How To Stop Being Stupid: Proverbs

“The proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel:

to know wisdom and instruction;
to discern the words of understanding;
to receive instruction in wise dealing,
in righteousness, justice, and equity;
to give prudence to the simple,
knowledge and discretion to the young man—
that the wise man may hear, and increase in learning;
that the man of understanding may attain to sound counsel;
to understand a proverb and parables,
the words and riddles of the wise.

The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge,
but the foolish despise wisdom and instruction.”

—Proverbs 1:1–7, WEB

I hope that everybody is having a great week and a great weekend.

We have been having a great time because my in laws are here in town, if you didn’t get a chance to say hi to them or meet them on the way in, definitely make sure to catch them on your way out after community groups are over. I know that they would be so excited to talk to you and catch up a little bit.

I am unbelievably excited for this morning’s service, because this morning we are kicking off our new series on the book of Proverbs.

And I could not be more excited.

And the reason that I’m so excited about the book of Proverbs is that it smashes so many of the false assumptions that a lot of us might have about the Bible.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about the fact that a lot of people think that the Bible is just about heavenly stuff.

Right?

A lot of people think that the Bible is just about spiritual stuff, that it’s just about religious stuff.

People think the Bible is just about how to get to heaven.

That it’s just about how to get your soul saved, stuff like that.

People think that the Bible is about all of that kind of pie in the sky stuff, but that it doesn’t really have anything to say about real life.

That it doesn’t have any real guidance for normal life.

That the Bible can teach you what to do about your relationship with God, but you’ve got to figure out how to live here in the real world on your own.

But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

No.

We need wisdom for this life. We need wisdom for how to thrive in this world. We need wisdom for how to just survive this world, let alone flourish in this world.

And because that is true, the Bible is packed full of concrete, practical wisdom for this life in this world.

The Bible doesn’t just answer the question, “How can I go to heaven instead of hell?”

It also answers questions like, “How can I get ahead in life?”

How can I find trustworthy friends?

How can I build healthy relationships?

How can I learn how to manage my money?

How can I learn how to get out of debt?

How can I figure out who I should marry?

How can I figure out what I should spend my life focused on?

And so much more.

And we find all of this more explicitly than anywhere in this book called Proverbs.

Proverbs tackles things as deep and personal as how we think about wealth and money.

How we think about sex and relationships.

How we think about work and rest?

How we think about friendship and community.

And children and parenting, and justice and injustice, and leadership and government, and addiction and recovery, and anger and forgiveness, and so much more.

And we are going to dive deep into proverbs over the next several months.

We are gonna mine and prospect the book of Proverbs for God’s revealed wisdom so we can apply it to our lives together.

But in order to do that, we have to spend this morning laying down a little bit of groundwork to help us understand the Proverbs we’re going to be exploring in the coming months.

So let’s dive right in.

Are you ready?

Here we go.

What Are the Proverbs?

So: What exactly are the proverbs?

I keep throwing this word around, but up to this point you may actually have no idea what that word means.

I used to hate it in church when the pastor kept throwing all these Bible words around without ever defining them.

And so: The best way to think about it is that the proverbs are like God’s fatherly instruction to us.

God is our Father in heaven, and the proverbs are one of the places where he gives us that fatherly instruction that we need.

And because that’s true, a lot of the stuff in the Proverbs is stuff your father should have taught you, but probably didn’t.

You know what I’m talking about?

This is God, our loving father sitting us down on the couch to have an important but uncomfortable conversation with us.

Right?

Because a father who loves his children will push through the awkwardness and difficulty and teach his kids.

A father who loves his children will make it his business to pass on what he knows to his kids, because he wants them to be blessed.

He doesn’t want them to have to wander blindly through life.

He wants to give them the gift of his guidance and counsel.

And when we read the Proverbs, we’re reading them as guidance from our wise and loving Father in heaven.

And so we are going to spend the next several months camped out in the Proverbs, diving deep into them and mining them for God’s wisdom for our everyday lives.

And I know that this is a big claim, and I know that this is a big promise, but I guarantee that if you zero in throughout this series, and you pour yourself into learning the guidance that the Proverbs have to offer us and then putting them into practice in your life, your life will be better at the end of this series than it is at the beginning.

