Trade Up Sermon #2: The Fool and the Wise Guy --- various Proverbs Dr. Matt Cassidy --- June 11, 2017 We pray that Your presence would be made obvious to us today. And I d ask, Lord, that in our worship time, our learning time, that we would have an experience that would validate that Your wisdom is beyond man s wisdom, that Your truth is how we should live our lives. Lord, I d ask that You d open up our hearts to understand what Proverbs is here to teach us and that we would enjoy that lesson; that we would heed Your warning; that we would seek wisdom, whatever it costs. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. Good morning. Please have a seat. We are studying the Book of Proverbs this summer as a church together. It s like summer school for wisdom. That s what we re going to do. And it occurred to me while I was reading, especially today, a lot of the passages that we re going to look at, I just thought, These are just life acts, that s all they are. If you look on the Internet, they have these little life act things, how to live life effectively, essentially. And usually a lot of these life acts have been staring you in the face all this time and you didn t see it and you didn t do them, and now you re living wiser. Proverbs is written so that we could live a great life, a life without regrets. It s effective especially for raising a family or better still, to raise you. It is how to live life. In our family I want to give you a couple of life acts. One is in our family we were built on the foundation of Bible revelation --- that was the source of authority. And in areas that weren t biblical, we went to musicals. Musicals is how we raised our children. And here s a life act that we learned from a very famous musical. Won t you play that tape. TradeUp.#2.cassidy 1
Video Clip from The Sound of Music https://www.dropbox.com/s/scbu5044achb67k/thesoundofmusicwhistleclip.mp4?dl=0 (All eight Von Trapp children are dressed in matching outfits and standing at attention in a straight line. Captain von Trapp has a whistle in hand, summoning each child with their own distinct whistle tone, and Maria, the new governess, is watching in horror.) Captain von Trapp: (Blows whistle shrilly.) Now, let s see how well you listened. Maria: I I won t need to whistle for them, Reverend Captain. I mean I ll use their names. And such lovely names. Captain von Trapp: Fraulein, this is a large house, the grounds are very extensive, and I will not have anyone shouting. You will take this please and learn to use it. The children will help you. Now, when I want you, this is what you will hear. (Plays several tones on the whistle.) Maria: (interrupting the whistle) I m sorry, sir. I could never answer to a whistle. Whistles are for dogs and cats and other animals, but not for children, and definitely not for me. It would be too humiliating. Captain von Trapp: Fraulein, were you this much trouble at the abbey? Maria: Oh, much more, sir. Captain von Trapp: Umm. (He begins to walk away.) Maria: (Blows whistle in his direction. He stops and turns.) Excuse me, sir, I don t know your signal. Captain von Trapp: You may call me Captain. That s a life act. Listen, we have a family whistle. We do. Because it is very effective. It started when I was in graduate school. I had a dog; her name was Leah the Wonder Dog because she was a wonder dog. A lot of dogs can catch Frisbees, but Leah the wonder dog could throw the Frisbee back. True story. This dog would throw you the Frisbee back. TradeUp.#2.cassidy 2
And when she was just a puppy I taught her a whistle. It was Leah s whistle and it was just a single note. You just hold a single note and she would drop everything and run to me as fast as she could. And I was able to train her to do that because whenever she d come I d start off by giving her a couple of treats and then a single treat, and eventually just a little pat on the head. But she would come whenever she heard the whistle. When we had children I thought, Well, if it s good enough for the wonder dog then it s good enough for my children. And so whenever I blew the same whistle, that same one note, the kids would drop everything and run to me. And I was able to teach them to do that by positive reinforcement when they would come. I d give them a little piece of candy or a trinket or a dime or a nickel, sometimes a sticker. And eventually we were just patting them on the head. That s all it took. And I have to tell you, a family whistle s a great thing, because it really comes in handy, especially if you lose them as much as I do in a store or in a crowded room or even in a church, you don t have to yell their name out loud. All you have to do is, even quietly, just that one whistle tone, and they drop everything and they run to you and all is well. As a matter of fact, when we went to Disneyland when the kids were very young we gave them the whistle and said, Listen. If you ever get separated from us, as soon as you realize that, TradeUp.#2.cassidy 3
