The Path to Wisdom: Sep 17. 1006
September 17, 2006, small group announcement, add Proverbs 26:12 to powerpoint…
Big idea: pride makes us fools, humility makes us wise.
A couple had been fighting over the purchase of a new car for weeks. The husband wanted a new truck. The wife wanted a fast sports car.
The discussion was getting very heated when finally the wife stated, "Look, I want something that if I “step on it” will go from 0 to 240k in six seconds or less, and that's all there is to it!"" My birthday is coming up and you better surprise me or you’ll be awfully lonely!
When her birthday came, the wife went out to the garage, no new car. Angry, she je asked where’s my gift? The husband handed her a bathroom scale to weigh yourself on with a red ribbon. He said, “You wanted something that if you stepped on it would go from 0-240 in 6 seconds or less!” Here you go!
A young, ambitious guy (and this is a true story) who I worked at the Amoco corporation got a big promotion that required a transfer to Cairo, Egypt. He went home to his wife and young baby and said, "Great news, we're moving to Cairo." Apalled, his wife said, "You're moving alone. I'm going home to my mother." There seemed to be no workable compromise: if he relinquished his promotion, he would resent his wife for ruining his career; if she just went along with the move, she would hate him for squashing her ideals for her baby and herself. What to do?
Many of life situations require more than a simple rule… they require wisdom. Buying a birthday gift typically is a simpler decision, then whether to take a job that will force you to work in a new city…
Some of us would love to have simple rules that in effect would make our decision for us, but in many life situations, a simple rule isn’t enough…
The decision about where to go school, where to work, where to live, if and whom to date, and if and whom to marry, if and how to raise family, when and how to confront someone… all require wisdom.
Wisdom according to the book of Proverbs is about gaining “skill or expertise in life,” it is about gaining “competence in life.”
This “competence in life” comes from both keen observation and experience as a result of God directly depositing wisdom in our hearts.
Solomon the author of the Proverbs received wisdom through both keen observation, but also directly as a gift from God in answer to prayer.
This morning I want to ask the questions: How do we become wise?
And how do we become fools?
What are the pathways to wisdom and becoming a fool?
According to the Proverbs, the gateway to wisdom is the fear of the Lord…
If you have a Bible please turn to Proverbs 1:7
7 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge,
but fools despise wisdom and instruction.
Now turn to Proverbs 9:10
10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,
and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
The fear of the Lord is the gateway to wisdom…
We will be exploring more of what this means a little later in the sermon.
But, the gateway to becoming a fool is pride…
Proverbs 26:12 says (add to powerpoint)…
12 Do you see people who are wise in their own eyes?
There is more hope for fools than for them.
Proverbs 16:18 tells us that pride precedes a person’s fall
When Proverbs use the term pride here, it is NOT pride in the good sense of having a healthy self-esteem.
Someone has rightly said, there’s a good kind of pride: having in faith in the idea God had when he made you.
But there’s a pride that can really damage us and that is the pride that makes us think that we are the king or queen of our world, the “god” of our world…
The pride makes us think we can make it on our own and that we don’t need God.
How does pride make us a fool?
Last week we talked about how Biblically speaking wisdom is a deep, heart understanding of the moral/spiritual order created by God… (If you couldn’t be here last week, you might want to pick up the cd of that message as it helps to explain the purpose of the book of Proverbs--by looking at the call of woman wisdom).
We talked about how wisdom in Proverbs is defined as having “mastery or expertise” in life or “competence” in life.
We talked about how this understanding of life comes through both a keen observation of life and also as a direct deposit from God into our hearts.
Solomon grew in wisdom as he attentively observed life and as he received wisdom directly from God in answer to prayer.
If we are proud, we assume we know or can figure something out on our own and so we don’t feel the urgent need to learn from others.
There’s a person I sail with who’s a beginner-level sailor…
The person often challenges our sailing coach, who is a master sailor…
When we’re doing the “man overboard” drill….
He instructs us how to do maneuver the boat based on the direction of the wind, assuming that in a real life situation the water is going to be choppy
This sailing student, crosses his arms, and says in effect… there’s a more efficient way to do this… we don’t need to zig zag to rescue the “MOB”—if we go strait to the person it will be faster…. The sailing master says it won’t work in a real life situation… when there’s likely to be considerable wind and waves…
The person’s arms are still crossed…and says let me try it my way… and it doesn’t work even in calm conditions…
I’m thinking this person’s pride is cutting him off from sailing wisdom…
A proud person says, I know what I need to know or I can figure it out on my own, so he tends to close his mind to wisdom that may be imparted by others.
