A Treasure of Common Sense - Justin McTeer

Jesus, thank you so much that we are all together this morning, and thank you that we have you just to celebrate.

Lord, you are amazing, and your grace is amazing, and just knowing you and knowing that we are loved by you is the most amazing thing in the world.

And we just we worship you this morning.

Our hearts just cry out that we love you, and we are we are just amazed by how much you love us.

And Lord, we ask that your Holy Spirit would be here this morning.

Holy Spirit, we ask that you would just speak to our hearts and just share with us whatever we need to hear to be closer to you and to live the life you created us to live.

And we ask all this in your name.

Amen.

Well, uh, Steve and Sue are out of town this morning, and so Steve will be back next week to finish up his series on marriage.

So if you came this morning hoping to hear some really great advice about marriage, the bad news is that I've only been married for about four and a half years and I don't have much to give you in that regard.

Um, I can shrug.

You know, what do you do in marriage?

I don't know.

Uh still figuring that out.

But we are going to talk about something that is gonna help all of our marriages this morning.

In fact, it's something that God tells us will not only help our marriages, but it will literally impact every aspect of our lives.

In fact, he tells us that it's something that will give us joy, something that will help us live longer lives, something that will help us gain the respect of the people in our lives, the people around us, the people in our community, and something that will give us real lasting happiness.

And that thing is wisdom.

It says in Proverbs 3, 13 through 18 joyful is the person who finds wisdom, the one who gains understanding.

For wisdom is more profitable than silver, her wages are better than gold.

Wisdom is more precious than rubies, nothing you desire can compare with her.

She offers you long life in her right hand and riches and honor in her left.

She will guide you down delightful paths.

All her ways are satisfying.

Wisdom is a tree of life to those who embrace her.

Happy are those who hold her tightly.

That's quite a picture.

What wisdom can offer us.

We've been talking about wisdom on Thursday nights with our high school group for the last few weeks, and it's been a topic that I've been really personally excited about.

And not really because I have a lot of wisdom and feel like this is an area of life that I have some expertise in to share, but I've been excited about it because it's an area of my life that I find I'm lacking on a really regular basis.

And so I've been really excited just to read about it, to study it so that I can grow in wisdom.

But it just seems for me, and I know this is true for all of us, that each step we take in life, every time we go from one phase of life to another, we come face to face with all of the things that we just do not have a clue about what to do.

There's so many things that we find ourselves just scratching our heads and trying to figure out what to do.

And it's really every phase of life.

I can think back to the phase of life when you're transitioning from living at home and living with your parents to being out on your own.

Some of us are in that phase of life right now, some of us are heading there, most of us have been there.

I remember when that was me, and uh, and I made my first budget, my first attempt at figuring out how much I thought life was going to cost.

And I was very confident in this budget.

I actually, whenever I asked uh my my wife's father if I could marry her, uh I showed him, I remember this, I showed him this budget, and I said, hey, look, this is how we're gonna live, because we were both still in college.

He had some questions about that, rightfully so.

And and I showed him this budget, and he didn't laugh.

And now I wonder why he didn't, because I I actually found, we my wife and I found that budget as we were going through some boxes.

And and all it took for me was one trip to the grocery store to shatter any ideas of financial wisdom that I had whenever that was uh that was us.

But man, every phase of life we move to, whether it's that phase of life or whether it's it's moving into marriage or having kids or when our kids are getting older or career choices, you name it, every phase of life brings with it this realization that there are a lot of things that we just don't know how to do.

There are a lot of things that we're just clueless about in terms of knowing what to do.

My wife and I are kind of going through one of those phases right now.

We just found out a few months ago that we're gonna be having our first child in April.

So, yeah.

I'll take that as you guys volunteering for babysitting.

That's what we'll do.

Just be there.

You're so excited.

Actually, at first, my reaction was the same as yours.

I was I was like, oh yes, this is going to be incredible.

I cannot wait.

And that was quickly followed by, oh no, what are we gonna do?

Because I'm I'm someone who I work with little kids a lot, and and by little kids I mean first grade and up.

And so, with a first grader, I'm fine, but you hand a baby to me and I just hold it like, you know.

And so the concept that in two months we're gonna have a child and the hospital is gonna give it to us and say, okay, go home, is just it's scary.

And so, you know, I can I can joke about it, but literally, there have been so many just serious, soul-searching questions that have been running through my mind at an almost constant pace.

And it, you know, it started with little stuff like, okay, how do you change diapers?

But that stuff has just faded into, you know, the whole category of I'll figure that out as I go along.

But now there's these other questions.

There's these things like, how am I supposed to manage, you know, having enough time to spend time with my wife, to spend time that I need to spend at my job to do it well, and to have time to be a father.

I don't feel like I have enough time now.

How am I supposed to invest in the lives of some of the great teens that we have here at his hands without neglecting to invest in the life of my son?

