SERMON: Wisdom and the Hands (Part 1)

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Mordsday sermon. And we pray that as we declare the Word of God, that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word and may the Lord be with you. Over the last several weeks, we have been working through what we've called the anatomy of wisdom. And to do that, we've been looking at the human body one part at a time in all of the various ways that Proverbs speaks about it.

And we've been asking, what does it look like when the Spirit of God gets a hold of each part of the body and begins sanctifying it and begins ordering it and filling it full of wisdom? What will that look like?

What will that look like in our eyes when our eyes are filled with sanctifying wisdom? What will that look like in the heart and the ears and the feet and the mouth? And last week we came to the stomach.

And we learned that the stomach is the seat of our appetites. And we found out that our belly is fundamentally a liar. We saw how it lies to us about the taste of sin, the end goal of sin, the sanctification and the need for sin, and even lies to us about who we are in relationship to our sin, trying to root our identity in our sin.

And in all of that, we've covered a lot of ground so far. And we've looked at almost every major part of the body, the eyes, the heart, the ears, the feet, the mouth, the belly. But there's a part of the body Proverbs speaks about that we have not yet looked at.

Wisdom Reaches the Hands

And that is the part of the body that responds to all the other parts of the body. And that part of the body, that once your head begins to believe something is true and once your heart begins to love and rejoice in the things that are true, then it will inevitably trickle down into your hands where the implementation of obedience actually occurs.

Think about it this way. The head learns to believe a thing. The heart learns to love the thing. And then the hands begin to obey that thing. And that is what we're going to be looking at today as we focus on the final stretch of this wisdom series, focusing on the hands.

And underneath everything that we're going to be looking at today is a question that's really been sitting underneath all of the messages in this mini series on wisdom. And that is to what end? When God opens our eyes to what end?

Why does he give us hearts that love what is good? Why? What's the purpose? Why does he open up our ears to receive wise counsel and long for hearing wise counsel? Why does he order our steps and our feet, tame our tongue and govern our appetites?

What's the purpose? Is the goal simply that we would become people who know more about wisdom than someone else? Or that we could sit around congratulating ourselves for not being fools? Certainly not.

Everything that we've studied in this series has been moving us somewhere from the eyes, to the mind, to the heart, and eventually to our fingertips. Because wisdom has not finished its work in us until what we know and what we love and what we believe and what we cherish actually begin to come out of us through our hands.

Doug Wilson has put it this way. Your theology will come out of your fingertips. It's a great way of thinking about it because our hands always do what we most love. That's our theology. That's who our God is, where our hands end up serving.

And that's the burden of these final couple of messages in this wisdom series that we want to see what our hands must do. When the rest of our body has been ordered, when the rest of our body has at least began the process of coming under the sanctifying power of Christ through his wisdom in our life, what does that do for our hands?

And what we will see is that when wisdom has done its complete work, it affects and employs our hands in a variety of different ways. Causes our hands to work, causes our hands to prepare, causes our hands to build, to establish, to rule, to govern.

And because there's simply too much information on the hands in the book of Proverbs for us to do a single sermon on that, we're going to do it in two parts this week and next week. I told the gentleman upstairs today as we were praying as a consistory that we are landing the plane, but a little unassuredly because we extended the landing to two weeks.

And it's a dreadful thing when a plane hangs up in the sky for too long. So I don't want to do that. But we are coming down. We're going to do this in two weeks. This week, we're going to be looking at the hands and how they prepare, because wise hands prepare.

They do the necessary work before the goal has been accomplished. So they prepare for things. And then also wise hands establish and they take what has been built. They take what God has given us and they make it stable.

They turn convictions into culture. They fill the household with the things that God has given us. And they make it something worth inhabiting. Our hands prepare and our hands establish. And with that, I'm going to read our passages for this morning.

I'm going to pray and then we're going to look at that very thing. Proverbs 24, 27, prepare your outside work, make it fit for yourself in the field and afterward build your house. Proverbs 31, 16 through 18.

She considers a field and buys it from her profits. She plants a vineyard. She girds herself with strength and strengthens her arms. She perceives that her merchandise is good and her lamp does not go out by night.

Proverbs 24, three through four, through wisdom, a house is built and by understanding it is established by knowledge. The rooms are filled with all prescient, precious and pleasant riches. And then Proverbs 14, one, the wise woman builds her house, but the foolish pulls it down with her hands.

