Congregation, let us stand for the reading of God's word. As is our custom, we will turn to both the Old and the New Testaments, beginning with our New Testament lesson, 1 Timothy chapter six, verse 11. Pay careful attention to the reading of God's word. This is the most direct, unmediated, unfiltered communication from God in the service as he simply speaks to his people. 1 Timothy 6.11. But you, oh man of God, flee these things and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, gentleness. Fight the good fight of faith. Lay hold on eternal life to which you were also called and have confessed the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. I urge you in the sight of God, who gives life to all things, and before Christ Jesus, who witnessed the good confession before Pontius Pilate, that you keep this commandment without spot. blameless, until our Lord Jesus Christ's appearing, which he will manifest in his own time, he who is the blessed and only potentates, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see, to whom be honor and everlasting power, amen. This is the word. of our God. We'll turn now to our Old Testament lesson in our sermon text, which likewise speaks of God's wisdom. Turn to Isaiah chapter 33, and our sermon text will really be verse six, but just to pick up the context, we'll read the first six verses of Isaiah 33 together. Woe to you who plunder, though you have not been plundered. And you who deal treacherously, though they have not dealt treacherously with you. When you cease plundering, you will be plundered. When you make an end of dealing treacherously, they will deal treacherously with you. Oh Lord, be gracious to us. We have waited for you. Be their arm every morning, our salvation also in the time of trouble. At the noise of the tumult, the people shall flee. When you lift yourself up, the nations shall be scattered and your plunder shall be gathered like the gathering of the caterpillar, as the running to and fro of locusts. He shall run upon them. The Lord is exalted, for he dwells on high. He has filled Zion with justice and righteousness. Wisdom and knowledge will be the stability of your times and the strength of salvation. The fear of the Lord is his treasure. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. Amen. You may be seated. This is the second Sunday of 2025, a new year. Happy New Year to you all. This is a fresh opportunity to engage the present, to remember the past, and to plan for the future. And for many of you, that is an exciting prospect. Perhaps you've made your New Year's resolutions, you have your goals and your objectives, your plans, and you're excited to see what this year will bring. Perhaps for others of you, this is not so much an exciting prospect as a daunting one. A fearful one, because, let's be honest, none of us knows what this year will bring. We don't know what tomorrow will bring. There is a sense of uncertainty. Consider those in L.A. who perhaps were going about their work and their business, and then in a very short period of time, suddenly they've lost everything. They've lost their home. They've lost all that they have. There's uncertainty, you can resolve and you can make ready, you can prepare, you can plan, you can have a bunker for the zombie apocalypse, and yet, at a fundamental level, you do not know what the next five minutes will bring. And that reality can be exciting, but often, congregation of the Lord Jesus, it is terrifying, it's destabilizing, it's, It's disconcerting. In a world of uncertainty, where do you look for certainty? Where do you look for stability, for strength, for security? It's an important question. And it's a question that faced a man about 2,000 700 years ago, so almost 3,000 years ago. There was a man named King Hezekiah, and he lived 701 years before Christ. And during his reign, which in many ways was blessed of the Lord, he faced a national crisis, worse than the L.A. fires, worse than 9-11. He faced Sennacherib, one of the most powerful people in the ancient world. the emperor of the Assyrian Empire, who led his armies to take out city after city after city, country after country, to come into Judah like a locust swarm, and to come all the way to the capital city, the city of the great king, to Jerusalem, and to besiege that city with thousands of troops. And Isaiah alludes to this national crisis in verse two of our text where it says, O Lord, be gracious to us. We have waited for you. Be their arm every morning, our salvation also in the time of trouble. You see, Isaiah was ministering at the same time as King Hezekiah. They overlapped. And the time of trouble likely refers to this siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib. A time of great instability, infirmity, insecurity. The enemy's at the gates. Everything's up for grabs. Nothing is certain. Or almost nothing is certain. Because actually, if you read this passage, There is a source of certainty in an uncertain world. In verse six, our sermon text this morning, the prophet Isaiah directed Hezekiah, he directed his generation, and under the inspiration of the Spirit, he's also directing you this morning. to the one source of certainty, the one bastion, the one fortress, the one refuge of stability, of strength, of security in this life, and that is God himself. God himself. Wisdom and knowledge will be the stability of your times and the strength of salvation. The fear of the Lord is his treasure. As we begin a new year together as a covenant community, I wanna give you God's perspective on 2025. God's provision for everything you're about to face in the coming year. We're gonna do that by considering three stabilizing truths, grounding truths that you desperately need. We'll look first at knowledge, Then we'll consider wisdom. And then finally, we'll