If on the other hand if a person is humble, all kinds of doors to learning open in all kinds of situations.
Einstein was once asked, “What is the key to your great knowledge?” He says, the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know and this drives me to learn more and makes me realize how much I don’t know and my hunger to learn grows.
Jesus spoke about the importance of having a child-like humility and openness to understanding the nature of the Kingdom of God.
Zen masters talk about the importance of having a “beginner’s mind.”
The book of Proverbs gives us this paradox: it tells us that if you think you’re wise you’re a fool, but if you think you’re a fool you’re wise or on the road to becoming wise…
Pride makes us a fool in that keeps us from feeling we need to keenly observe life and learn… from others…
Pride also keeps wisdom from directly entering our hearts (Proverbs 2:10).
According to Proverbs 6:16-17 God hates pride. God lists 6 things he hates, seven things he detests. Number 1 on the list is pride.
According to 1 Peter 5:5 God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
So, if we are proud God opposes us and we will not receive the grace, we will not receive the gift of God’s wisdom.
Prides cuts us off from wisdom and leads us to become fools…
What might it look like to become a fool through pride?
It might look like inadvertently hurting ourselves.
As we looked at last week, if we’re proud, we may not heed the instructions of God given in Proverbs and other places in Scripture…. to avoid “easy sex” and “easy money” and end up damaging our souls.
The Proverbs 16: 25 says,there’s a way that seems right, but in the end leads to death.
We might think we do not need God’s wisdom in other areas of lives and hurt ourselves.
There’s a pastor I know who was very successful. He went on to become the president of a very important Christian organization. He ended up committing adultery. People were stunned because this person was/is so smart and disciplined. When people asked him how could you do that? He said, God says take a Sabbath day once a week, I thought I was so busy (apparently he thought he was so strong) that I only needed a Sabbath once every 10 or 12 days and I became so tired… that I lost my footing…
Pride makes us think, we don’t need to follow God’s way and because God’s way is always organically connected to who we are and the way world is designed, when we don’t go God’s way we end up going against the grain (use prop) of who we are and the grain of the world.
Pride makes us a fool in that it causes us to disregard God’s wisdom in a way that makes us hurt ourselves.
Pride also makes us a fool in that it causes us to hurt other people.
If we think we’re better than other people, it will be easy for us to hurt others.
If you read historian Paul Johnson’s book The Intellectuals, you’ll read about these famous people, geniuses whose ideas of love and justice have shaped the Western world, but they were so proud they treated people like dirt.
Picasso was a great artistic genius. His work is amazing.… My wife and I saw a lot of his work this past summer.
But Picasso was very proud, he was once heard muttering to himself “I am god…” “I am god…” and because Picasso was proud he looked down on people and particularly on the women in his life… as Picasso himself admitted all the women in his life eventually became doormats. One mistress told him, “You have never loved anyone in your life.” “You don’t know how to love.” Francois Gilot his 3rd mistress once told him you’re the devil. Picasso then branded her with a cigarette held to her cheek, then stopping only as he said “I’ll stop now, only because I may want to look at you again”
What causes a person to abuse woman or someone on the basis of their gender, or discriminate different race or hold a person of a different socio-economic class in contempt? It’s because he thinks, hey, I’m better…
Pride makes us hurt people… who are infinitely worthy…
Pride cuts us off from keenly observing life and cuts us off from God, the source of real wisdom. Pride makes us hurt ourselves and others.
Pride makes us a fool. So how do we avoid this fate?
Solomon tells us it’s through wisdom. Where does wisdom come from?
Proverbs 1:7 tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.
Proverbs 9:10 tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Wisdom comes to us through the fear of the Lord…
What does the expression “fear of the Lord” mean?
OT scholar Bruce Waltke points out the expression “fear of the Lord” is a “compound expression.” You can’t get its meaning from simply dissecting the phrase and examining the words “fear” and “Lord”, just as you can’t understand the word butterfly by studying the words butter and fly, you have to take the expression “fear of the Lord” as a whole in order to understand it.
