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Good morning. How are we doing? For those of you who haven't met, which I met, I did meet some first time guests today. But for those of you who haven't met, my name is Kyrie and I'm a part of the team here. And before I really get into it, I want to share a story. So just as Chase talked about, we were, my wife and I, we helped lead a team to Mexico last week. And it was a great trip. And when you take 20 plus teenagers anywhere, it's gonna be a great trip. It's gonna have a lot of memories. There's gonna be a lot of things that you find out after the fact. Right. But it's gonna be fun. And, you know, the Lord is gonna do good work. And so this trip was no different. And I remember when we got there, everybody's just kind of taking the sights in and seeing what's gonna happen. And so we get into the hostel that we're staying at, and the team, the imb, they rented out this whole hostel. And so they're walking us through and giving us direction, you know, kind of laying the land. And so there was one thing, they said, hey, there's a roof at the top. And they said, it's safe. People go there all the time. But just know that there's an electric fence around this roof. And they said, it's 110. So, you know, it'll hurt, but it's not going to do anything crazy. Just stay away from it. And as you know, when you got a bunch of teenage boys, if you say stay away from it, that's like the first thing that they're gonna do. And so the first few days, they mess with it and nothing really happens. And so like, oh, this thing is not even on. Well, then a few days later, your grandson touched it and he got zapped a little bit. And so then we get back and I see a video of four of them. And one of them, they're holding hands, and one of them's like this, trying to touch it. And so they're trying to zap all the way through each other. I was like, okay, so that's a lot of things, but one of them is very unwise. And when I was preparing for this message, I came across a pretty staggering thing that said that we face up to 35,000 decisions per day, per day. Now, that's conscious and unconscious. It's everything from when we get out to bed to grab our phone, to what should we wear, what do we cook for dinner, what do we Eat. How do we respond to messages? Or even as it gets more serious, like, who would I marry? How do I deal with this family stuff? On and on and on. And so much so that by the end of it, that we have this thing called decision fatigue. And what happens is we have this decision fatigue and without even realizing, enables us to make bad decisions. Unless we have wisdom, Right? The reality is that if we seek holiness of the law, and I would believe we do, I would believe most of us say we do. And if we are inspired by the visions of the prophets, and I think we are, we can still make a mess out of our lives, our families, our church, our communities, if we are unwise. But what exactly is wisdom? I think if I were to ask that question, and I would actually get you to respond, many of us, instead of an actual definition, we would think about a person. We would think about the person that we would think, this is the wisest person I know. And many of us, we think that because we would think, this is the person that I go to for advice. This is the person that they've been through some life, they've been through some stuff, but the difference is they've not only been through it, but they've learned from it. That's a big difference. A lot of people have been through some stuff, but if you don't learn from it, there's not much wisdom in that. If you look at the dictionary, it talks about having an insight, having the ability to understand inequalities and relationships. And today we're going to look at what the Bible says about wisdom. How the Bible, through the Book of Proverbs, this new book that we're introducing today, this book that many of us are familiar with, right? This is a book that many of us read daily, read a chapter a day. And through this book, we're gonna see how God has designed wisdom for us. And we affectionately fight over these two types of wisdom. Two types that really try to gain our trust. And one is the wisdom of God. And the other is earthly, it's unspiritual. And the book of James would even say that it's demonic. And so as we. As we get into. Before we dive into it, let's go to. Let's go to God in prayer. Father, we are thankful to be in your presence. Father, I pray that you would work in and through us today. With so many decisions looming each day, even just this morning, all the decisions that we had to make. Father, give us your spirit of wisdom. God, I want to lift up those today that maybe this is their first time in a church. Maybe it's the first time in a while. God, I pray that you would show them your grace and your mercy, your love. I pray that you would speak the words to them, to their hearts. Father, we thank you for just this time to be able to unite together. We pray for those who are out, and we thank you for what you've given us. It's in your name we pray. Amen. The great Tim Keller, when he talked about Proverbs, he said this. He said that the Bible does not give us so much hard and fast rules as Proverbs does. Proverbs gives us motives and goals and values that have to be applied to the wisdoms and the situations of the world. He says that his wisdom happens more through communal reflection, especially through a text like Proverbs. Like, this is something that we can read daily, but together as a community, together as discipleship groups, we