Let's pray, Father. Thank you that you have so kindly spoken to us in your word about all of the different ways that wisdom can be applied to every facet of our body, from our feet to our head, from our heart to our fingertips.

And Lord, we thank you that your word is so practical in that way, that it can teach us what obedience to you looks like now that we're Christians, now that we've been indwelled by the spirit of God. What does that mean for our lives?

What does that mean for our head and our heart and our hands? Lord, help us today as we consider these things. To remember that your truth is good in every circumstance. It instructs us in how we are to live.

And in everything, Lord, our life, our thoughts, our loves and our actions are to bring honor and glory to you. It's in Jesus name we pray. Amen. Now, there's a question underneath everything that we're going to be looking at this morning.

It's a very simple question. Now that God has governed the whole of you, now that he's taken your eyes and your heart and your ears and your feet, he's purchased them, your mouth and your belly. And he's purchased them on the cross of Christ and brought them underneath his lordship.

What does that mean for your hands? Or to ask it another way, what are your hands for? Because everything we studied in this series has been moving in that direction. The eyes learn to see what is true.

The ears learn to hear what is wise. The heart learns to love what is good. The feet learn to walk in the right direction. The mouth learns to speak what is fitting. Your appetites learn to desire what is holy.

But eventually all of that has to make its way into your hands because our hands are where the inner man finally reaches out and touches the world. So when I talk about hands this morning, I'm simply talking about the things we do.

The hands are where our thoughts and affections become action. The hands themselves represent the work that we perform, the decisions that we make action on, the habits that we hold and practice, the money that we spend, the things that we repair, the people that we serve, the responsibilities that we either take hold of or neglect.

All of these are signified in the book of Proverbs by our hands, the organ that we use to accomplish everything. For instance, your eyes can see a field. Your heart can desire the field. Your mind can make plans for the field.

Your mouth can begin communicating all those good plans about that field. But eventually, if you're going to do anything, you actually have to grab hold of the field, take a plow in your hand and start working it.

And that's the great difference between wisdom as an idea and wisdom as a way of life, because whenever wisdom is applied, your hands have to be involved. Those hands have to be working and prepping and building something.

Those hands have to have calluses. And Solomon is going to show us that wise hands actually do many things. But today we're going to talk about the two things, wise hands prepare and wise hands establish.

Wise Hands Prepare Before They Build

And we're going to begin by talking how wise hands prepare. Proverbs 24, 27 says, prepare your outside work, make it fit for yourself in the field and afterward build your house. Now, at first glance, that seems like advice that you would get in a better farming magazine.

And in some ways it is good advice for farming. But it also teaches us something much larger than just the proper ordering of a field. It teaches us something about the proper ordering of our life. For instance, the field was literally the place of productive ground.

It's the place that sustained the household. It's the place where fruit and vegetables could be grown that would feed the people who live inside the house. So when you apply this beyond farming, we're talking about whatever work and skill and income and planning and preparation or responsibilities that must be put in order, in order that our life and our home may actually be sustained.

Now, notice the order. Solomon doesn't begin with the house. He begins with the field. That's important. He says, prepare your outside work and then make it fit for your home. Afterwards, build your house.

Because in the ancient world and in ours as well, the field is where most of your food came from. The field is where your livelihood began. The field produced what your household ate and the field produced what your household could produce and sell.

So if you built yourself a very beautiful house without preparing the land, you have just built yourself a very beautiful coffin. Why is that so hard to say? It's a dark image. You've built yourself a very beautiful coffin.

You've built yourself a place where you can live as you starve to death. And that's Solomon's point. Wisdom secures the means before it ever enjoys the results. Wisdom plants before it harvests. Wisdom provides before it consumes.

Wisdom prepares before it possesses. And that's where wisdom moves from the mind and the heart down into the hands. The wise man doesn't merely understand what needs to happen first. His hands actually begin doing the first things first.

Wise hands prepare today what wisdom intends to build tomorrow. For most of us, the field is not acreage. We live in a time period where we're very blessed, where we go to Market Basket or wherever else.

Market Basket is the great cultural center of the world. You will find all kinds of culture there, and it is lovely. Most of it. For most of us, again, our acreage is not a field, but it may be a trade that I need to learn.

Maybe a budget that I need to make. Maybe debt that I need to pay down. Maybe a skill that I need to develop. It may be a conversation that I need to have. Maybe a discipline that I need to establish.

