Wisdom

Last sunday's message was a great blessing. Here it is transcribed, but you can listen to it &/or download it online as well.

Greetings in Jesus' name; I'm glad to be here this morning. Let's turn to Proverbs 1 where we just sang (Lo, Wisdom Crieth In The Streets).

Proverbs 1:20 Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets: 21 She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates: in the city she uttereth her words, saying, 22 How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge? 23 Turn you at my reproof: behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you.

God, his spirit is crying in the streets. He is speaking to us, trying to teach us and show us a better way. In Titus 2 it talks about how the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us to deny ungodliness and worldly lusts that we should live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world. And then in James …

James 1:1 James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad, greeting. 2 My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; 3 Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. 4 But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. 5 If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.

If you had a list of the things that you want out of this life, what would be at the top of that list? If you could have whatever you want, what would it be? Just imagine – let your mind wonder – what's the first thing that comes to your mind? Maybe you want a new truck. You are thinking, “Wow, if I could have a wish, what would I want? If I could have anything … a nice farm with a nice house; a nice husband or wife with a nice family...” Maybe you want something a little lower than that. Maybe you want a new toy to play with. A new cell phone – maybe that's what you thought of. Or a nice computer? Or a new horse or something. “Maybe if I just had a new saddle ...” What is on your list? What did you think of when I said, “If you could have whatever you want”? What is it you find yourself longing for whenever you are daydreaming about something? What do you want? Do you know what ought to be at the top of your list? King Solomon was made the king of Israel and God basically told him to ask for whatever he wanted and he would give it to him. He went and offered sacrifices and prayed, and you know what he asked for? Wisdom. Wisdom to do God's will. Do you know what ought to be at the top of our list? What is God trying to give us? Wisdom. He is trying to give us wisdom. That ought to be the top thing that you think of. “Lord, give me wisdom.” Is it something you have to beg for? Does God say, “If you beg me for wisdom long enough, I might share a little bit of it with you.” No, he does not. “ASK and I will give it to you liberally. I will freely give you all you want of it, if you will but ask.”

You know, people say (I am so sick of this …), “Oh, I'll pray about it”. You know how when there is a decision to be made and they say, “I'll pray about it.” Forget about that – ask the Lord for wisdom! “Lord, I need wisdom. Help me make the choices I need to make in my life. Guide me the way you want me to go.” When people say, “Well, I'll pray about it,” a lot of times they just end up with the wrong decision. If they would have asked for wisdom … Lord guide us, give us wisdom … instead of looking for a loophole, they would have seen the Lord's will. That's what most people are looking for whenever they say, 'Oh, I'll pray about it:' a loophole. What they are really saying is, 'I see what's right in front of me, I see what the bible says, but we'll pray about it and see.' You are going about it backwards. If any of you lack wisdom, ask of God that giveth to all men liberally, and he doesn't complain about it one bit. He is not going to scold you for asking for wisdom. He is not going to upbraid you or rebuke you or argue with you – he is going to give it to you. “But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering.” It goes on and talks about a double-minded man; a man that is driven to and fro. That man that is just looking for the right situation. Ask God for wisdom.

What is wisdom going to teach us? Wisdom is crying in the street waiting for someone to hear it, and we are off daydreaming about something else. The some we sang that someone called out this morning (it's pretty neat how things fall together): “Young men in all your revelry” just having a good time … young men in having your good time, enjoying your youth. “Young ladies, proud and thoughtless” Proud and thoughtless. Boy, how often you see that. When children are left to themselves and unrestrained, what happens? Young men grow up wanting to have a party. Wanting to have a good time. The young ladies think they are real pretty, and are thoughtless. They don't even think. “Proud and thoughtless.” “Will you be saved eternally?” There is wisdom. It gives you something to think about. “Or die forever hopeless?” What are you thinking about? “Toward hell you hasten in conceit; you plunge in sin's perdition. Yet wisdom cries upon the streets 'in God there is redemption!'” Praise the Lord! If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God who giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him. That's not just for young people.