can see that, we can analyze it, we can hold each other accountable. We can walk this path together. Now, this book is one of the most practical books in the Bible, but it takes a true understanding of the entirety of the book, how it's laid out for us to understand it. Because originally, priests taught the law and prophets delivered the Word and wise men gave counsel. And God gave us more than just the law and the prophets, but he gave us his wise counsel through this book. Now, this book we'll see is about Jesus himself. It's about coming to us as our counselor, as our sage, as our life coach, so to speak. And Jesus is our priest. He's our prophet. And through the Book of Proverbs, we see that he's also our mentor. And if we look at things through this lens, we'll begin to see how the Bible lays out wisdom and how it's connected to Jesus. Right? We know that when the world was created, there was perfect harmony between God, between Adam and Eve. But we know that that was broken because of sin and that caused division, right? And because of that, we have division between us, between others, between the world, between things around us. And because of that, we don't rightly perceive the world, especially at all times, in the way that God has intended for us to see it. But the Book of Proverbs is about restoring that harmony through Jesus Christ and about becoming wise in the everyday life because of all these decisions that we make minute and second after second. It's through the relationship with Jesus and through the Gospel. It's about the kingdom that God has always meant. For us to have to be a part of. And today we just look at the first part of Proverbs and how it's set up. Just these. As you look at the first even nine chapters. It's. It's all about wisdom and folly and written to the. To the youthful. And so we'll see that. So if you have your Bibles open up to Proverbs, one will be in verses one through seven. All right, let's read God's word. The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel. To know wisdom and instruction to understand words of insight, to receive instruction in wise dealing, in righteousness, justice and equity. To give prudence to the simple knowledge and discretion to the youth. Let the wise hear and increase in learning and the one who understands obtain guidance to understand a proverb. And saying the words of the wise and the riddles, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. At the beginning it says the Proverbs. I got any college football fans in the house here? Okay, a few. I forget I'm not in the Deep South. Everybody loves college down there. Okay, that's sad. It's almost like when I asked about baseball, nobody raised their hands. Sad, too. So in college football, there's a team that. We're gonna say it. Usually I don't like to say it, but, you know, they say the Ohio State, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. We're not gonna do that. But when. And so when you look at this text, it's not saying it in that way. Right. There's such a reverence and a respect for this text. It's saying the proverbs. It's the strategy of the book. And a Proverbs isn't just like going to Panda Express and opening up the fortune cookie and seeing what you got and seeing the numbers, like, boom, I got it. No, no, no, no. It's so much deeper than that. It offers more of a practical truth. It means to represent. It's a model, a reality. It's a representation of our daily lives. So think about it like this. So you have virtual reality, and virtual reality allows you to go inside this world that's not real, but to face certain things, but you don't have the real life consequences of reality. And that's kind of what the book of Proverbs is. It's to be able to see things, to see them before they happen, and not have to encounter them. And so there's. I don't think we're going to do a Lot of VR in our house anymore. We have two. We've had two bad experience. The first one, we're doing it. My wife went in labor. She is not pregnant, by the way. And then the second time, we got a VR set for the youth room and took it home, you know, installed it, did all this stuff. And I was like, I'm gonna play this thing first, see what it's like. And so I'm playing it, and I don't remember what game it was, but it was something where you had to kind of move between these rooms. They kind of move things out of the way, whatever. And I remember I was like, this is kind of cool. And I would pull it up just to make sure it wasn't real. Well, then I got really into it. Something came, and I was like, bow. I was like, dang, that was. That was real. And then I hear out of nowhere, kyrie, what did you do? And I realized, okay, well, this. And I open up the goggles and the mirror above our fireplace. I punched it, and my knuckles were bloody. And I was like, well, this was real. This was really real. That was my last experience with VR. And so when we look at the Book of Proverbs, we look at it like that, but without those consequences if we truly understand how to read it. And the second part of this book, it comes from Solomon. And we know that Solomon, aside from Jesus, was the wisest man. We know that he studied a bunch of different things. And so most books in the Bible, they connect to usually the history. You know, there's Abraham or Isaac or any of those things. But this book is laid out differently than those. And it's clear that it's really pointing to Jesus. And then we make our way to verse two, which says that to know wisdom and instruction is to understand words of insight, right? It talks