Proverbs chapter six, verses one through 11, these are God's words. My son, if you become surety for your friend, if you have shaken hands in pledge for a stranger, you are snared by the words of your mouth. You are taken by the words of your mouth. So do this, my son, and deliver yourself. For you have come into the hand of your friend. Go and humble yourself. Plead with your friend. Give no sleep to your eyes, nor slumber to your eyelids. Deliver yourself like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter, like a bird from the hand of the fowler. Go to the ant, you sluggard. Consider her ways, and be wise, which, having no captain, overseer, or ruler, provides her supplies in the summer, and gathers her food in the harvest. How long will you slumber, O sluggard? When will you rise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. So shall your poverty come on you like a prowler and your need like an armed man. Amen. Thus ends this reading of God's inspired and inerrant word. We rejoice that he adds his blessing to the preaching of it as well. One of the things that I think we had mentioned before, is that Proverbs is a book for young people, especially a book for young men. And I'm, as preached through it this time around, really seeing it more and more as premarital counseling. especially for the man. Also for the lady, young ladies, you are looking for a husband who is not just well-educated, but formed by the truth of the Word of God. And so the husband being the head of the wife, the spiritual leader of the home, how important it is for his wife and his children's spiritual health that he would be formed. So it's not like the first 30 chapters aren't for the ladies too. They ought to eavesdrop. on what God says to the men, especially when God warns them against the complaining woman or the contentious woman and tells him to stay as far away as he can, lest he live in a misery worse than being on the corner of a rooftop in a rainstorm for the rest of his life. None of you ladies want to inflict such misery upon a man for decades, certainly not the man that you hope will be your husband, for whom God has appointed you to be his specific help and appointed him to be your specific head. Well, it's also premarital counseling, I think, Because if there's anyone that realizes at the end of his life he needed it, it would be Solomon. Remember his other book concludes in part, in large measure, remember your creator in the days of your youth. And so there's good reason. We actually don't have any hope from the scripture that Rehoboam paid good attention, and yet these things came upon him, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come. All that to say that By the time we get through chapter 8, I think we will see that in this first 30 chapters, where basically he educates the young man and the kind of man he practically ought to be and needs to be, before he even begins thinking about looking for the sort of woman that's described in the 31st chapter, I think by the time we get through the first eight chapters, we're going to see that there is a great concern for marital purity, for the purity of the heart and the delight, and the purity, the singularity of the sort of help and intimacy and identity that a man should have with his wife alone. But interspersed, we have other instruction. And as someone who has done premarital counseling a few times, and every time we finish, I think of maybe how I'll do it a little bit better next time, and it's a little bit better next time. And I could see that the chapter division between chapter 5 and chapter 6 is, again, artificial. I think many of us are accustomed to or have heard Proverbs described as this almost randomly put together collection of wisdom sayings. But if we are to be prepared for marriage, if we are to take fearing the Lord, knowing him and living before him, this is the great thing in marriage. You can have premarital counseling in 10 seconds. to receive everything in your marriage, including what your spouse does, as a good gift from God, and to do everything in your marriage, and especially what you do to and with and for your spouse as a service unto God. I don't know, maybe that was 15 or 20. But that's it. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. and receiving all of life as from God and living all of life as for God is essentially the fear of the Lord. To live in wonder at Him, living out worship unto Him. And so he comes from this chapter that we took three sections on thinking about romance and single-mindedness and not giving any of that or trying to get any of that to or from the unauthorized woman, anyone other than the one whom God has appointed to be your wife. And immediately he says, my son, if you become surety for your friend, Yeah, Proverbs is going to spend a lot of time on money issues. And one of the reasons is that just as many of the even pagan or kind of flimsy evangelical that doesn't really take biblical theology into account for everything they do, all of those people, when they do premarital counseling, Well, they deal with how to handle money. They deal with how to speak to one another and how to listen to one another. Things that Proverbs is going to hit, and not just once, as if you can have your one-hour session in one of your premarital counseling weeks and say, well, this is how to have a good conversation over a difficult thing, and they're set for life. If that isn't ingrained in how they've