Let's hear the word of God. Proverbs chapter four, beginning in verse 10. Hear my son and accept my words that the years of your life may be many. I have taught you the way of wisdom. I have led you in the paths of uprightness. When you walk, your step will not be hampered. And if you run, you will not stumble. Keep hold of instruction. Do not let go. Guard her for she is your life. Do not enter the path of the wicked. And do not walk in the way of the evil. Avoid it. Do not go on it. Turn away from it and pass on. For they cannot sleep unless they have done wrong. They are robbed of sleep unless they have made someone stumble. For they eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence. But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. The way of the wicked is like deep darkness. They do not know over what they stumble. My son, be attentive to my words. Incline your ear 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 to the left. Turn your foot away from evil. This is God's holy word. Let's pray together. Oh Lord, you tell us in your word that the unfolding of your word gives light. And it gives wisdom and understanding to the simple. And so God, we pray that by your spirit, you would give us light. that you would help us to unfold your word, to open it up and to explain it. Help us to know what it means and what it means for us. We pray that you would give us more and more light, more than we already have, because we need you. We do not depend on ourselves in this time. We need your spiritual wisdom that is spiritually discerned. And so we ask again that you would give us your spirit. We pray that you would give us your spirit through the Savior who has risen, Jesus Christ. Amen. Well, we call them accidents, but Most car crashes are crashes, not accidents. You could get in a car accident if maybe a deer just jumps right in front of you and you're going a safe speed and there's just no way to avoid it. Or maybe you get in an accident if you're stopped at the red light and someone just runs in and hits you from behind. But many times when we get in car crashes, they aren't accidents. They are things that we do. Maybe we were going too fast. Or maybe, usually what happens is that we aren't paying attention. For a few seconds, maybe you look down at your phone. Or for a few seconds, you're zoned out. You're thinking about something else. You're not thinking about where you're driving and what's happening in front of you. And the person in front of you slams their brakes and you don't really realize it and so you hit them. So in those cases, those aren't accidents. Those are us losing attention, not paying attention. Maybe some of you have never gotten into a car crash. You've never been at fault for hitting any other cars or anything on the road. I'm guessing most of you have, and you know that feeling. You know the feeling when you have made a mistake, and you have that sinking feeling in your stomach, you have this pit in your stomach because you realize that now you've created all this kind of trouble and mess, and maybe it's gonna cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars and a lot of hassle to deal with this. And you think to yourself, if only I had just made sure what speed I was driving. If only I had just not looked at the phone for one and a half seconds. I could have just saved myself all kinds of trouble. Well, in a similar way, this passage is talking about a path or a journey. And they obviously didn't have cars back then. People would walk a lot on their path. And here in Proverbs, he is presenting life as a journey. Now that is very cliche. Life is a journey and it's not about the destination. It's about the journey. You hear those cliches all the time, but this is a biblical metaphor that life is a journey. You're all on a path. And what he's trying to tell his son, this father, Solomon, is trying to tell his son here is that there are many dangers. There are many snares that will await you on the path. And so he's telling his son he needs to pay attention. He needs to pay careful attention. just like one second of distraction driving your car could end up in a crash that was not something that just happened to you, but you are responsible for. He's saying in the same way, we are responsible for the life that we live. And just a few moments of foolishness, a few bad decisions can really ruin your life. can really set you on a destructive path. So he says, be careful. Pay careful attention. That not even for one second, you would take your eyes off of the road that you need to travel. And he says, above all else, keep your heart. Keep watch over your heart because out of the heart you will make decisions. You will do things in this life. You will walk the journey that will either lead to life or destruction. So this is what we're going to look at today in verses 10 to 27. And so using this metaphor of the path, we can say that the first section, verses 10 to 19, is about road hazards, the dangers that lurk for the sun as he walks down the road of this journey of life. So let's look at the first part, the road hazards. So the passage starts in verse 10 once again with that phrase, hear my son. So we know from this that he is beginning a new lecture to his son that we've seen happen many times in these first four chapters. Remember