Open your Bibles, if you would, to Proverbs 29. Proverbs 29, Solomon's final words within this book of Proverbs. The next two chapters are written by King Lemuel and by Augur, son of Jacob. So we'll look at them over the next four Sundays. So Lord willing, we'll be done with Proverbs on the second Sunday of November. And we'll go on to Exodus in the evening. Proverbs 29, starting at verse 17. Notice, if you would, how many themes from the beginning of the book and from the beginning of the collection of the Proverbs of Solomon are repeated here. Solomon started chapter 10, a wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish son is the grief of his mother. And this final section starts very similarly, verse 17, correct your son and he will give you rest. Yes, he will give delight to your soul. Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint, but happy is he who keeps the law. A servant will not be corrected by mere words, for though he understands, he will not respond. Do you see a man hasty in his words? There's more hope for a fool than for him. He who pampers his servant from childhood will have him as a son in the end. An angry man stirs up strife, and a furious man abounds in transgression. A man's pride will bring him low, but the humble in spirit will retain honor. Whoever is partner with a thief hates his own life. He swears to tell the truth, but reveals nothing. Fear of man brings a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord shall be safe. Many seek the ruler's favor, but justice for man comes from the Lord. An unjust man is an abomination to the righteous. and he who is upright in the way is an abomination to the wicked." Thus far, the Proverbs of Solomon. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, give us the wisdom to hear the wisdom of your Word. Help us once again as we look at the thought process of the Lord Jesus Christ and see how he thinks, to hear the principles by which he interpreted his world, help us to internalize his wisdom and to act it out in our daily lives. Lord, help us not to be hasty in our words, Help us instead to know wisdom's discipline and the happiness and comfort that it brings. Prepare us to be abominations to the wicked because your righteousness is so good and so sufficient for us. We pray these things, Father, in Jesus' name, amen. So section five of Proverbs ends here. Chapter 30 is the sixth section or the sixth heading in this book. And then chapter 31 is the seventh and final of the seven pillars of wisdom that are referenced in chapter nine. Wisdom has built her house. She's hewn out seven pillars. So the book of Proverbs has seven subsections. This is the end of the sixth one that started in chapter 25. These also are the Proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah, king of Judah, copied. Hezekiah's men put together this section, the fifth section, and they chose to end it by highlighting the wisdom of discipline, the wisdom of faith, and then finally the wisdom of righteousness. The wisdom of discipline, the wisdom of faith, and the wisdom of righteousness. All three of these things make the father glad. That's where the section starts. Verse 17, correct your son and he will give you rest. He will give delight to your soul. Why do we want the discipline of wisdom? If you say, I discipline my children because I want to be obeyed. I discipline my children because I want peace in my home. I discipline my children because I know I should, because God told me to. Those are great reasons, but they're not great enough. The ultimate reason to discipline is joy. The wise father disciplines out of joy and for joy. The disciplined son gives delight. And that's, of course, what the Father says, speaking from heaven, this is my son, my beloved one. The son of his love, Ephesians calls him. The father delights in his son, in part, because the son is disciplined. That's what the ultimate reason for discipline. Something less than that is not discipline. If it's not about joy, I want to share the joy of God the Father, and so I discipline myself and my children in order to make my Father glad. Being undisciplined, in other words, is the surest road to misery. Fail to correct your son and he won't give you rest, he'll give you sleeplessness. He will give misery to your soul. So discipline, as verse 25 warns, is not about the fear of man. The point of discipline is not to get your kids to fear you, or to fear human culture, or to fear the state. The point of discipline is to get them to fear God. Now it's possible that, well, yeah, it's certain that fearing you, Fearing civic authority is part of fearing God. But if you don't fear God, if you just stop with human fear, then that's not discipline. That's not adequate. That's a snare. You have to move beyond that to teaching discipline as the fear of God. Telling your kids to worship you is no better than putting any other idol in their hearts. In fact, it's worse because then they're idolaters and they're stuck with somebody who has a God complex. Don't do that. Teach your children this kind of discipline, the correction that helps them do what's right because it's right, rather than what helps them do what you want because you want it. The promise of discipline is first, joy. Second, happiness. Verse 18, where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint. Happy is he who keeps the law. Now, in its King James Version, where there is no vision, the people perish. This is a staple of the motivational speaker circuit. But Solomon is not saying that if a leader fails to cast a vision, his organization will fall apart. That may or may not be true. What is Solomon saying? He's saying that where there is no revelation from God, where there's no recognition, either of general or special revelation, that society is doomed. a society that is incapable