Okay, well you can turn in your Bibles to Proverbs chapter one, verses one to seven. Proverbs chapter one, starting in verse one. We've been looking at kind of the overview of Proverbs as we started this book for four weeks. Now we're going to, Lord willing, just at least at the beginning, go through these passages text by text. So we'll start today at verse one and go to verse seven. Well, we'll actually, we'll only get to verse six, but verse seven is included in the passage. So verse one, the Proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel. To know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight, to receive instruction in wise dealing, in righteousness, justice, and equity. To give prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the youth. Let the wise hear and increase in learning. and the one who understands obtain guidance. To understand a proverb and a saying, the words of the wise and their riddles. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. So in these first seven verses is what we call the preamble, the preamble. So it's the introduction to the introduction. The first nine chapters are the introduction to the book of Proverbs, and so we have the first seven verses are introducing it. Verse seven is the main thesis statement, the main idea of the whole book. And then the first six verses, verse one is obviously telling us who the author is, verses two to six are introducing the introduction. So it's a preamble. Maybe you recognize this preamble, not from the Bible. It says, we the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, do ordain, there are some words I'm skipping, do ordain and establish this. What is this? What is that talking about? Constitution, right? So the constitution starts with a preamble, we the people, in order to do this, to form a more perfect union, we are establishing this constitution. And so the preamble tells you the purpose of the document. So here in verses two to seven, we have the purpose of the book of Proverbs. So I'm not gonna spend any time really on verse one. First one tells us author is Solomon. I don't think we need to spend a lot of time on that. But then we get to verses two to six. And verses two to six, you might notice as we're reading it, it's like a mosaic. It's a mosaic of words. If you know what a mosaic is, it's a bunch of little rocks, little pieces of ceramic, and then you put them all together and it makes a picture. And so we could spend a lot of time, and maybe we will spend a lot of time, looking at each little rock and each word and how each word means something slightly different. But you're supposed to get a big picture by reading verses two to six. You're supposed to look at the whole mosaic. And so that's what we'll try to get at today. What is the big picture of what he's trying to tell us? Now, I have a whiteboard today. So it's a little bit of a challenge to make this point because it doesn't quite come across in an English translation. But what I want to show you is that in Hebrew, as it's written, there's a word pattern. There's a pattern of the number of words that are being used. So, in English, when we have all these words in there, like the word to, T-O, or the word and, or the word of, in Hebrew, you can just smush that onto a word and make it a word. So, for example, instead of to know, it just puts that word, and it's know, so it's the word know. So, I don't know if that makes any sense, but it's very clear when you look at the text in Proverbs, that there's a pattern. Each verse has two pairs of three words, except for one exception. So, verse two, no wisdom instruction. And then the second half of verse two, understand words, insight. Verse three, receive instruction, wisdom. Then the second half, righteous, justice, and equity. Verse four, give, prudence, simple. Second half, knowledge, discretion, youth. So three, three, three, three, three, three. Then verse five, wise, hear, increase, learning. So we have two verbs and two nouns. Then it goes back to three, understands, obtain, guidance. And then verse six, understand, a proverb, saying, and then it ends, words, wise, and riddles. So there's obviously a pattern here. Three plus three, three plus three, three plus three. And then we get to verse five. So the beginning of verse five breaks the pattern. And then we have three again, and then we have three and three in verse six. So, usually when they break the pattern, it's to make a point, it's for a purpose. And so I think it's pretty clear from the very intentional pattern that we're supposed to have our attention drawn to this one. The beginning of verse five, let the wise hear and increase in learning. So, in a sense, you could say, well, what's the point of the book of Proverbs? So that the wise can hear and increase in learning. So, this is what we want to, what we're going to focus on, this whole concept of how do we become wise people? Well, we need to hear. and we need to increase in learning. All of us. need to learn. All of us need to listen more and talk less. And that includes teachers. That's why the Bible says it's a dangerous thing to be a teacher. We who teach will be judged with greater strictness because the tongue has power. The tongue, the tongue of the teacher is meant to help us be wise and increase in our learning. And so if you're a bad teacher or if you teach the wrong things, then the tongue has power to set on fire the course of hell. That's