but you'd say to yourself, well, it just seems like there's something missing.
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Isn't there supposed to be something more full to the melody line that we are playing together? And if we only look at the
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Proverbs as a set unto themselves, without anticipating who Jesus is, we're only reading the book by essentially playing along the white keys.
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And so even as we read through the book of Proverbs, we want to listen for the melodic line of all the keys, which would say to us, hear who is
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Jesus, the one who has come to deal with our foolishness. So there's lots more that we could say by way of an introduction, but at least it gives us a sense of where we're going.
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And what I'll do this morning is, in just a second, I'll just, a brief prayer, and then we'll work through this series of Proverbs that we have together.
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I'll do my best to read many of them as we go through them, as Dodd read them as a collection at the beginning, but I'll try to refresh them up for us as we go along.
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Just a word of prayer. Well, Father, what we know not, we now ask that you would teach us, and what we have not, we ask that you would grant us, and what we are not, we ask that you would make us.
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For Jesus' sake, we pray these things. Amen. If you ever watch a show like CSI, or some other law enforcement drama, you're eventually going to come across an episode in which a police artist plays an important role in the solving of a crime.
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The sketch artist. They assist police when they're trying to sort out who a potential suspect may be.
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And so you've probably all seen the episodes where someone sits down, and they start to give descriptions, and the artist begins to sketch out a picture.
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He's five foot nine, Caucasian, bearded, age 40, recast church,
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Matawan, Michigan. You get the picture. You go, oh dear, look out for this fellow. Well, that's essentially what the forensic artist does is creates a picture by sketching an image.
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And that's exactly what I'd like to do with us today is to take the descriptions of the foolish person in Proverbs and sketch out a picture of him in more full -form fullness, in what we could call sketches of a fool.
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Now, if you're an artist, then the word sketches will be one that you know right away because it makes you think of quick movements.
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So there's a little shading here and a little shading there, and that's what we're going to do today. I'm just gonna give us a bunch of little sketches, which means that we can only spend a little time on each little one because we're trying to get into the bigger pursuit of the full picture of who this fellow may be.
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And over and over, as you work your way through the book of Proverbs, all 31 chapters, what is the most predominant image within this book is the foolish person who is contrasted and compared to the wise person.
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And it becomes very, very clear that as you read through this book, that it's wisdom that is commended and it's foolishness that is condemned.
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And you say to yourself, okay, well, that's fine, but why is that so? Why is foolishness to be avoided and wisdom to be embraced?
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Well, there's a lot that we could say there, but Tim Keller has a wonderful little quote in which he gives a good reason for it in this way.
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He says, why is wisdom better than foolishness? He says this, because fools are people so habitually out of touch with reality that they make life miserable for themselves and all around them.
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We can't treat our body any way we want without consequences. We can't treat people any way we want and expect to have good friends and a strong family.
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We can't all live selfish lives and expect the social fabric to remain intact. Fools, however, do all these things and therefore sow and reap discord and destruction.
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In other words, fools are themselves miserable even though they may appear happy and they cause misery everywhere they go.
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This is one of the many reasons that wisdom is better than foolishness. So let's sketch out the picture this morning so that you know what to do when you encounter a fool.
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But let's also sketch out the picture and pay attention to what we see and discover if we might catch a little glimpse of ourselves in these things.
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The great tendency is to go, oh yeah, that is totally so -and -so. But maybe you might say to yourself in just a moment,
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Lord, will you help me to see myself in these things too? It would be a foolish endeavor on our part to spend the whole time talking about fools and not to see a touch of foolishness in ourselves.
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You ready? Sketching number one. And probably most foundationally is this, is that fools trust in themselves.
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Fools trust in themselves. Proverbs 26, 12. Do you see a man who's wise in his own eyes?
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There's more hope for a fool than for him. It's playing on the extremes in that little proverb there.
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Now just a moment ago, I said that a fool is out of touch with reality. So he thinks that he's got life figured all out.