of looking at how God built the world and correctly interpreting that, right, we could say a society that no longer recognizes the image of God as male and female, that society is doomed. Or similarly, a society that casts off special revelation, that no longer listens to the word of God or regards the written word of God as correct, truthful, Moral, but instead says we are more moral than that ancient book We are more correct than those dumb sheepherders from 3,000 years ago That society is doomed to perish and to be miserable the people will cast off restraint and they'll do all the things we see people around us doing and The one who keeps the law, the one who listens to God's revelation in nature and scripture, that one is happy. That's the promise of discipline. That it brings not only joy and comfort, verse 17, but also that it brings happiness. How do you get that happiness that comes from keeping the law? Well, you get it through discipline. Listen to the law in a disciplined fashion, not just in a haphazard fashion, but in a disciplined fashion, and you will be happy. Have that happiness that comes not only from listening, but, verse 19, from obeying. A slave will not be corrected by mere words, though he understands, he will not respond. What is this? Well, this is the third verse on the promise of discipline. Discipline is not achieved by just saying, hey, don't do that. Particularly when you're dealing with somebody with a bad attitude, I think is the message of the text. A slave will not be corrected by mere words. This is not telling us if you have a slave, you always have to beat him. It's rather talking about the slave mentality, we could say, that mindset that is also known as a bad attitude. I won't do anything unless you make me. Anybody with that attitude won't be corrected by being told, hey, don't do that. He'll understand perfectly well what you want him to do and he won't care. And so harsher discipline is in fact called for when somebody has that kind of rotten attitude. The promise of discipline is that if you discipline rightly, the person will be corrected, will understand, will respond. So discipline your son, teach your son the law, teach yourself the law, the revelation from God, and discipline your servant, the person who works for you, and of course, in the end, discipline yourself. We've all experienced, I'm struggling with this sin. I'll read the Bible more. That will correct me, right? Mere words help me do better. We go read the Bible more and then we find that we don't do any better. Well, that too is what this verse is talking about. Mere words may not do the trick. A higher degree of discipline is called for. But when you discipline in an adequate way, in a way that produces a response, in a way that changes attitudes and behaviors, then you have that happiness of the one who keeps the law. Then you understand and respond, whether we're talking self-discipline or disciplining of others. That's the promise of discipline. That's the positive side of the discipline of wisdom that's ultimately about teaching yourself and the people under your care to fear God. And Solomon has majored on that through all 19 chapters of the Proverbs of Solomon, all 20 chapters of that, I should say, the core of this book. Now, he turns to the negative side. What happens when you don't discipline? The peril of the undisciplined, kind of the counterpart to the promise of discipline. And he profiles a number of people here. The first is this one, the man hasty in his words of verse 20. There's more hope for a fool than for him. Well, coming after 28 chapters, of denouncing the fool, if we hear that somebody's worse off than a fool, we know that that person is in pretty bad shape. If you just open your mouth and vent whatever pops into your head, you're worse than a fool. There's not much hope to be had for that person. What is shooting your mouth off at random a sign of? It's a sign of lack of discipline. It's a sign that you don't keep the law and are not happy. It's a sign that you were not reproved and given wisdom and that you don't bring delight to your mom and dad. So the undisciplined are shown by their mouth. They're shown by their failure to discipline those under their charge. Verse 21, he who pampers his servant from childhood, and different translations say different things in the second line, because the Hebrew says, whoever pampers his servant from childhood, or the one who pampers his slave, will in the end find him to be a man on. Unfortunately, that Hebrew word appears only here in the entire Bible. Nobody knows what the word manon means. And so some translations guess that it's positive, like the new King James, he'll have him as a son in the end. Others guess that it's negative, he'll be arrogant later on, says the Holman Christian Standard Bible. But the fact is we don't know what the servant pampered from childhood will turn into. What we do know, based on the context, is that the one who fails to discipline is hardly going to find a good outcome from that failure. Take your slave, pamper him, don't give the discipline of wisdom, and the outcome will not be good any more than if you yourself live an undisciplined life. Another kind of someone who is undisciplined is the angry. We're all familiar with the indiscipline that anger brings. We've even said it, right? She wouldn't say that if she weren't angry. Ooh, if I weren't angry, I would not have done, said, written, sent, whatever. Anger is the opposite of discipline. An angry man stirs up strife, a furious man abounds in sin. If you walk around angry all the time, you're walking around in sin all the time. Yes, there is a possibility of righteous anger, but I can promise you that somebody who lives in anger all the time is not living in righteous anger. And that's why Solomon just says, without