been trained to have conversations by mom and dad all day, every day for 10, 15 years, maybe as many as 20. Remember last week's passage says, rejoice with the wife of your youth. There's assumption in the Bible that you're going to get married young. But there's also a requirement in the Bible that you get married wise, which means you don't have time in your youth to be a fool. Because you have to get wise and get married while you're still young. But these are the things that stress a marriage. When resources are thin. When resources are put in danger by a foolish commitment. Like becoming surety for another. when one or the other isn't accustomed to diligence. And so it's very closely connected. These are necessary things. One of the necessary things is handling money well. Handling money well. In this passage, we see at least three necessities for handling money well. One is the necessity of prudence in the first section, verses 1 through 5. The second is the necessity of diligence in the second section, verses 6 through 11. And then the necessity of urgency. which is from the middle of verse 3 to the end of verse 5, and then from verse 9 to verse 11, or verse 10 and verse 11, at the end concluding each of the sections. There's a parallel here. That's one of the reasons why we took them together. So in the first place, the necessity of prudence. My son, if you become surety for your friend, if you have shaken hands and pledged for a stranger, you are snared by the words of your mouth. Note that this applies both to neighbor or friend and to stranger. There are no exceptions given here. And one of the reasons is because of the way that someone comes to need a surety. Now, it might just be in the ordinary providence of God, despite their diligence, the Lord in his wisdom and mercy has afflicted them and brought them into a season where not only do they lack the resources to provide for their ongoing needs, but they don't even have anything to put up as collateral. But more frequently, it's a combination of failing to follow verses six through 11, a lack of diligence, a lack of planning, a lack of carefulness, folly and sin, much more often than some naked providence. are uncomfortable with the fact that we are sinners and because we're not humble enough before a holy God, we have difficulty with the fact that most of the time is something sinful that has produced this situation. That's usually how someone comes to need a surety. And so it's foolish then to become a surety, in part because, at least in that circumstance, you're harming the person that you're becoming a surety for. Putting up your own resources as collateral for them harms them because it reinforces their lack of urgency, as we're going to hear about in the third point. God is urgent about our using the material things that he's given us well. Stewardship is a knowing God as the one from whom your life comes issue. That you would know that everything you have is a gift from God to be enjoyed by him, enjoyed by you as a gift from him and enjoying him, then him and his own goodness in his gift, and to be employed in his service. And so it's foolish to become a surety for them, especially if it's a good idea to lend to them, and you have the resources to lend to them, then instead of being a surety, you can be the one who lends to them. If you happen to have personal knowledge of the situation or in God's wisdom and providence, now that we have in the wake of Pentecost and now that we have at Hopewell in the last month, diaconate, There are those who can sit down and go over things and in a discipling sort of way express Christian generosity rather than putting your own resources at risk or laying them out for the person. I mentioned before At least three of you mentioned two recently. It's a book that helps you think through some of those things when helping hurts. But you must never put your own family at risk. There's a difference between leading your family and sacrificing together in order to be generous and sacrificing what was reasonably expected to take care of your family. That's not leading your family in sacrifice. That's sacrificing your family. And that would make you deny the faith and be worse than an unbeliever. And sometimes, sometimes either because the other person has done it to themselves, and so helping them would be hurting them, or because, yes, they are in a situation where they are needy, but you also are in a situation where you can't rightly, honestly, in a godly manner, afford to give. Sometimes you can't help at all, at least not materially. You help by being a good church member. You help by submitting to the deacons and praying for them and participating in a church life so that those to whom God has given much, whether in your own congregation or as we see in the Bible, you remember those in Macedonia and Achaia, there was a general poverty in the region of Judea. But we cannot always help, and we must never make ourselves the surety for another. There is only one. There is only one who could be surety for another, who could rightly be surety for another, and that is our Lord Jesus Christ. of whom Hebrews 7 verse 22 reminds us, teaches us, that he was the surety for us. for a better covenant. Better in two ways. One, from the Old Testament covenant administration, in which you had prophets and priests and kings, and especially the priests and the kings as those upon whom, in interacting covenantally with God, a lot depended. If