"Wisdom's Beginning" Proverbs 1:1-7 Sunday Evening Worship Service

You can open your Bibles to the Book of Proverbs, chapter one.

The book of Proverbs, chapter one.

It might take you a minute to find it, but over the next few weeks, your Bible will naturally fall up in there.

Proverbs chapter one, I'll read for us, verses one through seven.

That's all we'll do tonight, and then we'll finish chapter one, Lord willing, next Lord's Day.

Proverbs one, verse one.

The Proverbs of Solomon, son of David, the king of Israel, to know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight, to receive instruction in wise dealing, and righteousness, justice, and equity, to give prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the youth.

Let the wise hear and increase in learning.

The one who understands, obtain guidance, to understand a proverb and a saying, the words of the wise and their riddles.

The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge.

Fools despise wisdom and instruction.

I have a very clear memory of being a young child, I'm going to say around seven years old.

And I was brought with my dad to go to the hardware store, Ace Hardware Store, back when such a thing existed.

And I was allowed to go while my younger brother was not allowed to go.

And that made me feel so grown up.

I remember sitting in the back of the station wagon, one of those seats that face the opposite direction, and asking my dad from the backseat, Dad, am I a grown-up now?

And I don't remember exactly what he answered, but I remember being encouraged by it.

It was a few years later I found out the hard truth about Santa, by the way.

That's about the level of my own maturity right there at the time.

The Bible speaks of this transition from childhood to adulthood this way, 1 Corinthians 13, verse 11.

1 Corinthians 13:11

When I was a child, I spoke like a child.

I thought like a child.

When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

This is what the book of Proverbs is designed to do.

The book of Proverbs is written by King Solomon.

You see that in chapter 1, verse 1.

He's writing to his son.

You see that in chapter 1, verse 8.

Here, my son, your father's instruction.

The word son here, by extrapolation, speaks of father to children.

Not necessarily, these aren't gender-specific terms, father to a male child, but this is parents to children.

This is parents teaching their kids what it means to transition from being in the backseat of the station wagon to knowing what it's like to be a grown-up.

The book of Proverbs is about wisdom and it is about maturity.

There is no doubt that our society needs both wisdom and maturity.

In 1980, the average age of marriage in the United States was 22.

Last year, in 2022, the average age of marriage was 29.

31 for men, so it has raised nearly a decade in a short amount of time.

In 2015, there was about 20% of 20-year-olds living at home with their parents.

According to the Pew Research Foundation, last year, 2022, in the United States, that is 33% now, meaning a third of people between the age of 23 is what they did, 23 and 30, are living at home in the United States.

And if that sounds like a discouraging uh fact, you should see the stats for the rest of the world.

In Italy, it's 78% of people in their 20s live at home.

In Croatia, it's like 82%.

Many surveys say that this is owing to COVID and the societal reset that happened after COVID when people moved home.

But now that COVID is over, whatever that means, the ducks have not fled the nest quite yet.

They've come home to roost.

It's very common now.

Employers complain that this new generation of college grads doesn't want to go to work.

If you saw in the news, even last week, there were several major companies in New York City that faced walkouts over their employees who do not think it is right or just or equitable for them to have to be at work physically in the office place.

It's just not fair.

And if you think about it, the current generation of college grads has gone through the last four or five years where they have basically been told you don't have to show up.

Showing up, in fact, is dangerous more than helpful.

Now, these are all symptoms.

You can blame some of this on COVID, but these are all just simply symptoms of a decline in maturity.

And it is, of course, not new to have a person behind a pulpit complaining about the maturity of today's kids.

Get off my grass, young ones.

It's endemic, of course.

Solomon, in a sense, is lamenting the immaturity of his generation back in Israel.

And Solomon had means to and justification to.

You know, his son, who received the book of Proverbs, Rehoboam, was indeed a fool.

Rehoboam launched a civil war because he wouldn't listen to the advice of wisdom.

Nevertheless, it does seem true that our society increases in immaturity every passing season.

This is not a Pew Research stat, but it is a fun anecdote.

I met the head driving instructor down at Quantico.

He's a guy who looked for the FBI.

He's a guy that looked like he would be a head driving instructor, shaved head, big beard, like Z Top style beard.

The guy looks like he is a driving instructor.

And he said that he used to love his job, but now not so much anymore.

