NOTE:
This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.
› Engagement
Many of you have probably seen this meme before [Just bought a book from IKEA]. And if you’ve ever purchased anything from IKEA you certainly get it. The instructions that show you how to assemble their products aren’t always the easiest to follow. For instance, here are the instructions for how to assemble a house. [Meme]. So I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes it just seems easier to go ahead and assemble the item without consulting the instructions. Sometimes that has worked out, but far more often I end up taking things apart and going back to the instructions and starting over. That’s a perfect illustration of what we’re going to learn from our study of Proverbs this morning:
I’m never more foolish than when I think I’m wise
› Tension
I think if we’re honest, all of us would admit that there have been times in our lives where we have proven that statement to be true. And undoubtedly, we’ll do that again. But hopefully today’s passage will help us learn how to at least make those times fewer and further between.
› Truth
This is the fourth week in our current sermon series - Fool Proof. We’ve been studying the book of Proverbs to see what we can learn about living wisely and avoid being a fool. By now you’ve probably figured out we can’t possibly cover the entire book in the seven weeks we’ve allotted to it. So after covering all of chapter 1 the first three weeks, we’re going to skip ahead to chapter three this morning. Then for the next three weeks, Ryan is going to share some topical messages that will pull from the rest of the book.
Please go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Proverbs chapter 3 and follow along as I read the first 12 verses of that chapter:
Proverbs 3:1–12 ESV
1 My son, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments,
2 for length of days and years of life and peace they will add to you.
3 Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart.
4 So you will find favor and good success in the sight of God and man.
5 Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.
6 In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.
7 Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD, and turn away from evil.
8 It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones.
9 Honor the LORD with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce;
10 then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.
11 My son, do not despise the LORD’s discipline or be weary of his reproof,
12 for the LORD reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.
My guess is that for many of you, when we got to verses 5 and 6, they sounded very familiar to you. Perhaps you’ve even memorized those verses. But, while those two verses are certainly important, I’m going to suggest to you that the heart of this passage, the main idea, is found in verses 7 and 8. The reason I say that is because the structure of this section leads me to that conclusion.
You’ll notice that this passage contains six doublets, or pairs, that begin with a command and end with a blessing that comes from following that command. This is a good time to point out that these pairings, as well as much of what we’ll see in the rest of the book isn’t as much a promise or guarantee as it is a statement of the way things generally work. One commentator that I read a few weeks ago suggested that these things generally work about 90% of the time. And that seems about right. Because we live in a world that is corrupted by sin, right now there are always exceptions to these principles. In this world, the righteous suffer and the wicked often get wealthy. But if we’ll heed these instructions, our lives will almost always be more blessed than if we do not. And down the road, when Jesus returns and establishes a physical kingdom, these principles will work 100% of the time. So we ought to be practicing them now.
These 12 verses are also arranged into a pattern called a chiasm. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on this, but here is the basic idea:
• Verses 1 through 4 correspond to verses 11 -12. They are connected by the concepts of God’s teaching and His commandments and the consequences of obedience and disobedience.
• Verses 5-6 correspond to verses 9-10. There are parallel ideas of trusting the Lord and honoring the Lord.
• That leaves verses 7-8 as the focal point of the passage.
In particular I want to go back and look at verse 7 in some more detail:
Proverbs 3:7 ESV
7 Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD, and turn away from evil.
In many ways, this verse conveys nearly the same message we found in verse 7 back in chapter 1, which we said was the theme verse for the entire book. There we concluded that the wisdom that comes from fearing the Lord involves living as if God is God and I am not. The main idea we’re pursuing today, which comes directly from this verse, is essentially the same idea phrased a bit differently:
I’m never more foolish than when I think I’m wise
The opposite is also true:
I’m never wiser than when I recognize my foolishness
Here in this verse we see that a fool is wise in his own eyes. He trusts in what he can know, what he can figure out, what he can do. He’s like the person trying to put together the IKEA furniture with no directions. It might look like it’s working for a while, but ultimately he’ll have to take it all apart, read the directions and put it back together the right way. And the biggest problem is that the fool doesn’t see his folly. As we saw last week, even if someone else points that out, he still chooses to hang on to evil and to his sin and he refuses to listen to the reproof that is calling him back to God and His ways.
But the good news is that once I recognize just how foolish my own wisdom is and I choose to fear God instead, this is what I can look forward to:
Proverbs 3:8 ESV
8 It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones.
The idea here is that when I recognize that my own wisdom is worthless and I choose to rely upon the wisdom of God, that will bring a kind of healing to my life that I can’t find anywhere else. And all the other blessings promised to those who heed the commands in this passage are different aspects of this primary blessing.