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He doesn't need anyone else's input or help because he's wise in his own eyes.
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And as a result of that, many things can happen to him. He can be duped into simple belief in just about anything.
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One of the characteristics about the fool as you read through Proverbs is that they're often young, ignorant about life.
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But even grownups can be terribly foolish people who can be duped into believing just about anything.
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A charismatic figure comes along and says, ooh, listen to this, or if you give me a little money, I'll do this for you.
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Fools, they trust in themselves in this sense of false intuition that they have because they don't actually want to ponder and think something out because they're intellectually lazy and often overly impressed by the spectacular.
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And Proverbs makes it very clear from the beginning that we as human beings aren't actually inherently wise and that it's the ultimate hubris to think of ourselves as being wise.
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But fools, they trust in themselves. They're self -promoting. They can be divisive.
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They're just unpleasant people to be around. Just think it out. Have you ever found endearing these self -promoting loud mouth and you say, oh,
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I'd like to spend a lot of time with that person? No, because humility, not pride, is a quality of the wise.
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Fools trust in themselves, but no one trusts them. So that's the first sketching.
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Fools trust in themselves and it's arguably one of the most important and it really is foundational to everything else and that'll become clear as we go along.
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But now, let me just give us a burst of other little sketchings. Three more here, we'll go through these quickly to show you a bit more of the character and the depth of a fool.
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There's simply this, is that fools, they don't listen to reason. Fools don't want to change and fools don't learn from past mistakes.
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So first of all, fools don't listen to reason, 23 .9. Do not speak in the hearing of a fool, for he will despise the good sense of your words.
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So there are some people in life that will listen to no one and you'll waste your breath trying to have a one -on -one conversation with them because the fool is determined not to hear you.
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Tremper Longman says that the wisest advice will bounce off of the ears of fool and even worse, it will bring on their hostility.
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Particularly if you try to speak to a fool and you try to point out something about their behavior which is causing harm to other people, they will turn their wrath upon you.
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Fools don't listen to reason because fools, they don't want to change.
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This is a great word picture in this proverb, so listen to it again, it says this. It says, crush a fool in a mortar with a pestle along with crushed grain, yet his folly will not depart from him.
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So in the ancient world, people would grind grain in a bowl, a mortar, by using a hard tool, a pestle, and they would crack and they would pulverize the seed in order to turn it into something more useful like fresh bread.
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So they would apply this great deal of force of pressure and it would bring about a change. And the proverbs are playing on this picture and this imagery by saying that, well yeah, you can crack the shell of grain, but you can't actually crack the obstinacy of a fool.
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Because no amount of pressure or pain will ultimately change a fool and make anything useful out of them, why?
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Because fools don't want to change. If you're a parent, you get little glimpses of this.
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Because loving parents will do their best to correct and make it their aim to shape the lives and patterns of their kids.
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But you still recognize that there's this deep -seated foolishness within them, that only the loving and corrective grace of God can crush and love and make something new truly happen within them.
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So by God's grace, children can change, God can transform people who were once foolish into wise people, but the problem with the fool is that he goes,
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I don't want to change at all. I like the foolishness that I'm in. And not only that, thirdly here, fools, they don't learn from past mistakes.
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This is 2611. Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly.
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Now before all the dog lovers get up in arms, don't worry, cats do this too. Either way, it's a truly revolting word picture.
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A dog lapping up its vomit is as uncomfortable to see as a fool who continues in the cycle of stupidity.
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So experience is a good teacher for the wise but not for fools because fools don't learn from past mistakes.
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We see there's actually more to this than just stupidity because the fool actually doesn't want to learn from past mistakes, he prefers the same regurgitated folly if you can follow the rather graphic picture there.
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And what we have actually in this proverb is a picture of sin's gravitational pull.
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That sin's curse within us, it's powerful. It's as if we are under a spell of sorts.
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That there's an addictive power buried within our foolishness. That our vices are dominating and destructive.