qualification, a furious man abounds in transgression. The disciplined person is not angry. He's joyful. He doesn't make decisions out of anger. He doesn't walk around in anger. He doesn't give himself over to sin because of his anger. He gives himself over to righteousness, joy, and peace in the heart. So if anger has been your fuel, the thing you lived on, what do you do? You seek the discipline of wisdom. Learn to let go of that anger, to forgive, to stop living in bitterness. Proverbs talks about this to some extent, and the rest of the Bible talks about it at length. Yet another type of undisciplined person, verse 23, is the arrogant, a man's pride will bring him low. Arrogancy that wants to lift itself up, raise its nose in the air, is what will eventually humble you and bring you down. The well-disciplined don't walk in that pride that says, I don't need to apologize, I don't need to think before I speak, I don't need to admit when I'm wrong because I'm never wrong. I don't need to consider the other person's idea because the other person's idea is stupid. That's how the arrogant think. The law of God, the word of God, the actions and attitude of God are against the proud. It's the humble in spirit who retain honor. It's those who subject themselves to the discipline of wisdom and who walk in the fear of God that will ultimately be honored. The ones who walk in pride, who insist on bountying themselves above the rest, think they're better, they will lose any honor that they once had. And then the final person who's undisciplined, the accomplice. Verse 24, whoever is partnered with a thief hates his own life. He hears the adjuration to testify and reveals nothing. In those days, and it's even mentioned in the Bible, They had what we also have today, a legal instrument that we call a sub pena. You could be forced to testify, sub pena means in Latin under penalty or under pain. You don't come into court and testify, then you will be held in contempt of court. And in those days, you would not only be in contempt, you would also be a perjurer. if you were subpoenaed and didn't speak. That was considered to be lying under oath. And the Bible goes into detail about the punishment that will be given for that. If you're that partner with the thief, if you're an accomplice, it's awful hard for you to testify against the one who did the crime because, well, you profited from the crime as well. And it's a little awkward to say, Well, we, we stole this and that. You hate your own life if you go in halvesies with a thief, because you will be convicted not only of contempt, but also of perjury. And God threatens terrible things to the person who knows what happened and who refuses to testify accurately. So five kinds of undisciplined people who lack the joy, who lack the obedience, who lack the happiness that comes from discipline. The hasty speaker, the servant pamper, the outrage, the arrogant, the accomplice, all of them have misery of one kind or another. Solomon then profiles two substitutes for discipline, two things people turn to when they say, you know, I don't want to fear God, but I don't want the miserable life of the angry, the arrogant, and the accomplice. I want to live a decent life by worldly standards. What can I do? Well, the first of these is the fear of man. That's a popular one, then and now. I will do whatever the crowd wants. I will be the chameleon. Whatever other people think I ought to do, that's what I'll do. My life is made up of testing the wind. Oh, I see which way the wind is blowing. That's the way I'm going. And so we mock this, right? When Barack Obama was elected president, he was against homosexual marriage. When he left office, he was in favor of it. How did that happen? Well, times changed. The will of the American people changed, the mainstream changed, and I changed right along with it. But in one sense, We shouldn't mock it. That's how the vast majority of human beings live their lives. I look around, I see what other people think, and I decide that I think it too. Man-fearers, people-pleasers, call it whatever you will, they live as slaves of public opinion. And it's easy, of course, when somebody is tempted to strive for an approval of the different sector of the public than you are, it's easy to look at that and be like, that's stupid. You really care what the so-and-sos think? And the memorable phrase, we buy stuff we don't, what is it? We buy stuff we can't afford to impress people we don't even like. We buy stuff we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't even like. That's part of human nature as fallen people. But if you live for the approval of your pastor, your spouse, your mother-in-law, your kids, your boss, you're not living for the approval of Christ. You are this person who walks in the fear of man and who will fall in the trap. Fear of man brings a snare that's not an adequate substitute for the fear of God. To find out what the spirit of the age is saying and say, I'll do that, will win you some popularity, some ability to fit in with the crowd, but it won't give you the benefits of real discipline. It doesn't bring the joy, it doesn't bring the happiness, it doesn't bring the ability to obey God, it instead brings a snare. It's the one who trusts in the Lord, that's the one who's safe. Well, the second substitute for discipline, almost as popular as walking in the fear of man, is what today we call rent-seeking. I go to the civil authority, and I attempt to get them to give me something. Many seek the ruler's favor. In this day and age, we have in Washington swarms, what is it, 6,000 or so, I think I've read, registered lobbyists who are there for the stated purpose of seeking the ruler's favor. They are paid by a particular interest group a particular professional association, such as the American Medical Association, or