How to Have a Heart of Wisdom • July 26, 2026 • Matthew Spradlin • Ecclesiastes 10-11–20

Welcome to the Valley Baptist Church sermon podcast.

We're so glad you're here, and we hope this message inspires you,

builds your faith, and moves you toward a deep relationship with God.

Today, you'll find great insight into the Bible

and learn how you can apply it straight to your life.

So welcome and enjoy the message.

If you have your Bibles, I want to welcome you and those joining us at Olive Drive

to open your Bibles to Ecclesiastes chapter 10.

Ecclesiastes 10 · chapter mention

We're going to continue our series of messages through the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes.

Now, Ecclesiastes was written by a man by the name of Solomon.

And Solomon was the wisest man who had ever lived.

And one of the things that he's going to address in this passage is how to be wise in our words

and in our work.

Now our words, what we say, our works and what we do

are very powerful within our life.

And if we can learn to follow the Lord

and to surrender to the Lord our words and our work,

then I think that we would have a new relationship

with the Lord.

We would have a new relationship with ourselves,

with our family and with God.

others. But the first thing that you need to understand and that I need to understand

is that it all begins in your heart. And so look what he says in chapter 10 and verse 2.

He says, a wise man's heart is at his right hand, but a fool's heart is at his left.

Solomon says that wisdom and foolishness begins in the heart

and kind of works its way out.

And so here's the big idea of the passage

that we're going to look at today.

Your words and your work make visible

what is invisible inside of you.

Now, where do our words come from?

What motivates our work?

Well, Solomon says it is your heart.

Now, when the Bible speaks about your heart,

it's not talking about an organ beating in your chest.

It's talking about the control center of a person.

It's talking about what you love, what you desire,

and what you think about.

And so if we want to change our words and we want to change our work, we have to change

our heart first.

Now the problem with that is that you and I can't change our heart on our own.

We need the work of the Holy Spirit to change our heart because our hearts can become hard.

Our hearts can become broken.

Our hearts can be divided.

And what we need is for the Holy Spirit

to renew in us a new heart

so that we can have a heart that has the right type of words

and the right type of work.

Look what he says in verses 11 and 12.

He says, a serpent may bite when it is not charmed.

The babbler is no different.

The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious, but the lips of a fool shall swallow him up.

Now, I think the idea here is that once a snake has bitten you, it doesn't do any good to charm it after that.

The damage has already been done.

The venom has already been applied.

And harmful words have a way of sticking in you.

They have a way of sticking with you.

They have a way of staying in you

and they're hard to get out of you.

And so if your eyes say something harmful to someone else,

it's very hard to take those words back, isn't it?

And so Solomon is saying use helpful words,

not hurtful or harmful words.

Now our words are meant to help and to heal, not to harm.

Sometimes just listening to someone and talking to them

can be like a medicine to their soul.

And when you genuinely want what is absolutely best

for someone else, your words become helpful

and your words become gracious.

A wise heart is a gracious heart.

And a gracious heart produces gracious words.

Now being gracious doesn't mean that we shout grace and we whisper repentance.

What it means is that we speak the truth in love, that we love people enough to rejoice

in the truth.

So we need to be full of grace, but we also need to be full of truth.

Now most of us gravitate to one extreme or the other.

Some of us are truth people.

You stand on the word of God.

You don't compromise the truth,

but maybe you struggle to have grace toward others.

I want to remind you or share with you some words that my wife once shared with me.

Grace is truth.

Forgiveness is truth.

Mercy and compassion is truth.

If you want to be committed to the truth, make sure you're committed to the whole truth.

And grace is a part of that.

Now, some of us are so full of grace that maybe you struggle to ever hold anyone accountable.

You struggle to ever say that anything is a sin.

You struggle to talk about repentance within your life or within the life of other people.

In John 1.14, it says that Jesus is described as being full of grace and truth.

Jesus is not 50% grace and 50% truth.

He's not partially graceful and partially truthful.

