Proverbs 1:1-7 (The Foundation of Wisdom)

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherd's Church Podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon. We pray that as we declare the

Word of God, that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who

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

When you first meet someone, it's natural, the very first thing for you to see about them is the external features.

Their appearance, the car that they drive, the house that they live in, but we don't tend to see the foundational issues that are underneath the surface until much later.

Time is a great gift in relational building in that way. Time reveals what a person is founded upon.

What is their anchor? What is their rock? What is their foundation? The more time you spend with a person, the more you will realize what actually makes them tick, what is holding everything that they believe together, and what the difference is between what they say with their lips and what they actually believe with their life.

Now storms is another gift that actually demonstrates what a person actually believes. Storms reveal what we think and how we feel and who we are.

For instance, you may walk up and look at an impressive building, and yet the foundation is the part that you cannot see, and it's the storm that can cause that building to come toppling down.

It's the storm that can expose its integrity or lack thereof. And we're the same way as humans.

I heard a pastor once say that people are like oranges. You don't know what's in them until they're squeezed. And we're a lot like that.

There's ugly things inside of us that come out when we are squeezed by life and squeezed by pain that we're like, that's not me, is it?

Yeah, it was just buried a little bit deeper than what life normally calls forth.

Today, we need to learn what the foundation for our life actually is. Because many of us have interacted with people of all different persuasions who have many different foundations for life.

But as the Bible says, there's only one foundation that will actually keep you standing in the middle of the storm, and that is the fear of the

Lord. Without that, Jesus says that your life will be built on sand, and the wind and the rain will come, and your house will become nothing.

It will come crashing down. But if your life is built on the rock that is

Jesus Christ, no matter what storm comes, your life will stand.

Now, that is why we're transitioning to the book of Proverbs. As you know, we spent three and a half years in the book of John, and that was very intentional for us.

Maybe not the three and a half years. I didn't know how long it was going to take for us to get through the book of John. But being in the book of John was very intentional because as a brand new church, we started

John before we were even six months old as a church. And we started

John because we wanted to have a foundation in the Lord Jesus Christ. We wanted to understand who

Christ is as the cornerstone. Maybe you've heard that phrase before, and you're not quite sure what that means.

He's the cornerstone. He's really important. What's more than just important? In the ancient world, the cornerstone was the most crucial stone in a building's foundation.

It was the very first stone that was laid, and every other stone that was laid thereafter was patterned off of the cornerstone.

So that if the cornerstone is off, the entire building will be off and will come crashing down.

So when Christ is said to be the cornerstone, he's the very first stone that's placed in a new temple that God is building.

You remember we talked about this in John 2 and in John 20, that Jesus brings down to rubble the old temple of Jerusalem, and he's building in its place a new temple, which is the people of God, with Christ as that first cornerstone.

The stone under which all of us have been patterned to be shaped like him, to think like him, to walk like him, to talk like him, and in connection to him.

Christ is the cornerstone. He is what our lives are to be aligned to as God builds this new temple, this eschatological temple called the church.

In John, we learned about how Christ is the son of God, by believing in him, we'll have life in his name.

We learned that how if we believe in Christ, that we will have a true and a proper foundation. But as you know, foundations are important.

They are critical, but we also need to build on top of them and actually construct a building.

We don't ride through neighborhoods where the only thing that's completed is the foundation. There's actually first floors and second floors and staircases and cathedrals are built on foundations.

We need as a church to now not move on from our foundation, but to build on our foundation.

And we need to move into a new era, the next five years, where we're building on the foundation that we've laid these first five years.

And where we're growing up into maturity of Christ so that by the end of the next five years and 50 years, and by the

Lord's grace, 500 years, that this church will be a cathedral to the glory of God, not just a foundation, but it will build upon it to the glory of Christ.

So that's why we're in the book of Proverbs, because there is, out of all the books in the Bible, it is the most practical book in the entire

Bible. If you want to know how to live in your everyday life, read the book of Proverbs. If you want to know how to build on the foundation of the gospel, read the book of Proverbs.