He used to teach these new agents how to, you know, do high-speed pursuits in reverse, how to come into an alley and get shot at, and how to do an e-brake turn and swing their car around and roll out the driver's side door, shooting back at the bad guys.

And now he says that the typical agent today, 22 years old, has never driven before.

They didn't have their driver's license in college.

They were dropped off at college by their grandparents, and they were picked up at college when they got out, and they got their driver's license to get into the FBI.

So he says, now the best they can do is when they're getting shot at, I tell them, put their arm over the passenger seat and back up slowly out of the alley.

That's their best chance at survival, is reverse.

Proverbs 20, verse 11 says, even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure and whether it be right.

Proverbs 20:11

And so it's worth asking yourself as you look into your own life, do you represent maturity?

The Washington Post recently ran an editorial.

Yes, dumber.

Some of it is simply that while Americans waste their time on social media, the Chinese are becoming, you know, violin maestras in utero or something like that.

They're learning calculus where our kids are watching YouTube.

This is not a new thing based upon the Chinese either.

It was Aldous Huxley's novel, A Brave New World, in what 1930s or something.

And that book, which I was required to read in high school, back when high school students were forced to read things.

He lamented that people were addicted to entertainment.

This is 1930s.

And as they're addicted to entertainment, they begin to medicate themselves to not think about the world by watching this fictional drug that he called soma, which meant for entertainment.

They feed it into their bodies, they become apathetic, all they care about is entertainment.

Neil Postman, of course, adopted that and wrote his book, Entertaining Ourselves to Death.

Neil Postman died in 2003, the year before Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook.

And there is a sense that the entertainment-driven scrolling attention span lacks maturity, and because it lacks maturity, it essentially lacks wisdom.

Proverbs is the antidote to all that.

Proverbs teaches you what maturity is like.

Proverbs make your eyes get off of the computer screen and onto the world.

Proverbs is a very interesting book in that it is resting your eyes really away from the book, even, and onto the world, to study the world.

The goal of Proverbs is to create wisdom and maturity.

That's the theme of the whole book.

If I were to encapsulate the whole book of Proverbs into one sentence, the sentence would be this the goal of Proverbs is to create wisdom and maturity.

Let me define these words for you.

First, wisdom is the ability to direct one's mind towards a full understanding of human life and toward its moral fulfillment.

That's what wisdom is: the ability to take your mind and engage with human life, the world that God made, and its moral fulfillment in the world.

What should human life look like in this world?

And what are the moral implications of that?

That's wisdom.

There's a moral element to this definition, of course.

Wisdom is not your IQ.

There are very intelligent people that are fools, according to Proverbs.

Wisdom is not about your ability to solve spatial-related problems or to learn a foreign language or to do calculus or to drive.

Wisdom is about your ability to perceive human life in God's world and its moral implications.

Wisdom is a special capacity.

Wisdom is necessary to have a fully ordered human life.

And the crazy thing about wisdom in the book of Proverbs is that it can be acquired through the application of the mind.

This is a relatively unusual human characteristic.

You think of other characteristics: speed, strength, IQ, intelligence.

Those things can't really be increased throughout your life.

Certainly an athlete by going to the gym in discipline can make himself more athletic and can increase his time in the 40 or the amount that he can bench press or whatnot.

And at the level of a professional athlete, your time in the gym makes a big difference.

But for most people, the amount of time you spend in the gym is not going to increase your athleticism all that much.

Intelligence.

You can get tutoring and go from getting, you know, a B to a B plus in a specific class, but no amount of education or tutoring is really going to make you that much more intelligent.

People have a relatively set mental capacity.

But wisdom is not like that.

You can grow in wisdom in ways that you're not going to be able to grow in speed or in strength.

Some people are slower, weaker, or dumber.

Some are faster, stronger, and smarter.

The good news about Proverbs is it's about wisdom, and wisdom can go to the slow and the fast, the weak and the strong.

Those with high IQs, those with low IQs, all can grow in wisdom through a study of the book of Proverbs.

You can make yourself wiser.

That's what Proverbs is about.

That's the seed.

Proverbs is the seed.

You read the book of Proverbs, the seed is planted in your heart.

You apply the Proverbs that you read, you plant it, you water, and your wisdom grows like a tree out of your life.

You are growing in maturity.

As you apply yourself to wisdom, you grow in maturity, which leads to a definition of maturity.

Maturity is the ability to understand your relationship to wisdom.