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That's why fools don't need more self -discipline or willpower, he actually needs a change of appetite.
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A change to happen within him to see that he might have a change and a desire for something better. He needs the curse of sin's power to be broken so that he won't return to his spew and folly but so that he'll taste and see that the
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Lord is good as the psalmist says. So that he will discover that actually Jesus is better.
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You see, this is actually quite a different way of understanding ourselves than what you'll find in most of the self -help books that you downloaded on your
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Kindle this past Christmas. Because if you're here today and maybe you're exploring
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Christian thinking, you came out with a friend, I can actually understand how what I've just said will be rather offensive to you.
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Because you say to yourself, well what do you mean that I'm under a curse of sin? And that I don't have the power within me to get out from under, what are you doing saying that I'm like a dog that returns to its vomit?
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I understand how that sounds, but I just wonder if you'll just give fresh consideration to what
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Proverbs is saying here. Because if the messaging of self -help books that are printed ad nauseum, that essentially say within them, look within, try harder, you can do it.
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If these books of self -help keep getting printed over and over and over again with their regurgitated message and people keep reading them, why don't people actually find fundamental change happening within them?
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I just wonder if you'll give an objective thank to the wisdom of Proverbs that says, well you don't need to try harder to change, you actually need
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God's power to come from outside of you and transform you. This is one of those great questions of life that eventually at some point we find ourselves asking, you say, well how do
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I really become wise and change? I want to change and grow,
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I want to be the full person that I think I'm meant to be, but how does it happen? Well, there are many factors involved, and I mean, just think it out for just a moment.
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We all can and do become wise by observation and experience.
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One of the traits of the wise is that she's an observant person. The wise woman tries to understand why certain behaviors work and others don't.
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She's self -aware, she's self -critical, which makes her more apt to be wise.
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So you can actually become wise through observation and experience, but you also become wise through instruction that's based on tradition.
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I know we have a general disregard for anything that's older than two years ago, but the ancient faith that is passed on to us from generation to generation is one in which we receive from the hands that have gone before us.
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We take into the hands of ourselves. You can actually learn a whole lot from your mentor, even from your parents at various ages of life.
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So you grow through observation, you can grow in wisdom through tradition, and of course, as we've said, part of gaining wisdom is learning from our mistakes.
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One of the things I appreciate about Proverbs is that it supposes that everybody makes bad choices all the way, along the way, that we actually all trend towards stupidity.
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I love that about this book because I go, oh good, there I am all over the place. But one of the differences between the wise and the foolish is that the former learns from mistakes.
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So how do you become wise? Observation, tradition, learning from mistakes.
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They're all important sources of human wisdom, but more than all of that, it's divine wisdom.
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It's divine revelation, it's God's word, which is the well from which all other human wisdom is drawn.
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So Proverbs actually says that at the heart of wisdom itself is God himself, and that if you try to find an understanding for life apart from him, you'll just keep coming up empty.
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Apart from him, there's no true insight into our world or into ourselves. So it's actually
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God's voice that is the source of the sage's wisdom in Proverbs. He tells us how life ultimately works best and doesn't work because he's the author of life.
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He's the creator and sustainer of everyone and everything. He's the source of all true wisdom, which means that you don't need another self -help book to read, but you do need
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God's word of help that's found in this book. The revelation of God's wisdom is contained in the
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Bible and in the person of his son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Little sidebar there, but that's the key to heeding and receiving the wisdom of Proverbs.
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It's actually to fundamentally start with recognizing to stop looking for help within and to look for help from outside of yourselves, from the wisdom and the power of God.
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So in one sense, the wisest thing you can do in life is to trust what God says and orient your life around him.
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But for those who refuse to do so, they'll continue down the path of foolishness, trusting in themselves, living in misery, and being a source of misery to others, which now takes us on to two more sketches of a fool, which are this, that fools can't control their speech and fools can't control their temper.