you just grab the whistle and blow on it and all the rest of us will run towards you. It was a great little thing for safety. I loved it. It was a very big help. Do you guys want to guess who the biggest problem person was in our family about learning the family whistle? Yeah Melinda. First of all, we weren t really a family, it wasn t a family whistle, we were dating, so it was more like a girlfriend whistle at the time. And she s like, I am not going to come when you do the Leah the Wonder Dog whistle. What, are you going to treat me like --? And I said, Chocolate? She said, Here I am. And I pat her on the head now. That s all I have to do. And she calls me captain. I m going to need a place to stay tonight. That life act was from our family to yours --- it s free. Another life act that we had at our house that has been paying big dividends was twenty years ago we looked at the Book of Proverbs together and we bunched up the different personas, the personality profiles, and we looked at those and we came up with great little sayings and came up with hand signs for each one. And that s what we re going to learn today, because they helped us parent our children, but they also helped us parent ourselves. The Book of Proverbs, if you study these personalities and personas, you re going to see that they can change your life. That s the way they were written. That s the way we re supposed to live with them. It s supposed to change the way we view ourselves and the way we view other people. And how to live accordingly in light of the different personas that we re talking about. The series itself is called Trade Up. And a lot of people on campus are doing this together. If you have a first grader through twelfth grader, you re going through this series together. As a matter of fact, I d very much encourage you if you have young children, to do the Summer Family Challenge. They re working through the same weeks that we are working through, the same personalities that we re working through. We re getting trading cards every week. They re in the lobbies on the table. Don t leave without grabbing one per family member. You ll have verses to memorize for each one of the different trading card people. Trade Up trading cards --- that s the feel of things. This week we re going to look at two of those personas and that would be the wise guy and the fool. Now before we get into that, let me do some quick review from last week because last week was so important. The best thing you can do to catch up with us would be to listen to or TradeUp.#2.cassidy 4
watch last week s teaching time, because we studied the fundamentals of Proverbs. But let me just try to summarize quickly. The theme of Proverbs is to pursue wisdom; seek wisdom; get wisdom. And wisdom in the Bible is the skill of living. It is the way to live godly. It is the way to live without regret. Simply, the Bible is God s owner s manual. He made everything and this is the owner s manual. Proverbs is actually the most practical way of doing that and the most efficient way to learn how. Verse after verse, Proverbs is written in such a way that it s a father saying to his child, You need to get wisdom. Whatever wisdom costs, you pay that, because you don t pay for wisdom, you pay for being foolish. And so blessed is the person who acquires wisdom, who gains understanding, because it is more precious than silver and it has a better return than gold. Get wisdom. Live wisely. You don t have to make all the mistakes yourself. Now that s the theme of Proverbs. Here are the five things we re going to do this summer to get the most out of this style of writing. Because they are proverbs and they re packed with meaning and layers of understanding. We re all going to read a chapter today. There are thirty-one chapters, so whatever day of the week it is ---- today s June 11, so you read chapter 11. You read a chapter a day. When you re reading that chapter you find a couplet or a verse and you say, Oh, this is the one I want to memorize. That s the second thing you do. Then the next thing you do is you take that verse and you memorize that verse. The way you memorize Proverbs, because of the style, is you probably want to translate it in a way that makes sense to you, make it modern, make it apply to you. And the second way to memorize a proverb is to try and fix a story to it. Attach a story to it, a success story or a not-so success one, a Bible story or a real life story. Between translating and attaching a story to it, you re probably going to remember that proverb. Then the next thing I want you to do is to write that proverb down somewhere, on a back of an old business card, or we even left the bulletin blank so you could write that down. And then you put it in front of you, because the fifth thing you re going to do, is you re going to watch and see. Because God wants us to have these Proverbs regularly rattling around in our heads, because all of life is a display of the wisdom of God or the folly of man. And by doing these five steps --- that last step is just looking for God to show you in success or failure stories, you re going to gain wisdom. That s the easiest and best way to grow and live a life. TradeUp.#2.cassidy 5
The Fool So enough with review. Let s look at our first personality profile, the fool. There s the fool. Does he look familiar? You might have seen him at work, or on the highway buzzing down, maybe at the soccer field. But in the Bible, the time you see him most often might be in the mirror. And the reason is, and you have to be careful when you study the fool, because we all are foolish in particular areas of our lives, different ones for different people. There are aspects of our lives that are foolish, but when Proverbs talks about it, it s the lifestyle of a fool. It s a person that s on a foolish path and is continuing to live a way that s insane. How do you qualify to be a fool? You consider the limitless number, amount, the mindset of a fool is the amount of scientific research, the evidence that says something is true --- the fool says, Naaa. That doesn t matter to me. No matter how much statistical