The expression fear of the Lord refers to being in awe of God--in a way that is demonstrated by submission to the truth he reveals to us. 2x
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom… because it causes us to live in a way that’s consistent with God’s design for us.
A person can say, “I reverence God, but the test as to whether we really do or not is to see if that person really submits to God’s Word or not.”
This past week in our small group, we went over parts of Psalm 119: each verse in this very long Psalm exudes reverence for God’s word and passion to submit to it…
If we really trust and respect what God has said, we will align ourselves with what he says.
If we really trust and respect a person we’ll consider what he says, if we really respect the person and his judgment we’ll tend to do what he says…. (I say “tend to” because no human being is infallible).
If we really trust and respect God,we will align ourselves with what he says.
As we align ourselves with God’s way for us, we will find that we are living more and more in a way that is consistent with God’s design for us.
If we work with wood in a way that is consistent with it’s design… we’ll find it cuts more easily… so it is with our lives… if we work consistently with the grain of our lives we tend to find that we flourish…
Martin Laird in his book Into the Silent Land talks about how a young prisoner cuts himself with a sharp knife to dull his emotional pain.
“As long as I can remember,” he says, I have had this hurt inside. I can’t get away from it, and sometimes I cut or burn myself so that the pain will be in a different place and on the outside.
Someone then taught him how to pray and how to turn his prison cell into a monastic cell.
After learning how to meditate and practicing it twice a day for several weeks, the young prisoner speaks movingly of what he has learnt.
“I just want you to know that after only 4 weeks of mediating half an hour in the morning and at night, the pain is not so bad, and for the first time in my life, I can see a tiny spark of something that I can like.”
When we worship God spending time in God’s presence or in community something happens inside to move us toward wholeness, in the presence of God whether alone or in community we become in words of Thomas Merton, our true self…
When we honor God’s design by coming into contact with the One in whose image we were made… we flourish…
If we go against that design we flounder….
Last year I was out teaching in Hawaii--a rough assignment, but someone has to do it—Sakiko and I were with our hosts on Oahu’s North Shore--infamous for it’s rip tides.
I remember our host saying one time to me, don’t wade into the water, because the rip tide may carry you out into it and people die every year…
Imagine that you don’t know that and you wade into the water and a big wave comes over you and the rip tide pulls you up into the ocean…
Every impulse in you says swim back… to shore… front crawl…maybe butterfly…
I am no expert on this, but I’ve heard that if you try to swim against the rip tide you’ll drown, but what you do is let the tide carry you and then as it weakens you swim parallel to beach until you are out of the rip and then you swim back to shore…
If you do what you really want to do and try to swim directly back to shore you’ll drown, but if you honor nature and you go with it, you’ll be ok or there’s a better chance you’ll be ok…
C.S. Lewis in his book the Abolition of Man said the ancients, used wisdom to conform to reality in a way that led to life… he says modern people try to use a technique that tries to reshape reality in a way that will conform to their immediate desires, but in a way leads to death…
E.g. someone discovers that the Scriptures teach that God’s design for sex is for exclusive, covenant relationship of marriage… but after hearing that says, I don’t need to follow that… because I’ll use a condom…. thinking that through a technology, he can “reshape reality” in way that allows him to meet his immediate desire.
But when a person violates the grain of God’s design for our sexuality, while technology may help him avoid an unwanted pregnancy, he damages his soul….
We’ll have sermon on sex and sexuality in this series….
When we end up swimming against the current, going against the grain of the way God designed us, we end up damaging our relationship with God, our soul, and with others…
Wisdom is about honoring the physical, social, moral and spiritual order…
We become people of wisdom by living in the fear of the Lord by reverently submitting to God’s loving design for us....
Sometimes God’s way is really counter intuitive…
If you want to be great, God says don’t start acting like a King or Queen, become a servant…
If you want to receive, give.
If you want to financially flourish, honor God by giving the first 10% of your income…
How counter intuitive is that…
If you want to be truly free, submit to God’s design…
If we reverence God and submit to his revelation… we will honor our design and we will therefore be people with wisdom…
In the best sense “wisdom works,” we’ll find that as we pursue God’s way…
As we fear God, reverently submitting to God, we will find that wisdom will enter our hearts not only through observation, but as a gift… directly from… God…
Proverbs 18:12 tells us that pride goes before a fall, humility precedes grace and honor…
Humility precedes honor and humility before God is the fear of God.
