Any fool can know...
Notes
Transcript
Intro: What is Wisdom?
Intro: What is Wisdom?
Today we begin a new sermon series through various themes that are discussed in the Psalms.
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
for the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.
Today… we are going to talk about wisdom. Wisdom is something that is near and dear to my heart. I’m going to flip our discussion time to the front end today. How do you, personally, try to be a wiser person?
“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
When I was a teenager…we went to a slew of churches (20+). I remember being part of a Spanish-speaking congregation in Oxford. I was reading in my ‘message remix’ Bible through Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. You’d think teenage Dennis only thought those two books alone made up the Bible. I had a book on King Solomon and what made him ‘wise.’ I often look towards wisdom and not Jesus to get me places in life.
I was a weird kid reading through Ecclesiastes and Proverbs (not being discipled) and listening to a mixture of Lecrae, Kirk Franklin, Lupe Fiasco, Lil Wayne and Chamillionaire (but not riding dirty)…and Linkin Park (the collision course with Jay Z).
So, first… a textbook definition of wisdom: the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment;
Wisdom was broken into three parts:
1. Experience
2. Knowledge
3. Good judgment
Young Rivera only focused on the accumulation of knowledge and was living through some stuff that wouldn’t be able to provide true ‘wisdom’ until years later.
Psalm 1 tells us that those that delights in the law of the Lord is like a tree planted by a stream. So,
You have access to the stream
You will yield fruit
You will prosper (easy with that word…)
In all that you do…
Those who don’t pursue this kind of wisdom are known as the wicked:
The wicked are like chaff that the wind blows (you aren’t firmly rooted…you’re just being blown from place to place)—think fo the
so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.
The wicked will perish…they’ll stand before the judgment and, unlike the wise, they will not stand in the presence of the righteous (the Lord and his followers)
The argument here is that those that follow the law of the Lord they will follow the decrees of the Lord. Psalm 1. The first psalm serves as the gateway into the entire book of Psalms, stressing that those who would worship God genuinely must embrace his Law.
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
So… what does this mean for us as 21st century Americans and especially in the world we live in today (which for the record is the ‘same world’ that has always existed)? As believers, we pursue wisdom by reading Scripture and following the Law of God. Following what Scripture outlines for us as a good ‘Christian’ life. We seek to bear fruit:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
We seek to ultimately live out the Gospel in every facet of our lives. We also seek to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit as he leads us on this thing called ‘sanctification’…right? Meaning, I look more like Jesus on day 100 than I did on day 13 or 76.
But, I wanted to be helpful today, how does the world around us view wisdom? And how is wisdom pursued in our society? I will say this: wisdom and truth are tied together. So, if our society believes it is pursuing truth then…it logically concludes that it is pursuing wisdom BUT I haven’t heard any of my non-believing friends (people of peace or otherwise) who said while enjoying their morning espresso: I think I’m going to pursue wisdom today!
Philosophical Nominalism:
Philosophical Nominalism:
So, let’s talk about Philosophical nominalism
“Philosophical “nominalism” a belief in our culture/world that nothing has any essence or purpose. No words have any fixed meaning reflecting eternal truths or even shared, common natures (such as “humanity”, “morality”, “faithfulness”, “marriage”).
Words are simply tags we apply to individual things, like a clerk wielding a price gun. We don’t use words to reflect any kind of truth, just to get what we want (or to match our opinion). We “price” things as we will, in order to sell people on what we’re peddling.”
Wisdom in our day and age doesn’t look clean-cut like Psalm 1. Why? Because everyone defines truth differently. Everyone defines certain words that are tied to different truths differently… Bottomline: we can’t agree on anything
We tie wisdom to an eternal truth…the ways of Jesus and the Bible. The world around us ties wisdom to ‘truth’ that keeps moving every few years.
Causes
Causes
So, this is where it gets tricky. I have a lot of friends who pursue a lot of things and most of these things are tied to ‘causes’. And these causes aren’t necessarily ‘evil.’ More often than not, these causes are part of their worldview and worldview is the filter through which we put our systems of truth. I know this is a lot but, a lot of the issues plaguing the church right now or our society (and I would argue they always have) is how we experience the world around us based off of our worldview:
Case in point: you don’t have to scroll very far down your timelines on FB or listen to the news very long to know our nation is ‘divided’ on a lot of issues. And if you listen closely, these divisions are philosophical divisions that often have to deal with a perception of truth. Even a topic like history is greatly debated because it has to do with the lens through which you view it… I don’t want to get lost in the woods here.
Opinions
Opinions
Every single person on this call has things called: opinions. We wouldn’t hold certain opinions if we didn’t think they were true. We hold opinions on everything from the shoes we wear, the teams we follow, and toppings on pizza. The tricky part if we also have political opinions, religious opinions, and how to live things out.
Your opinions are heavily impacted by:
Your experiences
Your knowledge source (which could be skewed)
Your opinions than often change the way you act out ‘good judgment’—you will do certain things and refrain from doing certain things based on your opinions.
If you’ve been paying attention you can see that I just replaced the word ‘opinion’ for ‘wisdom’. So, is ‘wisdom’ in the eyes of the beholder? Is wisdom tied to something beyond us? Or, is it up to debate?
As believers we know how to ‘live out’ wisdom: am I looking like Jesus when I say and do this? When I pursue this will I bear fruit in this endeavor? But… then it gets tricky. Should we buy this house? Should we send our kids to this school? Should we live in this neighborhood? How should I respond to this?