what James said. And so even a teacher, to be wise, needs to increase in learning so that he can teach wisely and teach well. And there are a lot of proverbs about this, about talking less, listening more, learning more. So let's look at some. A lot of them are in chapter 10. So if you turn over there to chapter 10. Verse eight, we'll start in verse eight, chapter 10. The wise of heart will receive commandments, but a babbling fool will come to ruin. Okay, so the fool is the one who babbles, always talking. and he will come to ruin. But instead, the wise person receives. Instead of talking and saying everything that they think that they know, they listen and receive the commandments of God. And if you go down to verse 14, we're still chapter 10, verse 14, the wise lay up knowledge, but the mouth of a fool brings ruin near. So you have the same thing again, the two opposites. The fool is always talking, but in contrast, what's the wise man doing? He's laying up knowledge, he's learning. So the opposite of learning is always talking. And we need to stop talking so that we can listen. Listening to others, we can learn from them. Then you go down to verse 17. Verse 17, whoever heeds instruction is on the path to life, but he who rejects reproof leads others astray. And so here we have someone who maybe hears the words, but doesn't really listen, doesn't take them to heart, doesn't learn what that person is trying to teach them. The one who heeds instruction, listens to the instructions, is on the path to life. But if you reject what people are trying to teach you, it's gonna lead you to ruin. There's one more out of many others, but this one is in chapter 18. And I think I mentioned this one last week when we were talking about Jesus at the temple. But it's in chapter 18, verse two. A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion. So here we have it again. The fool always wants to say what he thinks is right, express his opinion, and not stop and try to understand what someone else might be saying, understand well maybe I could be wrong and I need to listen and learn from someone else and consider their opinion instead of always babbling my opinion. The fool that we see in those Proverbs, the fool thinks that he knows it all. He's not interested in learning and he likes to talk a lot and he likes to tell everyone how much he thinks that he knows. So in contrast, we can go back to the beginning of Proverbs chapter one, in contrast the wise man hears, and learns. So we need to be learners. Go back to verses two to six. Look at the whole thing again. Look at verse three, verse two, sorry. Verse two, to know wisdom and instruction. Instruction is key. People need to teach you. And you need to learn what people teach you. All of us do. Verse three, you have the same thing. Receive instruction in wise dealing. How are we gonna be wise? It's by receiving what people teach us. Go down to verse seven. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. So the fool despises instruction. And notice in verse seven, The three words that are used at the end, knowledge, so the fear of the Lord is knowledge, but the fools despise wisdom and instruction. So knowledge, wisdom, instruction, at the end of verse seven, are the same as the beginning of verse two. To know, have knowledge of wisdom and instruction. So he's bookending it. The first three words at the beginning, the last three words at the end are knowledge, wisdom, instruction. And so what he's trying to tell us is that those three things go together. If you want to be wise, it's going to have to come through instruction. Receiving, sitting, studying, learning, listening, and accepting what wiser people or more knowledgeable people tell us. So, anyone know what the word sophomore means? Have you? Heard this, Chris? Yes. Good. So, okay, Evan. Wise moron, good. So yes, so the first part of the word, soph, is the Greek word, Sophia, for wisdom. The second part of the word is moros, or we get the word moron from. But in Greek it just means fool. And so a sophomore is a wise fool. So why do we call the second year a sophomore? Because the freshman is just the fool. He doesn't know anything. The freshman knows nothing, but he knows that he knows nothing. But then after a year of school, you think that you know, right? Once you become a sophomore, you think you're so smart because you've learned all this stuff for a year, and so you think you're wise, but you're still dumb. a fool. So you are a sophomore. After you're a sophomore, you realize that there's a lot that you don't know, and so you're a little more humble. So that's where wisdom begins, getting past the sophomore stage, getting past thinking that you're wise when you're actually a fool. So we can think about it this way. So here's this vast world of knowledge and wisdom out in the world. So there are people who know it all or they think they know it all. Those people Proverbs is calling a fool. To be a fool is to think you know everything. Of course, if you're a fool or if you think you know everything, you're not going to want to learn anything. You're not going to want to grow. So that's what makes you a fool. Then there are people who don't know what they don't know, okay? So Proverbs calls those people simple. A simple person is not a fool. He just doesn't know a lot, but he also doesn't know what he doesn't know. And I'll explain that a little bit. So this person, the person who