As we close, I want to shift the focus slightly to talk about how we become people who fear God…
Specifically, how do we become people who don’t have the bad kind of pride that makes us think we don't need to learn from God and others and yet have the good kind of pride that enables us to have faith in the idea that God had when he made us.
I think the way to have this healthy fear of the Lord, the absence of bad pride that makes us think we’re superior and that if we had to we’d be fine without God and others and to have the presence of the good pride…
It is to focus our identity on Jesus Christ and what he did for us on the cross.
Let what he did for us sink deep into our heart…
If our life is focused on something other than what Jesus Christ did for us…
We’ll tend to be either proud and not humble, or humble, but not confident…
For example if our identity is based on our performance at school, or having a boyfriend or girlfriend or being a good spouse or lover, or our work or some athletic or artistic ability or being a parent…
Then we’ll tend either to be proud, perhaps smugly self-satisfied because we’re doing that better than others or we’ll tend to feel inferior because we are focused on the fact others are doing better than us.
How do we become people who are humble and yet proud in a good way…
One way is by looking to Jesus Christ and what he did for us on the cross.
If we look to the cross, we will understand our sin caused Jesus to voluntarily die on the cross as sacrifice… our sin caused someone to die…when we really understand… how can we be proud?
If our identity comes from the Gospel, the good news that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, how can we be proud, how can we ever look down on anyone… because of their gender, their race, their socio-economic bracket…
If our identity is really tied to the cross we can never really look down on anyone again…
The cross tells us how serious our sin was—we can never be proud.
On the other hand, as we look at the cross and realize Jesus Christ died for me and you we will realize how deeply we’re loved.
And we can become people who are humble, but confident….
The Gospel tells us our sins are far greater than we ever dared imagined, and that we are far more loved than we ever dared hope.
So, if our identity is built on the Gospel, we’ll be humble, but confident..
As we humbly submit ourselves to God’s way… wisdom enters our heart and we will find the path to life… because pride makes us fools, but humility makes us wise…
Benediction….
Humble yourselves therefore under God’s mighty hand and he will lift you up in due time…
(The sermon can be heard online at: http://www.tenth.ca/audio.htm)
Big idea: pride makes us fools, humility makes us wise.
A couple had been fighting over the purchase of a new car for weeks. The husband wanted a new truck. The wife wanted a fast sports car.
The discussion was getting very heated when finally the wife stated, "Look, I want something that if I “step on it” will go from 0 to 240k in six seconds or less, and that's all there is to it!"" My birthday is coming up and you better surprise me or you’ll be awfully lonely!
When her birthday came, the wife went out to the garage, no new car. Angry, she je asked where’s my gift? The husband handed her a bathroom scale to weigh yourself on with a red ribbon. He said, “You wanted something that if you stepped on it would go from 0-240 in 6 seconds or less!” Here you go!
A young, ambitious guy (and this is a true story) who I worked at the Amoco corporation got a big promotion that required a transfer to Cairo, Egypt. He went home to his wife and young baby and said, "Great news, we're moving to Cairo." Apalled, his wife said, "You're moving alone. I'm going home to my mother." There seemed to be no workable compromise: if he relinquished his promotion, he would resent his wife for ruining his career; if she just went along with the move, she would hate him for squashing her ideals for her baby and herself. What to do?
Many of life situations require more than a simple rule… they require wisdom. Buying a birthday gift typically is a simpler decision, then whether to take a job that will force you to work in a new city…
Some of us would love to have simple rules that in effect would make our decision for us, but in many life situations, a simple rule isn’t enough…
The decision about where to go school, where to work, where to live, if and whom to date, and if and whom to marry, if and how to raise family, when and how to confront someone… all require wisdom.
Wisdom according to the book of Proverbs is about gaining “skill or expertise in life,” it is about gaining “competence in life.”
This “competence in life” comes from both keen observation and experience as a result of God directly depositing wisdom in our hearts.
Solomon the author of the Proverbs received wisdom through both keen observation, but also directly as a gift from God in answer to prayer.
This morning I want to ask the questions: How do we become wise?
And how do we become fools?
What are the pathways to wisdom and becoming a fool?
According to the Proverbs, the gateway to wisdom is the fear of the Lord…
If you have a Bible please turn to Proverbs 1:7
7 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge,
but fools despise wisdom and instruction.
