Proverbs chapter 4, verses 20 to 27. It's Proverbs 4, 20 to 27, which can be found in your pew Bibles, hopefully on page 530. While you're turning there, just to take a moment to say thank you to Casey and the elders for having us this morning. My wife and Grace and I are delighted to be with you here and to worship with you. Let's hear the words of the Lord. My son, be attentive to my words. Incline your ears to my sayings. Let them not escape from your sight. Keep them within your heart, for they are life to those who find them and healing to all their flesh. Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. Put away from you crooked speech, and put devious talk far from you. Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you. Ponder the path of your feet. Then all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or the left, or turn your foot away from evil. That's the reading of God's word. I mentioned that my wife, Grace, is here with us this morning. What I didn't mention is that we have been married just over three months. I feel like there's a certain window, thank you, there's a certain window in which you can use the novelty of marriage as a sermon introduction, and I feel like we're still in that window. So we've been married for three months, and one of the delights of being married has been thinking about how two lives and two families come together. We've had the normal kind of conversations about holidays and who do we travel with. My family's in Missouri, her family's in California. We're all the way out here on the East Coast. Who do we go visit when? How do we do all of these things? There's conversations about how two families are coming together. One of the things though that has also come out of that conversation is how do we honor the past in our families? How do we honor our parents and grandparents, great-grandparents, with family heirlooms? I don't know about you, but I'm sure all of us probably have some family heirlooms sitting around, and some of them are treasured. We kind of break out every year around the holidays. There's China or something like that. Some of them, as the years go by, get forgotten. they end up in antique shops or landfills. And that's a question that Grace and I have been thinking a lot about, of how do we treasure these things that are coming from the past? How do we remember what was important to our grandparents or our parents? There's a sense that if we don't learn now while our grandparents are alive or while we can still hear the stories, then they won't matter in a couple of years. They won't matter to our kids. And so we've been trying to have conversations about how do we receive that well? How do we ask questions while we still can and pass that on? There's a sense, whether it's with heirlooms or family stories, that they only really matter in as much as they're still being used. If a generation doesn't continue to use them, doesn't continue to pass them on, they get forgotten. They rust, they wear out, they don't carry the meaning. Biblical wisdom, wisdom in scripture, is much the same. It's a family affair. It's learned in the home and it's passed from generation to generation. Parents teach their children the life lessons, the path of godliness that they learned from their parents before them. In Proverbs 4, at the beginning of the chapter, before our text, the king, the father, is speaking to his son. In verse 3, he says, when I was a son, my father, tender, the only one on the side of my mother, he taught me. Again in verse 11, he goes and then says, now I have taught you the way of wisdom. I have led you in the paths of righteousness. The king was taught by his father, the way of wisdom. And now he's turned and he's passed it on to his son. Wisdom for Proverbs, wisdom in scripture is familial. And while that's true in sort of the, small sense of the nuclear family. There's a sense that wisdom is passed down from generation to generation. It's true for all of Israel. We see in the law in Deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 4, this is called hero Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. The law goes on to exhort parents to pass the law on to their children, to have it on their doorposts and talk about it with them as they come and as they go. The family is meant to do this. Israel is meant to do this, to pass on wisdom to the nations. And the commission has extended to the body of Christ, to the family of the church throughout the ages. And so when we come to Proverbs, when we come to the scriptures, there is a sense that we are receiving the wisdom of past generations. We're receiving the wisdom of the family of Christ Our king has given us the words of his father. Jesus, the word, the wisdom who was with God in the beginning has given us wisdom. And so in this context, we receive wisdom. And so today we're gonna look at the characteristic of wisdom. We're gonna look at what wisdom means and what we're called to do with wisdom. Proverbs is one of those books in the Old Testament that is actually kind of can be a favorite for people, especially in today's