Do you want wisdom? Fathers and mothers – you are training up children; do you ask for wisdom in how to handle each situation? Whenever you come up to a problem with your children, is your goal just to fix the situation, or is your goal to instill some wisdom into the child? The bible says train up a child in the way it should go and when it is old it will not depart from it. I've said often that child training first begins with adult training. If you do not have enough courage and enough wisdom yourself, how are you going to pass that along to your children? It takes discipline. Children really are pretty easy to train, the problem is the parents being diligent in training. God has given you children; train them the way they should go.

There are so many things that are so easy to fall in to. It's hard to say this right: to be able to train someone, often we have to just be honest enough with ourselves to first seek that wisdom and apply it to our own lives. I want to be a better man. I want to be a better man. Do you want to be a better man? A better woman? A better wife? A better son? A better daughter? Do you want to be better? We need to train ourselves to be better; to find out what is wrong and correct it now. Many of the habits or the things we do in our lives reflect on how we were trained and brought up. And it is a lot easier to catch those things whenever the person is a child than an adult. The deeper the groove or rut you have traveled in, the deeper it gets and the harder it is to climb out of. Whenever we are feeding cattle and working in the mud, we drive the same path every day and begin to make ruts. All winter long those ruts get deeper and deeper and deeper, and then it freezes and you get in that rut and try to turn out of it, it is almost impossible. When you first make that path through there, you can stir out of it easily; but as you continually go down that same path every day, the rut gets deeper and deeper and deeper.

Whenever we are training children and we train them to act like a little fool and then we laugh at them, do you know what we are training them to do? We are training them to grow up to be a clown because they love that attention. We spend the first two or three years of their life laughing at them because they are doing something stupid, and then we spend the next 16 years (or how many are left under our care) trying to take that stupidness out of them, and wonder why they are so foolish. We wonder why they always are causing trouble and trying to get attention. The bible says foolishness is bound in the heart of a child. We do not have to train them to be foolish, yet we encourage it. We need to drive it from them when they are little. A lot of the time it is just little things like that; ask God for wisdom with your child. How are you training them when they are little? Are you training them to follow? Are you training them to be careful? How are you training them – are you training them to be a little monkey?

The bible says in Titus that we ought to teach young men to be sober minded; in all things showing thyself a pattern of good works. That does not mean to never laugh and just be 'sober'' or what we would consider 'serious' all the time, but it does mean we ought to think about reality. To be sober – to be serious enough to consider our situation.

We do not have to train our children to be children; we are trying to train them to be adults. They have enough free time of their own to be children. We need to be working on them, whenever we have the opportunity, to be adults; to grow them up - not only to just keep throwing food in front of them so they get big and tall. We don't feed them baby food; we get them to where they will eat so they will grow and move up into adulthood. That's how we ought to be feeding them whenever we are feeding their minds. I don't think we should have a different language when we speak to babies. If we want them to talk properly, we need to talk properly to them. We need to show them how to do it; show them how to learn.

We try to improve their situation when what we ought to be doing is teaching them how to deal with hardships. That's what makes people strong and builds their character. You do not build character without some tribulation. Do you think Job came out of his tribulation a better man or worse? He came out of it a better man. It was hard to go through it! Training children ought to be hard on them; it is life! Whenever we have them so sheltered and protect them from anything difficult, we are not helping them at all. That is why when they get out of all their schooling that the world teaches them is going to solve all their problems and then they get out into the real world and hit life, all they can do is whine and cry. It's no wonder they turn to drugs, or alcohol or some bad habit. It's no wonder they fall into lust, they've had things handed to them all their life and when they have to face reality they cannot.

This idea that the world teaches, that there is no real loser, and they give everyone a ribbon, or whether they have a passing score or not they pass them anyway, because they don't want them to feel bad … all you are doing is training them that there are no consequences for their wrong actions or failures. There are consequences and struggles and hard times. The trying of your faith works patience. You don't make a knife sharp by keeping it wrapped in a little cotton box. You sharpen a knife when you take the edge of it and grind it up against a hard rock. It bites into that metal and tears little pieces off of it and makes it sharp. What are we trying to train them for? So they can live in a little cotton box all of their life? Or are we trying to train them to be useful? To be able to cope?