Now turn to Proverbs 9:10
10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,
and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
The fear of the Lord is the gateway to wisdom…
We will be exploring more of what this means a little later in the sermon.
But, the gateway to becoming a fool is pride…
Proverbs 26:12 says (add to powerpoint)…
12 Do you see people who are wise in their own eyes?
There is more hope for fools than for them.
Proverbs 16:18 tells us that pride precedes a person’s fall
When Proverbs use the term pride here, it is NOT pride in the good sense of having a healthy self-esteem.
Someone has rightly said, there’s a good kind of pride: having in faith in the idea God had when he made you.
But there’s a pride that can really damage us and that is the pride that makes us think that we are the king or queen of our world, the “god” of our world…
The pride makes us think we can make it on our own and that we don’t need God.
How does pride make us a fool?
Last week we talked about how Biblically speaking wisdom is a deep, heart understanding of the moral/spiritual order created by God… (If you couldn’t be here last week, you might want to pick up the cd of that message as it helps to explain the purpose of the book of Proverbs--by looking at the call of woman wisdom).
We talked about how wisdom in Proverbs is defined as having “mastery or expertise” in life or “competence” in life.
We talked about how this understanding of life comes through both a keen observation of life and also as a direct deposit from God into our hearts.
Solomon grew in wisdom as he attentively observed life and as he received wisdom directly from God in answer to prayer.
If we are proud, we assume we know or can figure something out on our own and so we don’t feel the urgent need to learn from others.
There’s a person I sail with who’s a beginner-level sailor…
The person often challenges our sailing coach, who is a master sailor…
When we’re doing the “man overboard” drill….
He instructs us how to do maneuver the boat based on the direction of the wind, assuming that in a real life situation the water is going to be choppy
This sailing student, crosses his arms, and says in effect… there’s a more efficient way to do this… we don’t need to zig zag to rescue the “MOB”—if we go strait to the person it will be faster…. The sailing master says it won’t work in a real life situation… when there’s likely to be considerable wind and waves…
The person’s arms are still crossed…and says let me try it my way… and it doesn’t work even in calm conditions…
I’m thinking this person’s pride is cutting him off from sailing wisdom…
A proud person says, I know what I need to know or I can figure it out on my own, so he tends to close his mind to wisdom that may be imparted by others.
If on the other hand if a person is humble, all kinds of doors to learning open in all kinds of situations.
Einstein was once asked, “What is the key to your great knowledge?” He says, the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know and this drives me to learn more and makes me realize how much I don’t know and my hunger to learn grows.
Jesus spoke about the importance of having a child-like humility and openness to understanding the nature of the Kingdom of God.
Zen masters talk about the importance of having a “beginner’s mind.”
The book of Proverbs gives us this paradox: it tells us that if you think you’re wise you’re a fool, but if you think you’re a fool you’re wise or on the road to becoming wise…
Pride makes us a fool in that keeps us from feeling we need to keenly observe life and learn… from others…
Pride also keeps wisdom from directly entering our hearts (Proverbs 2:10).
According to Proverbs 6:16-17 God hates pride. God lists 6 things he hates, seven things he detests. Number 1 on the list is pride.
According to 1 Peter 5:5 God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
So, if we are proud God opposes us and we will not receive the grace, we will not receive the gift of God’s wisdom.
Prides cuts us off from wisdom and leads us to become fools…
What might it look like to become a fool through pride?
It might look like inadvertently hurting ourselves.
As we looked at last week, if we’re proud, we may not heed the instructions of God given in Proverbs and other places in Scripture…. to avoid “easy sex” and “easy money” and end up damaging our souls.
The Proverbs 16: 25 says,there’s a way that seems right, but in the end leads to death.
We might think we do not need God’s wisdom in other areas of lives and hurt ourselves.
There’s a pastor I know who was very successful. He went on to become the president of a very important Christian organization. He ended up committing adultery. People were stunned because this person was/is so smart and disciplined. When people asked him how could you do that? He said, God says take a Sabbath day once a week, I thought I was so busy (apparently he thought he was so strong) that I only needed a Sabbath once every 10 or 12 days and I became so tired… that I lost my footing…
Pride makes us think, we don’t need to follow God’s way and because God’s way is always organically connected to who we are and the way world is designed, when we don’t go God’s way we end up going against the grain (use prop) of who we are and the grain of the world.