So that's what we're going to be doing in this series. We're going to be looking at it, and I'm not committing to a timeline, but I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 months is where we're going to be in this book, subject to change.

We're going to take this book in two phases. It's not going to be like John. John we covered expositionally, expositionally just means verse by verse through the gospel of John.

And we did that because the gospel of John is written that way. But Proverbs actually is a very unique book in the

Bible, and we will cover some of it verse by verse, but some other parts of it we will cover theme by theme.

Proverbs one through nine is typically a verse by verse section. It's the foundation of wisdom.

Christ is the cornerstone, and we need to build some other stones on that foundation, which is

Proverbs one through nine. But when we get to Proverbs 10 and Proverbs 10 through 31 more specifically, we're going to shift our approach in preaching.

Now we're an expositional church. We believe that that is the best way to preach through the books of the

Bible, but with Proverbs, you have what's called circular themes. You have the theme of masculinity that shows up in every chapter.

You have repetitive themes of marriage and of singleness and of wisdom and business of honor and integrity.

So what we're going to do is we're actually going to do something unique. We're going to take every passage in the book of Proverbs on masculinity, and we're going to preach sort of a mini series on masculinity.

We're going to take every passage in the book of Proverbs on femininity, every passage on children, every passage on business, every passage on all these great themes, and we're going to cover them as little mini series throughout this book.

And because this book is thematically oriented, we're not going to do every passage on masculinity sequentially.

We're going to do one on masculinity, one on femininity. We're going to cycle through these themes over and over for the next 18 months so that we can have a really interesting view of what the good life is, of what wisdom is, of what a life well lived to the glory of God is.

So that is the goal. Again, Proverbs, the most practical book in the

Bible. It's going to encourage us. I think it's the right book for this season of our church. It's going to encourage us to build.

It's going to encourage us to grow, to grow up in our faith. It's going to encourage us to be developed in every area of life.

Proverbs is great in one other way, because verses in Proverbs don't often show up in other books.

Like we could read the entire Gospel of John and not get to a sermon on tithing, because that's not

John's purpose. Proverbs talks a lot about money, it talks a lot about things that we don't normally bump into.

So it's going to be great in that sense. It's going to encourage us to be developed as Christians in every area of our life, so that by the end of it, we will be able to say all of Christ for all of life.

So my prayer for this book is that we would grow in wisdom, and that our lives would be pleasing to the

Lord Jesus Christ, and that in His pleasure, He would use us in this area called Chelmsford to see more people come to Christ.

That is my goal. If you will, turn with me to Proverbs chapter 1, verses 1 through 7.

And as you turn there today, we're going to be looking at four things. There's four things we're going to be covering in the very introduction to this series.

Number one, we're going to define what wisdom is, because you have to define your terms. Number two, we're going to talk about what is the source of wisdom.

Number three, we're going to talk about what is the purpose of wisdom. And number four, we're going to talk about what is the fuel of wisdom.

So Proverbs chapter 1, 1 through 7, if you will, let us read together. The Proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel, to know wisdom and instruction, to discern the sayings of understanding, to receive instruction in wise behavior, righteousness, justice, and equity, to give prudence to the naive, to the youth, knowledge, and discretion.

A wise man will hear an increase in learning, and a man of understanding will acquire wise counsel.

To understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and their riddles.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Let us pray. Lord, we thank you so much for this great book.

31 chapters of wisdom for even our longest months, a chapter for every day.

Lord, we thank you that you care about every aspect of our life. Lord, that you did not die to create mere

Christians, mere believers. As Bonhoeffer said, those who ascribe to a form of cheap grace.

Lord, you didn't die just to make professors. You died to make Christians, whole life oriented

Christians. Lord, I pray for this series. I pray that as we study all of the different facets and nooks and crannies of our life, whether it be our masculinity, femininity, our families, our marriages, our work, our stewardship, all of them.

That, Lord, you would make us a people who are conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, who are wise in very unwise days, and who by our lives are a testimony of the goodness of Christ and bring pleasure to God.

