Getting Help Along The Way Series

Getting Help Along the Way

The Path Series

October 24th, 2021

Scripture- Proverbs 15:22

I have a theory I want to see if you agree with me about-

I believe that…

One of the most difficult things in life is to know what you don’t know.

What do you think? Do you think that’s true?

I’ll give you a couple of examples of this from my own life.

I’ve told you before that the first time I ever showed up at a Christian bible study.

Tammie and I got saved and jumped right into the church culture that existed in the early 90’s.

You weren’t really saved unless you carried the 20 pound life application bible, complete with $70 bible cover stuffed with the last 10 church bulletins.

I remember my first bible study.

I felt very proud of myself walking into the meeting carrying the same kind of book that everybody else was carrying.

So when the pastor said, “Turn to 1 Corinthians,” it took me 5 minutes to find it. And then when I looked more carefully, I discovered that I wasn’t actually in 1 Corinthians, I was in 1 Chronicles. It took me another 10 minutes before someone saw me struggling and helped me find the right spot.

How was I to know that I could have solved all my frustration in 30 seconds by just turning to the table of contents at the front?

After a few years of being a Christian, God called me to the ministry. I’ve always been good at remembering what the bible says, just not exactly where it says it. This was before the internet really took off so if you wanted to find something in the bible, you had to spend forever looking for it.

I mentioned that to my pastor, and he showed me in his office all of the references that he had, including a book called Strong’s Concordance.

How could I have known that unless someone told me?

You’ve probably had a few of these yourself.

If you’re a parent, how could you have known that you knew nothing about parenting until the day your first child was born?

When Haley was born, I sat there holding her in the hospital room while the nurse was telling us how to take care of her when we got home. There was so much information and I’m sitting there thinking, “Wait a minute, they are actually going to let ME leave the hospital with this?”

Fortunately, we had parents, and a few older friends who helped us through those first few weeks.

If you’re in the military, on the day you reported to Boot Camp.

You realize very quickly you are not prepared, you know absolutely nothing, and if you have any doubt about that,

you have this large, very loud man telling you constantly you are a worthless excuse for a human being and it’s his job to teach you how to soldier.

In all of these cases, someone came along side to help us.

Over the last few weeks we learned about a very simple formula for getting from where we are to where we want to be.

We are learning that our Direction determines destination. That getting from point A to point B involves more than hopes and dreams—it involves a path. So far, we’ve learned that life is a series of mid-course corrections, that when we see danger, it wouldn’t be prudent to ignore it. We want to take refuge and avoid the danger.

- We’ve learned that one of the most common mistakes in determining which fork to take is trusting our hearts, because our hearts often lie to us.

And, today, I add to our learning about walking the path God has for us.

The lesson has to do with figuring out what you don’t know.

How do you do that? How do you discover what you don’t know that you don’t know so that you avoid the potholes and pitfalls and landmines you never saw coming?

Fortunately, Solomon, the author of Proverbs and the wisest man who ever lived, gave us some help with this as well. In Prov. 15:22, he wrote:

Prov. 15:22

Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.

Prayer

So, how can you know what you don’t know?

You seek advice from “advisers.” Specifically, you seek the right advice from the right advisers.

But what keeps us from doing what the bible is telling us is the right thing to do?

Why we don’t seek advice:

1. We think we already know what we need to know. (Ignorance)

2. It feels better to have people think we know where we’re going than to let them know we don’t have a clue. (Pride)

3. It’s too much work to figure out how to get advice. (Laziness) – The Bible calls this “slothfulness,” which is a word we don’t use very much, but it’s very descriptive.