about deep character and straight thinking. To know wisdom and instruction, that develops this deep character and to understand the words of insight develops this straight thinking and this type of wisdom, it's really discernment, right? When you think about the wisest person in your life, the people that we were talking about earlier, that person that you thought of, they probably are very discerning people. It's because not only they've been through life, they've seen stuff, they've learned from it, but they know what not to get into, what not to get involved in. There's this thing about them. And as we look more and more at what true wisdom, what godly wisdom look like, it looks like having some type of Discernment to know. And some versions say discipline instead of instruction. And right with discipline, there comes a humility posture. There's an understanding and a willingness to learn. And this is key because I think when we think about wisdom, all of us would say, hey, we want wisdom. We want to be wise. But for some reason, when you look at the scene of our people, our church, our city, people aren't knocking down the door to figure out how to get wisdom. And it says it right there in verse two. Because it says it because you have to have discipline. And I'll be honest, not many of us have that, especially not in a lot of areas in our life. Discipline is something that we have to have to be true disciples of Jesus, but also to have wisdom. And then as we look at verse three, it says to receive instruction and wise dealing and righteousness, injustice and equity. And that word receive, it means everything here. To be able to truly receive something like this is to have such a posture of humility, a posture of I want to learn. Because oftentimes what we have is a posture of entitlement, a posture of I know it all. This verse is coming from the viewpoint of a learner. There's a path to wisdom, and to receive it, there's. There has to be some correction along the way, right? If we want wisdom and righteousness and injustice and all of these things, sometimes it's a hard path to get there. There's things that we have to learn. And then we take our way to verse four. It's to give prudence to the simple knowledge and discretion to the youth. Now, the first part of this book, Solomon is straight wanting to give this wisdom to the youth. And. And so when you look at that, the book of Proverbs categorizes people in really a lot of different ways, but really four, inexperience, mocking, foolish and wise. And when you look at that, I think many of us would say there's areas in our life where we feel very competent and we feel good about that. In particular, those are fields that maybe in our work we've done for a long time. And there's also fields we would say, I feel really inexperienced in this and somewhat, sometimes foolish, and it's no in between. And so the inexperienced, they oftentimes aren't wise or foolish because you've heard the term, you don't know what you don't know, right? But what often happens with somebody that is inexperienced is they're on one sense gullible and on the other sense, entitled. Right, Gullible because you don't know what you don't know. And then an entitled because you want to act like you know more than you know. It's this weird thing that you operate in. But inexperience is not always synonymous with age, right? I mean, you get experience with life, you deal with things as you get older. But there's often times where as you get older, there's things that happen, there's things that come out that you may be a novice at. Right. I know people in my life, particularly my grandparents, that are really experienced. They've lived a life, they've done a lot of things. But when it comes to technology, I mean, my grandma's still on Facebook and she'll sign her name still. I was like, granny, it says your name as your profile. You don't have to do that every time, right? And that's an area where she's experiencing. But there's so many more areas that she's wise in that she's still teaching me about youth or inexperienced. As you gain wisdom, there's three things that you gain. That verse four says, it's this prudeness, which really. It's a shrewdness. I like that word better, that translation with the Hebrew. It's the tactics to succeed when something is on the line. And then the second is inexperience. Benefit from wisdom, of having knowledge, right? Just being able to just know things. And the benefit of that is it's not only knowing things, but putting that to good work and not just having knowledge, just to have knowledge, right? One of the things that we used to say, or I think somebody told me this when I was younger, is if you have a bunch of theological knowledge, if you have a bunch of doctrine you've never shared, it's just like just this spiritual obesity. God has not created us for just to keep it all in. And then the third, as you put those together, is discretion and it sees through temptation. In other words, character and integrity, right? These are things that we don't talk about enough and we don't bring people up enough in these nowadays. Character and integrity. I remember I was told when I was younger, when I was asking about the definition of integrity, somebody says it's what you do when no one's looking or doing the God thing when no one's looking either way. And so that's one of the things to ask ourselves. Are we people of integrity? Are we people of character? Are we doing the right things? Are we doing the God things even when nobody is looking? Or is it just to save face? And