Lord, I ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Now, before we proceed, we need to define our terms.

Wisdom. What is wisdom? Well, wisdom comes from the Hebrew word chokmah. Chokmah.

You can try to say it if you'd like. It is fun to say Hebrew words. Chokmah. Chokmah is not mere intellectualism.

It is not merely the accumulation of facts and knowledge. And it is certainly not common sense knowledge level either.

It is not a natural ability that you and I have. Chokmah is something different.

For a starting definition, and we will build upon this as we go, it is a practical God -centered knowledge in life which involves knowing what is right, knowing what is just, and knowing what is fair in every situation.

It's a wisdom that gives you the ability to be able to make decisions that please

God. It is the ability to please God in life, circumstances, and in everything that you do, regardless of what you walk through.

Now, you apply this to Solomon. We learn in his life that he didn't have this ability when he began.

He had to ask the Lord for it. This is not natural talent or IQ scores or cleverness.

Solomon asks the Lord for wisdom in the beginning of his life, and the Lord answers that prayer.

So let's add to our definition now. Wisdom is God -given, spirit -directed, moral reasoning that enables a person to live in every situation in a way that pleases

God. I'll quote this in the study guide, by the way, so you don't have to furiously scramble to write down definitions.

God is the source of all wisdom. So what is wisdom? Wisdom is God -given, spirit -directed, moral reasoning that enables a person to live in every situation in a way that pleases

God. Next, where does wisdom come from? How do we get it? Well, we see that right in the very beginning of, or in the book of 2

Kings, 1 Kings actually, where Solomon is the king who's divinely appointed after the death of David.

He's the king who God divinely pursues. He's the king who God comes to.

This doesn't happen every day in the scripture. Solomon is unique in this. God comes to Solomon and says, ask what you wish, and I will give it to you.

Solomon got a blank check. Yes. I remember when

I first got into ministry, I prayed, Lord, I was terrible at remembering names.

And I said, Lord, would you please help me to remember names? And the Lord answered that prayer, and I've gotten better at it. And I was just like,

I should have asked for something more. Solomon got a blank check in 1

Kings 3, verse 5. But Solomon responds with humility and with the fear of the

Lord, which we will learn is critical to wisdom. Instead of asking for wealth and long life and victory over his enemies or a great kingdom,

Solomon says this in 1 Kings 3, 9. Give your servant an understanding heart to judge your people, to discern between good and evil.

Solomon's asking for a God -given, Spirit -directed moral reasoning that enables him to live in every way that pleases

God. And the Lord is pleased with Solomon's request. The Lord says, because you've not asked for all of these other things,

I will give you a wise and discerning heart, verse 12, which kind of gives us a paradigm for how we ask for wisdom even today.

Solomon realizes that he's finite, that he has great humility and fear. If you realize that about yourself, you're in good company.

You're in the same company as Solomon. And Solomon, instead of sitting in his insecurities and fears, he pursues the

Lord. He requests the Lord. He says, Lord, give me wisdom so that I may live in such a way that pleases you. And God responds by giving

Solomon wisdom. And then God is, because He gives Solomon wisdom, God is pleased with Solomon.

Do you see what I'm saying there? God is pleased with the life of Solomon because God first gives

Solomon wisdom. So what God is pleased with in Solomon's life is what God already gave him to equip him.

The point I'm making is, what God is pleased with in your life as well is not you.

What God is pleased with in your life is not your ability, it's not your IQ, and it's not your cleverness. What God is pleased with in you is what

He's deposited in you. And that's Jesus Christ in the same way for Solomon. What God was pleased with Solomon for was what

God deposited in Solomon before. It's really important that we remember that. And this also reminds us that wisdom and pleasing the

Lord through our life and our behavior is not just a Sunday morning activity. Solomon did not ask that he would be able to please the

Lord in the temple. He didn't relocate it that way. He says, may my life have wisdom to rule and govern your people.