doesn't know what he doesn't know, is similar to the know-it-all, because both of them don't know. But his problem here is that he wants to learn. Well, that's not the problem. That's the difference. The difference here is he wants to learn, but his problem is he doesn't know where to start learning, because he doesn't know what he doesn't know. So I tried to come up with an analogy. So let's think about someone trying to learn how to drive. and drive a car. So the know-it-all is the 10-year-old kid thinks he knows how to drive a car, grabs the keys, sticks the key in, turns it on, manages. And he manages to turn on the car and drive it a little bit. And because he thinks he knows how to drive, he crashes the car. But then there's the second 10-year-old who doesn't know what he doesn't know. And so he might be able to get the key into the ignition and turn on the car, but maybe you've seen this or you were this kid, you try to move the gear, and it doesn't move. And you have no idea what to do, because you're thinking, well, I see my dad, he just, and then he drives the car. And so he's uneducated, he doesn't know what to do. So that's why he can't drive the car. But the know-it-all is gonna crash the car because he thinks he knows it all. The second kid, all he has to do is ask. All he has to do is learn, be instructed. And so if he has someone who will tell him, put your foot on the brake or the clutch, and then move the gear, and that's how it works. He can learn. Okay, so they are similar, but they are different. And so we don't want to be the fool. That's the main point. We don't wanna be the person who knows it all, but we also don't wanna be this person, the simple person. Because if you don't know what you don't know, you're not gonna learn. How do I even start? If I just keep pushing this gear and nothing's happening, I'm not gonna learn unless I know that I don't know something. And so the wise person realizes I don't know how to drive a car, so I'm gonna ask to be instructed how to drive the car. So this is the person we wanna be. We wanna realize that there's a lot we don't know. They did a study of psychology. Maybe you've heard of this, the Dunning-Kruger effect. Anybody heard of that? Okay. It's named after these two psychologists. They did this study about how our brain works. They found in this study that the people with the lowest abilities at a certain skill or the lowest knowledge in a certain area, those people were the most confident that they knew how to do the task or how to, or they thought they knew everything about that area. So you see this happen in real life. So you have a business and the intern comes for the summer to intern at the business. And he looks around and he says, oh, this guy, he's no clue what he's doing. Look at all this waste that's happening in this business. If I was in charge, this business would be great. We'd be making so much money. So why does the summer intern think that he knows how to run a business? Because he knows a little bit, enough to become an intern, but he has no clue how to act, all the things actually involved in running a business. Teenagers, most of them aren't here right now, but this is what teenagers do. They say, I know, Dad. I know, Dad. They love to say that, right? because they think that they know everything. Or maybe you had this experience, if you're a parent, before you had kids, you looked at everybody else's kids and you said, oh, I can't believe parents let their kids do that. My kids are never gonna be like that. My kids will never do that. And then you have kids. of your own and you become much more humble about parenting. You realize parenting is actually very difficult. So this is the psychological fact of how our brains work. You have a little bit of knowledge of something, you think you're very confident in your knowledge and your abilities. And so we need humility. We need to recognize that we tend to overestimate ourselves. We overestimate our knowledge about a subject. We overestimate our abilities in certain tasks. And so we need to realize how much we have left to learn. There's another proverb about this, chapter nine. Go to chapter nine, verse nine. Verse nine of chapter nine, give instruction to a wise man and he will be still wiser. Teach a righteous man and he will increase in learning. So he's just making this point of this kind of person that you wanna be. If you're a wise man, you know that you don't know. And so if you're a wise man and someone teaches you, you become wiser. If you're a righteous man and someone teaches you, you will increase in learning. So this is the person we want to be. Teachable, humble. It's really humility at the root of all this, right? It's our pride when we think that we know everything. And so we always have to check ourselves, no matter how old we are, no matter how wise we think we are, to humble ourselves to realize that we can still learn and that we do overestimate our wisdom and knowledge and abilities. So, how do we apply all this then? That's what we'll do the rest of our time. So how do we apply this humility and learning? Well, the first thing that the book of Proverbs is saying, remember it's the preamble, and so he's saying, if you wanna be wise, you need to listen and you need to be instructed in what? Well, first he's saying the book of Proverbs. This is why I'm writing you this book, so that if you will listen and learn from this book and be taught