The Proverbs are an expression of God’s love for us.
A lot of people don’t like the Proverbs because the Proverbs seem harsh. The Proverbs seem stern. A whole lot of the Proverbs basically boil down to the Proverbs saying, “Don’t be stupid.”
Know what I’m talking about?
So many of the Proverbs basically say, “If you do this, bad things will happen. If you do that, disaster will strike.” The Proverbs use a lot of rough language.
Again and again, the Proverbs say, “Don’t be a fool. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t be stupid.”
The Proverbs use a lot of words that, in the ancient world, would have made proper high-society, easily-offended people blush.
It’s not for the faint of heart, and because that is true, a lot of people don’t like the Proverbs.
A lot of people avoid the Proverbs like the plague because every time they open up the Proverbs to read, it feels like they’re getting dressed down or chewed out.
But what we’ve been learning as we’ve made our way through the Proverbs is that that could not be further from the truth.
The Proverbs are not God laying into you and tearing you apart.
The Proverbs are God sitting down on the couch with you and having an important talk with you because He wants you to be happy.
I know that might have sounded wrong, but it’s true.
God does want you to be happy.
That’s not Joel Osteen nonsense.
That is biblical truth.
God created you not to be miserable but to be infinitely joyful.
He created you to share in His joy.
He created you in His image to live with Him forever in perfect contentment and satisfaction.
But the reality is that true satisfaction does not come from getting everything you want.
True satisfaction comes from knowing the Lord in His fullness.
True satisfaction comes from experiencing God’s presence in its fullness.
And true satisfaction comes from bending our lives according to God’s will and God’s ways—living according to the good, created design that God made us in.
Because that is true, so many of the things that we desperately chase after in the hopes that they will make us happy actually make us extremely unhappy.
Know what I’m talking about?
Truth is, there is no amount of casual sex that will actually make you happy.
There is no amount of wealth and power that will actually satisfy your soul.
There is no amount of accomplishment that will actually bring you genuine joy.
There is no amount of acceptance from society that will actually bring you contentment.
A bigger house will not make you happy.
A better car will not make you happy.
Dating that person will not make you happy.
Giving in to this urge or that urge will not make you happy.
And we know that because our entire culture has spent the last couple decades basically doing a large-scale experiment to see what happens when you cut off the leash and let everybody pursue everything they want all the time no matter what.
Know what I’m talking about?
We have spent the past few decades as a culture in this relentless pursuit of every one of our desires and urges and preferences and tendencies.
Which—theoretically—should mean that we should be one of the happiest generations in human history.
We sleep with whoever we want, whenever we want.
We jump from one job to another.
We hopscotch through marriages every time we feel dissatisfied for more than a couple of years.
We reject parenthood so that we can climb higher in the corporate world and build better careers.
We make more money than all the previous generations combined.
We immediately accept that our sexual preferences MUST be good and our sexual orientation MUST be a vital part of ourselves—that it is core to our identity.
We no longer agonize over things like same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria. Instead, we celebrate these things and blackball anybody who doesn’t.
On paper, you would think we would be the happiest generation in history.
But instead we are one of the most anxious generations on record.
We are one of the most depressed generations on record.
We are one of the most deeply unhappy generations on record.
Something is horribly wrong.
The Proverbs have an answer for that.
They say true happiness comes not from pursuing your desires, true happiness comes from pursuing the Lord.
True flourishing comes not from relentlessly satisfying all of your plans, goals, dreams, and desires.
True happiness comes from seeking out God’s plans and goals and dreams and desires.
True happiness comes not from getting our own way.
It comes not from controlling our own destiny.
It comes not from defining right and wrong for ourselves.
It comes not from validating your identity.
It comes from learning to live God’s way.
And so our world and our culture have it exactly backward.
Our culture teaches us to seek our own will and then demand that God bless it for us—and then get bitter, confused, and angry when it falls apart.
But the true recipe for happiness, flourishing, joy, and wholeness is to seek God’s will and then enjoy the blessings that come from it.
Happiness Comes from Seeking God’s Will
This is the core message at the heart of the Proverbs.
Happiness, flourishing, thriving, and wholeness come from seeking God’s will and then enjoying the blessings that come from it.
As we ease back into our Proverbs series this morning, we’re going to talk a little bit about what that looks like.
We need to start off our time together this morning with kind of a crash course in who God is and what God is like.
In order to understand God’s will and God’s ways, we need to understand who God is and what God is like.
Know what I’m talking about?
We can’t understand what God wants for us and what God wants from us if we don’t understand who He is and what He is like.
We need to understand a little bit about the nature of God, the character of God, the attributes of God.
Specifically, I want to talk about three vitally important things about God.