That means on Monday and on Tuesday and on Wednesday and on Thursday. He's saying, may the wisdom, the knowledge, the goodness of God so permeate every facet of my life that I would be pleasing to you and live my life with great wisdom, which means that all of our life is under the banner of God's Lordship.

And we need wisdom. And as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10 31, that whether we eat or whether we drink, we do everything to the glory of God.

We need wisdom for everything. You need wisdom for your job. You need wisdom for your family. You need wisdom for your neighborhood.

You need wisdom for your dealings and your business. You need wisdom for everything because God requires glory in all things.

James 1 5 through 6 says it like this. If in case you think that you lack wisdom and all of us lack wisdom to a degree,

James says, but if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask God who gives to all generously and without reproach and it will be given to him.

But he must act in faith without any doubting for the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.

Brothers and sisters, you're in a better position to pray this prayer than Solomon because you have the

Lord Jesus Christ. Ask the Lord if you desire wisdom and ask in faith knowing that the

Lord can give you wisdom. It is not, wisdom is not your cleverness and wisdom is not your intelligence.

Wisdom is a God giving moral reasoning that is given to you so that you can please him in all facets of your life.

Wisdom doesn't come from us. It comes from him. God is the source of all wisdom and he gives us wisdom so that we will please him.

Said most simply, God wants your life to please you or to please him and he gives you wisdom in order for you to do that.

Now, our next section, the formation of wisdom. So we know now where wisdom comes from. It comes from God. We know what wisdom is.

It's a moral reasoning that allows us in every single situation to honor and glorify God. Well, where or how do we form wisdom?

How do we grow in wisdom? How do we develop wisdom so that we can have a knife that is obedient, pleasing to the

Lord? Well, there's three areas that Solomon focuses on in this passage. He focuses on intellectual formation.

He focuses on character formation and he focuses on stational formation, which we will define.

Don't worry. There's a mental, a moral and a stational aspect to the development of wisdom, which basically means all of your life.

For instance, intellectual formation. Christians are not anti -intellectuals.

We believe that we are to love the Lord our God with all of our mind and Solomon says in verse 2 that God himself will bring wisdom to the believer in their minds.

Verse 2 says that we are to know wisdom and instruction to discern the sayings of understanding.

The word there to know is yada, which means a mental cognitive ability to understand and reason things.

The other word discern, it's pronounced bean in English. It's not what that means.

Bean, to discern. It means to comprehend, to ascertain, to seek out. What God is saying here is that our minds are incredibly important in the development of wisdom and there's three ways that he will develop wisdom in your mind as a believer.

And these are things you should pray about that the Lord would develop your mind in wisdom. He will develop you, it says, to know wisdom.

He will develop you to know the kind of wisdom that allows you to please God and he will develop you to understand deep truths.

These are incredibly important for the believer. He equips us, he equips us to understand the deep truths of scripture so that we can live a life that is pleasing to God.

We live in a world, brothers and sisters, with all kinds of competing voices, with all sorts of worldly wisdom and counterfeit wisdom that's being propagated to us every day, left and right, up and down.

Woman is not woman, man is not man, and you know all of it. What the Lord is saying here is that Christians need a mind of understanding.

Christians need to be the leaders in the world as far as clarity of thought, as far as being able to discern what is from the

Lord and what is not from the Lord. We need to be able to discern these things. We need to be able to have the wisdom to discern what real wisdom is because of such lies and unwise times that we live in.

If you don't have that level of discernment, if you don't have the mental cognitive development in your faith, in the things of God, pray for it.

Ask the Lord to help you. Ask the Lord to write his word on your heart, to give you understanding of the word so that you can be wise.

James says, ask, and he gives generously, ask. Don't settle for,

I'm okay where I'm at, Jesus accepts me just as I am. Of course, he saved you just as you are, but he didn't leave you where you are.

He wants you to be developed. And we'll talk about mental development over the course of this series. Paul says in Ephesians 4 .14,

as a result, we are no longer to be children tossed here and there by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness and deceitful scheming.

Christians are not designed to be the ones who have the rug pulled over their eyes and who are the ones who are swindled.