this book, you will grow in wisdom. So this is the purpose of this book, is to teach you to increase in your wisdom. And so then we can also apply that to all of the word of God. The wise man is the one who increases in learning and is instructed in the word of God. Maybe you know this verse from Psalm 119, verse 99. I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. So how did this person become even wiser than his teachers, all this because he was being instructed, most of all, by God. He was being instructed, most of all, by the word of God. He meditated on the word of God, and so he increased in wisdom, and was wiser than all his teachers. So, this is what Spurgeon says. This is a little bit long. but he encourages us. He says, oh, that you and I might get into the very heart of the word of God and get that word into ourselves. As I have seen the silkworm eat into the leaf and consume it, so ought we to do with the word of the Lord, not crawl over its surface, but eat right into it until we have taken it into our inmost parts. It is idle merely to let the eye glance over the words. Okay, so sometimes we read our Bibles, eyes just glance over the words. I gotta read three chapters today, so I'm just gonna read through the three chapters. My eyes just glance over the words. So we don't wanna do that. He says, or recollect the poetic expressions. So you remember some psalms and they encourage you, they inspire you. Or the historic facts. They're saying, we don't just wanna stop there, remembering some nice poetic expressions or historical facts. But it is blessed to eat into the very soul of the Bible until at last you come to talk in scriptural language and your very style is fashioned upon scripture. And what is better still, your spirit is flavored with the words of the Lord. Then he says, I would mention John Bunyan as an instance of what I mean. Read anything of Bunyan and you'll see it's almost like reading the Bible itself. He had read it till his very soul was saturated with scripture. He can't give us Pilgrim's Progress without continually making us feel and say why this man is a living Bible. "'Prick him anywhere, his blood is bibline. "'The very essence of the Bible flows from him. "'He cannot speak without quoting a text, "'for his very soul is full of the word of God.'" And so he says, I commend his example to you. So that's what we're getting at. We wanna be people, if we wanna grow in wisdom, we wanna be people who eat into the Bible, who, as he says, if you prick me, My blood would bleed Bible. That's what he says about John Bunyan. That's the kind of person we wanna be. Now honestly, I think that it is a struggle for a lot of Christians to eat into the Bible because it's a hard book. This is a very, very big book, isn't it? It is 66 books. 39 of these were written at least 2,500 years ago, the Old Testament. And so there are some places you get to the Old Testament and you're just like, I just have no idea what that says. I don't know what that means. I don't know what this random nation is. I don't know who the Sidonians are. How is this relevant to my life? I don't care what happened to the Sidonians. And then you get to the New Testament, and it's more similar to our culture, but still, it was 2,000 years ago in Rome and Greece, and you gotta know all these things that are happening in the background so that it makes sense. They're written in different languages, you know? And I think, like Spurgeon says, a lot of us, we want to, I just wanna read the Bible. and I wanna be encouraged by it. I wanna find something that will feed me. And so I get that when I read some Psalms, or I get it when I read Romans, but Ezra, I have no idea what Ezra's saying. So why do I even need to bother with Ezra? Or revelation, revelation is just crazy. So I'm just totally lost when I read revelation. So I don't even know, because it's not helping me get what I want. And so if we can use an analogy, I thought maybe it's like an apple tree. Like I just want to go out every day, pick an apple, and eat an apple. Oh, this is a good apple. I feel nourished and satisfied. And in many ways, though, the Bible is not like that. We have to think also of the Bible to be like a mine. How do you get into the mine? If you want gold in the mine, you gotta do a lot of drilling, a lot of digging. And so you're not just gonna go pick off an apple tree if you want gold. You've got to do a lot of work. Now maybe, to some of you, that's discouraging. Like, oh man, a lot of work. I got plenty to do. I don't need more work. But for me at least, and I hope for some people, it's encouraging to think about it this way. If you're reading Ezra and you're like, I have no idea what this is about, You're a normal person. You're a normal person in 21st century America. There's a lot to not understand in Ezra because it's Ezra as written a long time ago. So, we're normal, but God put the Bible together this way so that, maybe it was Spurgeon who said, it's simple enough for a child to understand, and yet deep enough for the great scholars to continually be studying it. So, yes, the basic message of the Bible, anyone can understand, but if you want the gold, if you want the real treasures, it does take a lot of work. And so it's gonna take years It's gonna take you years of reading the whole thing, because you have to see how it all fits together before you understand the little parts of it. That's part of the problem, I