› Application
So how do I make sure that I don’t become a fool by relying on my own wisdom? It’s a matter of trust in four important areas of my life. I need to choose to quit trusting these aspects of my life to myself or to the world and start trusting them to God.
HOW TO MAKE SURE I DON’T BECOME WISE IN MY OWN EYES
• Trust my heart to God (vs. 1-4)
Because this is so important, Ryan is going to preach an entire message on this idea in a couple of weeks. It is one of the main ideas we see throughout the book of Proverbs. So I won’t spend a lot of time here.
Most of the “self-help” books or seminars you’ll see in our culture today are all about techniques you can use to get what you want. Unfortunately you’ll even find some churches that operate based on that idea. But the Bible, and particularly the book of Proverbs, doesn’t operate like that at all. The principles we find there are not about changing the world to match what we want. They are about changing us from the inside out so that we’ll seek what God wants.
We really see this in these first four verses where we find the word “heart” used twice. The Hebrew word translated “heart” in Proverbs can mean the muscle inside our chest that pumps blood to our body. But in Proverbs, and elsewhere in the Old Testament, it most often describes the immaterial part of who we are. We might think of it in terms of our “personality”. It includes our emotions, our thoughts and our will.
Solomon is instructing his son to obey God’s commandments, not just outwardly, but from the heart. You’ve likely heard of the little girl who was acting up so her mother told her to go sit in the corner. “No”, she replied. The mother got really angry and yelled, “You go sit in the corner right now or you’re going to get a spanking that you’ll remember”. So the little girl went and sat in the corner, but she retorted, “I may be sitting on the outside, but I’m standing on the inside”. I wonder how often we do the same thing with God.
Solomon wants his son to remember that those commandments are an extension of the steadfast love and faithfulness of God that we see all throughout the Bible. When our obedience flows out of our appreciation and love for who God is, then we will want to obey His commands from the heart and not just obey out of obligation or fear.
The best way I know of to trust my heart to God is to delight in His Word and to pray that He might use it to impart His wisdom deep inside my heart. As I said Ryan will be going into much more detail on this principle in a couple weeks.
• Trust my decisions to God (vs. 5-6)
Verses 5-6 make it clear that we are to trust all our decisions to God, not just the “big ones”. Notice that we are to trust Him with “all our heart” and acknowledge Him in “all our ways”.
But far too often what we do is to make our own decisions without consulting God and then ask Him to bless those decisions. It is true that God has created us with the ability to reason and I believe He wants us to use that as part of the decision making process. So it may actually be a wise thing to make a list of pros and cons when we need to make a decision and to use that to help us in the decision making process. It is certainly wise to consider the possible consequences of our decisions and use that to guide us. But we should only do that after we have entrusted the decision itself and the entire process to God.
So what does that look like in real life? Before I answer that question I think it’s important to point out that most of the time, God is much more concerned about the “how” than the “what”. We have a tendency to want God to show us the exact path He wants us to take, kind of like a road map for our lives. But God rarely seems to work that way. But He does provide us with a lot of guidance on how we are to live our lives. Psalm 37 is really helpful here:
Psalm 37:3–5 ESV
3 Trust in the LORD, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.
4 Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.
5 Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him, and he will act.
Unfortunately, verse 4 is often taken out of context and used to teach that if we delight in God, He will give us whatever we want. But viewed in context, it is clear that the idea here is that if I delight in God, He will give me desires that align with His purposes, plans and ways.
Like we find frequently in Hebrew poetry, trusting in God, delighting in Him and committing my way to Him are parallel and related ideas. And all those concepts are closely related to the idea of trusting my heart to God.
So with that in mind, I’m going to give you a very simple two-step process for trusting your decisions to God:
• Delight yourself in the Lord
• Do what you want
If you’re truly delighting in God, then He will put the right desires in your heart and He will make your paths straight.
Let me give you a couple of illustrations:
Let’s suppose you’re trying to decide on which job to take. And you pray about it and ask God to guide you. You read the Bible, not because you’re going to find the specific answer there, but because you’ll find those “how” answers. You’ll see what God’s heart is concerning the way that you do your job. And then when you’ve done that, go ahead and make the lists of pros and cons and then as long as the potential jobs all allow you to work the way God wants you to work, just choose whichever one you want.
Or let’s say you need to buy a new car. Obviously the Bible won’t tell you exactly what car to purchase. I mean there weren’t even any cars around when the Bible was written, except for the one Honda in the verse where it says that all the disciples were in “one accord”. So you pray and ask God to guide you. You search the Scriptures for principles about how you are to handle your finances. We’re going to have a lot more to say about that in a moment and again in a few weeks when Ryan will address that in more detail. Again you focus on the “how” questions rather than the “what”. And once you’ve done that do whatever evaluation you think you need to do and then buy whichever car you want.