He is a 100% truth and 100% grace.

And so we need to become better at using our words to bring life to other people, to build

them up and to be gracious to them, not to harm them or to hurt them.

See Solomon says, unkind words not only wound others.

they also wound us.

He says the fool's words swallow him up.

And so while he's hurting other people with his words,

he also is hurting himself because it hardens our heart

towards other people when we use unkind words.

Look what he says in verse 13.

He says the words of his mouth begin with foolishness, and the end of his talk is raving madness.

He says the fool is not living in reality.

They're living out the lies that they're telling themselves, and they're living out a lie within their life.

And so Solomon is saying use true words, not false words.

Now, why do we lie?

And why do we distort the truth?

Well, studies have shown that there are two reasons, main reasons, that people lie.

We lie to make ourselves look better than we actually are,

and we lie to make ourselves not look as bad as we actually are.

Now the Bible says that people lie because we think that it's going to work out in the short term for us.

But the Bible says you want to speak the truth because you want to be on the side of reality.

Why? Because reality always wins in the long run.

And so lying is trying to fix things in the short term

instead of thinking about the long term.

And in the Bible, wisdom is always more concerned

about the long term than it is the short term

of doing what is good and best

over the longest period of time.

You see the truth is forever, but a lie is for a moment.

And so we are to tell the truth and to trust God that in the long run, it will be better for you

and it will be better for everyone in your life if you are truthful. When we are deceptive,

we're being like the devil. When we are truthful, we're being like Jesus. Look what he says in verse

14.

He says, a fool also multiplies words.

No man knows what is to be done.

Who can tell him what will be after him?

You know, the Bible says in the multitude of sin, or multitude of words, sin is not lacking.

And so Solomon says, use few words, not many words.

Now, a major value in Scripture that is also one of the fruit of the Spirit is self-control.

And you and I cannot exercise self-control on our own.

We need the work of the Holy Spirit within our life to overcome the flesh and the sin that we are tempted to do.

And that is certainly true with our words, isn't it?

We need self-control because we have desires and attitudes that we're not supposed to be engaging in.

And so we need to exercise self-control in our life.

We need to exercise self-control in our dating.

We need to exercise self-control in our eating.

The Bible says, and this passage talks about, we need to exercise self-control with our words and also with our work.

Now a foolish person just says everything that they think because they don't have a filter.

Andrew said a few weeks ago that some people never have an unspoken thought, you know,

that the fool is always saying something first and thinking second.

And I certainly have been guilty of that within my life.

But Solomon says a wise person doesn't say everything they feel or everything that they think.

Because everything that we feel may not be real.

And everything we think may not be helpful to say or useful to say.

And so when it comes to words, Solomon says, sometimes less is more.

Look what he says in verse 15.

He says, the labor of fools wearies them, for they do not even know how to go to the city.

He says the fool thinks they know everything, but they often have trouble doing simple things within their life.

A fool's heart knows how to say a lot, but doesn't know how to do a lot.

You see, what we see in the Bible is that while words are incredibly powerful within our life,

words sometimes are limited and words are also sometimes inadequate.

And I think the idea here is that Solomon is saying words are no substitute for action within our life.

Now, the Bible says that words are important, but there are some people who all they ever do is merely talk.

Some people have words but no substance.

They have words but no action.

This is one of Jesus' greatest critiques of the Pharisees.

He says, do what they say, but don't do what they do.

Jesus often got upset with hypocrisy, and I think that we need to address the hypocrisy

that we have within our own life, because all of us say more than we do.

All of us believe more than we live, and so we need to allow the Holy Spirit to transform

our heart so that what we say we believe is also applied to our heart and lived out within

our life.

See, after being a Christian for a while, it's really easy to say the right things.

You kind of learn Christianese, you might say.

You learn how to say the right things.

You talk about struggling with sin when what you're really doing is just giving in to sin.

You talk about praying about things when you're really not.

You're just thinking about them.

We can get really good at giving the right answers instead of the real answers.