Christians are to be the most wise people on earth, discerning the things of God and seeing what is evil and calling it what it is.

Wisdom comes from God to help you and I think and discern and to live in such a way that we are founded upon the truth and we see lies.

So that's intellectual development. There's more we could say, there's more we will say, but that's at least sort of a baseline.

The second way that God intends to develop you and I with wisdom is character development.

Proverbs 1 .3 says that we are to receive instruction in wise behavior, righteousness, justice, and equity, which mean that God gives wisdom to develop your mind and to develop your behavior as well.

The Hebrew word there is musar, which means character formation and instruction to make us obedient to the

Lord. It means discipline or correction. It means that God cares about the way that we live and just like he's going to develop us in three ways mentally, he's also going to develop us in three ways attitudinally or in our character.

It says that he's going to develop us with righteousness. That word righteousness means living in alignment with the moral law of God.

Well, if you're going to live in alignment with the moral law of God, you need to know the moral law of God. See how our mind and our behavior work together here.

It's integrated. The second thing he says is he's going to grow you and I in justice. Don't mishear that, brothers and sisters, because the left has hijacked the term justice.

God is going to grow his people in true justice, in a kind of justice which sets things right again and gives to people what they're due and what they're owed.

A pervasive, holy, and righteous, and happy kind of judgment that pervades our thinking and our behavior in all things.

We are not the ones who propagate injustices. We are Christians. Also in equity, another

DEI term that's been hijacked by the left, true equity is living with moral integrity.

It's living with a straightness of life. When someone looks at you, they don't see crookedness. When someone looks at you, they don't see a

Randy Johnson slider. Here, they see a straight as an arrow sort of person, but it doesn't deviate to the left and right in order to make their life easier or to cut corners, a person who is straight in all their ways.

These aren't abstract concepts, and these aren't woke concepts. They're practical and essential so that you and I could grow in righteousness, so that we could grow in justice, and so that we could grow in equity.

Brothers and sisters, we live in a time period where the church has adopted a kind of easy believism where it says that accepting

Jesus Christ as my personal Savior is enough. That's enough.

I don't intend to grow as a Christian. I don't intend to be developed as a Christian. I don't intend to grow in my theology.

I don't intend to grow in my life. I don't intend to grow in my character. I have Jesus, this

I know for the Bible tells me so, and that is good enough. That is not what the scriptures teach us.

The entire book of Proverbs is predicated upon the fact that once that foundation has been laid, you will be developed.

And as we talked about last week in John 21, if God is truly infinite, and he is, you have an infinite amount of days to be developed in the knowledge of God, and you will never exhaust him.

He has given us in his word a glass of water among a universe of oceans, and it will drown you in it, and you will spend the rest of eternity learning how to please this

God in exciting and thrilling ways. Heaven and the new earth will not be a bunch of stoic people holding hymnals.

Heaven will be a toe -curling, joyful experience where God is ever more joyful and satisfying to us every day we are there.

So development is essential. Jesus did not attach us to the great vine in order for us to wither or in order for us to be stagnant.

So we're in this book now so that we can be developed, and a part of that is our character.

That's our religious duty, but that's also our moral duty to grow in righteousness.

When the world sees us, they should see a righteous people. When the world sees us, they should see past us to Jesus.

Obviously, we're not the perfect picture of who Christ is, but increasingly so we should become that way.

We should be growing so that when they see our good works, they will glorify our Father in heaven.

When they see us, they should not be confused about who our Lord is. Proverbs is a book that's going to help us develop.

The other form of development here is stational. What I mean is what station are you in in life?

The book of Proverbs has something to say for you no matter where you are. If you're a babe, the

Proverbs have something to say to you. If you're a young man, Proverbs has something to say to you. If you're an old man, the Proverbs has something to say to you, and for women as well.

The book of Proverbs is for every person at every station in their life, and it's right there in the grammar.

For instance, let me read verse four through five. It says, wisdom is to give prudence to the naive, to the youth knowledge, a wise man will hear an increase in learning, and a man of understanding will acquire wise counsel.