God Is All-Knowing
Know what I’m talking about?
God is all-knowing.
What do I mean when I say that God is all-knowing?
I mean that He sees everything.
God knows everything.
God understands everything.
I love the way that Proverbs puts this.
“The eyes of the LORD are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good.”
—Proverbs 15:3 (ESV)
What did Proverbs 15 just say?
It said, “The eyes of the Lord see all.”
God sees everyone and everything.
He sees the evil carrying out their evil, and He sees the good carrying out their good, and He knows the difference.
He knows what is good, and He knows what is bad.
He knows what is right, and He knows what is wrong.
He knows what is life-giving, and He knows what is spirit-crushing.
He knows what makes us flourish, and He knows what makes us wither.
He knows what makes us thrive, and He knows what makes us languish.
He knows what is destructive to us, and He knows what brings genuine, lasting joy and contentment and satisfaction.
I love the way Proverbs 16:2 puts it.
“All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the spirit.”
—Proverbs 16:2 (ESV)
It says He sees us not just from the outside looking in.
He sees us from the inside.
There’s a great quote from the British novelist Francis Spufford.
“To be known by God is like being known from the inside, but without all of my illusions.”
—Francis Spufford
He says, “The Lord knows me better than I know myself. He understands me better than I understand myself.”
I can lie to myself pretty well.
Can you?
I lie to myself all the time.
My doctor has me doing a very specific exercise regimen because a whole lot of heart-related issues run in my family.
There are a fair number of people in my family with lifestyle-related diabetes and other things like that, and he says, “You can avoid that by doing this exercise regimen three to five times a week.”
But when the day comes and it’s time to exercise, I will lie to myself, and I’ll say, “It’s not a big deal if I miss this one. I’ll just make it up later.”
I am not going to make it up later.
That is just not who I am as a person.
I’m either doing it right now when I scheduled it, or I’m not doing it.
I lie to myself.
You ever lie to yourself?
He has me eating very specific things.
He said, “You can avoid those heart issues and diabetes and so forth that run in your family if you eat this stuff and don’t eat that stuff.”
And then when the day comes, I go to Cook Out instead, and I say, “It’s not a big deal. This is just one meal. I can make it up later.”
I am not going to make it up later.
Other people may be able to do that, but not Ryan Ellington.
Ryan Ellington is lying to himself.
So I don’t even see myself clearly.
I’m filled with illusions about myself, and yet God has no illusions about me.
God knows me wholly, and He knows me perfectly.
He knows me better than I know myself.
He knows you better than you know yourself.
God is all-knowing.
God Is All-Good
Here comes number two:
God is all-good.
There is no spot or blemish in God.
There is no darkness in God.
There is no cruelty in God.
There is no selfishness in God.
He is wholly good, wholly perfect, wholly pure.
We can’t even wrap our heads around this.
God is a person of wholly good will.
The book of James says there is no hint of shadow in Him.
God doesn’t have good days and bad days.
He doesn’t have high points and low points.
Down to His very essence, God is goodness itself, and He is working in everything to bring about our ultimate good.
God wants good for you.
He created you for your good.
He created you to do good for you.
It was not a mistake for God to create you.
He didn’t miscalculate.
He didn’t create you just to suffer.
He didn’t create you just to treat you like an ant under a magnifying glass that a little kid’s holding on a hot summer day at about 11 a.m.
I used to do that when I was a kid.
You ever do that when you were a kid?
That is our fallen human cruelty at work.
God doesn’t have that.
Every step of the way, God’s desire for you is good.
It is to bless you, not curse you.
It is to prosper you, not destroy you.
I love the way Proverbs 10:29 puts this.
“The way of the LORD is a stronghold to the blameless, but destruction to evildoers.”
—Proverbs 10:29 (ESV)
And Proverbs 18:10 says:
“The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous man runs into it and is safe.”
—Proverbs 18:10 (ESV)
By His very nature, the Lord is our stronghold.
He is our strong tower.
He is our safety.
He is our covering.
He is our home, our fortress.
He relates to us through love.
The destruction that the Proverbs mention isn’t arbitrary.
It doesn’t come from cruelty.
It is triggered only by wickedness, only by sin.
God is all-good.
God Is All-Powerful
And number three:
God is all-powerful.
He bends history to accomplish His good purposes.
God does not need our help.
God works through humanity.
He works through His people.
But He does that because it pleases Him to raise us up and work through us.
It pleases Him to exalt us by working through us—not because He needs us.
There’s a really popular book by Rabbi Harold Kushner called When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
And in that book, he basically says, “God would like to stop your suffering, but He can’t.”
That’s not true.
I have nothing against Rabbi Kushner.