day and age. It's really easy to open up to Proverbs, to find a verse and get sort of a punchy, pithy answer to life's questions. Sometimes they're confusing. Sometimes it feels a little stark. There's these Proverbs about the sluggard who puts his hand into a bowl and doesn't even take it back out. There's some gripping imagery. that we are familiar with. There can also be some confusion, right? There's proverbs that exhort you to answer a fool according to his folly. There's also the same proverb that says, don't answer a fool according to his folly. These types of proverbs, these one sentence, one verse proverbs make up the bulk of the latter half of proverbs. It's really chapter 10 on is these short, pithy, one line proverbial statements. Our text falls in the first 10 chapters that really act as an introduction to the rest of the book. It's sort of, if you can think about it, it's the father in chapters one through nine, the father is exhorting his son, like pay attention to wisdom, listen to wisdom. I've put you on a path, right? The father reckons his son as one of the wise people. He's saying, you are wise, I've set you on a path to wisdom, now follow it. The latter half of Proverbs is in some ways the wisdom, the path of life that the father has given his son. The latter half of Proverbs is all the wisdom that he's supposed to hold on to. But the first half is an exhortation of what to do with wisdom, how to live a life in light of the wisdom he's given him. In fact, in these first nine chapters, there are roughly 10 instructions. There are 10 different units that all start And with that familial note, my son. It is the father passing it on to his son. And ours is the seventh of those 10 instructions saying, my son, pay attention. And so what we'll see in our passage, right, what we'll see about how to engage with wisdom, how do we treat this wisdom later on, is we'll see that in the end, ultimately wisdom is a heart matter. Wisdom is not at its root a black and white answer to all of life's situations. It's not a right or wrong, yes or no, this is the way to respond in every situation. Wisdom is a heart matter. And we will see two particular things. See that wisdom is a heart matter because that is where our hearts or where wisdom resides. is receiving wisdom is done in the heart. We receive wisdom into the hearts. We'll also see that it's a heart matter because our hearts can easily be led astray. Wisdom in a sinful world is slippery. And when we receive wisdom into our hearts, it can also slip away quickly. So we'll see in verses 20 to 22, storing wisdom, receiving wisdom into the heart, the crux of the passage, the call to action, verse 23, the heart of wisdom, and verses 24 to 27, protecting wisdom. Now, we're gonna actually skip verse 23 until the end because verse 23, it roots both sides of the passage. So if you think of your mind from Greek mythology, the character of Janus, who has kind of two faces that look either direction, Verse 24 is in some ways, verse 23, sorry, is in some ways a Janus passage. And so the call in verse 23 to keep wisdom, to keep our hearts is both because our hearts are where they store wisdom and because our wisdom is slippery. So we'll return to that at the end to see the importance of keeping wisdom. But first, look with me at verses 20 to 22. Our hearts are where wisdom is stored. Says, my son, be attentive to my word, incline your ear to my sayings, let them not escape from your sight, keep them within your heart. Right, so he's saying, I've given you these sayings, I've taught you, I've instructed you, you've seen me act wisely, you've heard my teachings, keep them in front of you, store them in your heart. And one of the, crucial elements that we see here through the wording, through how the passage is worded, is we see that the prince's instruction in this passage, how the king taught his son, wasn't merely cognitive. One author will talk about a common modern conception of thinking of people as heads on sticks, that discipleship, training, education, all of these things It's just kind of brain work. It's just, here's the information you need, go from there. Not so with biblical wisdom, not so with life in the family of God, right? We think of training children. All of us at some point can think of formative experiences where a parent, a family member kind of pulls us aside and says, come sit here, watch me, and then you do it. There's this practical hands-on wisdom in the family of God. The language gets brought out, one commentator refers to it as the anatomy of discipleship. It's the eyes, it's the ears, it's the hands. This is how the prince has learned wisdom from his father. And it is a holistic wisdom. Just because it says just the eyes and the ears doesn't mean it's just still cognitive. It's the whole life. There's this sense that it is a life lived well, that wisdom, the path that the father has set his son on, is a skillful life. He is deft at living well. And that can be difficult in a fallen world. I remember hearing at one point Ed Welch, a pastor and counselor, kind of tracing the progression of