This lays out four stages of development, not physically, but spiritually.

For instance, these sort of mirror the physical aspects of development. You all know we are born babies.

Nobody's born with a whole lot of knowledge. We're born babies. We know mama, and we know our thumb.

That's about the extent of our knowledge. That's our period, though, of greatest energy. I often remember back when

I was a child, and I think I wish as a 40 -year -old that I had the energy that I had when I was three. All horsepower, no torque.

But we grow up from that, don't we? We grow out of our years of greatest energy, and we grow into our years of greatest growth, which is like preteen, teenager, even young adult, where we're growing a ton.

Then we enter into a phase in our early adulthood all the way to the middle of our life where we enter our years of greatest production.

We go from greatest energy to greatest growth to greatest production. In our years of greatest production, say 20 to 50, we're producing a lot of things.

Our career is actually getting stronger. We're making more resources. We're supporting our family better.

We're growing a legacy of sorts, and then we enter into a final phase of life, which is our year of greatest influence from 50s to whenever we pass away, where grandchildren are coming to us, where we're not producing as much at work, but we're actually pouring our life into other people and making them better by our influence.

Well, the same is true also in the spiritual life. Solomon says right there in the beginning that wisdom is to give prudence to the naive.

This is the babe. This is the one who's a babe in Christ, who barely knows at all what it is to know

God. This word naive here is a Hebrew word that talks about a young, infantile sort of person who is inwardly focused, and that's not a bad thing.

If you're a baby, I want you to be inwardly focused. I want you to be self -absorbed, because when you have a problem,

I need to know about it. And when you scream, that's a good thing. And when people come to know

Jesus, when they're babies in Christ, they're often tremendously focused on themselves and on their development and on their prayer life, and they're all internally focused.

That's not a bad thing. The Lord uses that season in order to build you up as a babe in Christ, in order to give you prudence, in order to give you wisdom, in order to establish a foundation for you.

Do not despise that season, brothers and sisters, where you're focused on growth.

You're focused on the things that God is bringing into your life and into your heart, but you don't stay there. We don't stay as babes in Christ in the same way we don't stay as babes in our families.

We enter into a period where Solomon calls it knowledge and discretion. It's the kind of discretion is being able to challenge a fact.

If any of you have teenagers, you know that there is a transitional period that happens when they know more than you.

And they're now discerning things. They're using discretion. They're trying to figure out things. There's this natural phase that happens where they're trying now to challenge things and to figure out things for themselves.

Well, Solomon says that there is a knowledge and a wisdom that comes to this particular stage of life as well, especially for the believer who's now moved past their infancy and who is now growing to be able to kind of stand on their feet a little bit.

To be able to reading the Bible every morning is no longer a forced discipline. It's becoming natural.

Where they're starting to pray without ceasing, where they're starting to become someone in the community that people look to and say, you know, they know a couple things.

There's a natural maturation process that happens. And there's wisdom that God gives you and meets you in that phase.

There's also an era of time where you grow up as Paul talks about. And now you are beginning to pour into other people like most of us who are in our thirties and forties.

You start to have children. Your life's no longer about you anymore. You're working hard. If you're a man, you're working hard.

If you're a woman to give to these little ones around you. And there's the same thing in spiritual life. You reach a point where you're no longer developing yourself.

You're actually looking around you and seeing who are the people around me that I can begin to develop? Who are the people around me that I can begin to pour into disciple, help raise up the next generation of Christians?

There's a phase that unfortunately many in the Christian faith never reach.

All of us, unless something tragic happens, will reach this phase physically. But there's so few people in the

Christian church who actually reach the phase where their life now is more than just themselves and they exist to pour into the next generation and to develop the ones who are around them.

I pray to God that we have an entire church filled with this group of people. So that when the babes in Christ come, they will come into a church that's ready to receive them and ready to disciple them and ready to care for them.

Our life, brothers and sisters, is not about us. And you'll reach a phase in your walk with Christ where you see that.