I’m sure he’s a great guy.
But I think he’s misunderstanding the very nature of God here.
The Lord has given us freedom.
He has given us the ability to make choices.
Some of those choices are good, and some of those choices are bad.
Sometimes we choose to obey and submit.
Sometimes we choose to rebel.
And when we rebel, it ultimately leads us to wither.
So God has given us freedom.
And yet that doesn’t mean that God is at our mercy, because in His own mysterious way that we do not understand, still, God bends history, using our free choices to accomplish His good purpose in the end.
I don’t know how this works.
But the Lord actually works through both our obedience and our disobedience to accomplish His good, redemptive purpose in history.
Proverbs 21:30–31 says:
“No wisdom, no understanding, no counsel can avail against the LORD. The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the LORD.”
—Proverbs 21:30–31 (ESV)
He says, no matter what happens in the short term, ultimately, God’s will is going to come out in the long term.
No matter what I do to rebel against Him in the short term, ultimately, He’s going to even use my rebellion to bring about the ultimate good in the long term.
We see that same thing in Proverbs 16:33.
“The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.”
—Proverbs 16:33 (ESV)
And in Proverbs 21:1:
“The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will.”
—Proverbs 21:1 (ESV)
Absolutely everything, from our plans and goals and dreams and desires all the way up to the choices made by kings and rulers, presidents and tech billionaires who’ve gotten their hands on the reins of the government—
They may be good, or they may be bad.
They may be righteous, or they may be wicked.
They may submit to the Lord’s will, or they may rebel against the Lord’s will in the short term.
But they will ultimately bend, in some mysterious way, toward accomplishing God’s good and perfect, redemptive and benevolent purpose in history.
In the end, God is all-powerful.
What God Wants for Us Is Better Than What We Want for Ourselves
Now, why are we spending so much time on a deep-cut theology lesson?
It’s really simple.
It’s because all of this means that what the Lord wants for us is better than what we want for ourselves.
Know what I’m talking about?
If God is all-knowing and all-good, then what the Lord wants for us is better than what we want for ourselves.
That’s what God is talking about in Proverbs 3:5–6.
This is one of the most famous verses in all of Scripture, but we’re about to take it off our coffee cups and put it back into its context.
“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.”
—Proverbs 3:5–6 (ESV)
We see that same thing in another very famous passage, Isaiah 55:8–9.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.”
—Isaiah 55:8 (ESV)
A lot of times, we quote these verses when something weird or strange or frankly dumb happens, and we say, “Oh, it’s not ours to question why.”
I have no idea where we got that concept.
That is not in God’s Word.
You should question absolutely everything.
You should look into absolutely everything.
You should investigate literally everything.
You are not an ant.
You are not a dog.
You are not a robot.
God created you as a whole person, and people ask questions.
So what is this saying?
It’s saying that the fact that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts is good.
The fact that His ways are not our ways is good.
Because so often, our thoughts and our ways are wildly misguided, aren’t they?
So often, our assumptions are wildly mistaken.
So often, our grasp on reality is astonishingly shaky.
The Proverbs say, “Do not lean on your own understanding.”
When you lean on something, that means it’s supporting you.
It’s holding you up.
It’s serving as your foundation.
Do not make your own wildly untrustworthy perception and assumptions your foundation.
Make the Lord your foundation.
Let the Lord lay out your path in front of you.
Because He is an all-knowing God.
And He is an all-good God.
He knows you better than you know yourself.
And He wants good for you.
Because that is true, what the Lord wants for you is better than what you want for yourself.
Our Plans Must Align with God’s Will
At exactly the same time, all of this means that none of our plans, goals, dreams, or desires will work out unless they align with His will.
Because He is all-powerful, none of our plans, goals, dreams, or desires will work out unless they align with God’s will.
I love the way that Proverbs 16:9 puts it.
“The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.”
—Proverbs 16:9 (ESV)
We see the same thing in Proverbs 19:21.
“Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will stand.”
—Proverbs 19:21 (ESV)
You can plan your life, and you should.
We are going to talk about that in just a few weeks in our Proverbs series.
We need to plan and be proactive.
Instead of drifting through life just reacting to the things that happen to us, we need to sit down and plot a course—plan out a way to succeed and thrive.
That’s good.
But listen, it matters what your plan is.
A bad plan can be worse than no plan.
Our plans need to match God’s purpose.
Our goals need to match God’s purpose.
Our dreams need to match God’s dreams.
Our desires for ourselves need to bend into the shape of God’s desires for us.
The way that we make our plans should look very different as followers of Jesus than they did in our old lives.
We used to make our plans based on our own selfish desires.
We pursued wealth, power, validation, acceptance, and success.