My story about being in the backseat of the car as a child asking my dad if I'm a grown-up, that's a very immature question.

It's immature because it's a vocalization of a person who doesn't understand their relationship to wisdom.

As a person grows in maturity, they become aware of how they function in the world, how they fit in with those around them.

Immature people don't understand how they fit in with the world around them.

They don't understand how their conduct affects other people.

Mature people understand how their conduct affects other people.

Mature people don't recline their seats on airplanes.

It's a gray area.

I'll grant it.

You recognize how your conduct affects those around you.

That's a sign of maturity.

The mature person sees his strength and weaknesses.

Now, so much of this is just a simple concept of aware.

You understand how you function in society.

The five-year-old thinks he's the fastest person in the world because she's five.

A mature person understands that there are faster people than you.

The mature person knows that true wisdom lies with the Lord and living a life that corresponds to the nature of God.

And so it is worth asking yourself, are you wise?

Are you mature?

Now, obviously, as we go through the book of Proverbs together, you're going to see different tests of this.

You know, taking out a loan for something that is worth less the moment you take it out and you now owe more on it than it is worth.

Is that wisdom or maturity?

The college student who really wants to be an engineer or a lawyer but majors in kinesiology.

Is that wisdom and maturity?

The person who's dating somebody who's ungodly, but they're nice.

The person who does these things, who dates the ungodly person and takes out a loan for something that's now they owe more than it's worth, the person who's majoring in the thing that they don't want to do when they grow up, the person who has all those things in their life but thinks they're wise, is immature.

Proverbs is helping you understand that.

So my goal over these next several months as we go through Proverbs is to get you to love the book of Proverbs.

The book of Proverbs is given to you to help you choose the best course of action from all the available options.

That's the way our life is.

You're in a situation in life and you don't know necessarily where the choices in life came from, but you're confronted with different choices.

You can act this way or that way, you can say this or that.

The book of Proverbs is given to give you wisdom, to help you understand how a mature person would respond.

The book of Proverbs is not rules.

The book of Proverbs is not promises, they are not money-back guarantees.

The book of Proverbs is principles.

Principles that are generally true.

I'll give you some examples about this.

Proverbs 22, verse 3.

Proverbs 22:3

The sensible person sees danger and takes cover, but the inexperienced keep going and are punished.

This is a great proverb for understanding what the book of Proverbs is like.

This is not a promise.

This doesn't mean that the inexperienced person takes a wrong turn and keeps going and gets punished by providence or by circumstance or by the Lord or by an angel every single time.

This proverb, Proverbs 22, verse 3, is a great example for what the book of Proverbs is generally like.

Proverbs 22:3

Most of the content of the book of Proverbs are just observations about things that are normally true in the world.

It's Solomon who's looking out his window.

He has the wisdom that God has given him.

As Solomon has studied the world, he has grown in wisdom.

Of course, God granted him supernatural wisdom.

Solomon applies his wisdom to making observations about life.

These observations are generally true.

And he's giving them to you in a way that helps you learn them.

They're pithy, they're short.

In Hebrew, they're even more pithy and short.

Hebrew is terse in Hebrew.

They're very economy of words in Hebrew.

Just doom, doom, doom.

I read in one commentary this week that the typical proverb in the book of Proverbs is almost twice as long in English as it is in Hebrew.

It just takes so many words to translate this.

So you kind of lose the staccato fashion of Hebrew as reading it in English, but that's all we got is the English right now.

So we may as well roll with it.

Proverbs are like this it's not a guarantee that the sensible person will take cover every time he sees danger.

There's a time to be brave, of course, we all know that.

It's just an observation.

The sensible person generally gets out of the way of the train.

So if you see a foolish person doing something and he escapes punishment, does that mean the Bible is false?

No, it just means that that guy got lucky.

Proverbs 26, 4 and 5 is my other very favorite example of the genre of Proverbs.

Don't answer a fool according to his foolishness, or you will be like him yourself.

Answer a fool according to his foolishness, or he'll become wise in his own eyes.

I remember as a new Christian reading the book of Proverbs and coming across this and just being stuck.

What?

There's a contradiction in the Bible right here.

And you think, oh, it's got to be something hidden in the Hebrew.

Like it's got to be a different word in the Hebrew for foolish in verse four as it is from verse five.

That's the explanation.

It's a different Hebrew word.