And one of the things that marks the fool is that he reverses the order. The fool wants the house before securing the food supply. The fool wants the marriage before having the income to support her. The fool wants the pickup truck before he has made enough money to pay for it.

He wants the title before he has worked hard enough to earn it. He wants to enjoy tomorrow without doing the necessary work. He wants to be like Mike without getting up at four o 'clock in the morning for basketball practice before basketball practice before the basketball practice.

He wants his hands full of the harvest when those hands have never even worked in the field. And that's what makes wisdom different. And it puts wisdom in the opposite direction. Wisdom asks, what needs to be prepared now so that I can actually build later?

You can't build until you prepare. You can't build until you've dug a foundation. What do I need to do now that will allow what I build with my life to actually stand and be given to my generations? And usually that means doing the work that nobody else sees.

Clearing the stones, breaking the ground, planting the seeds, waiting for the harvest. Think about it. That's not the glorious work of being a farmer. That's the part of the work that nobody sees. Nobody appreciates.

They, they, they want the harvest, but you got to do all those things first before you get there. And nobody actually hangs a picture on their house of an empty field. They hang a picture of a house, but they have to get there through the field.

Look at how Solomon examples this or illustrates this in Proverbs 31, 16 through 17 about a woman, a wise woman, the wise woman, the pinnacle of wisdom. When it comes to womanhood in the scripture, she considers a field and buys it.

From her profit, she plants a vineyard. She girds herself with strength and then she strengthens her arms. Look at the verbs. It says that she considers, she prepares. And then after she's considered, she buys it.

She plants it. She girds it. She strengthens herself. Her wisdom began in the consideration and the preparation, not in the purchase. Eventually her wisdom reached the arms and employed her hands, but it was preparation first.

The woman is not waiting around, hoping that something productive will happen to her. She sees a piece of ground. She considers what it could become. And then she puts forth the energy and effort and work to get it to where she wants it to be.

That's wisdom. Wisdom does not merely see the potential, but it cultivates it. And it does so early in the process through preparation. Wisdom doesn't merely dream about fruit. It plans for it. Wisdom doesn't merely admire the field.

It puts the hand to the plow and plows the field and keeps on plowing the field and keeps on plowing the field and keeps on plowing the field. Because in the case of Proverbs 31, this meant an actual field and vineyard.

In our case, it might mean something else like a spreadsheet or fixing what is broken or doing something around the house that needs to be continually maintained in order for it to be well and good, because here's the thing that we have to remember about a field and about life, a field doesn't continue in fruitfulness simply because we've prepared at one time.

Yeah, we're supposed to prepare for fruitfulness, but if we only prepare once, that's not enough. We have to continually prepare and plow, prepare and plow. Look at Proverbs 24, 30 through 34. I went by the field of the lazy man and by the vineyard of the man devoid of understanding.

And there it was all overgrown with thorns. Its surface was covered with nettles. Its stone wall was broken down. When I saw it, I considered it. Well, I looked on it, received instruction, a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest.

So shall your poverty come like a prowler and your need like an armed man.". Notice what happened. The field was prepared at some point. Someone had the wisdom in order to make preparation. Someone planted a vineyard.

Someone cleared out the ground. Someone built the wall and someone eventually, or someone did all of the wise things that were needed to get that field going, but eventually the hands stopped moving. And that's where the collapse began.

Not in the beginning, but slowly over time. He didn't stop knowing what a vineyard was for, a vineyards for the grapes. He didn't necessarily stop wanting the vineyard to prosper. He wanted the wealth that came from it.

But what he did was he stopped employing his hands. And once the hands folded, the wilderness began to take over. The man didn't burn the vineyard down. He simply neglected it. He folded his hands and by doing nothing that did everything.

Because he quit preparing, he quit tending, he quit plowing. He quit mending. The thorns came back. The nettles came. The walls begin to erode, cracks formed, rocks fell out of place. And the wall eventually came down.

The cultivated ground became wilderness again with no effort whatsoever, which gives us one of the great contrasts in the book of Proverbs, folly folds the hands, which leads to chaos. Wisdom fills the hands, which leads to order.

Sometime folly looks like open rebellion where you do something really stupid. I've been there, but sometimes it often looks like neglect. Not doing anything. And this is because the fool doesn't always need to actively destroy something or actively burn something down or actively take the wrecking ball to something.