when other people are around us and when other people are looking, because true wisdom, this wisdom that we read about says that it's character and its integrity and it's having discernment. It's all of these things. And to get that is what we read right now. And then we go to verses five and six, which says, let the wise hear and increase in learning. And the one who understands obtain guidance to understand a proverb and a saying, the words of the wise and their riddles. And so here we see Solomon, who he had been speaking to the youth, and now he kind of transitions and he's speaking to those that he would say, he would deem that are wise. And he says, I pray that you would increase in your learning. He goes from one to the other. Now, I talked about my grandparents earlier, and so my Pawpaw is one of the mentors in my life that from early on, there's pictures my mom would always say I was always around him, always sitting on his lap. I always wanted to eat what he ate, everything. And he's somebody that's been in ministry pretty much my whole life. And he's very, very regimented. He went into the army really early as a drill sergeant, then retired as a chaplain. So he's kind of had it all. And he is somebody that, when you talk about a straight shooter, right? When I go to him for him advice, I got to be ready because I know it's not going to be just stuff I want to hear. But he is somebody that has been there. And I can't even tell you he retired at a really high rank. And I can't even tell you when he retired because he's. I feel like he's gotten busier since he retired. Some of you that are retired, you know that, too. But he is somebody that continues to do thing after thing after thing. Every time I talk to him or talk to my grandma and I ask what Pawpaw's doing, it's like he's writing a paper for this new master's program. He's doing this or he's doing that to the extent one time, I'll never forget this, this was the wildest thing. So I was in. When I was in seminary, I got an email from a professor. And the email basically said, in a nutshell, hey, I'm with your grandfather. And he says, hello. Well, my seminary professor was in Russia. I was like, how did this happen? Right? And so my grandfather was doing, leading some mission, met some guy and the professor said, yeah, I teach at Liberty. Oh, my grandson's at Liberty and Seminary. He's like, who's your grandson? He said. He said, oh, I taught him last semester. It's like, this is the person that I've looked up to, that I've learned from. And he is somebody that is a continual. He's a lifelong learner. And that's what we look at when we look at this book of Proverbs, when we look at those that are already wise and they stay like that because there's a continued pursuit of learning. There's an understanding and a humility about them knowing, hey, I don't know everything. There's areas in my life where I want to get better in. And my prayer is that we would be those people that as we get older, that we would get wiser, that we would mature, that we would understand. Hey, there's areas in my life where I need to grow in. There's areas in my life where I don't know as much as I should. And I want to take a posture of humility and learning from others, even if they're younger, to help me. And that's the posture that we should take. Wisdom isn't just a goal to obtain, but. But it's a lifelong pursuit that we continue on and on and on. And wisdom is being corrected and disciplined. It's understanding how to read situations. It's justice and discernment, understanding the right and the wrong, and knowing which path to take and which path to avoid. Wisdom is not only listening to instruction, but receiving guidance. I want to say that again. Wisdom is listening to instruction, receiving guidance. But this wisdom that we've talked about, how do we obtain this? How do we get this? Well, verse seven, it lays it all out. Verse seven is really the cornerstone of not only these first seven verses, but really the book of Proverbs in its entirety. Verse 7 says, the fear of the Lord is beginning of knowledge, and fools despise wisdom and instruction. And so what does the fear of the Lord mean? I remember early on in my faith and I would hear this a lot. The fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord. And I was like, you know, I instantly thought about. Somebody was asking me here before, do you like in the fall, like, scary stuff, like the hay rise and all that stuff? I was like, nah, I don't mess with that. And so. But that was kind of what I thought. Like, I'm supposed to be scared of God, really. That doesn't line up with what I think. But in reality, if we have this true reverence for God, if we have this true respect and honoring, there is a healthy fear that we have of who he is and his wrath. But this is not what it's talking about. This is talking about a respect, an understanding, a reverence of who he is and who we aren't. It's the fear that is open to to him, the openness, the eagerness to please him, the humility to be instructed by Him. The fear of the Lord is a willingness to turn from evil and to change, to surrender to his will. It is meekly fitting in with one another. It's when we realize that I am not the measure of all things, that I am being measured. It's a respect, it's a reverence towards God. It takes place in this deep maturity where, where no one just has to follow. But it's a deep motivation from within to understanding what's right and what's wrong. It opens our eyes. And C.S. lewis puts it great. He says, in God, you come against