How are we supposed to stretch our money so that we can afford all the things that go along with having kids?

I mean, there are whole sections of Walmart that we've never paid attention to until now.

And and we've just now started to look at those sections, and I looked at the price of diapers, and it's ridiculous.

And I I don't even know what else comes along with having kids, but but literally it's one of those things that how are we gonna have enough to pay for all these things?

The things like how am I supposed to be a good father if I don't even feel like I figured out how to be a good husband yet?

Those are the kinds of questions that are running through my mind all the time.

And the truth is I don't have a clue what the answers are.

I don't know.

And it's like that for all of us.

All of us live life, and we have these heavy questions going through our minds all the time.

It's how am I gonna fix my marriage?

How are we gonna get out of debt?

How am I gonna find the right person to get married to?

How am I supposed to help my kids?

I see the choices that they're making, and I'm worried about the direction they're heading.

How am I supposed to get them on the right path?

We live with those questions going on all the time, and and a lot of the time, we don't know the answer.

We don't have a clue.

We need wisdom.

And fortunately for us, wisdom is something that God not only has plenty of, but it's something that he will give to us if we go to him for it.

James 1, 5 says, if you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you.

He will not rebuke you for asking.

What a cool verse.

I love how it begins with if you need wisdom.

If.

As if there's ever a time in life that we don't.

But it tells us that God is generous, that he has what we need, and he is ready to give it to us.

It says he will give you wisdom.

And then it has this really cool part where it says, He will not rebuke you for asking.

And what that tells us is that when we go to God and we say, look, I don't know what to do.

I'm lost here, he will not rebuke us for going to him for help.

He will not rebuke us for asking for his wisdom.

That means he's not disappointed in us when we don't know what to do.

He's not surprised when we're not sure of how to handle a situation in our life.

He doesn't have an attitude of, like, well, if you would have memorized more of your Bible, you would know the answer to this question.

That is not his attitude with us.

He knows that we need his wisdom.

He expects us to encounter things in life that we don't have the solution for.

And that's why he encourages us to go to him.

He will not rebuke us for asking for his wisdom.

Even Jesus had to grow in wisdom.

Whenever Jesus was living life as one of us, it says in Luke 2, verse 52 Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and favor with God and all the people.

Luke 2:52

Even Jesus had to grow in wisdom.

So it is okay for us to have to go to God and say, God, I don't know what to do.

See, not only do we feel this weight, because not knowing what to do in life, not knowing the answer to those questions that are major areas of our life, there is a burden and there is a weight there.

And we carry it, and it gets exhausting.

It is tiring.

But on top of that weight, a lot of times we we carry an extra weight of this guilt that we feel because we don't know what to do.

So if we're a parent and we have a child and our child's making choices and we're trying to figure out how are we going to get through to our child, and we can't figure out how to do it, no matter what we do, it seems like it's not working.

Not only do we have this weight of I don't know what to do, now we have this extra weight of this guilt that, oh, I'm failing as a parent because I don't know what to do.

But God says, no.

No, we we don't have to carry that weight.

He expects us to not know what to do.

That's why he's given us this relationship with him that we can come to him and ask him for wisdom.

We can go to him and ask him for help.

We don't have to feel a weight and a guilt for being clueless about how to fix major areas of our lives.

That's the way it is.

Even Jesus had to grow in wisdom.

Like James 1:5 said, God will give us wisdom if we need it.

James 1:5

He will not rebuke us for asking.

He knows we need his wisdom.

As we've been studying wisdom with the high school students on Thursday nights, I've been reading the book of Proverbs.

And it's an amazing book.

It's an amazing book filled with so much wisdom.

And I came across these two verses really early in Proverbs that just jumped off the page to me.

It's Proverbs 2, 6 through 7.

It says, For the Lord grants wisdom.

From his mouth come knowledge and understanding.

He grants a treasure of common sense to the honest.

He is a shield to those who walk with integrity.

There's a phrase in there, a treasure of common sense.

When I read that, I was like, man, what a cool phrase.

A treasure of common sense.

Common sense is one of those things that it is not that common.

It is very, it's it's deceiving.

I don't have a lot of common sense.

And that is not me being modest, that is not me being humble, that is me being totally honest.

Common sense is something I have struggled with in life.

A true story, I can back this up.

Whenever my wife and I were dating in college, this was probably two years before we got married, uh, she came to me and she said, you know, Justin, I feel like I'm gaining weight.

And like point blank, I just said, Well, work out more.

There's actually another verse that I read in Proverbs that uh Proverbs 30, verse 2.

Proverbs 30:2

It says, I am too stupid to be human and I lack common sense.

Yeah.

That's me.

That is me.

See, but you're you're clapping for me, but she still married me after that.

So both of us, both of us had some common sense issues we needed to work out.