see how the fear of the Lord ties both of those truths together. First, knowledge will be the stability of your times. Knowledge. The word translated stability in verse six comes from a root which means truth. E.J. Young, the commentator, says it suggests certainty. constancy, trustworthiness, that in the midst of unstable, uncertain times, there is certainty, there is stability, and the Bible tells us that it is knowledge. Now, what is knowledge? What does it mean to know something? Well, knowledge is not merely belief. or even true belief. Knowledge, if we get down to its basic bedrock, is warranted or justified true belief. In other words, knowledge is when you believe the truth for the right reasons. Give you some examples. Sometimes you believe something is true, but it isn't. I'm sure everybody's had this experience before, where you think something is true, but you're incorrect. For example, you believe you're early to church, when actually you're an hour late because you forgot to set your clocks forward. Or other times you believe something is true, and it is, but you have bad reasons for believing it. For instance, you could believe the sun will rise tomorrow because you saw a favorable omen in the forest or in the sky. Well, in that instance, the sun's rising had nothing to do with your superstition. Even if your belief proves true, your reasons were invalid, and so it falls short of genuine knowledge. Now congregation, knowledge has a higher bar, a higher threshold. Knowledge is warranted, justified, true belief. Believing the truth for good reasons, where you believe in the existence of God because of the light of nature in man and the works of creation in providence, that God has revealed himself to you. where you believe in the authority of the Bible due to the evidences and perfections of Holy Scripture and the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit. As Voddie Bauckham says, he believes the Bible because it is a reliable collection of historical documents written by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses. They witness to supernatural events that took place in fulfillment of specific prophecies, and they claim that their writings are divine rather than human in origin. Those are good reasons to believe that the Bible is the word of God. Believing in the deity of Christ due to the names, titles, attributes, works, and worship ascribed to him. That's what knowledge is. It is a reasonable faith. Perhaps some of you this recent week followed the online lightning storm in which Christian apologist Wesley Huff engaged in various debates and conversations. And what we witnessed, by God's grace, was a skilled defender of the faith, not merely saying what Christians believe, but why. giving good reasons for the faith we share and defend. Now, it's true that there's a difference between knowing something and being able to show it. Some of you children in math class, you know the right answer to the problem. You really do. But when it comes to showing your work, sometimes you struggle to show and articulate how you came to that conclusion. So there's a difference between knowing something to be true and being able to show it or articulate it. But knowledge, by definition, is warranted. It's justified. And here the Bible says that knowledge of the truth is stabilizing. It is the stability of your times. When even when everything else around you is falling apart, if you know the truth, that's like water in the desert. That's like a pillar that is lifted up and established that cannot be moved. Not only does the Bible say that knowledge is the stability of your times, but it is the strength or fullness of salvation. In fact, the Bible teaches us that knowledge is a necessary component of true saving faith. If you say you believe in Christ, you need to know certain things about him. You need to know that He is the God-Man. You need to know that He's Lord and Savior. You need to know that He lived a perfect life, that He died an atoning death, that He rose again the third day, that He ascended into heaven, that right now He is seated at the right hand of God the Father, and that one day He is coming again to judge the living and the dead and make all things new. Saving faith presupposes some kind of knowledge about the object of your faith. And if you are to go on with God, if you're to go forward in your Christian life, if you're to be mature in the faith, you also need to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. It's the strength or fullness of salvation. And so I ask you this morning, do you know the Lord? Yes, that would include propositions about God. God is good, God is great, God is love, God is righteous, God is holy, holy, holy. But it also connotes an experiential knowledge of God. Do you know him as your savior? Do you know him as your God? Do you know him as your father? Do you know his words? Do you know not just what you believe, but why you believe it? I wanna encourage the young people, especially those who are in college, this is a great time when you're, whether it's at Liberty, or Patrick Henry, or wherever you are, Cape Fear Community College, what a time to wrestle with not just what you believe, but why you believe it. And I tell you, God won't play games with you. If you desire the truth, he's gonna show you the truth. If you truly desire to know what is true, God wants to lead you to that knowledge. That's the first thing. that is stabilizing its knowledge. Second, like unto it, wisdom will be the stability of your times. Now what is wisdom? We might think wisdom and knowledge are synonyms and sometimes they might be used that way in the Bible or in life, but if knowledge is about believing the truth for the right reasons, then we can say that wisdom is knowing how to apply that truth