If you seriously take these proverbs to heart and apply them in your own situations, your life will improve.

And when your life improves because of God’s wise guidance, God gets glory.

Right?

God is glorified when we listen to his counsel and it improves our life.

God designed the universe to function in that kind of win-win fashion—and that is what the proverbs are all about.

You know what I’m talking about?

Wisdom Means Living According to God’s Created Design

And so here’s what I think is the best way to put all of this—are you ready?—here we go:

Wisdom means living according to God’s created design for the universe.

Above all else, before anything else, the Proverbs teach us that wisdom means living according to God’s design for the universe.

When we talk about wisdom in the Bible, we are talking about learning how to live according to God’s good design for the universe.

What am I talking about? Here’s what I’m talking about.

The Proverbs tell us that wisdom is woven into God’s created design for the universe.

Wisdom is written into God’s created design for the world.

God created the world in his wisdom, and now his wisdom guides us through how to live in this world that He created.

Now, I want to stop here for a second and make sure we understand what I’m saying.

God created the world.

So God knows what’s right for the world.

God knows what’s good in the world.

God knows how the world is supposed to work.

God knows how we are supposed to live as people in his world.

God knows what we should do and he knows what we shouldn’t do.

And when we trust that God knows all those things and we do what he says as a result, the name the Bible gives that is wisdom.

The Proverbs teach us that wisdom means living according to God’s design for the universe.

That is the number one most important thing that we have to understand—not only to understand the book of Proverbs, but also to understand our own lives.

The Fear of the Lord

Here’s the thing though: The Proverbs cannot teach us wisdom or help us flourish in the world without first teaching us something much deeper: And that is something called the fear of the Lord.

Have you ever heard that term before?

The fear of the Lord.

This is an incredibly misunderstood term.

Because when the Bible talks about the fear of the Lord, it is not telling us to be afraid of God.

It is not telling us to be scared of Him.

It’s talking about something completely different.

It’s talking about something there’s really not an English word for—so whoever’s responsible for inventing new words in English really ought to get on that.

But when the Bible talks about the fear of the Lord, it’s talking about what happens when we get a clear view of God.

Some of us in here are extremely nonchalant about God.

We are extremely lax about God.

A lot of us are, frankly, really indifferent towards God, or we are arrogant in the face of God.

And the reason for all those things is because we’ve never clearly grasped who He is.

But there’s something really radical that happens when you get a clear view of God, a clear grasp of God.

What happens is that your newfound recognition of who God is fills you with an uncontrollable awe.

You know what I’m talking about?

A clear view of God fills you with an uncontrollable awe at his greatness, at his glory, at his power.

And that uncontrollable awe causes you to realize, in the starkest terms possible, just how small you are and just how big he is.

It causes you to realize just how dependent you are on him.

It causes you to realize just how powerless you are in the face of the God of the universe—who holds you in his hand, and who sustains you moment by moment.

And the result is that you start to revere him in the deepest part of yourself.

And that sets off a kind of chain reaction, because when you start to gain a clear view of God, and that starts to fill you with awe that causes you to revere him in the deepest parts of yourself, what happens is that starts to kill your narcissism.

Know what I’m talking about?

There is a tiny, little narcissist goblin who lives inside you and does everything it can to take control of you at every waking moment of your life.

You know what I mean?

If you haven’t met that tiny, little narcissist goblin yet, it either means you haven’t lived long enough or it means you’re not very self-aware.

But when you start to fear the Lord, it starts to kill your narcissism.

You cease to see yourself as the center of the universe.

You stop seeing yourself as the main character.

You stop seeing yourself as the most important person in the world.

You stop seeing yourself as the king of your own life.

You stop seeing yourself as the one who determines what’s right and wrong.

What’s good and bad.

What matters and what doesn’t.

And you start to become open-eared and open-hearted towards the Lord’s wise guidance and counsel, so that you can carefully listen and apply it in the endlessly complex and difficult decisions that we face every day of our lives.

The name that God’s Word gives to that experience is the fear of the Lord.