think, when we read the Bible, is if all you're doing is reading Romans, then you're not gonna understand how Ezra is related to Romans. So it takes years because it's such a big book. It's not like the book that you can just read in a couple hours. Over and over and over again, you have to read the whole thing. So this is the main way. If you want to be a wise person, if you want to increase in your learning, we gotta start mining the Bible for all the treasures that are in it. Now along with that, obviously, is we need to be instructed in the word of God by teachers, and that's why it's important that we have good teachers, and you need to make it a point to be instructed by the word of God. And so just like with reading the Bible, I wanna encourage you also to not be discouraged by the hearing and being taught the word of God over the long term. So you might say, okay, well, that lesson, I didn't really get much out of that lesson, or, you know, I was kind of tired during that afternoon service, and I mostly, I was half asleep through that afternoon service. You might think that. You might get discouraged sometimes. But if you will devote yourself to three times a week being taught the word of God, it will reap great benefits. And I always think about, you know, our minds, six days a week, our minds are always being bombarded by messages. Even if you're not watching bad stuff or listening to bad stuff, you're just always being, having your mind set on things that aren't necessarily going to help you grow in wisdom, help you increase in learning. And so three times a week really isn't that much to ask, but it will help to increase in learning. Another way to grow in being instructed is he's telling us here to learn from others' experience. He says, he's kind of making this point in verse four, giving prudence to the simple and knowledge and discretion to the youth. Another problem with the simple and the young is they just don't have experience. And so to grow in wisdom, we need to be instructed in the word of God, but we also need to be instructed from other people's experience. You know the billionaire Warren Buffett? He said, it's good to learn from your mistakes, it's better to learn from others. It's better to learn from others' mistakes rather than you being this young person or immature person who has to learn things the hard way. So learn from people more experienced than you, people who are more mature and wiser than you. Another thing we can add, this is the last one, okay. Another thing we can add is history. History is learning from others' experience. You probably heard the saying, if you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it. So the same thing with a young person. You can make your own mistakes and learn the hard way, or you can learn from others' mistakes. Everyone, we can make our own mistakes as a society or as a church, as a group of people, as a family, or we can learn from history not to make the mistakes people did before us. And I'm thinking especially about church history, the history of Christianity. Churches like ours, in our day, we're seen as the odd people. We're very different from many other churches in the country. You know why? Because people don't know history. They don't know the history of the church. For the first 1,900 years of the church, everybody kept the Lord's Day. Everybody had an evening service. It was normal. It was expected. for the most part, everybody took sin seriously in the church, and so concepts like church discipline, when somebody says, I can't believe the church removes people for their sin. We're just doing what all churches have done for 1,900 years, and it comes to a Baptist church, Do we realize that people are thrown in jail for believing what we believe, for practicing what we practice? If we knew the history and that people are going to jail over these things, we would learn. We would learn how important these things are. So that's one other area I would add. increase in learning by learning history. So, applications. First of all, know that you don't know. We all need to do that. We need to realize how much we don't know. And so we need the Bible. We need to read the Bible over and over again. Mind the Bible. We need to be taught the Bible over and over again. And then we need to learn. from those who are more experienced than us, which includes even a big picture learning history. So hopefully you can walk away with those things, keep those things in mind, and we will increase in our wisdom. Let's pray. Our God, we are grateful to you for your patience with us and your help with us and your spirit continually teaching us, because we can see in ourselves, first of all, as unbelievers, how, as your word says, we too were once foolish and disobedient and led astray by all of our various passions. and yet you were gracious to us and you were kind. Thank you for rescuing us from that folly of living in our sin. And then we look at our lives as believers and how slow we are to grow, how much wisdom we lack, how we long to be even more mature, and how immature we still are in struggle. with wisdom. We pray, God, that you would help us, help us to be instructed, help us to learn your word especially, help us to meditate on your testimonies. And we thank you for the work that you are doing. Lord, we pray that you would continue to make us a people full of wisdom and pleasing to you. We ask it in Christ's name, amen.