Words are incredibly and unbelievably powerful within our life, but they also are limited

because they are no substitute for action.

Look what he says in verse 16.

He says, woe to you, O land, when your king is a child and your princes feast in the morning.

Blessed are you, O land, when your king is the son of nobles and your princes feast at the proper time for strength and not for drunkenness.

Wisdom helps you to properly balance priorities within your life.

And so much of living a wise life is being able to balance competing priorities.

And I think what Solomon is saying is that a properly ordered balance between hard work and leisure benefits everyone.

It benefits you because you have a sense of purpose and a sense of meaning.

And you are living out love and expressing love through your work for other people.

It benefits other people because work by very definition is doing that which benefits others.

You see, Solomon makes it very clear that God wants us to be industrious in life.

A Christian ought to be the most diligent, the most responsible, the most thorough,

and the most dependable worker in the workplace.

Hard work is not separate from your faith.

It is evidence of your faith.

And in the Bible, it says,

whatever you do, do it with all your might,

as unto the Lord and not as unto men.

Solomon says we need to work when it's time to work.

But then he also says we need to rest,

enjoy the fruit of our labor when the work is over.

You know, if all you ever do is work,

then you're not living out God's plan and purpose for your life.

If all you ever do is leisure and rest,

then you're not living out God's purpose in your life.

We need to work and work hard.

But then we need to play hard.

We need to enjoy the gifts and the fruit of the labor that God has given us.

If you remember in Genesis,

God worked for six days and on the seventh day he rested.

And in the Ten Commandments, he gives that as an example.

Now, God didn't rest because he was weary,

although you and I need to rest sometimes because we're weary.

We need to rest to renew our strength, Solomon says.

But he rested a rest of enjoyment.

He was enjoying the fruit of his labor.

And you and I need to do that as well.

In the Old Testament, one day of the week was a day of rest.

There were seven feasts in the Jewish calendar

and some of them were for a whole week

where God's people would take time away from work

and they would worship and they would rest

and they would feast at times.

Every seven year was the Sabbath year.

Every 70 years was the year of Jubilee.

God knew that his people needed to live a balanced life.

Look what he says in verse 18.

He says, because of laziness, the building decays

and through idleness of hands, the house leaks.

A feast is made for laughter and wine makes merry,

but money answers everything.

Now Solomon says two things about laziness.

First he says, in the words of Pastor Brian,

laziness now equals problems later.

Right?

If present you is being lazy,

future you is gonna have some problems.

Things are gonna start falling apart.

Things that needed to get done are gonna get done

and your life starts to fall apart.

Ladies, I want to encourage you not to marry a lazy man.

You're going to have problems.

Now, he may be the best looking dude around.

He may be charming with his words and with his speech,

but if he is lazy and he doesn't know how to work hard,

then someday you're going to wake up

and realize you married a man who lives for himself.

and you're gonna have a hard time respecting him

and your marriage is going to be in trouble your household is going to begin

to

leak there's gonna be problems things will start falling

apart

now proverbs says four things

about

a lazy man

it says he can't get started in the morning

He seldom finishes everything.

He always has excuses for his inactivity, and he's always in trouble because he's irresponsible.

Now, that's not a list that you want for a potential mate, is it?

You want a man who's going to work hard.

And of course, the ladies, you want to be industrious as well.

So the first thing Solomon says about laziness is that lazy now equals problems later.

The second thing that he says is that money can't make up for laziness.

The fool says, you know, money is the answer for everything.

Well, eventually, if you're not productive, guess what?

The money runs out, doesn't it?

But even if the money doesn't run out,

Laziness has a way of corrupting your heart.

It means that there's foolishness, there's something wrong in your heart.

There are many young people who are struggling with a sense of purpose and self-respect

because they live with the idleness of brain rot instead of the industriousness of hard work.

Now, when you don't have any work to do, what happens is that you fall into the laziness of complaining, don't you?

Complaining is talking about what needs to be done instead of doing what needs to be done.

