How To Be A Wise Guy (Or Gal) Series

Engagement/Tension

Let me begin this morning with a question:

How many of you have made one or more foolish decisions in your life?

I certainly have and if you’re honest I’m pretty sure all of you have done that too.

• Maybe for some of you kids in school, it was the decision not to study for a test because you thought you already knew all the material. But then it turned out that you didn’t know as much as you thought and you failed the test or you got a bad grade.

• For some of us maybe it was a bad investment.

• Or maybe it was taking the wrong job.

• Maybe it was a purchase you shouldn’t have made

• For some, it was a relationship that turned out to be toxic

Unfortunately we can’t go back and change any of those decisions. But what we can do is to develop the kind of wisdom that prevents us from making some of those same foolish decisions in the future.

That’s what we’re going to be talking about for the next seven weeks as we study the book of Proverbs. We’re calling this series “Fool Proof”, which in hindsight may have been overly optimistic, since even if you diligently apply the principles we’re going to learn together it probably won’t totally prevent you from ever making a foolish decision again in the future. But hopefully it will at least help all of us not to make nearly as many of them. So perhaps in hindsight we should have called this series “Fool Reduction”, but it just doesn’t have quite the same force. so we’ll go ahead and stick with “Fool Proof”.

› Truth

The book of Proverbs is in a section of the Old Testament that is known as Wisdom literature. If you have your Bibles, go ahead and turn to your table of contents and you’ll see that the five books that make up that section are grouped together in our English Bibles:

• That section begins with Job - a book, that along with the book of Ecclesiastes, takes a look at the real world where good people sometimes suffer and evil people sometimes prosper - at least here on earth.

• Job is followed by Psalms - a collection of Hebrew poetry that is primarily focused on the corporate worship of Israel.

• Next comes Proverbs. We’ll come back to that in a moment.

• That is followed by Ecclesiastes, which I already mentioned. It asks out loud the question that we’re often afraid to ask - where is God in all the mess in the world?

• And then finally we have the Song of Solomon. Although many try to make that book into merely a metaphor for God’s love for His people, it is really an erotic love poem about a young bride and groom on their wedding night.

In the book of Proverbs we find a collection of short sayings, or proverbs, about how to live in a way that we don’t become fools. Proverbs are not unique to the Bible. In fact, this week I came across these proverbs from other sources:

• Don’t sweat the petty things, and don’t pet the sweaty things.

• Men are from earth. Women are from earth. Deal with it.

• Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.

And many of the proverbs we’ll be looking at are in the form of riddles that cause us to think about the deep things in life. Once again that kind of riddle is not unique to the book of Proverbs and I also ran across some similar riddles from other sources:

• If all the world is a stage, where is the audience sitting?

• If you ate pasta and antipasta, would you still be hungry?

• If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?

The book of Proverbs was primarily authored by Solomon, the king of Israel and David’s son. It’s like a treasure chest of precious gems of wisdom on almost every topic you can think of in life. That shouldn’t be surprising given the fact that when God promised to give Solomon anything he wanted, Solomon asked for wisdom. And as a result, Solomon is described in the Bible as the wisest man of his time.

But near the end of his life, Solomon also wrote the book of Ecclesiastes. By that time Solomon had accumulated 700 wives and 300 concubines, which alone is pretty good proof he was no longer living in accordance with the wisdom God had given him. I think that provides us with a very important and relevant warning. Living wisely requires constant diligence. It is not something that we just get once and then we have it for a lifetime. And, as we’re going to see throughout the book of Proverbs, the earlier we start to live wisely, the better.