Wisdom & Eternal Truth
Wisdom & Eternal Truth
We tie wisdom to an eternal truth…the ways of Jesus and the Bible. The world around us ties wisdom to ‘truth’ that keeps moving every few years.
So… how do I want to end today? In a very confusing way.
Wisdom in the Bible can be encapsulated in the wisdom literature:
Proverbs
Ecclesiastes
Job
So… how do you live wise lives?
Proverbs: the 1st nine chapters of Proverbs tells us to listen to Lady Wisdom and to not listen to the lady she is contrasted with. The first nine chapters of the book of Proverbs contrast Lady Wisdom to a foolish woman. If we want to be wise in the way we live, we're told to listen to Lady Wisdom, not to the woman without maturity or sense.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,
and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.
Proverbs outlines that if you pursue everything within it you can lead a ‘wise’ life…
2. Ecclesiastes: but in steps the teacher and the critic of Ecclesiastes
I the Preacher have been king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.
What is crooked cannot be made straight,
and what is lacking cannot be counted.
I said in my heart, “I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.” And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.
For in much wisdom is much vexation,
and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.
Ecclesiastes inserts the ‘random’ nature of the following proverbs.
How does he end Ecclesiastes?
The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.
Clarification: Vanity of vanities … everything is meaningless. He isn’t saying everything is void of meaning rather, he is pushing the readers: none of this could ever have meaning outside of God. The more you try to toil and control the worse off you will be. So, wisdom is tied to the pursuit of the Lord but and can overcome much good but the benefits of wisdom can be undone by evil (and foolishness).
This leads us to the final book: Job.
For those of you unaware with this book, the story goes as follows:
There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.
We are then introduced to the character known as “the accuser” or the Satan… he tells God that the only reason Job is so s faithful is because God blesses him. He states that Job is playing the system. He is feigning obedience to get blessings… God then gives Satan to run his experiment. Everything is taken from Job…including his property and kids.
Did Job deserve this? Why would God allow this? Has God allowed things to happen to me that could’ve been avoided?
What happens next is Job’s buddies come and try to pontificate as to why Job was exposed to all of this suffering. Did Job sin? Surely…he sinned. And they all take turns… meanwhile, Job goes through a spiritual rollercoaster.
At times, defending the Lord and his goodness
At other times demanding that the Lord come down and answer for his actions (inaction)… Job wants to bring God to trial.
God then answers out of a whirlwind… Job 38:3
It’s worth reading if you never have… it’s brilliant. But what I want to end today with his God talking to Job about the “Leviathan” (God talks about a lot of beasts and the world and how he has control over it). He then talks to Job about two massive beasts: the behemoth and the leviathan
“Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook
or press down his tongue with a cord?
Can you put a rope in his nose
or pierce his jaw with a hook?
Will he make many pleas to you?
Will he speak to you soft words?
Will he make a covenant with you
to take him for your servant forever?
Will you play with him as with a bird,
or will you put him on a leash for your girls?
Will traders bargain over him?
Will they divide him up among the merchants?
Can you fill his skin with harpoons
or his head with fishing spears?
Lay your hands on him;
remember the battle—you will not do it again!
Behold, the hope of a man is false;
he is laid low even at the sight of him.
No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up.
Who then is he who can stand before me?
Who has first given to me, that I should repay him?
Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine.
“I will not keep silence concerning his limbs,
or his mighty strength, or his goodly frame.
Who can strip off his outer garment?
Who would come near him with a bridle?
Who can open the doors of his face?
Around his teeth is terror.
His back is made of rows of shields,
shut up closely as with a seal.
One is so near to another
that no air can come between them.
They are joined one to another;
they clasp each other and cannot be separated.
His sneezings flash forth light,
and his eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn.
Out of his mouth go flaming torches;
sparks of fire leap forth.
Out of his nostrils comes forth smoke,
as from a boiling pot and burning rushes.
His breath kindles coals,
and a flame comes forth from his mouth.
In his neck abides strength,
and terror dances before him.
The folds of his flesh stick together,
firmly cast on him and immovable.
His heart is hard as a stone,
hard as the lower millstone.
When he raises himself up, the mighty are afraid;
at the crashing they are beside themselves.
Though the sword reaches him, it does not avail,
nor the spear, the dart, or the javelin.
He counts iron as straw,
and bronze as rotten wood.
The arrow cannot make him flee;
for him, sling stones are turned to stubble.
Clubs are counted as stubble;
he laughs at the rattle of javelins.
His underparts are like sharp potsherds;
he spreads himself like a threshing sledge on the mire.
He makes the deep boil like a pot;
he makes the sea like a pot of ointment.
Behind him he leaves a shining wake;
one would think the deep to be white-haired.
On earth there is not his like,
a creature without fear.
He sees everything that is high;
he is king over all the sons of pride.”
Job can only respond by saying: I have spoken and I shall say no more… Job’s friends are rebuked and everything is restored to Job (and God never answers).
The full ‘answer’ to wisdom then… is the following:
Pursue Christ and his teachings (Psalm 1 and all of proverbs 1 tell us this).
You aren’t promised comfort in Zion and sometimes bad things will happen despite you following Christ closely (Ecclesiastes and Job show us this).
Stop trying to control every facet of your life and trust/fear God (fear God).
He will restore things in accordance with his will and timing
So, even though this doesn’t answer 100% what school you should choose, the house you buy, who you should vote for, or how you respond to a world of conflicting accounts and views… it reveals the angling of your heart
And you will be like the tree, firmly rooted by the stream and prospering in all that you do and yielding fruit for the Kingdom.
Let’s pray