maybe from last week that Solomon was passing down his father's lessons from Grandpa David. But it seems that Grandpa David's lessons now have ended with the end of verse nine. And so Solomon begins with his own words to his son again. Hear my son, accept my words that the years of your life may be many. So he's calling him again to pay attention to what he's about to tell him. And then it looks like in verses 11 to 12, he goes back to the past. Look at verse 11. I have taught you the way of wisdom. I have led you in the paths of uprightness. And probably verse 12 follows with that, as in he's saying, I've led you in the paths of uprightness. In other words, I have taught you, verse 12, when you walk, Your step will not be hampered, and if you run, you will not stumble. I've taught you things so that when you walk, you wouldn't be hampered. When you run, you would not stumble. And so verses 11 to 12 are the father going back to the past with his son. Now, when do parents use the past tense? When do parents bring up what they have taught their children? when a parent says, I told you, I taught you better than that. That's not what I taught you. I taught you this. I told you to do this, not to do that. So when does that come up? It comes up when the child does something wrong. something they're not supposed to do. So when a child who is learning to drive comes home and says, ah, there was a little accident. And mom or dad says, well, what happened? And the child says, well, I was at the red light and you told me that I could turn right on red. And so I turned right and then a car just hit me. And so the parent says, Yes, but I told you that you can turn right on red, but you don't always have to turn right on red. That you need to look first before you turn right. So that's the kind of scenario that most likely is happening here in verse 11 and 12. What's happening is that the sun has listen to the instruction, he's heard wisdom, he's been taught throughout his childhood, and now he is a young man, and now he is probably beginning to go on a path. He's beginning to enter the path of the wicked. And so the father starts out by saying, that's not what I taught you. I've taught you the way of wisdom. I've taught you the way so that your steps can be secure. But what happens? Now he's in danger. So let's look at the danger. Verses 13 and 15. He's warning him. Keep hold of instruction. Do not let go. Guard her for she is your life. Do not enter the path of the wicked. Do not walk in the way of the evil. Avoid it. Do not go on it. Turn away from it and pass on. So at least he can see that his son is probably about to, if maybe he hasn't stepped the foot down that path, he is about to go down that path. And he's saying, avoid it. Turn away. You're at the crossroads. Don't walk down that path. Probably because the son, there's something in him that is thinking about it, wanting to go down the path. And you can see, I mean, it doesn't really come across on a written page here, but you can see the urgency. Keep hold of this. Keep it. This is what you say when someone is about to throw something in the trash. You say, no, no, no, don't throw that away. Keep that. And when someone is about to walk down a dangerous path, you say, no, no, no, no, don't go down there. It's dangerous. Avoid that path. That's the urgency of the father to his son. So here's the temptation. Here's the danger. The danger is curiosity. A young man has grown up with a father who's taught him wisdom, who's taught him the commandments of God. Children, we could say in our day, children grow up in church. Children are taught to know God and follow God and love God. They know right and wrong, but see, there's always the temptation of, well, I just wanna try it myself. I just wanna see if those things that my parents were warning me about, if they're really as bad as they say they are. How could they really know? How could I really know if I should avoid that danger if I haven't really tried it yet? So maybe let me just try it, let me do it, and then I can decide if it's good for me or bad for me. That's the temptation of curiosity, novelty, wanting to try sin that you've never tried before because your parents, as good parents, they want to protect you. They want to keep you from sin, but they can't keep you forever from all temptations. You will grow up. You will leave your home. You will be an adult. You will have to make your own decisions. And so you need to listen to the warnings. Avoid the path of the wicked. You don't even have to go down the path. No, you don't need to try it. just to see if it's bad. Don't enter. Don't step a foot on that path. So he warns him, and then he, to continue to warn, he warns him about the addictive behavior of the sin. Verses 16 and 17, he says, I don't think that here he is telling him, hey, if you walk down the wicked path, there are bad people who are going to jump you and they're going to kill you and they're going to hurt you. Now, I think he's talking about You, if you walk down this path, you are going to be like one of these people. You're going to join the crowd. You're going to join the gang. The crowd is addicted to sin. They can't sleep unless they have done wrong. They are robbed of sleep, he says, until they rob somebody else. They just love to think about sin. They