the priest was evil or the king was evil, if the priest was foolish or the king was foolish, the people of God suffered for the foolishness of their priests or their king, for the sinfulness of their priest or their king. You know, the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ never has to suffer at all. What a perfect and holy priest we have. A perfect and holy and powerful and wise king we have. But not just in this administration of the covenant of grace when he's prophet, priest, and king, but in the everlasting covenant. in that agreement from all eternity, which within the one divine will of God, the Father and Son and Spirit will together among the persons that the Son will secure those whom the Father is electing to redeem in the Son, and that the Spirit will apply the salvation of the Son He is the surety of the everlasting covenant. You see, Lord Jesus has perfect wisdom. And he doesn't help us because he knows that we were innocent and that we were wise and that this just came upon us by some naked... No, he helps us because we're sinners and because he has compassion for sinners. And he is the wisdom of God unto sinners and the power of God. You see, when Jesus lays himself out, when he takes upon himself our debt and our penalty, he's not putting anything at risk, is he? It's impossible that he should fail. The resources that are in Jesus will never run out. Even if the Lord was redeeming a multitude squared, all those whom he has elected to and sent his Son to redeem and to whom the Spirit will surely apply that redemption, multiplied by themselves, there would be enough righteousness in Christ, enough virtue in Christ to save us all. And then again, and then again, geometrically, exponentially, forever. God the Son, not a man over the house of God, but God the Son, the one who is the divine glory of God, is our surety. And so, in a small way, you can see how there's not just danger to the one we're helping or to ourselves and the ones who have a prior claim. There's not just danger to them if we make ourselves a surety for another. There is a small way in which we're impinging on something that really just belongs to Jesus. And so there's this necessity, this necessity of prudence. Generosity is better than collateral anyway. And you have to decide this in advance. Because if you don't theologically form this resolve and understand it, then when the needy person comes, or calls, or writes, and you have in that moment, and they're saying, I need to get a loan, but they won't give me the loan, and I don't have collateral, would you cosign for me? or could I put your house on or whatever it is, then you can say, no, I'm sorry. The scripture tells me very clearly not to do that, but I would love for you to go to the diaconate of your church and ask for help by the generosity of the saints and the way that God has designed. Or if they're in our church, the diaconate of our church, or if they're in no church, You actually have a need that's greater than the cosigning of the loan. Here's what we do in the church, but you need Christ as your surety first. And then when it comes to finances, among the church of Jesus Christ, there is generosity, not loans and collateral and risk. Well, we'll come back to the urgency portion in a moment. In the second place, we see not just the necessity of prudence, verses 1 through 5, but we see in verses 6 through 11, the necessity of diligence, the necessity of diligence. And immediately, we should be humiliated for being lazy. It should make our faces turn red and burn and humble us to the dust so that we would not be able to look down upon anyone else. Why is it so humiliating to be lazy? Look at verse six, children. Go to the aunt, you sluggard. Consider her ways and be wise. You know, when I was in high school and building out the resume, oh, you had never seen such a resume for those college applications. And from before I was born until I completely rebelled against it and switched to the ministry, I was destined for medical school. One of the many things on that resume was shadowing a doctor. Boy, especially if you're applying to combined undergrad and med school programs, you want those med school things on your resume before you get in. Shadowing a doctor. Well, that felt really big when you were 15, 16 years old. And in high school, you're almost like a doctor. You're just a doctor's shadow, kind of like the two political parties in the Dabney illustration. And if you don't know it, I'll tell you later. The point is, it's not really that great to be a shadow. You just think you're something when you're the shadow. But that's not whom Solomon says to shadow, is it? That's not whom Solomon says, go and watch them and understand what they're doing. Get yourself some wisdom. He doesn't say, go get yourself some wisdom from a doctor. Who does he tell you? To whom does he tell you to go, children? He says, go to the aunt. Isn't that humiliating? We're so foolish. We're so self-destructive. Ants aren't fallen. They belong to a fallen creation. There's bad things that have been inflicted upon them on our account. but our sinfulness has brought us so low, we who are created in the image of God and knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, to do all of this wonderful work in his creation and be imitators and displays, images of the working God who worked for the six days and then rested, we have been reduced to having to shadow the ant. to learn to