And so you talk to somebody who can read Hebrew and they're like, no, my friends, the two verses are exactly the same in Hebrew, except for one word in verse four, the word low, the word not.

It's the only difference.

One verse says a, the next verse says not a.

And you think that's a contradiction.

Yes, it is a contradiction.

Welcome to the world we live in.

Proverbs is principles to help guide you through this world where there are all kinds of contradictions.

And you understand that wisdom is the ability to apply Proverbs 26, verse 4 in some occasions, and Proverbs 26, verse 5 in other occasions.

Proverbs 26:4 Proverbs 26:5

Answer a fool according to his folly.

Otherwise, the guy is just going to think he's always right.

But then you get in an argument with a fool, and somebody comes along and they won't be able to tell the difference.

The two of you are both fools.

He's a fool and you're arguing with him.

Only a fool would argue with a fool.

Come on now.

You think, how do I know which one of these two to apply?

There's got to be other principles.

That's wisdom, is knowing which one to follow.

Knowing which one to follow is the biblical concept of wisdom.

And we have the similar problems in English, don't we?

Look before you leap.

But he who hesitates is lost.

Oh, come on now.

How are you supposed to look before you leap and hesitate?

Many hands make light work.

Also, there's too many cooks.

Oh, come on, man.

You need lots of hands, but man, this place is crowded.

Do those proverbs contradict?

Yes.

Are they true?

Also, yes.

They're proverbs, for goodness sakes.

They're not rules, they're more like guidelines, and you can hear that in a pirate voice if you want.

They're rules or rules are like training wheels in life.

You wish they were rules, but they're not rules.

They're guidelines that are forged to wisdom from people who have gone before.

And that's because people don't need rules.

People don't need rules.

Rules are not helpful.

Rules are not helpful in the pursuit of wisdom.

Rules are helpful for little kids.

They're not helpful for grown-ups.

Rules are like training wheels.

Training wheels are great on bicycles when you're four years old.

When you're nine years old and you sell the training wheels, they're getting in the way.

If you're 14 and you've got the training wheels on the bike, something is off here.

The book of Proverbs is not laws of physics, but Principles of wisdom.

Proverbs conveys pithy points and principles, not particular promises.

And it's how you apply them that makes you mature.

And so let's look at these seven verses real quick this evening.

And we'll get to these seven verses, and then we'll make a couple observations about the middle of this passage.

They're written by Solomon, who's the son of David, king of Israel, that's connecting you to the book of 1 Kings.

Solomon receives his promise from Yahweh.

Solomon was asked what he wanted.

He chose wisdom.

God responded by making him the wisest person who had ever lived, giving him wisdom that surpassed the wisdom of the nations, wisdom that surpassed the prophets of Israel.

Solomon, in that sense, had infinite wisdom.

He had access to God's wisdom, all the wisdom Solomon could handle, and he could handle a lot of wisdom.

Do you remember the Queen of Sheba who had the wealth of the world?

She came and visited Solomon, and she had her breath taken away at all the wisdom of Solomon and his people.

There was a trickle-down economics.

It was regonomics applied to wisdom.

The queen of Sheba recognized that those in Israel were so wise because of Solomon's wisdom.

This is where Proverbs begins by tying the wisdom of this book to the wisest king Israel had ever known.

He was indeed the king of Israel.

That would be a lamentable phrase.

As soon as Solomon dies, Israel splits.

The phrase King of Israel would never again be uttered of a Davidic heir until the Lord Jesus, who is the true Israelite king.

But everyone after Solomon would be the king of Judah.

In that sense, Solomon was the last true king of Israel.

But he was wise.

And so he tells you to know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight.

That's the point of this book.

For you to grow in wisdom, for you to go grow in instruction.

The word instruction here is not the word for rules, it's the word for direction.

So it's the idea.

This book is directing you to grow in principles, not rules.

Principles, not law.

Proverbs is not a book of law.

Law doesn't make you wise, law breaks you.

Wisdom makes you wise.

It gives you instruction in wise dealing, righteousness, justice, and equity.

We'll circle back to verse 3 later on this evening.

It will give prudence to the simple.

Simple here is the word for naive.

The simple is the word for the foolish person in Proverbs.

The simple person, as that word is used throughout the book, is the person who lacks wisdom.

It's not a fatal condition.

It is fatal if it's left untreated.

Being simple is fatal if it's left untreated, but you can treat it and you treat it with wisdom.