Face your problems. Face your problems. Face your angers. Listen to that wisdom that God is trying to tell you. We gave these older boys an assignment last week to each pick a Proverb and share how they have applied it to their lives. Two of them picked the same verse and one picked another verse about the same topic. It was a blessing. That is wisdom crying out: “Here is one of your main problems, learn how to deal with it.” Do you know how you are going to learn how to deal with it? Your brothers are probably going to be twice as ornery to you now. Do you know how you are going to learn how to deal with it? When someone says something about you, you are going to hear it more. You can run away like a little sissy, or you can deal with it; you can learn how to give that soft answer. You can learn how to control that spirit. A man that can control his spirit is like a man who can control a city. Learn that wisdom now when you are young. You need some of that temper, but let it make you strong. Control it. Turn it to make you a better man.

I thought about how a lot of times we are pretty easy to confess. “Oh, I'm kind of proud.” We hang our head a little and act real humble and say [in a kind of shy or quiet way], “I'm sorry, I'm so proud” or “I'm sorry, I'm no good.” And we can say that about ourselves, but you let someone else jump up and say it against you and we'll see what happens. “Yeah, you are proud. You are no good. Boy, you sure did not handle that good, that was dumb!” And we have this “ARRGH!!” feeling. That didn't work out, did it? That's how you tell whether there is anything there or not – whenever others say it against you and you can accept it with meekness and respond in kindness. I've heard men say whenever you tell them something, “Well they are a better man than I am. They are a better man than I am.” But what if the other man said, “I am a better man than you are.” How would you accept it then? Nothing wrong with saying 'yes he is a better man than I am and I want to learn from him,' but how do you respond when they say it? “I'm a better man than you are and you ought to learn from me.” We don't want to hear that, do we?

Look into the word of God. A man that won't look to something higher than himself will soon be a servant to something lower than himself. Look to the word of God – not to just be able to spout off doctrine or answer questions. If you will let the word of God make you a better person, you will have answers to questions. If you let the word of God shape your life, you will have the answers to questions and you will be able to say it with authority that will leave them with their mouths hanging wide open. That is the difference between just studying to improve your situation and studying to be a better man. Whenever you pick up the bible, do you read it just because you have to? Do you read it because you want to learn more, or do you read it to let it improve you?

Let's learn to be better. Let's ask God for wisdom. Let's ask God for patience. You know I've been taught all my life, “Don't ask for patience, God will give you trouble!” But that's exactly why he is giving it to you – so you will get some patience; and you ought to want it! Do you want to be long-suffering? Get ready for somebody to aggravate you or be trouble to you. Do you want to learn how to be kind? Get ready for someone to be unkind to you so you can learn to be kind. What is wrong with that? Are we trying to just improve our situation, or are we trying to be better men, better women, better children? That is what's wrong with this world – they are trying to work on their situation, trying to fix things through the government or education. They are trying to fix everything instead of making people better men. You are not going to fix anything until people become better people. The church isn't going to fix anything until the church has people in it that are determined to be better people. Better humans. Better servants.

Train your children to be honest, faithful, dependable. Train yourself to be faithful, honest, dependable, kind, gentle, meek.

James 1:3 Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. 4 But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. 5 If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, ...

Do you see how that all fits together? Do you want wisdom? Then you are going to have to go through situations where you just don't know what to do. That's pretty uncomfortable isn't it? Do you want patience? You are going to have to be under trial for a while. Do you want to grow good fruit in your life? We look at fruit just the way most people were taught – fruit is like pretend faith: you have it and God will start growing it. That is not the way it works. God grows his fruit just like you would grow fruit in a garden. It gets tilled. It gets manure slung on it. It gets wet. It gets tore up and a seed put in it. It starts to grow and it might get pruned. It gets more manure thrown on it. It gets more water and then it stands out in the hot sun. It gets the area all around it tore up once in a while to keep the weeds from growing, and then it can grow some fruit. And that is the way it is going to happen in your life. There is a price-tag for it, but it is what you ought to be seeking after. It will make you a better man. It will make you a better woman. It will make you a better young man or young woman. What is all that other stuff matter? What does all of it matter if we can't leave here a better person? That ought to be our goal every day – to wake up with a desire to be a better man today that we were yesterday. A better mother. A better father. Every day. Better than I was the day before.

Amen.