analysis is given to you, no matter what the odds are, the fool says, I know more. The fool is smarter than everyone. The fool is smarter than God. Proverbs 18:2 A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion. Here s the mindset of a fool in chapter eighteen, verse two: A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion, because his opinion is right. He thinks he s always right, no matter what science or statistics or what God s word says. How do you get to be a fool? Is it the way you were raised? Is it the way you were made? Maybe you re not so smart? The Bible says it s none of those factors. The Bible says a fool is a fool because he or she chooses to be foolish. Because being a fool is independent of the way you were raised or your intellect. It s not about intelligence. It s not about learning style. And you can see examples in your own life or in the Bible where you see someone who was raised in a very wise family with wise parents and they say, You know what? This simplistic, boring lifestyle is not for me. TradeUp.#2.cassidy 6
And on the contrary, I have a very good friend who is a pastor of a church and he was raised in a foolish house. All his siblings and his mother and father were just tremendously foolish, let s just say I ll be polite. And he says in his storyline that by age eight he realized how foolish his household was, and whatever his mom and dad did, he would do 180 degrees opposite of that. I m just going to do whatever is the opposite of my parents. And you know what? That got him to have a very wise life. Later on he started reading the Bible and he realized, Oh my, I m living wisdom. I m living like a wise person. Proverbs 12:15 The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice. So the difference is not how you were raised or how you learn, the difference is whether you learn or not; whether you re teachable; whether you want to learn. Look what it says in Proverbs 12:15: The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice. See, the issue here is the heart. That s one of the themes of Proverbs: Guard your heart; it s the wellspring of your life. It s your whole life. And the heart of a fool is pride and stubbornness. They don t need to learn anything else because they know everything. They don t have to change because they re right where they are. And they think they know more than God himself. And so when the Bible says, I don t know, like Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you, he says, Yeah, right. I m going to seek first me. And then I ll be happy. When the Bible says it s better to give than to receive --- that s in red letters, friends --- Jesus said that; he says, Yeah, right, it s better to get and acquire. When the Bible says, Better is one day with the Lord than a thousand elsewhere ; Yeah, right. See, the fool doesn t care about what s true or right or real. The fool says, I determine that and says, Yeah, right, to all other sources of wisdom. Well, we ve come up with hand signs for all these various personas and you can probably guess by now what the hand sign is for the fool. It s this. [Brushing away with one hand.] And the fool says, Yeah, right. TradeUp.#2.cassidy 7
Now here s what I want you to do in our series through the summer. I want you to be practicing. This was an easy one. Practice this as much as you possibly can. Just look for it, just like we said in the five deals, the fifth one is watch and see and learn. You ll see this. And when you see somebody, I don t know, this always hurts me, but you see a young person learning how to smoke cigarettes, choking this thing down, and they re learning how to have a lifelong addiction to nicotine. And do you know why? Because it doesn t matter how much science says, it doesn t matter all those health classes they took, they saw pictures of lungs and taught them about how much they re going to die slowly in pain. It doesn t matter all the billboards they ve seen --- Yeah, right. It doesn t matter that it says on the side of the package This will kill you. They say, Yeah, right. And when you see people acting foolishly, sometimes out loud (sometimes that s not good), sometimes in your head, but you say, Yeah, right. You see that person usually in the third lane, it s always the passing lane, and that person is texting while they re driving. You know why they re doing that? Because they think they can. They re the person that can drive a car that weighs 3517 pounds at sixty miles per hour while they re typing on a small screen and thinking it would be the safest thing to go in the fast lane and slow down to fifty. Not endangering anyone else s life --- Yeah, right. I got this. I can do this. Yeah, right. So again, when you see people doing that sort of thing, you see people being careless about the way they re not guarding their hearts --- they don t care about greed, they don t care about being independent of God --- you say, Yeah, right. The more you practice this, the more it will be part of the way you live life. Proverbs 26:11 Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly. The essential trait of a fool is found in 26:11. This is a pretty picture. Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who repeats his folly. Wow. You know, as though the picture of a dog vomiting isn t enough, it s the dog coming back to have lunch with that same Bleah. So what s the picture here? What s the point? It s nasty looking, but the point is that the fool is a repeat offender. It doesn t matter how many times they ve seen a choice made and TradeUp.#2.cassidy 8