You treat it with prudence.

Knowledge and discretion to the youth.

Those are two things that children lack.

Children lack knowledge, children lack discretion.

Proverbs gives it to them.

What age is the target audience of Proverbs?

We'll see next week he's writing to his son.

He's writing about marriage.

He's writing about who to look for in a spouse.

He's writing about sexual purity.

Because of that, most commentators tag Proverbs is written to around a 12-year-old.

It was Paul Washer.

I listened to him speak on Proverbs recently, and he said the same thing.

He says, if you teach Proverbs before the person is 12, you're likely overshooting your target.

They can still benefit from God's word.

Of course they can.

But it might be a little bit too early for some of these tools to be in the uh the toolbox.

And if you wait much longer than that, you wait till 14 or 15, then you kind of missed your little window there.

As I look around, I see some 12-year-olds here, but I see a lot of people that are older than 12.

I'm not saying you missed your window.

The Bible is still giving you tools, though, to grow in wisdom.

Verse 5, let the wise person hear.

So here's where Proverbs applies to the person who is 15 or 20 or 30 or 40 or so forth.

The wise person hears them, and even the wise person can increase in his learning.

The wise person takes Proverbs, they can grow even more.

You never outgrow the book of Proverbs, in other words.

You can bit the other arc of life.

And Proverbs is still helping you grow.

It's helping you understand a proverb and a saying that defines the genre of the book of Proverbs, right there in verse 6.

The book of Proverbs is, lo and behold, a book of Proverbs.

Again, I keep harping on this because a lot of people go off the rails when they study Proverbs because they treat them like laws and they treat them like promises and they treat them like guarantees and they get stuck in the mud.

Solomon himself says at the beginning of this book, they are Proverbs, they are sayings, they're things that are often said.

The words of the wise and their riddles.

Now, just because something's a saying doesn't make it true.

But because something is a saying in the book of Proverbs, that makes it generally true.

Solomon doesn't, you know, make a collaboration of sayings that aren't often true.

He makes a collaboration of the best sayings available, the kind of sayings that make somebody wise when they understand them.

These are, the use of the language of verse 6, the words of the wise and their riddles.

Many of them are riddles, like the one I just put on the screen.

And the wise person has to understand them.

So back in verse 2 to know wisdom and instruction.

That's the introduction.

Jesse, meet Proverbs.

Proverbs meet Jesse.

That's verse two.

You can assert your own name there.

Verse 2 is the book of Proverbs, shaking your hand.

Pleased to meet you.

Let's roll through this together.

Let me give you an outline to guide us in our remaining time tonight.

Three descriptions of maturity.

These descriptions come from verse three.

So much of Proverbs is chiastic here.

Chiastic is where you have a point at the beginning, a point at the end, and the main point in the middle.

Proverbs opens with a bit of a chiasm, verses one through six.

The middle of those verses is the main point.

Verse three, that's how Proverbs functions.

Verse three, the main point of Proverbs is to help you become wise.

And it describes wisdom in three ways.

It describes maturity in three ways.

To receive instruction in wise dealing, this is going to help you grow in maturity.

What are those three ways?

Righteousness, justice, and equity.

These are the three headings.

These are the three categories.

There'll be our three points in the outline tonight.

These are the three ways that the whole book of Proverbs helps you grow in wisdom.

These are all, each one of these words is soaked with meaning.

That's why every translation renders them differently.

The New American Standard says that you would receive instruction in wise behavior.

The Holman, that you would just receive wise instruction.

But the point of these is that when you take the righteousness, the justice, and the equity, it grows you into maturity.

The Proverbs will help you grow in these three areas to become mature.

First, maturity is godly.

Maturity is godly.

It's translated in verse 3 there, righteousness.

Maturity will help you grow in righteousness.

Maturity is godly.

That word righteousness, it is the technical Hebrew word for righteousness.

It's not a generic word for somebody who's more or less a good person.

It is a particular Hebrew word that speaks of the attribute of God of righteousness.

It's very much a religious and ethical word.

God is righteous.

He reveals himself as righteous.

Righteousness is not something external to God.

Righteousness is something internal to God.

God is righteous.

Something is righteous as it corresponds to God.

I harp on this because this is so critical, especially when we get to Proverbs 8, to understand that wisdom is internal to God.

God does not conform Himself to wisdom, God is wisdom.