eat the bread of wickedness. They live off of this. They drink the wine of violence, this picture of crushed grapes as a picture of crushed people whose blood is dripping. And yet, this is what gives life. This is the drink of the wicked. They love to hurt people. Now, we can apply this to sinners who are murderers and thieves and people who make it their lives to just always be criminals. But I think this is a more general point about the addictive nature of sin, how sin consumes you. And the thing about saying that you're gonna step one foot on the path is that you don't realize the danger and the lure of sin once you step on the path. Once you sin, as Eve was, as her eyes were opened, it just gives you more and more of a craving for sin. Once you sin, you just have more ideas and thoughts about that sin. And so it's not like you're just going to stop with one thing or one time. No, it keeps you awake thinking about sin. It becomes your life. It's what you live off of. And so we can apply this to things like alcohol and drunkenness and how when you get drunk and you could become an alcoholic and then this literally becomes your life and all you're doing is drinking and drinking and drinking. So, that's one temptation. That's one addiction is drunkenness. Or we could talk about drugs. No, you don't need to go trying all the drugs. You could get addicted. But we can talk about lots of other things too. Pride. the addictiveness of pride and thinking about yourself, and lust. We could talk about bitterness, which Hebrews calls a root of bitterness because it roots into your heart and spreads and grows. It's not easy once you have bitterness to root out that bitterness. So don't even start. Don't even go there. With all of these sins, we must root them out. We must not even walk down the path. We must avoid the path at all costs. Well then, he finishes this part by telling him the destination of these paths. He says in verse 18, but the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. The way of the wicked is like deep darkness. They do not know over what they stumble. The full day, the destination of the righteous is heaven. Following Christ leads to heaven. And he says that the path of that righteous person is like the dawn. It starts out small, But just like the day gets brighter, the life of the righteous, the path gets brighter and brighter. This is what sanctification is. This is what spiritual maturity is. As you grow in the Christian life, you become more and more spiritually mature. That doesn't mean that the longer you're a Christian, the easier your life gets, or that you don't have any more sin when you make it to the end of your life. But it does mean that you do grow. You are sanctified. You do know more of how to fight against your sins. And so it does get brighter. the more spiritually mature that you get. Some of you, you're a Christian, but you feel like Paul feels in Romans 7. You feel like, what a wretched man I am. How am I ever going to get rid of all of this sin that I find in my life? Well, Paul does struggle with sin, but he also says that there is deliverance. We can put sin to death. We can grow in holiness. And so maybe you are just at the light of dawn spiritually. And you don't see any way that things can get brighter. You don't think, how could I ever make it to the full day? I'm never going to finish this journey of the Christian life. But be encouraged. God sanctifies his people. Those whom he justified, he sanctified. He will bring to completion the work that he has begun in you. So it looks like the light of dawn in you, but he is making it and he will make it brighter and brighter until full day. But then there's the destination of the wicked. It's darkness, and they go deeper and deeper into darkness so that they don't even know what they stumble over. Unbelievers and those who are caught in sin, they don't even know what sin is. In the sense that they don't know what right and wrong is. They are just all confused, all messed up. Because they think what they're doing is okay. And they know that they're miserable, but they don't know why. And they don't know what to do about it. And this is what happens with sin. Your foolish heart becomes darkened. And God gives you up to more and more of the lusts of your hearts. So, the more you sin, the more ignorant you become of what's right and wrong. And that's why the Father says, avoid it. Don't go down the path. Because it can only lead to more and more darkness. So this is the road hazard that he warns his son about, walking down this way of the wicked. Second, we get to verses 20 to 27. And this is maybe a different lecture because he starts with the word, my son. But there are many themes about this path in verses 26 and 27. He talks about the path and the way and walking down the path. And in verse 27, he says, don't swerve to the right or to the left. In verse 20, When he begins this part of the passage, he uses the word incline, which is the word turn. And he says, turn your ear to my sayings. And that's exactly the word that he uses in verse 27 when he says, do not swerve, do not turn to the right or to the left. And so that's the main idea of verses 20 to 27. He's telling him to turn to the wisdom of God, the teachings of God, so that he will not turn off of the path that his father has