where it leads; they think they can make a certain choice and magically they will have a consequence that no one else has ever had. I mean, never mind, all the You Tube videos out there where people have done thus and such and ended up in the hospital --- they re different. No matter how many times they ve seen people play stupid games and get stupid prizes, they re going to be different. Because here s the thing: a fool says, Watch this. A fool says, Hold my beer. A fool says, Yeah, right. Proverbs 26:3 A whip for the horse, a bridle for the donkey, and a rod for the back of fools. You know how you change a fool? Proverbs 26:3: As a whip for a horse --- because he won t budge --- as a bridle for a donkey --- because he s being stubborn --- And as a rod for the back of fools. It s going to be the pain of consequences. That s the only thing that will work. And listen, by the way, this is not --- look how familiar we are with those other illustrations. This is not like the wrath of God coming down upon this person and their decisionmaking. Oh, no, no. God need not mess with this. This is Mother Nature and her number one servant Physics coming and saying, Hey, it s a cause-effect universe. Just let it play itself out. And the fool, like a horse needs a whip instead of a carrot, like a donkey needs a bridle, a fool needs a good whipping. Natural consequences and logical consequences might just be the thing that changes them. Now natural consequences are what happens, and that s physics speaking, when you jump off a roof of a house and you twist or break your ankle. You say, Yeah. Because that happens. Now logical consequences are when a person has to --- well, the natural consequences could hurt them or kill them, and so you have to inject logical consequences where a person can connect the dots. So whether it s in your life or the life of someone that you love, you need to understand this. Because a lot of well-meaning people miss this, especially if you love the person. If you withhold natural or logical consequences upon a person that is not learning, a fool, you are keeping them or yourself from learning and then changing. Let me say that again. If you withhold natural or logical consequences from yourself or another person that is being stubborn, you are preventing them from learning and then changing. If you love them, you ll let the rod hit their backs. TradeUp.#2.cassidy 9
When my son was young --- some of you like this story --- my son was very young and he raised a bunch of money by selling Cokes and stuff on the street corner. He was on the street selling coke --- NO, Coca-Cola on the street corner. Okay, you get it. It was a really expensive bike. This is getting worse. It was a really expensive bicycle and it s called a GT BMX Cruiser. It s really a very expensive and very nice bike. After he bought it we all celebrated that. And one of the first days he had it at home he left it out in the front yard and I came home from work and said, Hey, buddy, you better bring the bike in or someone s going to steal it. And he s like, Yeah, right. And then so the next day I come home from work and it s out there in the yard again and I said, Ryan, you need to get the bike out of the front yard or someone s going to steal it. That s a really good bike. All the other kids know that s a good bike. It s probably the best bike in the neighborhood. It s a GT Cruiser. It s going to get stolen. Yeah, right, Dad, what do you know? Well, I tried to reason with him and I tried to prove that this would happen; and by the way, there s never a bad guy around when you need him. And so no one is stealing this kid s bike. And so I stole his bike. I came home the next day and his bike was out in the front yard. So I said, If nobody else is going to steal it, I m going to steal it. And so I hid it. I came in and then he went out to play and the bike was gone and he came in running and his face was pale and he s panicking. I think someone stole my bike! I think someone did steal your bike, Ryan. And then he was crying and then he was really angry at himself because he left his bike out. We sat down at the table and we got out a bunch of poster board --- LOST BIKE --- you know, made a bunch of signs, put them up all over the neighborhood next to the lost kitten signs. And then he learned his lesson. And I said, Look, the next bike you have to buy the whole bike, not just half of it. You have to buy the whole bike. So, sorry. Ten days later I brought the bike out. Boom. He never, ever left that bike out again. The natural consequence was to have the bike stolen. The logical consequence was for me to steal it for him. See the difference? And listen, this works for you too. The last time I was pulled over for speeding it looked like the officer was going to let me go and --- this is true --- I just said, Listen, I think you should write me this ticket because I m a fool. My right foot is on his own and it won t behave and maybe this will be the thing that will slow down my driving. And he said, O-kay, okay, TradeUp.#2.cassidy 10