And God’s word cannot teach us wisdom or help us flourish until it teaches us the fear of the Lord.

And so the proverb says:

“The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge,
but the foolish despise wisdom and instruction.”

—Proverbs 1:7, WEB

Are you still following me?

Above all else, the Proverbs exist to teach us how to live by God’s created design through the fear of the Lord.

And when we do that, what happens is that we flourish and thrive.

A Great Spiritual War

But there’s a problem.

Because at exactly the same time, the Proverbs tell us something else that might be extremely shocking.

The Proverbs tell us something that you might not be prepared to hear.

Because in all of this, the Proverbs tell us that we are caught up in a great spiritual war.

Did you think you were going to hear about spiritual warfare in a proverbs series?

Well, you are. Congratulations.

But the Proverbs tell us again and again that we are caught up in a great spiritual war.

The world is not a piece of machinery that just operates on autopilot.

The world is not mechanical.

There are powerful forces at work in the world that go far beyond our comprehension.

There is a spiritual war happening all around us, and every waking moment of our lives we are being pulled and tugged at and attacked by the spiritual forces of darkness that are trying to turn us into fools.

I’m gonna say that again. Okay?

The spiritual forces of darkness are actively at work trying to turn you into a foolish person.

The devil wants to draw you away from wisdom and into foolishness.

And the Proverbs illustrate this in the funniest way possible.

Because the Proverbs describes wisdom and foolishness as two angry women yelling in the streets.

There is literally, like, a catfight happening between wisdom and foolishness.

On one side, wisdom is crying out to us, fighting for our hearts and minds.

And on the other side, foolishness is doing everything she can to get her hooks in us and drag us down into her abyss.

And so we don’t live in peacetime. We live in wartime.

The dark spiritual forces of foolishness have waged war on you.

They have waged war for your heart and your mind.

And the really unfortunate reality that you need to understand this morning is that in this fight in the short term, foolishness has an advantage.

The spirit of folly and stupidity has a fundamental advantage in the war for your heart and your mind.

And the reason is unbelievably simple: It’s because you and I have a sinful nature.

Our Sinful Nature Makes Us Foolish

Our world is fallen and broken, and we are fallen and broken.

We are born into this world with a fundamental brokenness, with a sinful nature that causes us to be bent and inclined towards sin.

It causes us to be drawn towards sin.

Don’t come up to me after the service butthurt that I told you that you have a sinful nature, because this isn’t actually a complicated issue.

Because if you didn’t have a sinful nature, you wouldn’t sin.

If you didn’t have a sinful nature, you would be perfect.

But you’re not.

And you know you’re not.

I know this contradicts what your grade school guidance counselor told you, but we need to be honest with ourselves about this: Not only do you not live up to God’s standards, you don’t even live up to your own standards.

You know what I’m talking about?

Like you hate people who gossip about you. Right?

And you 100% gossip about other people.

You hate people who don’t fulfill their promises to you. Right?

And you have absolutely failed to fulfill some of your promises to other people.

You hate people who act one way to your face and then talk bad about you behind your back, right?

But you have absolutely acted friendly to somebody’s face before and talked about them behind their back before.

And it wasn’t even on purpose, right?

It wasn’t malicious.

It wasn’t premeditated.

You didn’t mean to do that.

But you did it anyway.

Why? Because it’s in your nature.

You have a fallen and sinful nature that drives you toward sin and brokenness.

That’s why it’s really hard to sleepwalk into doing good, but you can very easily sleepwalk into doing bad.

It’s because that’s your natural tendency. You have a sinful nature.

And here’s why we’re talking about this right now: It’s because our sinful nature makes us foolish.

Right?

Our sinful nature makes us foolish.

And that makes it so much easier for the enemy to make foolishness attractive to us.

You see where we’re going with this?

The enemy relentlessly works to stir up our arrogance.

The enemy relentlessly works to bait us into ignoring or rejecting God’s wisdom.

And that’s an unbelievably easy thing for him to do because of our sinful nature.

And so the really important thing for you to understand this morning is that you are caught up in a great spiritual war between the spirit of wisdom and the spirit of foolishness—and the spirit of foolishness has a major advantage over you because of your fallen and broken and sinful nature.