even by a single private company. Google has more lobbyists in Washington D.C. than any other corporation. These lobbyists, their goal is to seek the ruler's favor on behalf of their clientele or their constituency. And some of the things they represent are very small. American Medical Association or the American Optometrist Association or something like that with only a few tens of thousands of members and Yet have large clout in Washington Now we can get off the hook, right? No, I'm not a lobbyist never wanted to be a lobbyist never will be a lobbyist. So this isn't me but Seeking the rulers favor can take many forms any Attempt to extract privileges from the state any attempt to tilt the playing field in your favor or your group's favor That's what this is talking about in Solomon's day with the barbarian chieftains It looked like going to court and trying to advance there Maybe get the king to give you some land or to give you a pension out of the public treasury today, it can look like advocating for policies that benefit what you perceive as your group, many seek the ruler's favor, and it can even look like a pretty good substitute for discipline. Well, we don't need more discipline. What this organization needs is not more fear of God, it's more funding. We need the fire hose of federal money to deal with problem X, Y, or Z. And a lot of people who don't actively seek the ruler's favor do believe that others should be seeking it. Do believe that the fire hose of federal spending would fix this problem or that problem or the other problem. Solomon says this is a substitute for discipline. This is not the real deal. This is not the discipline of wisdom to devote your life to extracting concessions from the state. He's not right. Discipline is learning to do the right thing because it's right. Coaxing favors from the state is attempting to do the expedient thing because it looks like it might work. So many seek the ruler's favor So the first line of verse 25 and verse 26 is negative. The second half of the verse presents the positive alternative, and I call this the wisdom of faith. The fear of man brings a snare. What's the opposite of the fear of man? Whoever trusts in the Lord is safe, or is set on high, doesn't fall into the snare, but instead rises and is exalted, is safe from that snare. So the wisdom of faith is what protects you. You aren't protected by going along with whatever the world is doing. In June, we were driving through Michigan, coming back, and we stopped at the beach in a little town there on the shores of Lake Michigan, and you had to drive through the downtown area to get down to the beach. And we noticed that most of the signs, most of the stores had Black Lives Matter signs in the windows. We thought, wow, that's interesting. All these business owners really care about black people. And then, of course, come to find out that what those signs mean is, please don't burn down my business. It's an attempt to be safe by putting up a little flag of truce. Now, it's not always wrong to surrender, to give your wallet to the thug so he doesn't beat you up, but the fear of man brings a snare. If that's what you're living for, if you say, I have to have the approval of this or that or any human entity, You're not safe. It's the one who trusts in the Lord who's delivered from the snare. Faith keeps you safe in a way that rent-seeking and the fear of man can't and won't. Living to please the people who seem to have some power, living to extract concessions out of those people who seem to be in charge, It's not worth it. It's the one who trusts in God who's safe. And when you walk in faith, if you live by faith, your hope is reoriented away from what you can get from the state. Many seek the ruler's favor, but justice for man comes from the Lord. What are those lines saying? They seek the ruler's favor. They want his face to look kindly on them. But the state can't fix your problems. They can't. It can't. It's justice comes from the Lord. That's the source that will put things right. So if you think, well, we talked about this the other week. We love because he first loved us. We have the ability to love because God loved us first and awakens love in our hearts. And in the same way, we have the ability to treat others rightly, to do what's just because God has given us justice first. It's fine to pursue your claim through the courts. It's fine to appeal an unjust conviction. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you pin all your hopes on that, you will be disappointed. Justice for man comes from the Lord. Being treated justly by God is what gives you the ability to endure patiently the injustice of fallen human beings. And to say, you know what? I don't have to be vindicated to name it. I tell Alexa this all the time. We don't have to justify ourselves to him, to her, to them, to that group, to these people. You don't have to. You can let your ex go. Don't have to justify yourself to your ex. Because justice for man doesn't come from man's ability to present a wonderful case that will convince everybody that he's right. Justice for man comes from the Lord. So that's the wisdom of faith. The wisdom of discipline is that it brings joy, verse 17. The wisdom of faith is that it brings safety and sets things right. God is fixing the world. We understand that by faith. And when we trust in the Lord, that exalts us out of the pit that the fear of man plunges us into, and that gives us the confidence that I don't need a lobbyist. because justice for man comes from the Lord. Well, finally, Solomon or Hezekiah's men, cherry-picking from Solomon, winded up with their statement about the wisdom of righteousness. An unjust man is an abomination to the righteous. Righteousness makes you intolerant of evil. If your heart actually wants to serve God, you have to look at