sure. So he wrote me the ticket. You need to know this. That is the very last time I have ever been caught speeding. So it works. It works. Proverbs 19:29 Penalties are prepared for mockers, and beatings for the backs of fools. Proverbs 19:29: Penalties are prepared for mockers, and beatings for the back of fools. Yep, it s the only way they change. Proverbs 17:12 Better to meet a bear robbed of her cubs than a fool in his folly. Now listen carefully. This is the advice to other people. Because fools are generous. They are generous with their consequences. They are generous with all the radioactivity that comes with them in their lifestyle. And so he says this: Better to meet a bear robbed of her cubs than a fool in his folly. What is Solomon saying? If there s a fool around in your life, he s saying, Stay away. He s not saying Stay away, he s saying way more than that, he s saying, Be afraid. Be very afraid because you re going to get swept up in his wake and destroyed by it. Don t you just love this picture? You re just out hiking all by yourself and then some guy runs up to you and hands you a couple of bear cubs and then runs. And then they both look at you and then they start screaming for mama, and then there s this twelve-foot grizzly looking at you like Dinner s served, kids. We re going to eat big tonight. He says that fear in that story, you in the woods with the mama bear with the screaming cubs, that s better, that day in the woods is better than you going on that stupid trip with your old friend that s a fool. That s better than ever getting in a business transaction with someone that you know is a foolish person, that s way better than going back on a hunting trip with your old high school buddies. It never works. And you say, No, no, no, this year will be different. It won t be different. Quit spending time with them. Better to be greeted by a mother bear with cubs stolen than hanging around a fool. TradeUp.#2.cassidy 11
Benjamin Franklin said, If you lie down with dogs, you re going to get up with fleas. One of the hardest things, I felt like, to teach students when I was a youth pastor was if you hang around people, you ll hang with them. If you hang around bad people, you ll hang with them. One of the hardest things I ve found to teach adults is if you hang around bad people, you ll hang with those bad people. You get it? That s the fool. That s what we can learn from the fool. The Wise Guy Proverbs 9:1-6 Wisdom has built her house; she has sculpted her seven pillars. 2 She has slaughtered her beasts; she has mixed her wine; she has also set her table. 3 She has sent out her young women to call from the highest places in the town, 4 Whoever is simple, let him turn in here! To him who lack sense she says, 5 Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. 6 Leave your simple ways, and live, and walk in the way of insight. Let s trade up, what do you say? Let s look at the wise guys. This is the wise guy. And this is wise thinking. There is a beautiful picture that s painted in chapter nine of Proverbs and it goes like this, picture this: Lady wisdom had built her house; she has carved her seven pillars, her majestic palace. She has slaughtered her best beasts; she is personally mixing up her very own wine; and then she has sent out all her little helpers and they ve gone to the high places all around and they are declaring this: Oh, you who are naïve, come and dine with lady wisdom! You who seek help, come and eat of my bread and drink of the wine that I have mixed. Leave your simple or naïve ways, and live, and walk in the way of insight. This is a huge, generous invitation to have wisdom. Do you know what the mindset of a wise person is? A wise person shows up at this banquet, pays whatever he or she needs to have TradeUp.#2.cassidy 12
an all-you-can-eat experience. They re going to eat up big. Because you don t pay for wisdom. You pay for being foolish. And the wise person knows that. Proverbs 18:15 An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge. ` The essential trait of a wise person in 18:15 is look what it says: An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge. There s the word heart again. The fool had a heart that was stubborn and proud. The wise heart is tender and humble. It is constantly looking for opportunities to learn. They can learn from small children, they can learn from nature, they can learn from an ant --- it doesn t matter. They re humble and they want to know. And they know that they need to know. An iconic example of that is from Greek history. Socrates, as you might know, is considered the wisest man in all of Athens. He was given that title by the oracle at Delphi. And the oracle said that Socrates was the wisest man. And Socrates didn t celebrate that. He questioned it. And so he went around for quite some time asking other people that were considered wise if they knew the ultimate purpose in life, the greatest good. And after asking so many people, and people kept giving him these various answers that were shallow and wrong, but they acted like they knew it. They were pretending they believed it. And Socrates said, You know what? I might be the wisest man in all of Athens because at least I know that I don t know. And so from that point on, wisdom was defined as a person that was open to learning. The wise man is always looking to learn. Proverbs 9:9 Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser; teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning. How do you change a wise person? You re going to love this, verse 9 of chapter 9: Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser; teach a righteous man, and he will increase TradeUp.#2.cassidy 13