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Fools can't control their speech. 15 .2, the tongue of the wise commends knowledge, but the mouths of fools pours out folly.
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So fools actually can't control the quality or the quantity of their words. He talks at big game, but he accomplishes very little.
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She's a proud know -it -all. He intrudes into conversations where he isn't invited, even starts talking without actually knowing what everyone else has been talking about.
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The fool says stupid things. He makes inflammatory comments that leads to quarrels and hurt feelings.
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He can't control his speech, and fools also can't control their temper.
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Proverbs 12, 16. The vexation of a fool is known at once, but the prudent ignores an insult.
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Vexation, it's one of those great words that I've never been able to use properly in a sentence myself, but if I read it from the
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Bible, I can maybe get it, but vexation. It means that a fool immediately reveals his true heart condition through his unrestrained character.
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You been around this person? He's volatile, and he takes everything personal.
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His foolishness rushes out of him the instant that his bloated ego is pricked. You end up walking on eggshells around a person like this because once a fool is angry with you, he'll carry on the feud to the bitter end and do a great deal of interpersonal damage.
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This is why it takes great discernment around a fool to know whether you should speak up into their lives or whether you should just shut up and walk away.
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Sometimes one is right, sometimes the other is better. They can't control their temper, and it's really no surprise then that fools create problems and bring sorrows, especially to their parents.
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17, 25. A foolish son is aggrieved to his father and bitterness to her who bore him.
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This is one of those sad themes that runs throughout the Scriptures. Children who cause trouble to their parents.
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Cain, he grieved his parents when he killed his brother Abel. Jacob's sons lied to him about their brother
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Joseph, nearly broke his heart. Samson grieved his parents by living with pagan women and fraternizing with the enemies of Israel.
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And Proverbs is not shy about making this parent -child connection. And while I am not your pastor,
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I do pastor people, and I have a sneaking suspicion that there are some of you who know all too well about this heartache that's represented in this proverb.
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The sketchiness is really just an affirmation from the quote that I gave earlier, that we can't treat people any way that we want and expect to have good friends and a strong family.
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We can't all live selfish lives and expect the social fabric to remain intact. Fools, however, do these things and therefore sow and reap destruction and discord.
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Fools create problems and bring sorrows, especially to the people in their life who are closest to them.
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And so often the topics of family and finances often come together.
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So it's no surprise either that fools don't know how to use wealth properly. 2120, precious treasure and oil are a wise man's dwelling, but a foolish man devours it.
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So fools know the price of everything, but they know the value of nothing. They spend what little money that they do have on things that are trivial and wasteful.
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So you spend your money on something even before it hits your checking account.
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It burns a hole in your pocket. While people who tend, wise people, actually people who tend to have material goods in capital because of their hard work and their stewardship and their patience, while the foolish tend to neglect thinking about the future and they just devour everything that they have in the moment.
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Fools don't know how to use their wealth properly. Now I've got one more sketching before we get the full picture in view, but before we do so,
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I just wanna answer a question that you may be thinking, because you may be saying to yourself, okay, I'm getting the picture and I see the sketches of a fool and the picture is actually a really painful one because it's a familiar one, because the fool is someone that you love.
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The fool is someone in your family. It's actually someone that you can't avoid. You regularly come into close contact with this person and there's friction that's never far from you when you're with this person because it seems like they are always out to wound you.
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Foolish people can be like coarse sandpaper. A few swipes up against a fool and you'll be destroyed.
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So what do you do if you have a fool in your life? Because it's not always possible to stay away from a fool because the person may be your spouse, could be your son or daughter, maybe it's your boss, maybe it's your coworker.
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And so given that it's unrealistic to avoid difficult people even though you want to, and given the inevitability reality of being around this foolish person, what are you to do?
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Well, this doesn't answer everything for you, but let me give you at least two simple suggestions. Give space and give grace.
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What do you do if you have a fool in your life? First of all, give space. Maybe quite literally, get away from the presence of this foolish person.