something which in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God in there before and know yourself, there's nothing in comparison. You, you don't know God at all. As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. A proud man is looking down on things and on people. And of course, as long as they are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you. That's what a true and healthy fear of the Lord looks like. Because Proverbs is such a practical book, it sometimes is. It's perceived as simple, it's not simplistic, it's not moralistic. But what God has going through this book is deep within our hearts, a change deep in our hearts. You see his wisdom through this book. If we mull over in Proverbs slowly and thoughtfully, we need multiple exposures over the time. Proverbs is not a quick fix for us or for our hearts. But it's ancient wisdom from long human experience, endorsed by God himself. And if we pay close attention, God will graciously make us into profound people. But most of the time we don't pay that close attention. It is he, the risen and the living King, Christ Jesus, to whom we must pay close attention to if we're ever truly going to learn anything. And we want our hearts to change. If we want our lives to change, then truly want wisdom that this book of Proverbs talks about. We have to not only listen, we have to help it move our hearts. The everyday decisions that we make in our lives to be done out of fear and out of reverence with the Lord in mind. Because our choices, our decisions, they reveal if we truly have that fear in us, right? Most of us, when we make those decisions, that we have those 35,000 a day that we make, whether it's conscious or unconscious, we're not always thinking about what that looks like. We're not always thinking about the Lord in mind. But I can promise you, those around us that know that we say that we follow Jesus are seeing that. They're looking at that, how we make decisions, how we handle certain circumstances, how we handle tough things in our lives. And the beauty is we don't have to do it alone, right? We have discipleship groups. We have each other. But there has to be a spirit of humility to be able to come to somebody else to say, I need help, to be vulnerable enough to say, I need you to walk alongside me. There has to be enough humility where you know somebody well enough, where they can go to you and they can say, hey, are you good? Because I see something off in you without you coming back at them with a certain attitude or a certain way. And that's hard. A lot easier to say that than do it right? Or if we get real personal, what if somebody says, hey, if somebody corrects your parenting? Now, sometimes it could just be an opinion. Sometimes it could be like, okay, you're a little too much. Now, I know for oftentimes, for a lot of us, and even for me, like, if somebody's done that, my first thing is to be defensive. But when I read this book, when I read Proverbs, that's not what true wisdom is. It's a way to go about it. It's a way to do it. And if we are going to be God people, if we're going to be people that have wisdom, then we have to look different than the world. And so often we look the same. If you truly want the wisdom that we read about today and want to have those experiences and the thing that we've been talking about time after time is, first it starts with humility, right? You look at the cross and you see a wise man hanging there, dying in a place for fools like you and me, because he loves us now, you may despise him because of something that happened to you, that happened to somebody that you love. You may even think yourself above him. But yet he humbled himself to death on a cross for us. So when you imagine that, look at him and look away from yourself and look at him until your pride melts and you will not only worship, but you will kneel and you will begin to grow wise. And you will truly understand what it's like to follow a risen king, a king that's conquered all. You see, wisdom is a person, and that person is Jesus of Nazareth. And through a relationship with him, you can be reconciled to God, to others, and to the world around you. And through a relationship with him, he will begin to produce wisdom in you. And you would live that out, the same wisdom that we read about here today. Let's pray. Father. God, we are grateful for your word, God, we're thankful for your presence, God, in light of today and the word that we read. God, I pray that you would. God, that you would bestow on us wisdom. God, that you would give us that wisdom that we read about in your word today. You would help us to gain that humility, Father. You would give us the boldness to continue as we get older, as we age, to continue to press on. Father, you set an example for us. You've given us the Holy Spirit. May we use that to make disciples around us. Father, we thank you for the opportunities that you've given us, the people, the places, in all the places that we have in our work and our communities. Father, I want to lift up those now, and I pray that you would be with us in those conversations. I pray that you would. Even this week, conversations that many of us have had, we've been praying about an opportunity to share your word with this one person or at work or different places. God, I pray that you would provide that space. And I pray that you would give us wisdom and discernment as we walk in that. God, we thank you for your heart. We thank you for your son Jesus, and. And the blood that he shed for us. And it's in his mighty name we pray. Amen.