But man.

That was like my instant response.

And it's just an example.

There's so many things in life that I've done, and afterwards I've just said, oh my gosh.

Why did I say that?

Why did I do that?

Because I lack common sense.

And the thing is, it said in Proverbs that God will give us a treasure of common sense.

So many of the problems that we face, so many of the issues that we go through, and we scratch our heads at and we just deal with the overwhelming sense that we don't know what to do.

It's amazing how many of those problems will be fixed when God gives us a treasure of common sense.

I remember when Megan and I were first married, uh, we we moved into a really small apartment.

It was the only apartment that we could afford.

We were both still in college.

And I went online and I looked up our first apartment and it had 440 square feet.

And I don't know if you guys ever go to IKEA or not, but they have these, IKEA has these little model like living spaces.

And it'll say, here's what you can fit into an apartment that's only 400 square feet.

And that was the apartment that we lived in.

Except IKEA actually cheats.

If you go there, they don't have doors on any of the rooms.

So they can fit more stuff in because they don't have to, you know, adjust for the space you need to open and shut a door.

But we lived in this tiny apartment.

This is how we started our marriage, and we had a lot of fights in that apartment.

It was uh, I mean, it was a daily thing, honestly, almost a daily occurrence.

We would fight.

And one of our frequent battlegrounds was our bathroom.

And the thing is, if that apartment was 440 square feet, then the bathroom was like eight.

It was, I mean, it was ridiculous how small that bathroom was.

And what would happen was every morning we would wake up and we would get ready to go to class or go to work, and we would both eventually meet in the bathroom.

And, you know, Megan would have her blow dryer and her makeup and all this stuff, and it was the only mirror we had in the entire apartment.

So that was the one place to get ready.

So I would come into the bathroom and I would try to work around her stuff and you know, brush my teeth, and lean over to use the sink real quick, and then you know, all this stuff.

And eventually, just dealing with the tension of both of us trying to occupy this small space, you know, tensions would rise.

Megan would give me a look.

And it was scary.

Um but she would give me a look and she would say something like, Excuse me, you're in my way.

And because I lack human because I lack common sense, because I'm too stupid to be human sometimes, instead of just saying, I'm so sorry, let me get out of your way and let you get ready, I would respond defensively and say something like, Well, excuse me.

Did you ever think maybe you were in my way?

I didn't know this was your bathroom.

I'm sorry.

And those kind of comments never go well, so so we would get in a fight.

And so every single morning, almost every single morning, our morning would start in the bathroom, getting angry at each other and having a fight.

And this happened almost daily for the first year of our marriage.

It was an almost daily occurrence.

And so every day we started off on the wrong foot.

And it was really hard.

I mean, it got to the point where I think both of us were really starting to think there must be something seriously wrong with our relationship if we can't even get up and get out the door without having a fight.

And it racked my brain.

What is wrong with us?

Why can't we get along?

Why can't we be happy?

And then God mercifully, after about a year, it was about 10 months into our marriage, he gave me this little treasure of common sense, and I know it came from him.

I know it did because I'm too stupid to be human and I lack common sense.

And I had this kind of epiphany, and I was like, wait a minute.

It takes Megan 30 minutes to get ready in the bathroom.

And it takes her 15 minutes to get dressed and accessorize and all that kind of stuff.

That's 45 minutes.

It takes me 15 minutes to wake up and get out the house, and that's if I shower.

I mean, you know.

So I could sleep for 30 extra minutes every morning, wake up when Megan was walking out of the bathroom.

I could use the bathroom, I could be ready, we'd be ready to leave at the exact same time.

I would be happy because I slept for 30 extra minutes.

Megan would be happy because she had some peace and quiet and some space.

And it totally changed our marriage.

It sounds ridiculous, it sounds silly, but it totally changed our marriage because we went from starting every day off on the wrong foot and getting angry and spending the whole rest of the day trying to patch that up to all of a sudden we're starting every day and we're actually happy.

We're not fighting, we're driving to work or to school, and we're not, we're not having an awkward silence because of an argument we just had.

It changed our marriage.

And it was this little piece of common sense, this little treasure of common sense that God gave us.

It is amazing how many of the problems that we have in life can be fixed by the wisdom that God will give us.

And most of the problems that we face are much, much bigger than bathroom time management and space management.

That's what we were dealing with.

But it doesn't matter what the problem is, God's wisdom, the common sense He will give us, it will show us the solutions to so many of those problems that weigh us down.

So many of those things that we walk around with not knowing what to do.

Whether it's our finances, our marriages, other relationships we have in life, relationships with our parents, with our kids, it's our jobs, addictions, it doesn't matter.

God's wisdom is a solution for all of it.

And like he said in James 1.5, he will give it to us when we come to him.