Sometimes all he needs to do is stop tending it, stop working it. And the thorns and the thistles will do the rest. And you can see this all over new England. Actually, if you drive 15, 20 minutes from here and take a walk in the woods, you'll find an old stone wall running through a mature forest.

And you're like, why did somebody build a wall in the middle of a forest? They didn't. Somebody originally cleared that ground. They stacked those stones. They planted the crops there that would feed a household from the soil.

And now 80 foot trees grow all the way around it because someone at some point stopped working, their hands stopped plowing. And it was not because someone came along and destroyed the farm or because they thought, oh, this would look more beautiful with 80 foot trees.

It was inactivity. It was apathy. It was neglect over a long period of time. That's why you have walls in the middle of the forest. And it's certainly true of a field, but it's also true of a marriage.

If you stop mending your marriage, if you stop working on your marriage, if you stop tending to your marriage, then chaos, decay, and death will slowly creep into your marriage to when the 80 foot trees of rebellion have choked out the life of your home, the thorns and thistles will overtake it eventually.

If you just do nothing, it's true of a child. If you stop correcting them, stop disciplining them, stop caring for them. Then chaos and recklessness will creep into the life of your children. It's true of a church.

If we stopped holding fast to the biblical convictions that God has given us, if we stopped holding to sola scriptura, if we stopped holding to the faith once for all delivered to the saints, then don't you worry.

Missional drift would creep in, liberalism would creep in, and before long, you would have a lime haired colored lesbian and a multicolored robe preaching from this very pulpit. It doesn't happen instantly.

It happens slowly. It happens over time. You can read the history of the PC USA and you can see it. A little folding of the hands here and their ruin came upon them. If you take your hands off the wheel of any aspect of your life, you'll end up in a ditch.

Everything God has given you, everything that God has given you is just a decade away from a wilderness. If you do nothing, everything, and I mean real things again, like your marriage, your finances, your vocation, your physical health, do nothing.

And you'll see the chaos creep in our communion with God. Do nothing. Don't read, stay fat on yesterday's graces. Don't spend time with the Lord and you'll see entropy come in and the people whose care that God has placed in our hands.

If we do nothing, entropy, chaos, friction will enter our relationships. The wilderness will overtake any area of your life where you do nothing, where you don't employ your hands and godly work. If you don't have the ongoing work of mending, plowing, tending, the weeds and the thorns will come in.

And that presents a danger because I can look at the sluggards field and I can look at it and say, wow, that man really mismanaged his life. I can walk through the forest of New England and say, oh, what a dummy.

Somebody lost their farm and now the only thing that's left here is a silly wall. And yet God has put things in my hand that need work, that need tending, that need preparation, need cultivation. And the question that that forces to ask me and it forces us to ask each other is what has God given us that we've abandoned to the thorns?

Where have I been wanting fruit but refuse to do the work to get it? Where have I been asking God for a great harvest while leaving the plow in the barn? Maybe I want financial stability, but have I learned restraint in my spending?

If I've not made a budget, if I've not developed my skills in finances, if I've just frivolously spent my money and did nothing whatsoever to cultivate discipline, I should not be surprised if I am in financial ruin.

If I want a strong marriage and I've stopped learning and I've stopped growing and I've stopped pressing into godly leadership, I should not be surprised when my home is filled with chaos. If I've stopped asking questions, stopped listening to my wife, stopped pursuing my wife, stopped repenting quickly in my relationship with my wife, I should not be surprised when it grows cold and distant.

I often know what needs to be correcting, but I don't want the conflict that it will take. I often know what needs to be improved through teaching, but I'm tired. I know what habits need changing, but it's often easier to say, I'll do that next week and then next week and then next week and a little folding of the hands, a little sleep.

And the things in my life have turned to ruin. And that's the lie, isn't it? We tend to think in such small windows and that's what sin does. Sin says, oh, don't worry about it, you can get it next week and then next week comes.

Oh, don't worry, you can get it next week and the next week comes. Oh, you can get it next week. And before long, you've had 20 years of next week's. It's lulled us to sleep, we've stopped working. And when we get to the 20 year mark, we shouldn't be surprised when the chaos has crept in and choked it out.