We assumed that if we followed our hearts, everything would work out.
But all of those things have ended in disaster.
No amount of validation ever feels like enough.
Relationships built on impulse crumble.
Families suffer.
Health deteriorates.
Burnout becomes normal.
Because we pursued our own will as fallen and broken people.
We pursued our own misguided plans and goals and dreams and desires and just assumed that God would bless them.
But the reality is that none of our plans will work out unless they align with His will.
And that means when we make our plans, we need to be in the passenger seat.
And the Lord needs to be in the driver’s seat.
Three Practical Responses
1. Ask the Lord to Plan Your Life
Instead of planning out our own life and then just asking the Lord to bless it, we need to ask the Lord to plan our life.
Literally, go to the Lord every day and ask Him to show you what plans you should make.
Ask Him to show you what kind of life you should live.
Ask Him to show you what you should prioritize.
Ask Him to show you what you should value.
Ask Him to show you what you should pursue.
If you’re like me, you are probably afraid to do that.
For such a long time, I was afraid to let the Lord plan my life.
Because I was afraid He was going to take away my favorite toy.
I was afraid He was going to take away some part of my life that I wasn’t ready to let go of.
I was afraid He was going to take away some habit that I wasn’t ready to be without.
I was afraid He was going to take away some attitude, some mindset, some belief system, some assumptions that I had invested a whole lot of my identity in.
And yet the reality is that those things are worth losing.
Anything the Lord takes away from you is worth losing.
Because if the Lord takes something from you, it means it’s keeping you from thriving.
It’s walling you out from genuine joy.
And at the same time, when the Lord takes something from you, it means that He is ushering you into something so much greater.
He’s detoxing you from your old plans and preparing you for His new plans.
And His plans for you are so much more joyful, so much more life-giving, than the plans you had for yourself.
So ask the Lord to plan your life.
And keep doing it every day of your life for however many months or years it takes to get the clarity that you are looking for.
2. Listen When He Corrects You
Proverbs 3:11–12 says:
“My son, do not despise the LORD’s discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the LORD reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.”
—Proverbs 3:11–12 (ESV)
Our culture has taught us that any form of correction must come from anger, must come from hate.
That correction is punishment.
That could not be further from the truth.
The Lord corrects you to help you.
He corrects you because He loves you.
And His correction is meant to bless you and bring you out of languishing and into flourishing.
If you’ve been walking in the wrong direction for a long time, the Lord will do something to get your attention.
Maybe it’s this sermon.
Maybe it’ll be something more drastic.
He might take something away from you that you really value.
Not because He hates you.
Not because He’s against you.
Not because He’s mad at you.
He does that because you are walking in the wrong direction.
And the end of the line is a cliff that you are going to walk straight off of.
So He had to get your attention.
When He does that, don’t get angry.
Don’t be bitter.
Respond by saying:
“I’m listening. What do I need to change?”
3. Trust His Timing
Trust the Lord’s timing.
Keep sowing, and eventually, you will reap.
Proverbs 16:3 says:
“Commit your work to the LORD, and your plans will be established.”
—Proverbs 16:3 (ESV)
If you are following the path the Lord has given you, it is going to work out.
It is going to bear fruit.
It is going to come to fruition.
It is going to pay off.
But that doesn’t mean it’s going to pay off right now.
It may not pay off this year.
It may not pay off this decade.
But it will pay off.
You don’t have to fear failure.
You don’t have to fear loss.
You don’t have to fear struggle.
You may experience all of those things.
But you don’t have to be afraid of them.
Because the Lord is going to empower you to face every obstacle along the way.
I love Proverbs 29:25.
“The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the LORD is safe.”
—Proverbs 29:25 (ESV)
Joseph spent years in slavery and prison.
David spent years running from Saul.
Those seasons felt like failure.
But everything was going exactly according to God’s plan.
If they had stopped sowing, they would never have experienced the harvest God had prepared for them.
The same thing is true for you.
Ask the Lord to plan your life.
Listen when He corrects you.
Then trust His timing.
Keep sowing, year after year, and eventually, you will reap.
Our Need for God’s Power
Everything that I just said is easier said than done.
The reality is that we do not have the strength to do any of these things in our own power.
Our sinful nature bends us away from God’s will, not toward it.
It bends us away from submission, not toward it.
In order to do God’s will, we need God’s power.
And in order to access God’s power, we need to surrender ourselves to the Lord.
So what I want to do together now is pray all of this over each other.
I want to spend some time praying that the Lord would fill us with His Spirit and empower us to trade our wills for His will—
To trade our plans for His plan.
To trade our goals and desires for His goals and desires.
Mount Zion Baptist Church - Louisburg, NC 
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