set him on. He will not turn onto the wicked path. Don't swerve off. So, how are you gonna do this? How are you gonna avoid swerving off the good path and onto the wicked path? Well, first he says, you need to pay attention to the words that he speaks. Verses 20 to 22. My son, be attentive to my words. Incline your ear 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. He needs to pay attention to the words. They need to not escape from his sight. Maybe he's referencing writing here. The words of the commandments of God are, are written down. Like you may know in Deuteronomy six, how he says, put these things on the doorposts of your house. write them and, uh, Orthodox Jews, they have the, the, the writing of Deuteronomy six literally written down and wrapped around their arm. And they literally will have it, uh, on a little scroll at the entrance of the door of their house. And some of them will have the little thing on the front of their caps, the tablet between their eyes. And so, uh, At some point, they were literally writing down the commands of God. They were writing down scripture. And so, in a literal sense, he's saying, don't let the Word of God escape from your sight. Always be looking at the Word of God. Always be listening to the Word of God. If you do this, it will be life to you. This is how you have life. This is how your flesh will be healed. True life comes through words, seeing and hearing the word of God. And then he says, keep it within your heart. There's a picture here of the 10 commandments that were the 10 words that were placed within the heart of the tabernacle, the heart of the temple, the Ark of the Covenant. God's word was at the heart of the tabernacle. God's word needs to be within the heart of the temple of your body. Keep the words of God within your heart. Meditate upon the words. Memorize the words. Always have them in your mind. This is how you have life. In John chapter six, when the disciples, followers of Jesus, a lot of them abandoned Christ after him talking about eating his flesh, Jesus says to the disciples, will you abandon me also? And Peter responds, where else can we go? Only you have the words of life. The words that give life are only found in Jesus Christ. If you do not have the words of Christ, you cannot have life. These words that come from Christ need to be set before your eyes. They need to be coming into your ears and you need to be paying attention to them and they need to be kept within your heart because they give life. We need words because we're ignorant of truth. We live in a world that denies reality. They deny reality in every way. This world will not tell you about a heaven or a hell. People don't believe in it. And so the world is always telling you with every message that you need to live for this life and this world. What will make you believe in a heaven or a hell? It's only the words of God. What will make you believe that there is a God and that he has given his law and that he will judge you for breaking his law? It's only from hearing the word of God. There is no commercial that's going to tell you about that. There is no product at the stores and the mall that is going to tell you that God is a righteous judge. The only way you will hear about reality is by hearing The Word of God. It's the Word of Christ that saves us. The Word of the Cross. And so we need to read it, we need to preach it, we need to hear it. So does the Word of God give you life? Is it life for you? Have you found it and found life? Is it healing to your flesh? This is one of the big differences between someone who is truly converted, truly saved, and someone who isn't. And someone who may be living as a good person, may be doing some good deeds, may have general beliefs about God, but that doesn't mean you're a true follower of Christ and you have salvation. One of the ways that you know is that the word brings life to your soul. The Word convicts you, the Word moves you, the Word changes you so that your behavior and your life changes and your heart changes and you find life through the Word of God. So, life comes through the Word and then he says that we need to then pay attention to what we do. Pay attention to what we do as we hear the Word of God, we then do the Word of God. And so from verse 23 to 27, he mentions these different parts of the body to talk about what we do. The heart, the mouth, the eyes, and the feet. And he starts in verse 23 with the heart. He says, keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. We're going to spend more time on this one than the other ones because this is the one that he says needs the most attention from us. Keep your heart with all vigilance. The heart is the spiritual side of you. We all are made up of a body and a soul. So the heart here in the Bible is referring to our soul. With our soul, we make decisions. We have affections. We have a will where we make our decisions. We have thoughts and desires. Those all come from and through the heart. Our bodies and our souls are related to each other. They affect each other in ways that are hard to figure out and understand. But the heart is the spiritual side of you. And he says, from this flows your life. From your will and your desires come all of your actions with your body. And so he says, keep your heart. Keep your heart because