I've used this analogy before with the Ten Commandments, but it works for wisdom as well.

God doesn't see the Ten Commandments outside of him, like there's these Ten Commandments about godliness, and God gives laws that conform to them.

Rather, the Ten Commandments conform to God's own nature and who he is.

That's what makes them a guide for living.

Wisdom is the same way.

God does not conform himself to wisdom, but something is wise in as much as it conforms to God.

And so, when verse 3 says, You receive instruction through these proverbs that they make you righteous, it's talking about your ability to interact with the Lord on his terms.

And that's what's meant by verse 7.

The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge.

Fools despise wisdom and instruction.

That phrase verse 7, that's really categorizing the moral imperative of Proverbs.

Those who fear God want to be wise.

A foolish person rejects what God says.

That should remind you of Romans 1.

That God reveals what is true about Himself to the world.

People suppress that truth, reject that truth, claiming to be wise, they become fools.

People who reject God are foolish.

It doesn't matter if they have a high IQ, it doesn't matter if they have a PhD in astrophysics, whatever.

If you have a PhD in astrophysics and you reject the God who made the stars, you are a fool.

That's the point of verse 7.

True maturity is rooted in righteousness, which is an attribute of God.

You cannot be righteous and dependent of the Lord.

So wisdom begins with the gospel, which is the height of God's wisdom, of course.

Paul tells the Corinthians that the gospel is the wisdom of God.

This is the foolishness of mankind, but it is the wisdom of God.

And the wisdom of God very much intersects with righteousness.

The gospel is about righteousness.

You don't have a righteousness of your own, so you need an external righteousness, an alien righteousness, a righteousness from God.

Jesus Christ lives a perfectly righteous life.

He dies on the cross, making atonement for our sin.

When you place your faith in Christ, you are declared to be righteous.

This is the beginning of wisdom.

Wisdom launches out with the fear of the Lord, it launches out with submitting your life to the gospel of Jesus Christ, surrendering, confessing your sins to Jesus Christ.

That's the foundation of wisdom.

To call upon the Lord and to be declared righteous, like Solomon was declared wise.

Solomon was given a wisdom that wasn't his, it was a gift from God.

That's the pattern for righteousness.

You get a righteousness that is not your own, but comes through Jesus Christ.

This is the hallmark of God's wisdom.

You can't separate wisdom from the gospel.

The fool tries to, though.

The fool rejects God, the fool rejects God's category of righteousness.

Even though the fool might consider himself intelligent.

One commentator says that a high IQ is like a fast car, wisdom is the headlights.

You can be a very intelligent person, but if you lack righteousness, your fast car only gets you into trouble.

When night comes, you can't see where you're going.

And all of your intelligence just makes you crash faster.

Wisdom is the ability to conform your life to God and his moral commands.

The smarter you are, the more horsepower your car has, the more damage will happen to you when you crash it.

But there are some people who are really dumb, IQ wise and all, but who have more wisdom than kings and presidents because they have given their life to Christ.

This is Proverbs 19, verse 16.

Proverbs 19:16

He that keeps the commandment keeps his own soul, but he despises his ways will die.

This is a pretty basic gospel proclamation.

The commandment of God, of course, is to fear him, to be made right through faith, as Abraham was, a faith that was credited to him as righteousness.

The soul that rejects that will die, giving account for his sin.

This is picked up back in Proverbs chapter 1, verses 10.

Proverbs 1:10

My son, don't let sinners entice you, don't consent.

If they say, Come, lie in wait with us, ambush the innocents.

Verse 12, Sheol will swallow them alive.

They'll go down to the pit.

This is talking about hell.

Those that reject God will be swallowed by judgment and will be cast into hell.

And so the kind of maturity in the Bible, it begins with, are you saved?

But it goes beyond that.

Maturity is growing beyond are you saved?

Maturity is growing into what is actually good for you.

The saved person ought not live like the unsaved person because it ends in death and destruction.

The point of the mature believer is to take the wisdom of God and apply it to their life so they grow in godliness.

Proverbs are medicine for the soul.

That's how they grow in righteousness.

So ask yourself: does this describe you as your life spent in the pursuit of knowledge so that you grow in godliness?

That being the goal of wisdom is to grow in godliness.

That's what maturity is.

Recognizing how godly you are and where you need to grow.

Secondly, maturity is decisive.