to your life. Do you see the difference? There's a difference between knowing something and applying it. For example, perhaps you know people who are very intelligent, and they know all sorts of things about the world, but then you ask them to change the oil in their car, and they are absolutely clueless. That might be me, not to be telling on myself, but sometimes we know things, but we struggle to apply it to the concrete, nitty gritty, where the rubber hits the road reality of everyday living. Well, wisdom is about taking what you know and applying it practically to life. Not merely what you believe and why, but how to live. Brad Littlejohn defines wisdom as the soul's attunement to the order of reality. It's where you're in step with reality, where your life is conformed to the way things actually are. You're in tune with reality. in a very concrete way with the way God has made the world. You're going with the grain of God's creation. E.J. Young captures the difference between knowledge and wisdom when he says this, knowledge is the true recognition of what things are. You recognize what they are. Wisdom is the true and correct evaluation of things. So not just the facts, but the interpretation and the evaluation, the application to how you live. How to apply knowledge to life situations, that's stability. If you want to get a good example of what this looks like, read the book of Proverbs. The book of Proverbs is all about how to gain wisdom for godly Christian living in God's world. It even talks about debt. It talks about communication. It talks about how to deal with people who slander you. It talks about how to live a godly life in a very evil age. It is wisdom for a Christian people. And congregation, wisdom is the stability of your times. And again, not merely the stability, but the strength or the fullness of salvation. There is a connection between wisdom and being saved. and have known the Scriptures, Paul says to Timothy, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus. The strength of salvation. If you want to be converted, if you want to be saved, if you want to be delivered from sin and death and be brought into a true relationship with God, well, Paul says these words, these Scriptures are able to make you wise unto salvation through faith. which is in Christ Jesus. Wisdom and knowledge will be the stability of your times. And of course, the flip side's also true. Foolishness and ignorance will be the instability of your times. There is a backhand rebuke from this passage, that if you are ignorant of the things of God, and if you are foolish in your dealings with others, then things will not go well for you. You will be tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine. You'll believe whatever the last Instagram meme you saw. the last YouTube video you watched, the last charlatan you heard give a podcast, you will be captive to whatever is the latest and the brightest and the loudest. But congregation, if you are rooted and you're grounded in the truth, if you know what you believe and you know why you believe it, and you have the spirit of wisdom upon you to apply that truth to your life practically, then congregation, you will be established. you will find the fullness of salvation and the stability of your times. Otherwise, you'll be like what Peter says, the untaught and the unstable people who twist the scriptures and who are tossed to and fro. Hopefully I've convinced you that knowledge and wisdom, that's going to stabilize you. That's going to ground you in an uncertain world, which means that the big question is, how can I get knowledge? And how can I get wisdom? And that leads us to our third point. That's the fear of the Lord. Verse six says, the fear of the Lord, and there the word Lord's all caps, it's God's proper name, it's Jehovah or Yahweh, the God who is who he is. The fear of the Lord is his treasure. The fear of the Lord is the key. It's the key that unlocks wisdom and knowledge. The fear of the Lord integrates wisdom and knowledge. The fear of the Lord ties them together. And I say that because in the book of Proverbs, chapter one, verse seven, we read, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. You want to get knowledge, where do you start? You want to get true knowledge, where do you start? Well, you don't start by scrolling social media. You don't start by flipping through the Encyclopedia Britannica. If you want true knowledge, you begin with the fear of God. Likewise, Proverbs 9.10, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. If you want wisdom, if you want knowledge, where do you start? You start with the fear of God. Job 28, from where then does wisdom come? And where is the place of understanding? Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom. And to depart from evil is understanding. Well, that's true. We need to be really clear on what the fear of the Lord is. Some of you hear that and you wonder, what does that mean, to fear God? Does that mean I should be horrified of the Lord? I should run from Him and lock myself in a cabinet? What's that mean? Well, let's tease it out a bit. It certainly does include a healthy fear of God's judgments. I would be remiss if I didn't point that out. The Bible says in Matthew 10, 28, and do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul, but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. If you're not a Christian, if you're not trusting in Christ for your salvation, If you're perhaps trusting your own works to earn merits, or if you're rejecting Christ, then the fires of hell are very real, and that should be terrifying. There is a healthy fear of God's judgments. There is an absolute moral certainty, as one pastor puts it, that God will reward the righteous, and he will punish the wicked. But there's more to the