And I pray we all reach that phase where we see that. And then there's this period of influence that Solomon talks about.

A man of understanding will acquire wise counsel like an elderly man. Your entire life now is about pouring out for others.

I think this is why the Bible calls elders, elders. Not because of age, but because of a disposition that my life doesn't exist for me anymore.

As I was coming up in the faith, I was at a very seeker -sensitive church as a new believer.

And pastoral ministry looked really glamorous on stage. The celebrity with the, I never appreciated skinny jeans, but that's a phase that I hope history forgets.

But pastoral ministry looked really glamorous. As I've been in pastoral ministry, I realize how much the pastoral ministry is a slavery of sorts in a good way.

It's a giving of yourself for a people. It is not about status. It is about that your life is not your own and you exist for a people.

And you exist for their good and you exist for their encouragement. Your time is not your own, your calendar is not your own, you're nothing.

In fact, the further you advance with Christ, the more you'll realize that nothing is your own and that everything belongs to Him, even your time.

God gives wisdom in every single phase of our life, which is encouraging. Because He expects us to grow in every phase of our life.

So let's revisit our definition. I'll give it to you again in the email. Wisdom is a

God -given, Spirit -directed, mental and moral reasoning that equips you to think, live, and act with righteousness, justice, and equity in every situation so that your life will be pleasing to God.

By the way, I asked ChatGBT if this definition was a good one and it said that it was, so it must be true. The final thing

I'd like to speak to you about is the fuel for wisdom. We've talked about what wisdom is.

We've talked about where wisdom comes from, it comes from God. And we've talked about how God intends to grow you.

He intends to grow you in your head, your heart, in your behavior, and in every phase of your life. So all of you.

So what fuels wisdom? It's fairly simple. The theme verse for the entire book of Proverbs is right here at the beginning.

The fuel for everything is verse seven, the fear of the Lord is the beginning and the end.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. If you want wisdom, then you have to begin with the fear of the

Lord. And by the way, that's not a paralyzing terror of God.

That is a worshipful awe. That is a deep, profound, and worshipful sense of the majesty of God and his supreme authority, his worth, his holiness, his majesty, his justice, while also at the same time recognizing our humility, frailty, vulnerability, and neediness.

The fear of the Lord, if you want a picture to associate with it, is Moses trembling in the cleft of the rock.

It is all of the glory of God passing by him, and yet God protecting him in his own finitude from being destroyed.

That's the fear of the Lord. It's knowing simultaneously the grandeur of God and the loneliness of your estate.

And when those two tidal waves crash against each other, all you're left with is worship.

That's what the fear of the Lord is. The Bible also talks about the fear of the Lord in various ways.

It talks about the fear of the Lord causes you to turn away from evil, Proverbs 8, 13, and 16, 6.

It says that those who fear the Lord have the eyes of the Lord watching out for you,

Proverbs 33, 18, that the Lord's mercy extends to those who fear the Lord.

Psalm 103, 17, that the Lord prolongs the life of those who fear the Lord. Proverbs 10, 27, that you will have a vibrancy of life if you fear the

Lord. Proverbs 19, 23, that you will have the greatest refuge in all your pain and struggles if you fear the

Lord. Proverbs 14, 26 through 27, that you will have a greater hatred of sin and a more passionate love for righteousness if you fear the

Lord. Proverbs 1, 7, Proverbs 9, 10, Ecclesiastes 12, 13, I think they're up there, yes. That if you fear the

Lord, you will have a life ultimately that is pleasing to God, Proverbs 1, 7, that it will be the beginning of your understanding,

Proverbs, again, 1, 7, and Psalm 111, 10, that you will be built on a firm foundation and that you will lack nothing,

Psalm 34, 9. So the core of our wisdom, and what I want us to remember all throughout this book is if you want wisdom, if you want understanding, if you want a life that's built up on the foundation of Christ, it begins with the fear of the

Lord. It's the beginning of all wisdom, it's the beginning of pleasing Yahweh, it's the beginning of walking into His blessings, and I don't mean materialism,

I mean the blessings that God gives. But here's the bad news, none of us actually fear the

Lord. As we reflect on our lives, we are more in line with Romans 3, 18, where it says there is no fear of God before their eyes.