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Remove them from your social media feed. Detach and put distance between you and them.
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Back off far enough to not get pulled into the vortex of their foolishness. For example, this means that you don't always have to argue the stupid things that they say, and you don't always have to build up the merits for your argument of why you think your perspective is better.
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Or maybe giving space for some of us is a reminder that you need to be careful that you don't have a savior complex about yourself and the situation.
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Be wise how you help a fool so that you don't actually end up hurting the fool. You can't abandon them, but you can be less familiar with them.
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Jan Silvius puts it like this. She says, be kind, don't get overly involved in their stuff, and don't let them get overly involved in your stuff.
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I find that very helpful. Give space, but then secondly, give grace.
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Because brothers and sisters, having said all this about giving space, remember that you, as a Christian person, you actually must be ready to give grace.
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You must be ready to give them what they don't deserve, to give them unearned and unmerited kindness.
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You have to guard your heart from bitterness and ask God to fill you with a discerning sense of kindness.
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It's really what the apostle Paul was getting at in Ephesians 4 when he says, hey, be gentle with one another, sensitive.
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Forgive one another as quickly and as thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you. Give grace to the fool, because it was the saving grace of the
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Lord Jesus that changed your foolish heart and life. It was his unmerited and undeserved kindness that met you in your foolishness.
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Give grace. God's word will not steer us wrong in these things. It doesn't mean that it'll be easy, but it will be wise and it will be best.
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Give space, give grace. I think in an ultimate sense, the difference between the wise and the foolish is that the wise person, it sounds so simple, but listens to God's word.
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And they see foolishness in themselves when they do so, and it actually softens their heart as they engage with foolish people.
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So wise people are transformed by the wisdom of the scriptures, but the fool, which now takes us on to our final sketching, fools won't learn from God's word.
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Because why? They despise instruction, and particularly God's word. The key verse for all of Proverbs, the key that opens the door to it all is
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Proverbs 1 .7. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Fools despise, one more time, the fear of the
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Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. You remember what we said at the beginning, that the fools trust in themselves?
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This is why they don't listen to anyone else, and they won't learn from God's word. But the deceptive nature of our foolishness is that even intelligent and well -adjusted people who live with no fear of the
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Lord can actually succeed in making a good living. You probably know people in this in your life, you go, well, they don't care one thing about Jesus Christ, but they seem to be getting along fairly well, and that sometimes happens, but without Jesus, you may make a good living, but you'll never actually end up having a good life.
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Because think about it, you can have a great job that pays you lots of money and still be miserable. You can buy sex, but you can't buy love.
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You can live in a house with someone, and yet still feel all alone, because you will never flourish in life apart from having the fear of the
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Lord in your life. We've completely misunderstood the scene. If we think the foolish person is a foolish person, because of a low
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IQ or deficient education, the problem is actually the heart. The problem with the fool is that he won't revere the place of the
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Lord in his heart or submit his life to him, which is why the Bible reveals to us that the ultimate foolishness is to make anything else the center of our lives besides God.
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Whatever it may be, power, love, success, if you orient yourself around those pursuits exclusively, you will always end up being led to disappointment and disillusionment.
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People who are wise and growing in wisdom trust what the Lord says, listens to what he says, and does what he says.
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Wise people listen to instruction, especially the word of God, which means this, that the first step toward wisdom is actually having saving faith in Jesus Christ.
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In fact, in Matthew's gospel, at the end of Jesus's great sermon, the greatest sermon ever preached, do you remember how he wraps things up?
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He begins to compare two types of people. Do you remember who the two people are? The wise builder and the foolish builder.
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We won't get into it all, but essentially the point that Jesus is making is that he describes the foolish man as the one whose life is built on a metaphor, who's built on metaphorical stand instead of on the solid rock of Christ's word and wisdom.
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You see, the wise plan of God was to send his son to earth to die for our foolishness, for our sin, for our self -centeredness, so that we might be forgiven, changed, and made wise.