fear of the Lord than just a healthy fear of judgment. It also communicates, and this is the primary sense, a reverential awe for God's being, a reverential awe for who God is. John Murray, great Scottish theologian, put it well, the fear of God in which godliness consists, and being like God, consists in the fear which constrains adoration and love. See, this isn't, a fear that's opposed to love. It is a respect, it is an honor, it is a reverence that actually leads you to adore and to love the Lord. He goes on, it is the fear which consists in awe, reverence, honor, and worship, and all of these in the highest level of exercise. It is the reflex in our consciousness of the transcendent majesty and holiness of God. I hesitate to give earthly examples because they will always fall short, but I think of Mary Margaret went to the Grand Canyon a while back and got to see just the the majesty of that physical formation. I grew up in rural West Virginia where there was no light pollution. I grew up on several hundred acres of cattle farm and at night, in the summer, you go outside and you look up and you see the dome of heaven and just millions of stars and galaxies. And your response, if you're paying attention, is not going to be to shrug it off. You're gonna be in awe of that. It might even elicit a wow, a wow factor. Or maybe you've gone to Niagara Falls and you've seen the gallons and gallons of water pulsing down and striking the ground. Or Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, you've seen something spectacular and you're just in awe of it. Perhaps a tremendous athlete who can run faster than anyone you've ever seen or lifts more than you can possibly imagine. There's a sense of awe of respect, of honor, where you are struck by it. Well, take all of those things, and don't even add them to the power of 10. Take all of those things and realize God is infinitely, qualitatively greater than that. that God should elicit awe from us in a way that nothing else could ever do, in a totally different category. The best example I have is Isaiah 6, where the prophet, the same prophet who wrote this book, earlier chapter, he has a vision of the throne room of God. The veil is removed, and he sees the Lord high and lifted up upon a throne, and he gets a vision of the glory of the Lord and the seraphim, these six-winged, angelic beings with two wings that cover their face, with two wings that cover their feet, and with two wings they fly, and they are chanting, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. And Isaiah's response is to say, I am a sinner. I am undone. I am, to quote R.C. Sproul, psychologically disintegrated. There's this reflex as he comes into contact with the blinding light of God's glory where he's just in awe of it. And he fears God, he loves God, he adores God, he worships God. Whereas another puts it, Michael Barrett, a man I've learned a lot from, he says, fearing God means you live in the conscious awareness of God. God is real to you. You're living in the attitude of God consciousness, where you factor God into all of your life, that you realize that the eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good, that even when I'm in private browsing, even when no one else can see, even when no one else even knows, when it's behind closed doors, God is there, God sees, God knows, and I'm in awe of that fact. Our text says that this fear of the Lord, this reverential awe, is His treasure. His wealth, his security. Matthew Henry puts it like this, true religion is the true treasure of any prince or people. It denominates them rich. Those places that have plenty of Bibles and ministers and serious good people are really rich. And it contributes to that which makes a nation rich in this world. It is therefore the interest of a people to support religion among them and to take heed of everything that threatens to hinder it. We live in a land where the fear of God was once widely diffused. And our land was truly rich. And if you haven't realized it, we are in the process of spending down that inheritance. And we are squandering our riches. And we need to wake up and pray that in God's wrath, He would remember mercy, that He would revive us again and restore the wealth of the knowledge, the wisdom, the fear of God. I say the fear of the Lord is the key to stability because God Himself is the source of all wisdom and knowledge. We already sang about it, we already read about it, but He is God only wise, the only wise God. and we come to God, how? How could we come to God? How could we come to a thrice holy God, as sinful, as weak creatures of the dust? How can we do that? There's only one way. You come through the mediator, and this is where all the lights come on in the passage. Christ is really the key, because who is Jesus? Jesus is the wisdom of God, by whom the worlds were made. He is the wise architect who fashioned the whole cosmos. Paul says that in Jesus are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Well, there you go. The fear of the Lord is his treasure. Wisdom and knowledge are the stability of your times. Well, in Christ, in Jesus Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Yes, wisdom and knowledge are the stability of your times, but the key is the fear of God because David said in Psalm 31, my times are in your hands. And because my times are in God's hands, that's why the wisdom and knowledge of God are the stability of my times. I've set the Lord always before me because he's at my right hand. I shall not be moved. That's how you can be a rock of Gibraltar against all the peer pressure in the world. That's how you can say no when everyone else is saying yes. That's why you can swim against the tide because you're alive with the power, the grace, the love, the fear of the Lord. In 2025, How