• Trust my treasure to God (v. 9-10)
Although we don’t live in an agricultural economy like that in which Solomon lived, the general principle we find here still applies. We are to honor God with the “firstfruits” of all the possessions that God entrusts to us. The whole idea that the wise way to get rich is to give our wealth away is completely contrary to what the world tells us we should do. But isn’t that exactly what Jesus taught, too?
Matthew 6:19–20 ESV
19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,
20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.
As Jesus makes very clear here, the riches that we gain by giving away our wealth, especially by investing it in His kingdom, are not necessarily measured in dollars and cents. Neither Jesus or Solomon are teaching anything even close to what we know as the “prosperity gospel” here.
But when we take the very best of the material resources that God has entrusted to us for our stewardship and we invest them in furthering God’s kingdom rather than hoarding them for our own pleasure, we always receive a blessing that far outweighs any material possessions that we might gain by hanging on to that for own selfish desires.
Ryan is going to go into this principle in much more detail in a few weeks.
• Trust my sin to God (v. 11-12)
It is impossible for any of us to do the things we’ve been talking about this morning perfectly. None of us can trust our hearts, our decisions, and our treasure to God on our own. At some point we’ll end up going back to what is wise in our own eyes. We’ll be foolish because we think we’re wise.
But the good news is that when we get off track, God loves us enough that He will discipline us to try and get us back on track. That’s a concept we’ll see again when we get to Hebrews chapter 12 some time next year.
Those of us who are parents certainly can relate to this idea. When our children disobey, we discipline them, not because we want to hurt them or cause them pain, but because we love them and we don’t want them to let that disobedience develop into a lifestyle because we know in the long run that will be harmful to them.
Well God loves us even more that we love our children. So He disciplines us as necessary in order to continue to do the work He started in us the very moment that we committed our lives to Jesus - to make us more like Him. Paul put it this way:
Philippians 1:6 ESV
6 And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
I will never forget the day that one of our children, who will remain nameless, responded to a spanking by saying “that didn’t hurt”. So of course the result was an even harder spanking. I’m pretty sure that at some point in our lives, we’ve responded to God’s discipline like that too. And when we don’t respond appropriately to a gentle spanking God often has to resort to more painful discipline to get our attention.
So obviously the wise thing is to respond the first time God brings some sin to our attention. We talked a lot more about how to do that last week when we focused on how reproof can be a blessing in our lives.
We’ve seen today that...
I’m never more foolish than when I think I’m wise
› Action
As we just said, all of us are prone to being foolish in all these areas. On our own, we’re incapable of trusting God like we should. But fortunately, the blessing that comes from heeding these commands is not dependent on our own obedience, but rather on the faithful work and obedience of Jesus. He is the only human to ever fully trust God in every area of His life. So He is the only one worthy of these blessings. But the good news of the gospel is that Jesus took the penalty for our disobedience on Himself on the cross so that we can enjoy them, too.
That means that the most foolish thing we could possibly do would be to try and approach God on our own terms or try to earn His favor on our own. He is a holy God and the only way we can confidently approach Him is to put our faith and trust in Jesus alone. When we do that, we become clothed with the righteousness of Jesus and when God looks at us, He no longer sees our sin, but instead sees His Son.
So if you’ve never made the decision to trust Jesus alone as the only way to God, won’t you do that today? Perhaps you still have some questions about how to do that or exactly what that decision involves and we want to make sure that you have the proper information and that you’ve wisely considered the cost of following Jesus before you do that. Ryan and I and any of our Elders would love to discuss that with you some more. Just let us know that you’d like to do that.
Most of you joining us today have already made that decision. But every day you are faced with many more decisions - some really big ones and some others that might seem insignificant. To some extent, I think our natural tendency is to think we can handle those decisions on our own. But as we’ve seen this morning, that is actually a very foolish thing to do.
The wiser choice is to delight yourself in God, trust your heart and your decisions and your treasure to Him, so that He can guide you into His wisdom. That is not something you can do just once, or even just once a week. It is something we must all intentionally choose to do on a daily and even a moment-by-moment basis. That is the only way to receive the blessings that God wants you to have.
› Inspiration
Trying to assemble and IKEA product without the instructions is probably going to be a frustrating experience. But that is not nearly as frustrating as trying to live our lives without consulting God’s instructions for our lives and trusting Him completely in every area of our lives. But the good news is we don’t have to live like that. If we’ll trust God moment-by-moment, He will bless our lives in ways we can’t even imagine.