work, to be a little bit more diligent, a little bit better at planning, a little bit more consistent at execution. When you have to go to the end to consider her ways to be wise, you know that you have to go to the cross to get a righteousness and a goodness that is completely alien to you. How are we, how would we ever think that we could increase or attain, somehow make it back to what we, a little bit to what we ought to have been if we have fallen so far in the image of God to being humiliated by comparison to an ant? And so go to the ant for lessons in diligence, but go to the cross to be credited with an alien diligence, an alien righteousness, to receive the atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ for all of our blaspheming the image of God. by being created in his image, but living opposite what he is like. And so we're humbled, humiliated, because we don't have diligence, but God is merciful. He's given us authorities. He didn't give the ant captain, overseer, or ruler. The ant doesn't need it. You and I, we have parents who make us do our chores and bosses or masters who tell us when to clock in and when to clock out and what we need to get done in between and give us performance evaluations. And we have authorities whom God sets over us. That's a blessing, isn't it? If we're so low and humiliated and foolish, so opposite within ourselves to being diligent, oh, what a mercy from God that he gives us authorities. But we don't just need authority externally to inflict upon us discipline from the outside, do we? We need the Lord to give us self-discipline. Self-discipline is the best discipline. When you start not having to be told by your mom, you start knowing what you're supposed to do and just doing it, and even seeing something else that needs to be done that wasn't even particularly assigned to you. If you have a godly mom or dad, you know what they do. They see that it needs to be done, they do it. Or maybe even they ask you to do it, or point it out to you, or ask you a question that tries to help you not just have to be told, but to build that self-discipline, that initiative, so that you could grow up at least past the maturity level of an ant. If you're still having to be told, you're not yet to ant-level maturity, are you? But self-discipline is wonderful for something more than being an aunt if it's Christian self-discipline, if it's for the Lord's sake, if it's because you were made in His image. And when you work hard and plan and are wise and do well, provide not just for yourself, but for others. Let the thief no longer steal, but let him work with his hands, not just so he could take for himself, but so that he may have something to give to another in their time of need. Self-discipline doesn't just make you a more functional human being. In the believer, it's the fruit of the life and character of the last Adam, the diligent Adam, the perfectly wise and diligent Adam. Oh, they said of the Lord Jesus, didn't they? He does all things well. Everything, especially that the scripture said that the Messiah would do, he did perfectly. But the best commendation comes at his baptism, at his transfiguration, is announced by his resurrection. It is reveled in, exalted in, in the book of Hebrews, which calls him holy and harmless and undefiled. This is my Son, with whom I am well pleased. Oh, this is our Lord Jesus Christ. You know what He's predestined you for if you're a child of God, if you have His Spirit, if you are one of those who have no condemnation already because you are in the Lord Jesus Christ by faith. You've been predestined to be conformed to the image of the Son. You've been destined for that day when He is the firstborn among many brethren in glory. When God says of His sanctified children, this innumerable multitude of them, with His only begotten Son with whom He is well pleased, these are all my adopted children. with whom I am well-pleased. And oh, don't we love, or ought we not to love, to be self-disciplined, to make progress, real progress, to please our Father in that self-discipline that images Jesus Christ. We make a transition now from the necessity of diligence to the necessity of urgency as we continue in this second section. The pleading question in verse 9, I think not just every exasperated parent, although that has probably been the case if you have had partially or not even partially sanctified children for any amount of time. I think every one of us have had this experience in the mirror. How long will you slumber, O sluggard, When will you rise from your sleep? How much laziness does it take? How much laziness does it take to destroy what God has given you? As if there was a famine or as if there were intruders and a siege and they came through and they just wiped you out. How much laziness does it take to do that, verse 10? How much extra sleep? We already spend about a third of our lives asleep just to be good stewards and be healthy. How much extra slumber? How much extra folding of our hands to sleep? That's not the nighttime sleep. That's the, I know they get a bad rap, but the extra construction worker on the fattened contract because they didn't have to do contractor bids because the laws were crooked. And so you've got these extra workers that are there. The couple of guys who are doing all the work and the other stander-arounders folding their hands to sleep. That means it was working time, but the hands weren't working. The hands were folded