Pride makes us a fool in that it causes us to disregard God’s wisdom in a way that makes us hurt ourselves.
Pride also makes us a fool in that it causes us to hurt other people.
If we think we’re better than other people, it will be easy for us to hurt others.
If you read historian Paul Johnson’s book The Intellectuals, you’ll read about these famous people, geniuses whose ideas of love and justice have shaped the Western world, but they were so proud they treated people like dirt.
Picasso was a great artistic genius. His work is amazing.… My wife and I saw a lot of his work this past summer.
But Picasso was very proud, he was once heard muttering to himself “I am god…” “I am god…” and because Picasso was proud he looked down on people and particularly on the women in his life… as Picasso himself admitted all the women in his life eventually became doormats. One mistress told him, “You have never loved anyone in your life.” “You don’t know how to love.” Francois Gilot his 3rd mistress once told him you’re the devil. Picasso then branded her with a cigarette held to her cheek, then stopping only as he said “I’ll stop now, only because I may want to look at you again”
What causes a person to abuse woman or someone on the basis of their gender, or discriminate different race or hold a person of a different socio-economic class in contempt? It’s because he thinks, hey, I’m better…
Pride makes us hurt people… who are infinitely worthy…
Pride cuts us off from keenly observing life and cuts us off from God, the source of real wisdom. Pride makes us hurt ourselves and others.
Pride makes us a fool. So how do we avoid this fate?
Solomon tells us it’s through wisdom. Where does wisdom come from?
Proverbs 1:7 tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.
Proverbs 9:10 tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Wisdom comes to us through the fear of the Lord…
What does the expression “fear of the Lord” mean?
OT scholar Bruce Waltke points out the expression “fear of the Lord” is a “compound expression.” You can’t get its meaning from simply dissecting the phrase and examining the words “fear” and “Lord”, just as you can’t understand the word butterfly by studying the words butter and fly, you have to take the expression “fear of the Lord” as a whole in order to understand it.
The expression fear of the Lord refers to being in awe of God--in a way that is demonstrated by submission to the truth he reveals to us. 2x
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom… because it causes us to live in a way that’s consistent with God’s design for us.
A person can say, “I reverence God, but the test as to whether we really do or not is to see if that person really submits to God’s Word or not.”
This past week in our small group, we went over parts of Psalm 119: each verse in this very long Psalm exudes reverence for God’s word and passion to submit to it…
If we really trust and respect what God has said, we will align ourselves with what he says.
If we really trust and respect a person we’ll consider what he says, if we really respect the person and his judgment we’ll tend to do what he says…. (I say “tend to” because no human being is infallible).
If we really trust and respect God,we will align ourselves with what he says.
As we align ourselves with God’s way for us, we will find that we are living more and more in a way that is consistent with God’s design for us.
If we work with wood in a way that is consistent with it’s design… we’ll find it cuts more easily… so it is with our lives… if we work consistently with the grain of our lives we tend to find that we flourish…
Martin Laird in his book Into the Silent Land talks about how a young prisoner cuts himself with a sharp knife to dull his emotional pain.
“As long as I can remember,” he says, I have had this hurt inside. I can’t get away from it, and sometimes I cut or burn myself so that the pain will be in a different place and on the outside.
Someone then taught him how to pray and how to turn his prison cell into a monastic cell.
After learning how to meditate and practicing it twice a day for several weeks, the young prisoner speaks movingly of what he has learnt.
“I just want you to know that after only 4 weeks of mediating half an hour in the morning and at night, the pain is not so bad, and for the first time in my life, I can see a tiny spark of something that I can like.”
When we worship God spending time in God’s presence or in community something happens inside to move us toward wholeness, in the presence of God whether alone or in community we become in words of Thomas Merton, our true self…
When we honor God’s design by coming into contact with the One in whose image we were made… we flourish…
If we go against that design we flounder….
Last year I was out teaching in Hawaii--a rough assignment, but someone has to do it—Sakiko and I were with our hosts on Oahu’s North Shore--infamous for it’s rip tides.