scripture and highlighting the difficulty of living in a fallen world, living in a world of sin. And so one of the points he made was that in Genesis 2, living wisely before the Lord, living well for Adam and Eve was, at least propositionally, relatively easy. For them to live well and to live wisely involved not eating of the tree. That was it. They didn't have sin, there were no temptations in their heart, There wasn't any, the proposition that what the life well lived for Adam and Eve meant was don't eat of the tree. And when sin entered into the world, all of a sudden, wisdom, living well, became really difficult. There's all of a sudden, the murky, muckiness of life in a fallen world. And so we see the path of wisdom increasingly being laid out for the people of God. Into this fallen world, we see the Lord directing his people. So early on Genesis with Noah, the Lord is giving him certain instructions. There's animals that are clean, animals that are unclean. You're allowed to eat these things, you're allowed to not eat these things. The instructions get even more specific with the law for Moses. Leviticus gets pretty detailed sometimes. This is how you worship me. This is how you approach the Lord. This is how you relate to the foreign nations. This is how you don't relate to the foreign nations. This is who you marry. It starts to get more detailed. But Proverbs and the wisdom literature in general, Job, Ecclesiastes, these speak to a particular reality of the murkiness of life. One commentator aptly describes this when he says that there are details of character There's just parts of our lives and our hearts and our souls. There are details of our character small enough to escape the mesh of the law and the broad sides of the prophets, and yet are necessary and deciding in personal dealings. Proverbs moves into this realm, asking what a person is like to live with or to employ, how he manages his affairs, his time, himself. All of those later little one line proverbial statements get into the nitty gritty of life. But the king early on wants his son to know wisdom, the right way to live in light of all these later proverbial statements, starts with the heart. It's a life well lived, a skillful life. There's a sense that when we receive wisdom into the heart, when we live out a life well lived. A beautiful life. There's a sense of living well before the Lord is creating something beautiful. We can see an analogy to this early on in Exodus actually. In Exodus 31, they've come out of Egypt. Moses has led them out and now the Lord is giving them all these detailed instructions on how to build the tabernacle. And he does it twice. Do it this long, do it this color, do it these materials. It can get kind of boring sometimes to read if you don't see the overall arc of what's happening. And in the midst of that, in the midst of that, there's a wonderful insight from the Lord. It says, Exodus 31, one through five. The Lord spoke to Moses, saying to him, see, I have called by name, Basaliel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the spirit of God in wisdom and in understanding and knowledge and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works, to work in gold and silver and brass and cutting stone and setting them and so forth. The skill needed to build the tabernacle, to live to work with your hands, to be able to rot gold and iron, to work with beautiful tapestries. It's not just being good with your hands. Basilio needed to be wise. It's wisdom from the Spirit. And it's this idea of creating a beautiful, well-lived life before the Lord that the king is passing on to his son, that is holistic, that comes in and that resides in the heart. It's not black and white in a fallen world. Now, hear me well. There are certain things that are black and white. There are certain things that are yes, no, sin, not sin. But when it comes to the nitty gritty of relating well with other human beings, it's messy. It's messy. I think, for example, this two weekends ago, my wife and I were camping. We went up to New Hampshire and we were camping and we were doing dispersed camping. And so we were in an area of the national forest where there were kind of camping spots all over the place and you could pick one and stay there. And it was beautiful, like stunning. It rained the whole time, it was cold, but it was beautiful. And on our last night, we had gone into town. We'd gone for a hike and gone into town and we were coming back in And we encountered a woman who had been living in the National Forest. She was homeless, young, probably in her 30s. And earlier that day, an officer had come and told her she needed to move. She wasn't able to live there anymore. They have the law. You can camp there, but if you don't have a home, you don't have a residence, you can't live there. And for probably the next 12 to 15 hours, Grace and I talked with her, as we kind of got her settled at 10 o'clock at night, rainy, as we made a plan to help her the next day, as we connected with her and she wasn't there the next day, for probably the next 12 hours, we were constantly