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Because Jesus is the only one powerful enough to transform your heart, to undo the curse of sin, to take away your old life, your foolishness, and to give you new life.
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To the ears of many, it sounds like utter stupidity. God dying in my place because I'm lost and foolish?
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But the scriptures even anticipate our reaction in these things because the apostle Paul puts it, the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved, it is the power of God.
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For those who freely admit that they are fools in need of a savior, the gospel is the power of God for salvation.
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Others may call it foolishness, but for the Christian, the work of Jesus in our place is our hope in life. The world may call you foolish for believing such things, but giving your life to Jesus and living in the fear of the
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Lord will be the wisest and best decision in life that you can make. Do you remember what
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Jim Elliott said? He was the Christian missionary who died in the jungles of South America in the 1950s.
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He died for the Lord Jesus, and one of the little sayings that he had in life was this, is that he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
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My grandfather had that written on a note and stuck on the dashboard of his car, of his truck, and I remember riding with him as a kid and going, that's pretty cool, didn't really know what it meant.
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Then I started to understand what it meant, and then I heard the life story about the fellow who actually wrote it, and then I said to myself, that's truly remarkable right there.
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Because you'll recall that Jim gave his life for Jesus as a missionary, and as he did so, he ended up being unjustly murdered or martyred by South American natives.
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But his death ended up being a picture of Jesus -driven love that the natives eventually came to understand as a picture of God's love for us in Christ.
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Why did Jim do that? Because Jim was living in the fear of the Lord, which meant that his death was an utter loss.
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It turned out to be wonderful gain. He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
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So let me ask you, are you looking foolish for Jesus like Jim Elliot did, or are you looking foolish like the sketch of the fool in Proverbs?
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You see, we're all looking foolish in one way or another. Who's fool are you?
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It's an important question. Be sure that you can give a wise answer. Let me pray.
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Father, we now plead and ask that these words that we've heard today with our ears, by your grace, be pressed into our hearts so that they would bring forth from us the fruit of good living, to the honor and praise of your name, through Jesus Christ, our
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Lord, we ask these things, amen. Well, thanks a lot to Matt.
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I hope you heard from God this morning through the word. And the reality is, I hope that we can all admit in some humility that we've, at times in our lives, played the fool, but I hope that we can celebrate as well this morning that God has reached down to save fools, even fools just like us.
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And so, if the wisdom of God is broken into your life, personally, in such a way that you've recognized
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Jesus Christ as your king and the one who was sent by the Father as the sacrifice for your sins, if you've asked him to save you based on that work on the cross, then
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I invite you to come to one of the tables in the back during this next song to take part in communion together with God's people and really, ultimately, to celebrate his awesome salvation that he's given to us through his son.
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So, if that describes your life, that Jesus Christ is your king and he is your Lord, then I invite you to come to the tables to take the cracker to remember the body of Jesus Christ broken for you, and then take the cup of juice to remember his blood that was shed for you as well.
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And then let's leave this place this morning living out the wisdom of God in the new life that we have in Jesus Christ.
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My prayer for each and every one of us here is that we would walk into 2009 shedding the foolish things and living our lives with the great wisdom of God.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for your word expressed this morning.
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Father, I thank you for the conviction, even in my own heart, of the foolishness that I see there. And Father, I pray that you would continue to be rooting it out of each and every one of us by the only tool and the only means that is possible, and that is through the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ that brings us to humility.
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Father, I pray that as we have an opportunity to come to communion this morning, that you would help us to reflect deeply on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
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And then, even with our eyes open, looking around to do this in community together, recognizing that everybody who stands in line, everybody who takes that cracker, everybody who takes up that juice is reflecting on their own lives and remembering that it took an ultimate sacrifice to bring us reconciled in wholeness to you.
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And so, Father, I pray that you would give us humility as we march out into 2019. I thank you for this word, in Jesus' name, amen.