evil and say, no, that's abominable. I won't be party to that. I won't subsidize that. I won't support that. I won't put up with that. Now, this doesn't mean you have to leave the world. It doesn't mean you go around shooting unjust men. You don't become the sniper who tries to find evil people and shoot them. If you did that, you would have to kill everybody, including yourself. What is Solomon telling us? Ultimately, that you have to deal with the evil in your own heart. Injustice in general is an abomination. to the righteous. So yes, the unjust man at one level, but you have to be righteous before this verse is true. The more righteous you are, the more you hate evil, your own evil. If you tolerate your own wickedness, if you give yourself a pass for your evil, if your evil is not abominable to you, then you're of no value to the culture wars. Your value to stopping societal sin when you allow yourself to sin is zilch. You have negative value. When morally fouled up people are the only ones standing against sin, no one is standing against sin. So the hypocrite is such a common type, oh, I'm totally against that. Oh, we find out that you're doing it on the side. An unjust man is an abomination to the righteous. That's true. But far more often we have one unjust man pretending that another unjust man is an abomination to him. That's not what Solomon is talking about. He's not talking about the posturing of the hypocrite like we saw with the high priest denouncing Jesus. Oh, he blasphemed. Rip. Let me tear my clothes and show everybody how shocked I am that somebody wouldn't treat God as holy in here. No, that's become the second one. He who is upright in the way is an abomination to the wicked. We read this verse and we're so eager to say, that's me. I'm disliked because I'm upright in the way. And it's true, if you're upright in the way, you will be disliked. You will be abominable to a certain group. Solomon is warning us, first of all, you have to be righteous. You have to have internalized that discipline of wisdom. You have to be the person who obeys God, because he's God, who does the right thing, because you fear God. When that's true, When you genuinely hate evil in your heart, then you'll know the joy of denouncing evil and really meaning it. Then you'll be able to say, that injustice is abominable to me. I hate that. And it will be true. And we'll know it's true because you hate the evil in your own heart first. and foremost, and when you do that, then evil will be intolerant of you. Genuine righteousness makes you be called names like counter-revolutionary, or homophobe, or, right, you name it. Your intransigence and unwillingness to let evil happen can earn you a badge of honor, the badge of being denounced by the world as insufficiently moral. When people with the moral sensibilities of a dictator or the aesthetic sensibilities of a chimpanzee call you immoral, that's a compliment. When you're an abomination to the wicked, just like Jesus was, that's a blessing. Of course, the question arises, are we ready for that? Are you ready to be an abomination to the wicked? I'm not. None of us will be without spending time with Jesus. When we've learned perfectly to hate the sin and love the sinner, to wage war on evil and save people from the jaws of hell, to love like our master and denounce evil like he did, then we'll be ready to be treated as abominations. Our status as abominations is being traced in the wet cement of culture. Even now, within a few months or a few years, it will be written in stone. He who is upright in the way is an abomination to the wicked. This is Solomon's last word to us in the book of Proverbs. The wise son is ready to be mocked, ready to be an outcast, ready to be a pariah because of his views and his attitude and his actions. When you know the wisdom of discipline and the wisdom of faith, then you'll know the wisdom of pariahhood. When that happens, understand that the one who trusts in the Lord will be safe, that justice for man comes from the Lord, not from the ruler's favor. It's wonderful to have Christian leaders. The church can survive and has survived without them. If you live for the fear of man, you won't discipline. You won't be willing to be an abomination according to the world, and you'll perish. but the one who trusts God and accepts His discipline, he will be set on high. Maybe not here on earth, but where it counts in heaven, where your treasure should be anyway. That's where we'll find the comfort of discipline in the arms of the wise Son. He corrects us. He gives us rest. Let's pray. Father, help us to be ready to be an abomination to the wicked. Help us to genuinely be righteous, to walk in the fear of God all day long, to tremble always. Help us to know the blessing of discipline and to pass on the blessing of discipline to those under our charge. We thank you that you corrected your son and that he brings delight to your soul. Thank you that you correct us as your children. to teach us to share your holiness so that we can bring delight to your soul. Father, help us not to fear human beings, to stop trusting in man whose arm is flesh. Help us instead to trust you and to be set on high. Deliver us from rent-seeking. We pray against the army of lobbyists. We do ask, Father, that you would drive them out of Washington. We pray much more against our own rent-seeking attitudes and our desire to think, if only government policy X could be put in place, then I would be okay. Then I would be much better off. Help us not to seek the state's favor, not to live for what the state can do for us, but to seek your favor, to live for what you have done for us in Christ. Help us to be ready to be abominations, just as your son was ready. And help us to know that after suffering is glory. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.