And I went with the word decisive here, the ESV gives you the word uh justice in the ESV.

It's not the word for justice like a judge, it's the it's the like a judge uh sentencing somebody who's guilty.

It's the word for justice like a judge making a verdict, though, like deciding true or false.

It's a word in Job that is translated arbiter, it's the word for like a referee.

And I know something about this.

In a previous life, I was a soccer referee, and I understand a bit about what that means.

This is that word, it's rendered justice in the ESV, but it's the ability to make quick decisions about complicated things.

That's what this word is.

You understand as a referee, you see a play in front of you, and a bad referee is one who like stops the game and says, Hold on, I need a minute.

And replays it in their head, okay?

That guy did that, and that guy did that, and I'm pretty sure that guy did that.

So that way, bad referee.

A good referee can consolidate all that thinking in a split second and make a decision.

So bang, bang, play, and a good ref goes, pull, that's the call.

That's this word.

There's a word for that in Hebrew, and that's the word that's right here.

A wise person is able to make decisive decisions about life.

The immature person wavers all the time.

The mature person makes good judgment calls.

You don't have to be a referee to know this.

You know, even an athlete understands that principle.

When an athlete learns a new skill, they learn the skill on an open field with no pressure.

Okay, you're gonna learn a new way to kick a soccer ball.

You kick it like this, and you try it on an open field with no pressure.

Slowly, slowly, and then you make it a closed field.

There's boundary lines, now you're doing it a little bit faster.

Then you put an opponent in the way, and now you're doing it even faster with him interfering, and you keep increasing speed and pressure until finally you're out on a game and muscle memory takes over, and you can just do it naturally on the field.

That's this word.

That you train yourself by reading through Proverbs how you would act in certain situations.

So then you find yourself on the field and you make the decision instantly.

You know how to respond because you trained for it.

That's this word.

Proverbs 13, 14 says it this way: the law of the wise is a fountain of life.

To depart from it is snares of death.

Wisdom is knowing what the law is telling you to do and how to respond in any moment.

Mature people understand the difference between life and death.

Or Proverbs 14, 15.

The gullible person believes anything, but the mature person considers his steps.

In other words, a mature person is able to make a wise decision that is decisive and isn't gullible.

And this covers every area of life.

It covers work.

Maturity is decisive if it relates to work.

So much of Proverbs is about work.

Consider the ant.

The ant works hard.

Make good decisions about your work, about your work ethic.

The contrast, Proverbs 22, verse 13.

Proverbs 22:13

There's a lion outside.

I don't want to go outside.

I don't want to go to work.

There's a lion out there.

It could eat me.

That's a lame excuse.

The ant works hard.

The ant's not afraid of the lion.

The ant goes to work.

The mature person works hard.

Proverbs has a lot to say about money.

For example, Proverbs 12, verse 11.

Proverbs 12:11

It says the one who works his land will have plenty of food, but whoever chases fantasies lacks sense.

You want to be wise?

Work.

You want to be a fool?

Chase fantasies.

You want to be a fool?

Get a job in some pyramid scheme.

A job is in sarcastic quote marks right there.

Here's a basic principle I love to tell college students: a job pays you, you don't pay them.

You remember that basic principle in life, and you won't get sucked into selling essential oils.

Jobs pay you, you don't pay them.

You make decisions about money.

Precious treasure and oil are in the dwelling of the wise, but a foolish man consumes them.

This speaks of the foolishness of many loans in our world, the foolishness of going in debt, the foolishness of people who squander their money.

The wise person understands how money works.

Speech is included in Proverbs.

So much in Proverbs about speech.

Proverbs 14, verse 3 the mouth of the foolish is a rod of pride, but the lips of the wise will preserve them.

Proverbs 14:3

So many Proverbs about speech.

We'll go through a lot of this as we go.

But I heard a kid that I coached in soccer recently before at practice was just jabbering on, and one of the kids' like, Why are you talking?

And he says, Honestly, I start talking and I don't even know what I'm gonna say.

And everybody laughs.

Haha.

That's funny with high school kids.

Haha.

They start talking, they have no idea what they're gonna say.

You recognize that as a sign of immaturity.

Proverbs is given to help you grow in maturity, as seen in how you work, how you spend your money, how you speak, as seen in what kind of person you're gonna marry.

Remember, this is targeting a 12 to 14-year-old kid.

So much of the book of Proverbs is about who you're going to marry.