And we all are guilty of that.

We need to, instead of complaining

about what needs to be done,

we need to do what needs to be done.

You know, one of the hardest things about anything,

and this is particularly true about work,

is getting started, isn't it?

Once you get going, it gets a little bit easier

to keep going.

And so, we need to stop complaining in laziness,

and we need to start working hard and diligently.

Look what he says in verse number 20.

He says, "'Do not curse the king, even in your thought.

Do not curse the rich, even in your bedroom.

For a bird of the air may carry your voice, and a bird in flight may tell the matter.'"

He says, don't curse anyone in your thoughts or with your words.

Well, what does it mean to curse someone?

Does it mean you put a hex on them?

Does it mean that you cuss them out in your mind

or with your words?

No, that's not what it means at all.

I started wondering about this question.

What is Solomon telling us not to do in our thoughts

and in our words?

Well, the Hebrew word here means to think

or to speak of someone as if they have little worth.

It means to belittle them in your thoughts

or with your words.

It means to be critical of them.

Now, if you have something critical to say about someone else,

I want to encourage you to go talk to them.

The Bible says that we are to speak the truth in love.

And there's some people in my life who have loved me enough to confront me and to give me some constructive criticism.

And that's when I knew they really loved me because they loved me enough to go through the discomfort of confronting me with the truth.

And so if you have something critical to say, say it.

Go to them, confront them, but speak the truth in love, but also be gracious.

As you speak to them, speak to them as one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.

Speak to them with humility.

Speak to them with a sense of grace

and make sure that your words build them up

instead of tearing them down.

And so if you have something critical to say of someone else,

then I want to encourage you to go and talk to them about it.

But in this passage, God says,

don't rehearse it in your mind.

Don't rehearse it with your words.

Now, there are two reasons that he gives for this.

The first reason is that words spread easily, don't they?

James says our words are like a wildfire.

It starts with a little spark, but then it burns a whole forest.

Often we say something and they end up doing way more damage than we intended or that we wanted to

because words are so powerful that they spread easily.

Have you ever heard the saying, a little birdie told me?

Well, Solomon was saying that thousands of years ago.

He said, don't think it in your mind,

don't say it in your bedroom

when you think no one else can hear.

He says, because a little bird may hear it

and may take it on to someone else.

Words spread easily.

But the second reason, he says,

is that it corrupts your heart.

Now, it's interesting that he says here, don't gossip.

And boy, sometimes that's hard.

You have something critical that you could say about someone else

and saying it's not a part of solving

the problem for that person.

But you're like, I got to hold my tongue

because it's not helpful.

It's not useful.

It's not good.

I don't want to be critical in spreading gossip.

But it's interesting that he says don't gossip.

But before that, he says don't even think about it.

He says before you even deal with the issue of gossip,

he says first you gotta deal with the issue

of your thoughts and your heart.

And so I think what he's saying is that your words

reveal the posture of your heart.

We gotta be careful that a heart is one of love

and blessing, not one of criticism.

As a young pastor in my 20s,

there were a few times in one of my sermons

that I was talking about a wrong theology,

and I named a pastor that had that wrong theology

or that wrong teaching.

And after that, I had three people in my church

over a two-week period of time

set up an appointment with me.

And when someone sets a point, you never know what they want to talk about or what's going on.

But when we got together, they wanted to spend an hour or two talking about what some other Christian somewhere else said, something that was wrong.

And I thought, what is going on here?

I mean, these teachers and these Christians live hundreds, some of them even thousands of miles away from here.

They have nothing to do with our church.

They have nothing to do with what we're teaching or what we believe or how we're living.

They have nothing to do with any of those things.

things and I thought what is going on and I remember thinking in the last two weeks I've

had three people who want to meet with me to talk about what's wrong with other Christians

and I've had no one want to meet with me to talk about what's right with Jesus

and as I begin to pray about that the Holy Spirit convicted my heart

and I realized that I created this problem with my criticism of other Christians

I had become judge, jury, and executioner from the pulpit.