from it flows life. Jesus says the same thing in Mark chapter 7. The Pharisees were very concerned about the outward things. bowls that they ate out of and foods that they ate that they considered unclean. Jesus says in Mark 7, it's not what you eat that makes you unclean that comes inside of you. It's what's inside of you and comes out of you that defiles you. And he says, all these things come out of your heart, evil thoughts, immorality, sensuality, slander, all of these things come from the evil heart that is within you. Everything in your life, all of your words, all of your behavior, all of your action flows out of the spring of your heart. And so this is why this is really bad news for us. The really bad news for us is that we have very defiled hearts and there's nothing you can do to get yourself a new heart. But the good news is that God gives new hearts. God takes dirty hearts and cleans them off. He takes hearts of stone and makes them hearts of flesh. God can remove your defiled heart and give you a clean heart. So maybe for some of you, why do you continue with all of the evil thoughts, with all of the immorality? Why does it keep coming and coming out of you no matter what you do? It is possible that it's because your heart is still the old heart, the heart that is not made new. And what you need first and foremost is for God to give you this new heart. But even when we are Christians and we have the new heart, he says we still need to watch over the heart, keep your heart. The word for keep means to guard. There's an image of a guardian, a prison warden watching over the prison of your heart. It's the word that is used for Adam, that God told Adam in Genesis 2 to keep the garden. And he wasn't just telling him to plant some flowers But he was telling him to keep the snakes out of the garden, to guard the garden, to protect the garden from evil influences. But Adam didn't keep the garden. And so God, after Adam sinned in Genesis 3, he puts cherubim. And the cherubim, with the same word, it says, they stood at the entrance of Eden and they guarded, they kept the garden. And so that's the image. You have cherubim set over your heart, swords that watch over your heart to keep things from coming in and keep things from going out. You know, be careful about what comes out of your heart and comes to what you look at and what you say and what you do. Be careful what comes out of your heart. Be careful what comes in your heart. And he says, keep your heart with all vigilance. This is the most important thing to do. This is what you need to always be paying attention to, always be thinking about, always be vigilant about. Vigilance is another word for guarding, another word for a prison guard, for having someone in custody. Watch over your heart like a prisoner is in his cell and you need to pay attention to everything that he's doing, everything that goes into his cell and pay attention with anybody or anything that comes out of that cell. Always watch. Did you know that once upon a time, a serial killer escaped from prison? Many of you have heard of Ted Bundy and in 1977 he was arrested after many murders and put into a prison in Colorado, but he escaped. And sadly, when he escaped, he went on to commit more murders until he was caught again later. But what's unbelievable about this story is how he escaped. he escaped because the guards were on Christmas break. And apparently they did not have substitutes. They did not bring in enough guards to watch over the prison. And so Bundy sawed a vent off and he climbed up the vent in his cell and the vent ended up in the apartment of the chief jailer. But the chief jailer wasn't home. He was gone on Christmas vacation. And so all he had to do was grab some clothes out of his closet, walk out the door, and pretend that he was just a normal person. All because someone would be so foolish to just take a break and not make sure that anybody was watching. And this is the picture. of verse 23. You're the prison guard. You can't ever lose sight of the prisoner. You need to always be paying attention. You need to always be on duty. And when you're on duty, you can't fall asleep. A few minutes of sleep and the prisoner can escape. A few minutes of not paying attention, of being distracted, and the prisoner can get out. Keep your heart with all vigilance. Always be watching over your heart. Your heart can be enticed by sin. And so you have to always ask yourself, why Is that sin appealing to me? Two people can be in the same scenario, the same circumstance, and one person cannot be tempted at all, and the other one can fall into sin. Two people can walk into the same store, and one person will say, this is disgusting, look at all this stuff that's in the store. And the other person will walk in the store and be like, I want all of this, this is amazing. And you just buy and buy, and you covet and you covet, and you have greed and more greed. And you can apply that to any sin. And so every circumstance that you're in, you have to ask yourself, not just, how did I get into this circumstance? Do I need to change something about my circumstances? As Jesus says, do I need to pluck out my eye or cut off my arm? Do I need to change something? But you can pluck out your eye and not change your heart. And Jesus is saying, or Proverbs is saying, watch