Mature men find godly women.

You can contrast Proverbs 31 with Proverbs 21, verse 9.

Proverbs 21:9

It's better to live on the corner of a roof than to share a house with a nagging wife.

Proverbs 27, 15, an endless dripping on a rainy day and a nagging wife are all alike.

Nobody signs up for that when they get married.

They don't sign up for the nagging wife in the corner of the house.

I would like to get married in such a relationship that would make me feel like I long for the corner of a roof.

Nobody signs up for that, but the immature person makes bad decisions and doesn't see it coming because they're immature.

The mature person has read those Proverbs and has read Proverbs 31, and through training himself to make good decisions, he is able to tell the difference between the dripping faucet, the nagging wife, and the Proverbs 31 woman.

That's the nature of Proverbs.

You can get sucked into rabbit holes in any of these.

Thirdly, maturity makes you godly, maturity makes you decisive, and maturity comes with integrity.

That's the word that's translated in verse 3 here in the ESV, equity.

Equity, this is the ESV translation I'm using, dates back to 2002.

I'm not sure what the current ESV renders it as, maybe still equity, I don't know.

But equity is a word that's been destroyed by the last six years of American culture for sure.

The way Americans use the word equity now has zero to do with this Hebrew word, okay?

So understand that.

This Hebrew word is a word that can be translated integrity.

It's something that tastes like it looks like.

That's a very common way this word is used.

In fact, later in Proverbs, it's used for uh wine that as it goes down, as you swallow the wine, it tastes like how it smelled.

It's just a idiom for integrity.

That wine tastes like it smells, meaning it's good or it's bad.

You know, wine that smells rotten, and you the immature person says, Oh, that smells rotten.

Let me taste and see.

Yeah, it had integrity, but it was bad all around.

Versus the wine that smells good and you taste it and you go, Oh, that's good.

That has integrity to it.

That's this word.

Does your life match what's on the inside?

Does the outside and the inside line up?

That's maturity.

The same on the inside and on the outside.

That's maturity.

Your life intersects with your values.

Your values demonstrate what you believe, what you stand for.

That's integrity.

Proverbs makes you.

Wise in the issue of integrity.

Proverbs 20, verse 6.

Proverbs 20:6

Most men will proclaim to everyone his own virtues.

But a faithful man who can find?

There's no shortage of people that talk about how good they are.

Blah blah blah.

I'm so good.

I'm the hero of this story.

I'm the hero of that story.

But then you study their life a little bit, and you're like, I can't find a faithful guy anywhere.

All these guys talk about how good they are, but I can't find a faithful person anywhere.

That's a lack of integrity.

Proverbs makes them have integrity.

Proverbs 21, verse 8 a guilty man's conduct is crooked, but the behavior of the innocent person is upright.

Proverbs 21:8

The guilty man's life is crooked.

The godly person walks the straight and narrow.

So Proverbs is an appeal to you not to abandon wisdom.

Proverbs chapter 4, if you don't leave wisdom, she won't leave you.

Proverbs 4 · chapter mention

If you embrace wisdom, she will honor you.

As you pour yourself into a study of Proverbs, God will use Proverbs to make you grow in wisdom, to give you integrity, to make you decisive, and to mature you into a godly person.

It is worth asking yourself at the beginning of Proverbs.

Does this mature person describe you?

Are you mature or immature?

Is your outside the same as your inside?

Or are you a ticking apostasy bomb?

Does your life correspond to your values?

Do your values reflect the word of God?

If the answer is no, you say, you know, honestly, I'm not mature, that's a better place to start than the person who's deceived.

It's good to start Proverbs by saying, you know what, I'm not as mature as I should be.

That's great.

The book of Proverbs is written for you then.

It wants to help you grow in godliness.

God, we're thankful that you have given us this book to help us grow in wisdom.

We know it's not promises, but it is provocations.

It's pithy sayings that help us grow in wisdom.

So we pray over the next several months as we study this that you would use this book to really in our own life to help us be more wise when we end and when we begin.

Help us grow in wisdom so that we reflect your righteousness.

So we reflect decisiveness.

And so we reflect integrity.

These things are all true about you, Lord.

It is you who are righteous.

You, of course, have integrity.

Your words reveal who you are.

And you are the supreme judge of the universe.

So we submit our lives to you.

In Jesus' name, we pray.

Amen.

And now for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.