I had inadvertently created a posture of the heart and a culture that was one of criticism

rather than that was one of love and grace.

You see, critical thoughts and critical words are like a poison to your soul.

They rob us of our peace.

They rob us of our love and they rob us of our joy.

And so I wanna give you a point of application

and really it's a point of application

that Jesus gives in the Sermon on the Mount.

And that is look for opportunities to bless others

in your thoughts and with your words.

Now this word curse means to think

or to speak ill of someone.

but the word bless means to think or to speak good of someone.

And Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount,

if your enemy curses you, he says, bless them.

If they wrongfully persecute you, he says, pray for them.

If they treat you wrongly, he says, do good to them.

There was a guy

that caused a lot of problems in my life and

I had some resentment

towards him and

I thought that I had forgiven him and I'd given that to the Lord and I think I did at some level,

but you know there's deeper and deeper levels of forgiveness that we can have within our heart and

within our life. And the reason I know I hadn't fully forgiven him is that whenever I would think

about him, I would start thinking about what he had done wrong. Well, he did this wrong and

He did that wrong, and he shouldn't have done this, and he shouldn't have done that.

And sometimes I had these imaginary conversations with him that I was trying to persuade him

how that he was wrong in the way that he had acted.

And by the way, I didn't do everything right either.

But I had these thoughts.

But you know, every time that I had those thoughts that were critical towards him,

I had this yucky feeling in my spirit.

Just yucky.

It was poisoning my heart.

And so I begin to pray, God, would you take this out of my heart?

I don't want this.

I don't want this feeling.

I don't want this animosity.

I don't want this divided heart.

I don't want this conflicted heart.

I don't want any of this thing.

I just want love and peace and joy in my heart towards this guy.

And so I made the decision that every time that I thought of him, instead of criticizing him in my mind, I was going to thank God for him.

And I was going to pray for God's richest blessings within his life.

And here's what happened.

My thoughts changed and my heart changed.

My thoughts towards him changed and my feelings followed.

You see in the Bible, not only do your words and your thoughts

reveal your heart, but the Bible also teaches that they can steer

your heart. James says that our words are like a small rudder of a great ship, that they have the

power to change our heart and to change the course of our spirit and of our life.

And I wonder if maybe there are some of you that when you think about other people,

When you think about that person that hurt you, or that person that hurt someone you love,

or that person who wronged you, I wonder if you start getting that yucky feeling in your spirit as well.

By the way, I want you to know that God deeply cares for your hurt.

God hurts for you.

God has a heart of compassion for the pain

that you have experienced within your life,

and He alone understands it fully.

No one else may understand, but God understands,

and maybe no one else cares,

but I can tell you God deeply cares for you.

But you know, I believe

that if you get that yucky feeling, I believe God wants to take that away.

And not only that, but I believe that if you know the Lord

and you have the Holy Spirit within your life,

there's at least a good part of you that wants to get rid of that yucky feeling as well.

And so I want to encourage you this morning.

that you would pray and you would say,

God, would you change my thoughts

from thoughts of criticism to thoughts of blessing?

Would you change my thoughts from thoughts of ill will

to thoughts of goodwill?

In John chapter one,

It says that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Jesus is the Word of God.

And Jesus reveals to us the heart of God

because Jesus came from the heart of God.

Jesus came to bring us life from death.

Jesus fulfills every word that God said that he would do

because Jesus fulfills every word of God.

He's the fulfillment of the word of God.

Jesus is the truth and speaks the truth even sometimes when it hurts in order to heal us and transform us.

Jesus always brings the right word in the right way at the right time.

The Bible says in the fullness of time, Jesus came.

Not only is Jesus the word of God, he does the work of God.

Jesus' work on the cross brings us salvation and it brings us rest.

It makes us right with God and it gives us peace and joy and goodness and the fruit of the Spirit.

And when we realize that the Word became flesh,

that He died for our sin,

that He rose from the dead,

then the Bible says we gain.

