Sermon Tone Analysis

NOTE:

This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message.

The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit.

Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.

Engagement

Many of you have probably seen this meme before [Just bought a book from IKEA].

And if you’ve ever purchased anything from IKEA you certainly get it.

The instructions that show you how to assemble their products aren’t always the easiest to follow.

For instance, here are the instructions for how to assemble a house.

[Meme].

So I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes it just seems easier to go ahead and assemble the item without consulting the instructions.

Sometimes that has worked out, but far more often I end up taking things apart and going back to the instructions and starting over.

That’s a perfect illustration of what we’re going to learn from our study of Proverbs this morning:

I’m never more foolish than when I think I’m wise

Tension

I think if we’re honest, all of us would admit that there have been times in our lives where we have proven that statement to be true.

And undoubtedly, we’ll do that again.

But hopefully today’s passage will help us learn how to at least make those times fewer and further between.

Truth

This is the fourth week in our current sermon series - Fool Proof.

We’ve been studying the book of Proverbs to see what we can learn about living wisely and avoid being a fool.

By now you’ve probably figured out we can’t possibly cover the entire book in the seven weeks we’ve allotted to it.

So after covering all of chapter 1 the first three weeks, we’re going to skip ahead to chapter three this morning.

Then for the next three weeks, Ryan is going to share some topical messages that will pull from the rest of the book.

Please go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Proverbs chapter 3 and follow along as I read the first 12 verses of that chapter:

My guess is that for many of you, when we got to verses 5 and 6, they sounded very familiar to you.

Perhaps you’ve even memorized those verses.

But, while those two verses are certainly important, I’m going to suggest to you that the heart of this passage, the main idea, is found in verses 7 and 8.

The reason I say that is because the structure of this section leads me to that conclusion.

You’ll notice that this passage contains six doublets, or pairs, that begin with a command and end with a blessing that comes from following that command.

This is a good time to point out that these pairings, as well as much of what we’ll see in the rest of the book isn’t as much a promise or guarantee as it is a statement of the way things generally work.

One commentator that I read a few weeks ago suggested that these things generally work about 90% of the time.

And that seems about right.

Because we live in a world that is corrupted by sin, right now there are always exceptions to these principles.

In this world, the righteous suffer and the wicked often get wealthy.

But if we’ll heed these instructions, our lives will almost always be more blessed than if we do not.

And down the road, when Jesus returns and establishes a physical kingdom, these principles will work 100% of the time.

So we ought to be practicing them now.

These 12 verses are also arranged into a pattern called a chiasm.

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on this, but here is the basic idea:

Verses 1 through 4 correspond to verses 11 -12.

They are connected by the concepts of God’s teaching and His commandments and the consequences of obedience and disobedience.

Verses 5-6 correspond to verses 9-10.

There are parallel ideas of trusting the Lord and honoring the Lord.

That leaves verses 7-8 as the focal point of the passage.

In particular I want to go back and look at verse 7 in some more detail:

In many ways, this verse conveys nearly the same message we found in verse 7 back in chapter 1, which we said was the theme verse for the entire book.

There we concluded that the wisdom that comes from fearing the Lord involves living as if God is God and I am not.

The main idea we’re pursuing today, which comes directly from this verse, is essentially the same idea phrased a bit differently:

I’m never more foolish than when I think I’m wise

The opposite is also true:

I’m never wiser than when I recognize my foolishness

Here in this verse we see that a fool is wise in his own eyes.

He trusts in what he can know, what he can figure out, what he can do.

He’s like the person trying to put together the IKEA furniture with no directions.

It might look like it’s working for a while, but ultimately he’ll have to take it all apart, read the directions and put it back together the right way.

And the biggest problem is that the fool doesn’t see his folly.

As we saw last week, even if someone else points that out, he still chooses to hang on to evil and to his sin and he refuses to listen to the reproof that is calling him back to God and His ways.

But the good news is that once I recognize just how foolish my own wisdom is and I choose to fear God instead, this is what I can look forward to:

The idea here is that when I recognize that my own wisdom is worthless and I choose to rely upon the wisdom of God, that will bring a kind of healing to my life that I can’t find anywhere else.

And all the other blessings promised to those who heed the commands in this passage are different aspects of this primary blessing.

Application

So how do I make sure that I don’t become a fool by relying on my own wisdom?

It’s a matter of trust in four important areas of my life.

I need to choose to quit trusting these aspects of my life to myself or to the world and start trusting them to God.

HOW TO MAKE SURE I DON’T BECOME WISE IN MY OWN EYES

Trust my heart to God (vs.

1-4)

Because this is so important, Ryan is going to preach an entire message on this idea in a couple of weeks.

It is one of the main ideas we see throughout the book of Proverbs.

So I won’t spend a lot of time here.

Most of the “self-help” books or seminars you’ll see in our culture today are all about techniques you can use to get what you want.

Unfortunately you’ll even find some churches that operate based on that idea.

But the Bible, and particularly the book of Proverbs, doesn’t operate like that at all.

The principles we find there are not about changing the world to match what we want.

They are about changing us from the inside out so that we’ll seek what God wants.

We really see this in these first four verses where we find the word “heart” used twice.

The Hebrew word translated “heart” in Proverbs can mean the muscle inside our chest that pumps blood to our body.

But in Proverbs, and elsewhere in the Old Testament, it most often describes the immaterial part of who we are.

We might think of it in terms of our “personality”.

It includes our emotions, our thoughts and our will.

Solomon is instructing his son to obey God’s commandments, not just outwardly, but from the heart.

You’ve like heard of the little girl who was acting up so her mother told her to go sit in the corner.

“No”, she replied.

The mother got really angry and yelled, “You go sit in the corner right now or you’re going to get a spanking that you’ll remember”.

So the little girt went and sat in the corner, but she retorted, “I may be sitting on the outside, but I’m standing on the inside”.

I wonder how often we do the same thing with God.

Solomon wants his son to remember that those commandments are an extension of the steadfast love and faithfulness of God that we see all throughout the Bible.

When our obedience flows out of our appreciation and love for who God is, then we will want to obey His commands from the heart and not just obey out of obligation or fear.

The best way I know of to trust my heart to God is to delight in His Word and to pray that He might use it to impart His wisdom deep inside my heart.

As I said Ryan will be going into much more detail on this principle in a couple weeks.

Trust my decisions to God (vs.

5-6)

Verses 5-6 make it clear that we are to trust all our decisions to God, not just the “big ones”.

Notice that we are to trust Him with “all our heart” and acknowledge Him in “all our ways”.

But far too often what we do is to make our own decisions without consulting God and then ask Him to bless those decisions.

It is true that God has created us with the ability to reason and I believe He wants us to use that as part of the decision making process.

So it may actually be a wise thing to make a list of pros and cons when we need to make a decision and to use that to help us in the decision making process.

It is certainly wise to consider the possible consequences of our decisions and use that to guide us.

But we should only do that after we have entrusted the decision itself and the entire process to God.

So what does that look like in real life?

Before I answer that question I think it’s important to point out that most of the time, God is much more concerned about the “how” than the “what”.