faced with situations that weren't black and white. Is it wise or unwise to stop and help somebody on a dirt road in a forest in the middle of the night? I don't know. Is it wise or unwise to help a woman put her tent back up when the police has told her not to, but it's 10 o'clock at night and it's raining? All of these questions, there's grayness and murkiness to life in this world. Anyone who has raised children, who's cared for relatives, there's hard questions. And Proverbs, our passage, is keen to tell us that wisdom that the life that comes with it resides in the heart. We're to keep it, receive it, hold it in our heart. There's all the practical, pithy pronunciations later on. And they do lay out a trustworthy path, a way of life. But we first need to know, before we can do any of them well, that wisdom is stored in our hearts. It is a heart matter first and foremost. This leads us now to our second point. Remember I said we're gonna skip verse 23. We're gonna look at verses 24 to 27. Wisdom is a heart matter. Wisdom is stored in our hearts. But our hearts can easily be led astray. And so the king says to his son, put away from you crooked speech. Put devious talk far from you. Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you. Ponder the path of your feet, then all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or to the left, but turn your foot away from evil. Having looked to the other side of our Janus in verse 23, we again see this anatomy of discipleship. The king is using language of your eye, your mouth, your foot. When he's saying wisdom in a fallen world is slippery, it can easily go away. The three things he looks to are our eyes, our mouth, our feet. These are ways that wisdom quickly slips away. He looks first at our mouth. He says, put away from you crooked speech and put devious talk far away from you. Crooked speech in some translations is worded as distorting speech. It's helpful for us to remember that the king has set his son on a path of wisdom and reckons his son as one of the wise. So he's not telling his son here necessarily, stop your crooked speech. He's saying the people that are around you that have crooked or deceiving or distorting speech, put them away from you. Don't listen to their distorting speech. Now, this again requires wisdom. We know from the rest of the word of the Lord that we're meant to be salt and light to this world. We're not meant to not associate with a non-believer ever. We're not meant to completely discard anyone who is not walking perfectly in the way of the Lord. There's tension here. It's put away distorted speech and yet go forth, be fruitful, multiply, preaching the gospel, baptizing and bringing people into the kingdom. There's tension there. What might be a helpful illustration from scripture is the distorting words of the serpent in Genesis 3. The serpent comes to Eve, some craftier than all the other beasts of the field, and you hear the distorting words. Did the Lord actually say, you shall not eat of a tree? The Lord said you shall die. You won't die. It's distorting reality. There's a sense that gossip, slander, the grumblings that we can so commonly fall into. These are actually distort reality. One commentator refers to it as decentralizing our heart. So if wisdom is received into our heart and our heart is where we live out of and our actions flow out of, then distorting speech, gossip, slander, oh, did you hear that so-and-so did this? Oh, one of the common places that I think we see this so often is a certain pessimism that comes with political discussion right now. Whether you're on either side of the political debate, the pessimism about other people and about the state of the Lord's work in the world is distorting speech. The Lord is sovereign and the Lord will reign and he will see the nation go in whichever direction he decides. But we are called to steward our hearts now. We're called to not let wisdom slip away through distorting speech. Crooked, distorting, deceptive speech makes us question the reality of life lived in the fear of the Lord. He also then goes on to the eyes, the foot. So it's not just the speech, it's our eyes and our feet. Again, the prince has been set on a path And so there's a sense that there's one way that is faithful, wise walking in the world. There's not multiple paths that the prince can choose from. There's one way that the prince is meant to walk. And his eyes should be straight. They should be on that path. The image that comes into my mind, if you've seen any of the Lord of the Rings movies or read the books, there's a scene where some of the main characters, Frodo, Sam, and then Gollum are in this miry bog, they're in a marsh basically and they're walking through and there's only really one way through the entire bog. And repeatedly Gollum the guide says, stay on the path, don't follow the lights, don't look off the path. And at one point Frodo's eyes look off the path. He sees something in the water that distracts him and he falls off the path. Your eyes will, your feet will follow where your eyes look. And so you're meant to, we're guarding wisdom. Wisdom is received into the heart and we're keeping our hearts, we're guarding wisdom because it can slip away by looking at the path that is set before us. Another example of this that I think is, can almost be too trite. As a young person, I think I hear people warning about this all the time and it's hard to hear it. but social media, phones, all of these things are so easy to decentralize and distract where we're looking. I read a statistic recently that right now, over 90% of Americans have phones. 