can you, each one of you, how can you cultivate the fear of the Lord and thus gain wisdom and knowledge that will be the stability of your times, the strength of salvation, the treasure of God? How can you obtain strength, stability, and security? I wanna close with four practical applications. Again, wisdom applies to everyday life. Four next actions for 2025, first, Read your Bible in this coming year. You should read a lot of good books. If you're in school, you should probably read some textbooks. But you need to read this book. And I would encourage you, like the psalmist, to read it every day. Like our Lord, awaken morning by morning to have the ear of the learned. Make this book yours, be mastered by the scriptures, especially the wisdom literature. If you want wisdom, read the Psalms, read the Proverbs, read Ecclesiastes, read the Song of Solomon, read the wisdom literature to gain wisdom. Do it prayerfully, for it is able to make thee wise unto salvation. Consider a reading plan. I have found it helpful, practically, to have a plan to systematically make my way through the Bible. It might be in one year, it might be in two years, but think of a way to systematically work through the whole thing from Genesis to Revelation. And just so you know, it's not too late to start a plan. You say, it's already January 12th. I've already missed the moment of opportunity. Well, it's not. Just start now. Pick a plan and go with it. But read the Bible. Second, as you read it, pray. If you're on the cusp of some big life decisions, who to marry, what vocation to pursue, where to go to college, whether to take a new transition, a new job, move across the country, go into the gospel ministry, whatever it might be. And you need wisdom, and you need knowledge. Why don't you go to the one who has all the wisdom and has all the knowledge? Go to the Lord in prayer. That's actually what Isaiah calls us to do in verse 2. What's he doing? He's praying to God. When you're besieged like Hezekiah by Sennacherib, Yes, you should definitely fortify your outer defenses, and you should have a game plan for how you're going to bring food into the besieged city, but you should also lay it before the Lord in prayer. James 1, if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God who gives to all liberally and without reproach and it will be given to him. But let him ask in faith with no doubting for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord. He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. Well, we're talking about the stability of our times. There's a way of praying that actually is unstable, that is actually tossed to and fro because it's prayer divorced from faith. No, with the Bible in your hand and with a prayer on your lips, in faith cry out to the Lord. Believing this is the God who answers prayer. This is the God who preserved the life of our brother Calvin Gallagher in the prior year. Even if it meant the removal of a lung, he can still breathe, he can still preach the good news to his congregation in Sunnyvale, California. Praise the Lord who answers prayer. But pray in faith. Third. Third application, come to worship. Come to worship. If you want knowledge and you want wisdom and you want to cultivate the fear of God, you can't do that by yourself. No, come to the house of God. As the psalmist says, but as for me, my feet had almost stumbled. My steps had nearly slipped, for I was envious of the boastful. When I saw the prosperity of the wicked, he can't take it. until I went into the sanctuary of God, until he came to worship, then I understood their end. So come to worship. This is a place where not only are you convicted of your sin, but you're assured of pardon, you're consecrated by the word, you fellowship around God's table, and you're sent out with encouragement to serve God every week. More than that, this is a place where you encounter the holy presence of God in a unique way, in the assembly of the righteous. You come and you have an Isaiah moment where you feel utterly undone before the presence of a holy God. So come to worship. As you're able, I'd encourage you to come to evening worship. Be stabilized, because worship is a stabilizing experience. It's one day every week where we together orient our hearts to heaven. We synchronize our calendars and our clocks to the day of the Lord, where we unite our hearts together. We encourage each other on the way, and I don't care who you are, you need this, so come to worship. Fourth and final application, and really the most important one, and that is come to Christ. I said, you need to come to God for knowledge and wisdom, for salvation? Well, you can't come to God apart from Jesus Christ. This is eternal life, to know the true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. Jesus Christ, the only mediator between God and man. Jesus Christ, the only savior of sinners. whose name alone under heaven can men, women, and children be saved if they put their trust in Him. So come to Christ. Perhaps some of you come to Christ for the first time. Repent of your sin and leave that sin behind and cry out for Christ to save you. Put your trust in Him, your reliance, your dependence. Receive and rest upon Him alone for salvation. Say, I can't save myself. I've tried that. Didn't work. Other people have let me down, but there is one who sticks closer than a brother. There is one who is mighty to save, and his name is Jesus Christ, and he's the God-man, and he lived the perfect life, and he died for sinners, and he rose again in victory over the grave. He's someone you can trust, so come to Christ and trust in him. He's the wisdom of God. He's the rock built. your life on that rock. Build your life on the Lord Jesus Christ, and I tell you that he will be the stability of your times. Let us pray.