instead. How much of that does it take to impoverish you? It says it three times in verse 10. Did you catch it when we were reading or did you notice it when you looked at it earlier? Do you see it just now? A little sleep, a little slumber, A little folding of the hands to sleep. See, this helps us in two different ways. One, just on the fact that laziness is a sin. How much sin is permissible? I hope every one of you immediately answered, none, of course. And it's not always lazy to be not working. We're created to work 24 hours a day. There are recreations for the body, and those are required for six days. And then there's the refreshment and recreation of God himself, which we need morning and evening, but especially all day on the Lord's Day. But it is a matter of great urgency that we would not be lazy. And so here's something where he's dealing with not being a surety. He's dealing with a little bit of laziness. I can't wait to get to the weekend, the flesh says, or the fleshly man says. Oh, I can't wait to sleep in. I can't wait to, whatever, indulge myself. Or I can't wait to retire. Why? So I can sleep in for 30 years. You see, when the Bible takes a stand on something that the world is ambivalent about, like not being a shirji for another, or like the necessity of diligence, then we need to take a stand. We need to take a stand against ourselves. I mean, listen to the language that concludes the first section. Say, well, is it really that big a deal to make yourself surety for another, to put your own resources up, or yourself as the guarantee or the collateral for someone else? He says, oh, do this, my son. Deliver yourself. Go, humble yourself, plead. Give no sleep to your eyes, nor slumber to your eyelids. Deliver yourself like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter, and like a bird from the hand of the fowler. So, aren't you overreacting a little bit? Whose word is this? If it feels like we're overreacting, it's because we are underreacting. If the text feels over-urgent to us, it's because we are apathetic. We're pathetic. We're going to look up to the ants on diligence, and we mustn't also be apathetic. And so when the Bible takes a stand on something, like being surety for another, or like the necessity for diligence and self-discipline, we need to take a stand. And when the Bible is urgent about something, We need to treat it as urgent and important. And this is one of the things that you want to resolve if you're a young man before you go looking for a young woman to inflict yourself upon for the rest of her life. Or if you're a young woman, something that you want to resolve before you go looking for a young man who is going to, hopefully by God's grace and conforming into Jesus, not only be diligent, but desire for you to be diligent with him. Although in our upside down and kind of crooked culture, it's usually the poor young woman who ends up on the short end of the disparity of the diligence between the two. And so there's a necessity of urgency, urgency before God, urgency for care of ourselves, and especially for young men, urgency for care of the family, but not just young men. When we get to the lady in chapter 31, she's gonna be two big things, isn't she? Well, many big things, but two of the biggies are generous and diligent. Doesn't that exactly reflect what we see here? Verses 1 through 5, generous in a right and proper way, and verses 6 through 11, diligent. But oh, if the young man is going to be well matched to her, doesn't he need to be wise first, conformed to Christ in this first, so that we return to being generations of Christians who grow up and get married, rather than generations of Christians who get married and suddenly discover that we have to grow up. How this text pleads with you. It pleads with you for your own sake. And consider how this pleads with you for the sake of your spouse, whom you are supposed to care for as bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh, that you would prioritize her over yourself, not in a messed up way, but in a way that imitates what it looks like on the cross. where the appearance and the sense, you know, deeper, this is for the glory of Christ, the honor of the Father, who's pleased to display himself and his Son. But at the cross, in the action, there is a self-sacrifice that says the bride is more important to the groom than himself. And that shouldn't just start when you get married. Is it not true of the Lord Jesus Christ, in anticipation of his betrothing us to himself as his bride, that this has always been true of him? Well, one of the ways you can start serving your wife or your husband already is by working on prudence and working on diligence and being urgent about it like God is. Ultimately, we may not just pursue these things, but rejoice in how Christ has executed his perfect power, was never at risk, and his perfect prudence, knowing exactly what we are like and what he was getting himself into to speak in a way that is beneath him. But you understand the turn of the phrase. has executed perfect power and perfect prudence and endless love and diligence for his bride. How wonderful to be his bride. And we look forward to when his work on us and in us is done. And each of us individually are children who are conformed to him and corporately corrupt collectively are his bride who appear then in his own glory. May we start displaying that glory in how we handle even earthly and material things already.