18 years ago, less than 20% of Americans had phones. Now, whether phones or not are a good thing or a bad thing, the reality that there's such a dramatic change in less than 20 years for how humans do life and live life in the world. It's decentralizing. The dramatic change that happens means that we have to be watchful over our hearts. We have to watch how we steward the wisdom in our hearts. We have to watch our speech. We have to make sure our eyes are on the path set before us We have to ponder the path of our feet. The contrast is interesting, right? The king exhorts his son in verse 26, ponder the path of your feet, then all your ways will be sure. So a little while later in chapter five, the king is describing the forbidden woman, the adulterous woman. And in verse six, he says, she does not ponder the path of life. her ways wander, and she doesn't even know it. The wise path is a singular path that we must ponder, that we must keep straight on. Now, back to the core. We've seen that in the beginning, we've seen that wisdom is received into the heart, that as we're taught and instructed, that as we receive the wisdom that the Lord has given us, It's received into the heart, it's stored in the heart, but that our hearts are slippery. They easily are led astray by what we say, what we think, what we do, where we walk in the paths of our lives. Verse 23, this Janice that looks both ways, calls us to keep your hearts with vigilance. From it flow the springs of life. There's an intensity here, there's a vigilance. John Piper will talk about wartime, keeping people vigilant. There's a sense that they're constantly watchful, aware of danger surrounding you all the time. The NIV translates this as above all else, guard your heart. One translation that's getting at some of kind of the word play of the Hebrew behind this says, more than any watch that you watch, watch your heart. There's this sense that there are other watches that we're supposed to be mindful of. We're supposed to watch our life. Pastors are called to watch their life and doctrine. We watch over our children, all of these things, but more than any watch that we watch, we're to watch our hearts for from it flow the springs of life. Not only in the passage is there a certain bi-directionality to our heart. And verse 23 speaks of this bi-directionality, but in life there is bi-directionality. We receive things into our heart. And verse 23 also tells us that from our heart flow the springs of life. There's a bi-directionality of coming in of wisdom and then wisdom lived out of the heart. It's because of this that we guard them, hold them, protect them, keep an eye on our hearts. Our Lord knew this well. He often guarded his heart. We see him throughout his life and ministry, taking times, going to a secluded place, communing with the Father. We see in Luke's gospel, speaking that out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. There's this principle that the heart is the active agent at this core of all of us. And in the Lord, we see him laying a path for us. He walked the path of wisdom. He laid it out for us. And so there's a sense that when we read the Proverbs, when we wrestle with whether or not to answer a fool according to his folly, We're discerning how to follow the path that our Lord has already walked for us. And by his spirit, he's invited us into a skillful life, a life well-lived and beautiful. There's a sense that to live well, to live wisely, is to reign well. Wisdom in scripture, wisdom that was passed down from generation to generation of Christians that is an inheritance that we need to steward well is a kingly wisdom. The wisdom that we have to walk and live as Christians is to walk and live as co-heirs with the king of the universe. And so as we go from this place, as we live lives before the Lord, may we receive wisdom into our hearts and guard it well. Let's pray. Gracious God and Heavenly Father, we praise you that you have given us wisdom. We praise you for your word. We thank you that in it are treasures for life. We thank you most of all for Our Lord Jesus, that he walked our path for us and that he showed us a wise life. I pray father that by the spirit today, wisdom would take root in our hearts and that we would follow the path that we are set up on. Lord, I pray that in the murkiness of all of this, you would give us a sure confidence in your word that we might live well, that your name might be known in our communities, our relationships, and that you might be glorified. We love you, Lord, and we pray this in your name, Father, Son, and Spirit. Amen.