So the question is: if God's wisdom is the solution for all this stuff, well, how do we get God's wisdom?

How do we get a treasure of common sense from God?

And there's a couple of ways.

The first one is so simple.

It's like it said earlier, we ask God for it.

There is something about us realizing that we need his wisdom.

Because his wisdom is different than our wisdom.

We need a wisdom that's beyond just the normal wisdom we get from the experiences we have.

That's very valuable.

But sometimes we need more than that.

A lot of the times we need more than that.

We need God's wisdom.

And there is something about us realizing that and realizing that he has something that we need and that he is the source of what we need.

If we realize that and go to him and ask him for his wisdom, there is something about doing that that just puts our hearts in the perfect place to receive the wisdom that he wants to give us.

It all starts by asking God, because he is the source of wisdom.

He's the source of all of it.

So we go to him and we ask him.

And that puts us in the place where we're ready to receive it.

And then beyond that, we do things like reading the part of the Bible that was specifically designed to give us wisdom.

The book of Proverbs is an amazing book.

It's really interesting.

It has 31 chapters.

And each chapter is very short.

It probably takes about three to five minutes to read a chapter of Proverbs.

And the great thing about it having 31 chapters is most months there's 30 or 31 days.

And so if you spent five minutes a day reading one chapter of Proverbs a day, you would read the entire book of Proverbs every month.

You do that for a year, that's the entire book of Proverbs 12 times in one year.

Now, if someone read the instruction manual on their coffee maker 12 times a year, and something went wrong, they would have a pretty good idea of how to fix it, or at least how to get that process started.

And if we read, if we read Proverbs 12 times a year, and we faced a big issue in life, a crisis or a problem, I'm pretty sure we would have a really good idea of how to fix it or how to go about fixing it.

Because we would have gained so much of God's wisdom.

And it's just five minutes a day.

And the great thing is, is because it correlates with our calendar, if you forget to do it for two weeks, it's not a big deal.

You don't even have to worry about where do I go back and start.

If it's February 7th, you read Proverbs 7.

It's so easy.

It's all God's wisdom.

We talk about how we need God's wisdom.

We want him to give us his wisdom, and sometimes it's really easy to forget that he already has in a lot of ways.

That's not to say that he won't give us wisdom through prayer, he totally will.

And sometimes he will just supernaturally deposit his wisdom into us in a situation where we need to know what to do.

God will do that.

But he went through great lengths to give us his wisdom in his word.

And it's it's ready to us, it's accessible at all times.

We have it right at our fingertips.

All of God's wisdom.

A big part of life, a huge part of our lives is spending a lot of time dealing with problems and situations where we don't know what to do.

That is a big part of life, and that is a burden.

The only thing worse than having a problem in our marriage is having a problem in our marriage and not knowing what to do about it.

So we walk around with this weight and this burden.

But Jesus doesn't want us to do that.

It says in Matthew chapter 11, verses 28 and 29, Jesus says, Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

Matthew 11:28

Take my yoke upon you, let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.

Jesus wants to lift the burdens that we walk around with.

And that burden of not knowing what to do, whatever problems we're facing this morning that we have been thinking about, sometimes we think about them to the point where we don't even want to think about them anymore.

We've just given up.

And that's not what Jesus wants for us.

Jesus wants to take those burdens.

And he wants to give us the wisdom that we need to find the answers.

We need wisdom.

And Jesus and wisdom are one and the same.

He is wisdom.

He is the source of all the wisdom we could handle.

And so all we really need is Him.

We need more of Him, more of Jesus to have the wisdom that we need, and Jesus will give it to us.

It says in Proverbs 4:7 that getting wisdom is the wisest thing you can do.

Proverbs 4:7

Getting wisdom is the wisest thing you can do.

And Jesus and wisdom are one and the same.

We go to him, we have a relationship with him, we grow in our relationship with him, we spend time with him, we spend time in his word and we ask him for help.

We let him know I don't know what to do, but I know you do.

We face problems every day that we don't know the answer to, but we will never ever face a problem that God does not know the answer to.

That will never happen.

He has the answer to every problem we will ever go through.

And like it says, he will give us the wisdom we need.

He will give us a treasure of common sense and wisdom if we go to him, seek him, and ask for it.

Let's pray.

Jesus, thank you for thank you for being a God that gives us what we need.

Thank you for being a God that has what we need.

And Lord, this morning we just come to you and we ask for your wisdom.

We ask that you would give us the answers to the problems that we're facing.

We ask that you would give us the wisdom we need to deal with the situations that all of us go through.

And Lord, we just know that you are the answer to those problems.

We thank you so much for being our Lord, for being someone that gives us what we need, that gives us the wisdom we need.

And we just ask for it.

We're gonna go throughout this week, Lord, asking for the wisdom that we need to deal with life.

We love you, Jesus, and we just celebrate you.

Amen.