The Footprints of Folly

And because that is true, if you look back at your life up to this point, you can probably see the footprints of the spirit of folly in your life in clear and vivid detail.

Maybe you can look back at your life and you can see the way that this spirit of folly, has drawn you into one form of foolishness after another.

You can see the way that the draw of foolishness plunged you into addiction.

It plunged you into alcoholism. It plunged you into drug abuse. It plunged you into porn addiction.

It trapped you in these cycles of addiction that have nearly destroyed your life.

You may not be out of that cycle of addiction yet.

You may still be stuck in it, and so you’re here right now in the hopes that this can be a first step out and on the way to freedom.

Or maybe you can look back throughout your life and see the way that the pull of foolishness has ushered you from one wildly unhealthy partner to another.

Maybe today you are trapped in some really destructive relationships with some really destructive people who have a really destructive effect on your life, because in your foolishness you ended up creating a child with them, and now you’re stuck with them on some level.

Maybe that cycle of foolishness has drawn you into a long string of children that you are now having to co-parent with literal narcissists and manipulators and other human black holes.

Or maybe you can look back at your life and you can see the way the draw towards foolishness has put you tens of thousands of dollars in debt because you keep gambling away your savings, or you keep falling into scams, or you keep you burning money on things that make absolutely no sense to buy right now.

Or you can look back and see the way that the draw towards foolishness caused you to pick all the wrong friends, and all the wrong people to trust, and all the wrong people to associate with, so that you’ve spent your entire life surrounded by people who take advantage of you, and who have never had your back, and have been a drain on your life instead of a blessing on your life—and you have no idea how to get out.

For so many of us—and that includes me—we bear the wounds of our own foolishness.

And for some of us, we still haven’t found a way to escape.

The Proverbs Tell Us We Can Change

But if that is you this morning, I have gloriously good news.

Because at exactly the same time as all of this, the Proverbs tell us that we can change.

The core truth at the heart of the Proverbs is that we can change.

The Proverbs testify that we are not prisoners of our faults.

We are not prisoners of our shortcomings.

We are not doomed to do the same things again and again for the rest of our lives.

You may feel like you are literally not capable of change.

But you are wrong.

The gloriously good news that the Proverbs testify to is that we can change our lives if we seek God’s wisdom.

We can change our lives if we pursue God’s wisdom as our treasure.

We may have begun our lives as irresponsible, but we can become responsible.

We may have begun our lives as passive, but we can become proactive.

We may have begun our lives as selfish, but we can become selfless.

You don’t have to be a fool.

If there’s one thing that you should take away from this sermon, it’s that the Proverbs give us the gloriously good news that you don’t have to be stupid.

You might start stupid. But you don’t have to stay stupid.

And I’m saying this from experience, because once upon a time I was stupid—and today, I’m less stupid.

I haven’t arrived. I haven’t figured it out. I’m not all the way there yet.

But I am a testament to the fact that you can actually change.

And so even when the Proverbs seem harsh, even when they seem stern, even when they seem downright insulting, what they’re actually communicating is hope.

They’re communicating the hope that comes from knowing that you do not have to be a prisoner of your own flaws forever, because you can gain wisdom.

Learning Wisdom Together

And we are going to spend the coming months gaining wisdom together.

I am not preaching this proverbs series as some kind of “Guru” who’s figured it all out and mastered all of it and become some great paragon of wisdom and responsibility.

That is not me. Just ask my wife.

I am preaching this as a fellow learner with you.

I am preaching this as a fellow student with you.

I am preaching this as a fellow child of God, sitting down on the couch as our Father God gives us His fatherly advice and wisdom and counsel for how to flourish in the world and overcome our own self-destructive patterns.

And so a ton of the things that we talk about in the coming months are going to be things that I have to work on.

There’s going to be a lot of weeks where I get up here and start talking about a certain issue, and I have to stop and say, “Just so you know, I suck at this. So if you suck at this too, don’t feel despair. We can learn this together.”

What we’re about to do is go on a journey where God gives us the gift of humbling us so that we can grow in his wisdom together as his people.

And I could not be more excited to do this with you.