And maybe there's work that God has put directly in front of you as well, a skill that you need to develop that you haven't, a conversation that you need to have that's going to be difficult, but you need to have it, a responsibility that you keep postponing and putting off, a habit that you need to kill, a sin that you need to mortify, something that you need to finish.

And you keep telling yourself, I'm going to get to that tomorrow. I'm going to get to that when life calms down. I'm going to be honest with you, it doesn't. Like your schedule now is probably what it's going to be.

Until you're too old to do it anymore. And then you're going to have an excuse then to, when I have more time, God's giving you enough time when you feel ready, mortify your feelings because you're never going to feel ready.

When somebody else helps me, nobody's going to help you. Maybe they will, but just pretend like they're not and do something. The thorns don't stop coming while you keep sitting. The thorns will keep coming.

They will overtake everything you care about if you do not put your hands to righteous, godly effort. The wilderness never says, you know what, I'm going to come back when it's convenient for you. It grows whether you want it to or not.

And all of that means that I don't have to hate my marriage to sabotage it. I just have to neglect it. It means that I don't have to hate my children in order to ruin their future. I just need to neglect them.

I just have to stop disciplining them, stop instructing them, stop paying attention to them and chaos will do the rest. I don't even need to renounce my faith in God in order to have it shipwrecked. I just need to abandon it, stop cultivating it and allow the second law of thermodynamics to do what it does best to have its way with my faith.

I only have to keep putting off spending time in prayer, reading God's word, deprioritizing the means of grace that God has given me, elevate other things in priority, and before long, I will feel far from God.

So the question is not, what do I hope God gives me? The question is, what has God already given you that you need to continue tending today, tomorrow, forever? At least as long as you have breath in your lungs.

What in your life needs preparation? What in your life needs repairing? What in your life needs pruning or planting or cultivation or fixing or finishing? Where's the brokenness in your life? Look, ask and labor there.

Wisdom does not stand at the edge of the field admiring what it could become. Wisdom puts the hand to the plow and works and the hands prepare it. That's the first thing that I want us to see, is that wisdom would cause our hands to make preparations.

Whatever God has given you, you tend it, you keep it, you work it, you maintain it, knowing that God will bring the blessing through a long, faithful obedience in the same direction as Eugene Peterson once said.

The small, ordinary acts of faithfulness eventually will add up to a life of blessedness, but it takes that preparation to get there. It takes that faithfulness to get there. That's the first thing, that wisdom prepares.

Wise Hands Establish a Household

The second thing is that wise hands establish. Proverbs 24, 3 -4 says, Through wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established. By knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.

I want you to notice after we've made preparation, the different kinds of work now that our hands get to be a part of. Solomon lists three of them here. We get to build, establish, and fill. Solomon is describing something that's so much larger than getting walls upright and putting a roof over them.

He's describing faithful creation of an entire household. He's not, and by household, I'm meaning something very concrete. I mean a husband, wife, children, if God gives them that, a table, money, schedules, worship, work, conflict, hospitality, discipline, rest.

I'm talking about all of it, as well as the ordinary habits that it takes to establish a household under a single roof. Solomon is not describing the physical wood building called a house. He's describing a home that becomes stable and ordered and enduring and teeming with life through great preparation and work.

And Solomon says that every part of that work comes from wisdom. Wisdom builds the house, understanding establishes the house, knowledge fills the house, which tells us that a godly home is not produced by frivolous things.

A godly home is not produced by luck, money, square footage, the right neighborhood, the right school district. A godly home is built by men and women whose minds know the things of God, whose heart loves the things of God, and whose hands are faithfully working obedience to God.

That's what wise hands do. They not only prepare, but they also establish. And it's funny that it says it is established here, understanding by understanding it is established because Solomon is saying that through wisdom, the house is built and by understanding it as established, those are not exactly the same thing.

Building a house brings something into existence, but establishing a house gives it stability. There's a deeper layer to the establishing of the house. A structure can still be built and still be weak.

Walls can still be upright with the foundation that's shallow. A roof can be finished while the frame is unable to bear the weight. So when Solomon says that understanding establishes the house, the idea is that wisdom doesn't merely get something started.

Wisdom takes what has been built and makes it firm enough to stand for the future. And that same thing applies to our families. It's one thing to create a family. It doesn't take a whole lot of, it doesn't take a whole lot of faithfulness to create a family.

A man and a wife can create a family, but it takes wisdom to establish a home. An established household in that way has convictions that will make that home strong enough to carry the weight of ordinary life for decades and will hand them off to the next generation.