Not only does he give us hope and purpose and freedom and peace and love in this life,

but he gives us eternal life because we will forever be with him.

I want to encourage you this morning to allow the word of God to penetrate your heart

and to come into your life.

Allow Jesus to be the Savior and the Lord of your soul,

because when Jesus comes into your heart,

he begins to change your heart from the inside out.

Let's bow together as we ask the Lord to move in our hearts this morning.

Here in a few moments, we're going to have a time of invitation.

There's going to be prayer partners here at the front.

There's going to be people that want to pray with you and pray for you and pray over you.

I want to encourage you to come this morning.

Allow God to have his word penetrate your heart.

Have his word transform your heart and your life.

I want to encourage you to come and say, I want to give my life to Jesus.

He reveals to us the heart of God.

It's a heart of love and it's a heart of grace.

And it's a heart of truth.

And sometimes the gospel has some hard words to say, but hard words produce soft hearts.

The Bible says that you're a sinner.

And that your sin, my sin, separate us from God.

But Jesus came to die on the cross, to pay for our sin, and rise from the dead

so that we could have forgiveness of sins and we could forever be with God.

I want to encourage you to give your life to Christ this morning.

Maybe you want to follow the Lord in Believer's Baptism and say,

God.

I want to go public with my faith.

I want everybody to know that I believe in Jesus, that I'm his disciple, that he is mine and I am his.

You can come forward and say, I'd like to be baptized.

We'll set up a time to do that.

Maybe God is leading you to join this church, to be a part of this spiritual family,

a place where the word of God is read, where it's expounded upon, where it's taught, and where it's applied,

and by God's grace, hopefully lived.

within our lives and together.

Would you come and say, I wanna follow Jesus

with a band of brothers and sisters.

I finally wanna follow Jesus with others

and no church is perfect.

And if it were, I'd mess it up if I became a part of it.

And so would you.

But God wants us to follow Him together.

We can learn so much from each other, different spiritual gifts.

God's working in each other's lives.

Maybe God's calling you to come.

But I want to encourage you to come and pray.

I want to encourage you to pray right where you are, that God would work in your life.

God has been so good to me this week as I studied this passage.

As he convicted me that I need to be more gracious with my words.

I need to be more loving and build others up more with my words.

Maybe God is speaking to your heart today.

There's some words you wish you could take back, but you know, you can't take them back.

But you can ask for forgiveness.

You can not only ask for forgiveness, but you can repent.

You know, the Bible, when it talks about repentance, it means to turn, but it also means to replace.

You could replace those hurtful words, those harmful words, with true words.

Words of love and words of grace.

Yes.

I want to encourage you to come.

Have someone pray for you.

Have someone pray over you.

You can pray at these steps.

You can pray where you are.

But this is a time where the Holy Spirit of God works and speaks to our heart.

Do not quench him.

Do not push him away.

But allow him to have his way and his will in you.

Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word.

May it change our hearts and transform our lives.

Lord, help us not just to say the right things,

but to say real things.

Help us not just to be talk,

but help us to be action.

Not just to know what's right,

but to live it out and apply it to our life.

Lord, I pray that if there's anyone here that needs to be saved,

that today, Lord, they'd give their life to Jesus.

That they would see your glory and grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

They would be desperate to know Jesus today.

Lord, I pray for those of us that know Jesus, Lord, that you would give us a new heart,

new words and new work.

Lord, help us to wake up every day excited to spread your love and grace.

Help us to wake up every day to do the work that you're doing,

to join you and in love benefit the people around us.

Lord, I pray that we would not live out of a hard heart,

that we would not live out of a divided heart.

God, we would live out of your heart.

Help us, God, to be a people after your own heart.

God, we need you.

We are desperate for you today.

Would you move in us?

Would you speak to us?

Would you change us?

In Christ's name we pray.

Amen.

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No matter where you are in your journey,

know that we love you.

We're praying for you

and we can't wait to see what God will do in your life.