Solomon goes on to talk about the ones who despise wisdom and instruction are called fools.

See, I've just, we've just spent this entire time talking about what wisdom is, and none of us in this room do it.

We've talked about the source of wisdom, and yet all of us have drank from the polluted fountains of the world and looked for wisdom in places other than God, and every single one of us have at times refused to be developed in our mind, our heart, and our will, and have chosen laziness and slothfulness over the things of God.

And all of us here have played the fool. We've rejected God's wisdom for human understanding, we've rejected pleasing

God in order to please ourselves. And according to Proverbs and according to Romans, every one of us deserve the wrath of God.

But this is where there's hope. This is where there's hope. Because your record is not how the

Lord is going to judge you, praise God. Because there's only one who did what we cannot do, and that's

Jesus Christ. Proverbs chapter 1, verses 1 through 7 is not describing you, it's describing

Him. It's describing the one who is the source of all wisdom who came down and dwelt among us and we beheld

His glory. We're looking at the only one who ever feared the Lord, and that's

Jesus Christ. We're looking at the embodiment of true wisdom, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Compared to Jesus who was faithful, you and I are fools. And where we failed, praise

God, He succeeded. He succeeded by His life, not ours. He succeeded by His death, even though we deserved to die.

So that what? This is the gospel, brothers and sisters, that even though we've done nothing that Proverbs has told us to do, and we're just started,

Christ did it for you. Christ traded sentences with you.

Christ deserved all the riches of heaven, and He took our rags. Christ deserved innocence because He was perfect in all

His ways, and yet He took our guilt. Christ had no stain upon His record, and yet He took our shame.

You can try all your life to obey Proverbs 1, 1 through 7, and you will never fear the

Lord in a way that will please Him because you don't have it in you. The only way, the only hope, and the only life is through Christ and Christ alone.

If you want to be pleasing to God, you must be hidden in Christ. If you want to have a life that grows in wisdom, you must be founded upon the rock who is

Christ. Brothers and sisters, in this series, I don't want anyone to be confused that you are not working harder, that you are not grinding it out, that you are not white -knuckling righteousness in your own strength.

Our life must be built on Christ and His record, and if it is not, it will crash, as we said in the beginning.

The storms will come, and our life will collapse, but if we're built upon the rock that is

Christ, this is what the book of Hebrews says to us. Now, the God of peace, who brought up from the dead the great shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, even

Jesus Christ our Lord equip you in every good thing to do His will, working in us that which is pleasing in His sight through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever.

Amen. Do you see what this is saying? For all of us who could not live up to the standards of God, Christ did, and because Christ did, and He sent

His Spirit inside of us, now that's the root of our faith, and since the root of our faith is healthy because it's in Christ, now the fruit of our faith begins to grow in wisdom.

Do you understand what I'm saying? That you're not going to be able to grow in wisdom by your power and your strength, but you will grow in wisdom if you are rooted in Christ, and that is a good place for us to stop today, because that's what the book of Proverbs is all about.

We need Christ in order to live this life of wisdom, and now that we have

Christ, may we cling to Him ferociously, may we love Him with everything we've got, may we be grateful for His finished work on the cross, and may that build us up into the kind of people who are pleasing to God.

We are pleasing to God, and yet may we grow in the pleasures of God. Amen?

Let's pray. Lord, thank You so much for today, and thank You for this book that is so just saturated with wisdom.

Lord, may we never think that by human effort, by great intelligence, by spirituality, and by human machinations that we can accomplish the kinds of things that You talk about in this book without your spirit, without your power.

Lord, let us always remember that everything we do is rooted in You. You are the only one who feared the

Lord, and because now we are hidden in You, Lord, let us grow in the fear of the Lord. Let us grow in wisdom, and let this book be a blessing, a building upon the foundation that is

Christ. Lord, we ask these things in Jesus' holy name.