When the money becomes tight, the established household, the one that has put themselves under the wisdom of God, when the money becomes tight, they won't abandon what they believe. When sickness or death comes, an established household may grieve, but they don't surrender the truths where they stand.

When emotions become heated, truth doesn't become negotiable. Excuse making doesn't become precedent. When the surrounding culture changes its standards, the established household does not change with every passing wind.

The established household stands because something has been built there deeply enough to make it firm. And that raises the next question. How do we establish that kind of house? Because after we've made the preparations, after we prepared for those things, how do we actually do it?

How do we establish our household, our home with our hands? Well, it's quite easy, actually. Let me rephrase that. It's simple. It's not easy. We already know the answer. The implementation, though, is the hard part.

You want to establish a home? Well, wise hands would lead your family and family worship. Wise hands would establish a home in the truth of God. Wise hands would establish a home and where sin is confessed joyfully.

Instead of with shame and frustration, a wise hand would establish a home where forgiveness is practiced quickly with smiles, with hugs, wise hands would establish a home where work is honorable, where marriage is honored, where strangers are welcomed.

Wise hands establishes a house where children are raised in the fear and the admonition of the Lord. Wise hands establish a home in which the Lord's day is not treated like just another day, but one of the great rhythms around which our entire life is ordered.

Wise hands establish that a portion of my portion goes to the ministry of God, set apart for the work of the Lord. And none of that is established by doing it once. It's established by rhythms that go on and on and on.

Decisions that are made once, implementation that goes on. For instance, a single family dinner doesn't establish a household. Two evenings in a row of family worship doesn't establish a household. One heartfelt conversation, one family meeting doesn't establish a household.

One good Sunday service a month doesn't establish a household. Establishment comes when faithful things become repeated things, where convictions slowly become practices, where practices become habits, where habits become customs and where customs become culture.

So where the culture of your home is simply the air that your children breathe. That's why establishing a household requires so much more than just merely believing the right things and loving the right things.

They actually, we actually have to implement and do the right things. The convictions in our heart must become the habits in our hands. Our convictions must turn into culture. And by culture, I mean, what is normal in your home, what everyone quietly accepts as this is just who we are.

That's your culture. What is your culture made of? Is it made out of worshiping on Sunday, eating at the table together, apologizing when we sin, phones stay off at the table, guests are welcome, work gets finished, the Bible actually has direct impact on what we do in our life.

Or is it defined by something else? The mind may understand something in a moment. The heart may come to love it very deeply, but if the hands don't practice that conviction again and again and again, it will not become a part of the culture of your home.

Conviction must be embraced, but faithful hands have to embody that conviction a thousand times before it ever becomes a part of the culture of your home. It is that repeated embodiment of wisdom that transforms a household into one that is established.

And it's so easy for us to look at our life and say, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to do family worship, I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it this one time, maybe two times, I'm going to do it three times.

We don't start out that way, but that's how we end. And we say, oh good, check that off my list. No, you want your home to have a culture, you have to be faithful thousands of times and inglorious ordinary ways in order to build what God would have you build.

Solomon takes this even one step further. He says, by knowledge, the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches. Solomon is saying that every house is being filled with something. And we obviously know that he's talking about more than filling rooms.

He's not talking about going to Jordan's and getting a credit card and filling your house full of $20 ,000 worth of stuff. Actually Jordan's, that might be one room, but you know what I mean? Every household is being slowly filled with something, some kind of culture, some kind of habit, some kind of words, some kind of expectations, some kind of memories.

It's either going to be worship or it's distraction. It's either going to be hospitality or isolation. It's either going to be repentance and forgiveness or resentment and bitterness. The rooms of your house are not going to remain empty.

The rooms of your home, your life are not going to remain empty because we are always filling them with something. There is no such thing as an unfilled house in the same way that there's no such thing as an unfilled life.

We are filling it with something. The question is what? Culture is made up of what we consistently carry into our life, faithfully applied over decades. So let's make this practical. Wise hands, put food on the table, open the Bible at the table, wash the dishes that someone else has dirtied, put the children to bed at a faithful time, embrace the spouse, repair what's broken, prepare the meals, welcome people through the door.

None of these acts look particularly spectacular in isolation, but most of them and most of them will never be applauded by anybody. You're not going to have a biography written about you if you do these things.