over your heart as well. What is it that was so enticing about being in that circumstance with that temptation? John Owen writes a lot about this in his book, Mortification of Sin, and he says many things, but some of the things he says are that two people can be facing a circumstance that would make somebody angry, and he says one person Doesn't have any anger at all his whole life. And then another person is troubled every day with his anger. But Owen says, it's the second person who can do more, who may be doing more to put his sin to death. In other words, the second person is keeping watch over his heart more, even though he finds himself dealing with these temptations every day to anger. You might be an angry person in your heart. You just might not face many circumstances that bring out your anger, and you can apply that to any sin. He also says that many times we might divert our sins. We might stop struggling with one sin, but we just divert our desires, what he calls them lusts, we divert our lusts to something else. So he says, you have changed your master, but you're still a servant. And so this is what watching your heart is all about. Who am I serving? Why am I serving them? Why do I continue to fall into these sins? What is it about my heart that is desiring these things? Keep watch over your heart. Well then, in the last few verses, he mentions these other parts of the body, the mouth, the eyes, and the feet. Verse 24, he says, put away from you crooked speech and put devious talk far from you. Our mouth is connected to our heart spiritually. If you found yourself when you are complaining, that as you are complaining, you become more and more miserable, it's as if when you speak the complaint, it just has the effect of frustrating you even more. Or if you say unkind or mean things to someone, or you're talking about a person, It makes you harden your heart towards that person as you are speaking unkindly about them. Or the Bible says in Isaiah 58 about the Sabbath, it says not to talk idly. I-D-L-E, idle. Talk about things that don't matter. Because he says when you talk about things that don't matter, this is what Proverbs is saying, you start thinking about things that don't matter. And people who always think about things that don't matter, they aren't going to grow in Christlikeness. So if you don't want to think about idle things, don't talk about idle things. Don't just blah, blah, blah, blah about things that don't really matter. Don't complain. Don't speak unkind things. Don't say devious things, he says, as Paul will say about sexual immorality, that it should not even be named among us, because when we talk about it, then that desensitizes us to it. It normalizes immorality. So put devious talk far from you. Out of the heart will flow crooked speech, which will take you down a crooked path. Then he says, in verse 25, He's not just talking about physical things that you look at to not look around, to not look at those things, but he's talking about the path of life. Look straight ahead as you're walking down the path. Don't get distracted. Always be paying attention to what you are doing. In other words, focus on where you want to go in life and don't get distracted. Follow Christ. Don't get distracted by the vanities of the world. And then finally, he says in verse 26, ponder the path of your feet and all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or to the left. Turn your foot away from evil. Ponder, think about what you do before you do it. Life is dangerous. You're on a dangerous journey. So think before you step so that you stay on the right path. So above all else, guard your hearts. Watch your mouth. Watch what you look at and watch your feet. Maybe some of you heard the story recently about a self-driving car in San Francisco that got stuck in wet cement. It was driving itself without a person and ended up in a construction zone without realizing it and then stopped and then got stuck. And it's a funny example of how far we have to go with these self-driving cars. Because no matter how smart you make a computer, in my opinion, I don't think they'll ever be as smart as a human being. But the reason they, some people want self-driving cars is because they say, well, people fall asleep. People get distracted. And so they say it's going to be safer But still, nothing beats the driving of a human being. Processing all that information all at once. But what matters is that the humans pay attention. That the human beings, as they are driving, don't get in crashes because they are getting distracted. And so that's what he's saying here. Pay attention. If you don't want to swerve, if you don't want to crash, keep a close watch, above all else, on your own heart. Let's pray. God, we thank you that your word gives life, that your word warns us, that through your word you give us new hearts. We pray, Lord, that that would be the gift that you give to each one of us. And we thank you that you've also given us of your Holy Spirit, we who are trusting and following Christ. Give us your spirit to help us, to watch over our lives. Above all else, to watch our hearts. That we might be more and more sanctified into the image of Christ Jesus and live for your glory. We pray these things through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, amen.