Comments/additions (many of the comments were hard to hear):

Marcus – how true that is about being excited about accepting something that we thought was wrong but let someone else point it out first and there is the real proof of whether or not we really accept it.

Steve – I say 'yea' and 'amen'. As I grew up I did not have a dad and I don't know if all boys are this way but to a certain extent I think they are – they just want their dad to tell them when they have done something wrong (even if they say they don't want him to). And when I came to the beginning or the starting point of my walk with the Lord, there were not any men who were man enough to tell me when I was wrong. I remember looking back through all my life, even in elementary school, and the only person was my grandfather. He only taught me a little, but he expressly took the time to do it and everything that he taught me stuck. I want to encourage all of us dads that some that have had dads might take it a little for granted and might not see how absolutely important it is to diligently train your sons because you had a dad. But so often, the boys that come after the dad, the dads don't even teach them. That is a shame. The boys want to know, even if they get knocked around a little and taught how to be tough. “Dig this hole. Dig it again. Sweep the floor. Sweep it again. Sweep it again. Sweep it again.” Whatever it is to train them to be a man and to train them to learn how to listen to their leaders. Even when I got married I still wanted men to say, “Steve, you are wrong, just do what is right.” And whenever I (accidentally!) got put into a teaching roll and started telling people, “You are wrong”, everyone flips out because no one is telling them when they are wrong. It's not that I was outside of my roll by telling them they were wrong and do what's right; I was the teacher. As men, we have to be willing to hear that we are wrong. We have to be willing and able to do that to our boys also and not just think “Oh, I need to be sensitive. I don't want them to think I don't love them.” That's a lie from hell. It says in Hebrews that if we do not train them we do not love them. It takes time. Maybe time away from the things we want to do, but I think these boys want it and they need to hear that stuff.

Wilbur – When we ask for wisdom it's like asking for patience. We are going to have to face tough things that we are not sure how to handle. When we pray for wisdom, we need to learn how to recognize it when the Lord is giving us these tough situations in which we can learn more wisdom - and thank the Lord for them. We can ask a brother how to get through it and make it happen.

Tylor – When you were preaching I had a thought about how if we do not want to apply the bible to our lives but just read it because we enjoy reading it, then we have no business reading it. If we do not read it and see the examples in there and apply them to our lives and start walking it and obeying it, then we should not read it. That is something I have found a lot in my life – that I will read the bible for enjoyment and it makes me feel good and then I pass up other things that are more important.

David – Amen. Knowledge puffeth up.

Kevn – I like what Marcus said about us confessing a wrong. Sometimes we hurry up and confess it because it's a lot easier for us to confess it than to hear someone else say it about us instead. I've seen myself do that so many times and that is so wrong. When I do that, I am probably missing a lot of correctiveness I could have gotten if I would have just let someone else tell me, and take it, and grow by it. (can't hear much of this part) I don't know how all of that works out, but I've prayed for wisdom as a father pretty seriously for the past four or five years and I think that is why things have turned out like they have. If I hadn't stood as a father when I did, I might have lost all of my children instead of the ones I did lose. (cannot hear the rest)

Steve – one other thing from a vantage point of brother to brother: So often we pray for wisdom and we know within ourselves the weak points and we say within ourselves something like “Oh, I know this is a weak point and I have to work on this” and we do a little bit but then we slip. It seems that it's not until a brother comes along and points it out to us (what we already know) that we have the ability to really work on those weak points. I appreciate Brian for this so much – his honesty and no guile. We were street preaching once and he, just matter-of-factly, said to me, “Well you know sometimes you just talk too much to people when preaching.” And I know that! But it's not until a brother points it out that it's like, “Yes!” that we really [are able] to work on things. We have to have the right attitude. When I heard that I thought, “Yes, I want to stop talking so much” and then when we are out preaching again I am able to say to him, “Do you think I talked too much that time?” and it keeps it in my mind to do what is right. We must be willing to hear stuff and not be offended at it – even if someone is misunderstanding us, we can still take that as an opportunity to learn. Most of us know what our weaknesses are. What does the bible say? Something like “Faithful are the wounds of a brother.” A good friend is closer than a [blood] brother. Praise the Lord.

David – Amen.