I remember our host saying one time to me, don’t wade into the water, because the rip tide may carry you out into it and people die every year…
Imagine that you don’t know that and you wade into the water and a big wave comes over you and the rip tide pulls you up into the ocean…
Every impulse in you says swim back… to shore… front crawl…maybe butterfly…
I am no expert on this, but I’ve heard that if you try to swim against the rip tide you’ll drown, but what you do is let the tide carry you and then as it weakens you swim parallel to beach until you are out of the rip and then you swim back to shore…
If you do what you really want to do and try to swim directly back to shore you’ll drown, but if you honor nature and you go with it, you’ll be ok or there’s a better chance you’ll be ok…
C.S. Lewis in his book the Abolition of Man said the ancients, used wisdom to conform to reality in a way that led to life… he says modern people try to use a technique that tries to reshape reality in a way that will conform to their immediate desires, but in a way leads to death…
E.g. someone discovers that the Scriptures teach that God’s design for sex is for exclusive, covenant relationship of marriage… but after hearing that says, I don’t need to follow that… because I’ll use a condom…. thinking that through a technology, he can “reshape reality” in way that allows him to meet his immediate desire.
But when a person violates the grain of God’s design for our sexuality, while technology may help him avoid an unwanted pregnancy, he damages his soul….
We’ll have sermon on sex and sexuality in this series….
When we end up swimming against the current, going against the grain of the way God designed us, we end up damaging our relationship with God, our soul, and with others…
Wisdom is about honoring the physical, social, moral and spiritual order…
We become people of wisdom by living in the fear of the Lord by reverently submitting to God’s loving design for us....
Sometimes God’s way is really counter intuitive…
If you want to be great, God says don’t start acting like a King or Queen, become a servant…
If you want to receive, give.
If you want to financially flourish, honor God by giving the first 10% of your income…
How counter intuitive is that…
If you want to be truly free, submit to God’s design…
If we reverence God and submit to his revelation… we will honor our design and we will therefore be people with wisdom…
In the best sense “wisdom works,” we’ll find that as we pursue God’s way…
As we fear God, reverently submitting to God, we will find that wisdom will enter our hearts not only through observation, but as a gift… directly from… God…
Proverbs 18:12 tells us that pride goes before a fall, humility precedes grace and honor…
Humility precedes honor and humility before God is the fear of God.
As we close, I want to shift the focus slightly to talk about how we become people who fear God…
Specifically, how do we become people who don’t have the bad kind of pride that makes us think we don't need to learn from God and others and yet have the good kind of pride that enables us to have faith in the idea that God had when he made us.
I think the way to have this healthy fear of the Lord, the absence of bad pride that makes us think we’re superior and that if we had to we’d be fine without God and others and to have the presence of the good pride…
It is to focus our identity on Jesus Christ and what he did for us on the cross.
Let what he did for us sink deep into our heart…
If our life is focused on something other than what Jesus Christ did for us…
We’ll tend to be either proud and not humble, or humble, but not confident…
For example if our identity is based on our performance at school, or having a boyfriend or girlfriend or being a good spouse or lover, or our work or some athletic or artistic ability or being a parent…
Then we’ll tend either to be proud, perhaps smugly self-satisfied because we’re doing that better than others or we’ll tend to feel inferior because we are focused on the fact others are doing better than us.
How do we become people who are humble and yet proud in a good way…
One way is by looking to Jesus Christ and what he did for us on the cross.
If we look to the cross, we will understand our sin caused Jesus to voluntarily die on the cross as sacrifice… our sin caused someone to die…when we really understand… how can we be proud?
If our identity comes from the Gospel, the good news that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, how can we be proud, how can we ever look down on anyone… because of their gender, their race, their socio-economic bracket…
If our identity is really tied to the cross we can never really look down on anyone again…
The cross tells us how serious our sin was—we can never be proud.
On the other hand, as we look at the cross and realize Jesus Christ died for me and you we will realize how deeply we’re loved.
And we can become people who are humble, but confident….
The Gospel tells us our sins are far greater than we ever dared imagined, and that we are far more loved than we ever dared hope.
So, if our identity is built on the Gospel, we’ll be humble, but confident..
As we humbly submit ourselves to God’s way… wisdom enters our heart and we will find the path to life… because pride makes us fools, but humility makes us wise…
Benediction….
Humble yourselves therefore under God’s mighty hand and he will lift you up in due time…
(The sermon can be heard online at: http://www.tenth.ca/audio.htm)
posted by Shigematsu at 5:38 PM
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