in learning. That can t be right, but that s it. You just instruct a wise man and he gets wiser. You teach a righteous man and they just increase. Yeah, it s that easy. Wisdom pays. Having a wise heart pays. Listen --- fundamentals of human condition. There are two reasons people change. There are two fundamental reasons people change. Number one, most popular, now you tell me which person this is. When the cost of change is up here and the cost of current consequences gets to here --- so the cost of change is less than the cost of current consequences --- that s a fool. They have to have pain happen to them to the point where their current bill is so high, it d be less painful to change. That s why most people change, because it costs too much to stay the same. Proverbs comes in and says, You know, there s an alternative; you could just change because you love wisdom. Think about that. That d be pretty simple, wouldn t it? When we used to argue with our kids back and forth, whatever their value system was, we would appeal to that with wisdom. If they were lazy, we d say Wisdom s easier. If they were into thriftiness, we d say, Wisdom is cheaper. If they were impatient, we d say, Wisdom is faster. Wisdom is faster, easier, cheaper, better --- it s always that way. It s more valuable than gold. Get wisdom. Have a heart that s ready to learn. That s how you live life as opposed to being a foolish person. Now the hand sign for a foolish person --- not proud of this one, but it goes like this. You ve got your finger right next to the side of your nose, and this comes from the idea ---- the person is called wise guy. Now a wise guy some of you know because you are in organized crime a wise guy is like the slang for organized crime members. So there s that, that s our first clue. And one of the better organized crime movies that you ll ever see is called The Sting with Robert Redford. And the way they all communicated back to each other to say we re on the same team is they d go like this. That was their little hand sign. So that s how we get to this. I m not proud of it, but we re going to use it anyway. Okay, let s go here. That s the wise guy. So the fool, he goes like this [brushing away with one hand]. The fool says, Yeah, right, he s kind of pushing it away, and the wise man goes like this. [Finger laid aside nose.] TradeUp.#2.cassidy 14
Proverbs 13:20 Those who walk with the wise become wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm. What s the advice to others when you see someone else that s wise? This is good, Proverbs 13:20: Those who walk with the wise become wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm. See, wisdom is rubbing off. So hang around with them. Does this sound familiar? The advice to the fool, remember, the advice to people when you saw a foolish person was to stay away, be very afraid. And then the wisdom of Solomon says, If you find a wise person, yeah, you should hang around that person as much as you can. There s a saying, a proverb, in the South --- you might have heard this from your dad or your mom --- they d say, Matt, you better be careful who you re hanging out with after that football game because stupid rubs off. You ever heard, Stupid rubs off? Stupid rubs off. That s half of this verse: But the companion of fools suffers harm. Some of you guys are in work environments where profanity and vile speak is running through the office like some open sewage pipe. Let me ask you: does profanity rub off? You pick up some of those words without even wanting to? Yeah. Profanity rubs off. Some of you guys are in investments and that sort of thing and it s all about who makes the most money by the end of the year. Everybody s keeping score with dollar signs. Can I ask you a question? Does greed rub off? Yes, it does. Does hypercriticism, ingratitude, cynicism rub off? Spend time with that, yeah, you ll catch it. Stupid rubs off. Foolish rubs off. But let s turn this around, because that s only half the story of this verse. That s why the writer says, Stay away from that. He says this. The other half of the verse says, Walk with the wise and you become wise. If you come to a church full of people and they love God and they can t wait to sing with a great band and they want to learn what God has for them --- even better, you go on a retreat and spend three days worshipping God with other people, can I ask you, does the spirit of worship rub off? It does. Hang around the wise. Sometimes you could work at a place where there s a division head and she is overflowing with gratitude and encouragement eight hours a day and is pushing this all over the office. Can I ask you? Does that sweet gratitude become contagious? Does that rub off? It does TradeUp.#2.cassidy 15
rub off. You cross the parking lot and come on a Thursday night, you re enjoying a group called Celebrate Recovery. It s a twelve step program and you ll see people talking to each other, going through the steps, taking the courage to acknowledge what they ve done, to have the courage to take responsibility and make things write, working the steps. Can I ask you? Is courage contagious? Does courage rub off? It does. That s why Solomon says that is you re around the wise, you should spend time with the wise. C. S. Lewis put it this way: The next best thing to actually being wise yourself is to live in a circle of wise people. It s like, I m not very smart, but if I hang around the right people, I could be wise myself. So here s the point of today s application for the most part and summary. Friends, all of our lives we ll be spending time with people. Don t be so naïve or foolish to believe that the people you spend time with will not affect you significantly in your life and the consequences for your life. The wisdom of Proverbs brought to us from God, He says this: You decide who your friends will be, and then they ll decide who you will be. Be warned. And I ll just say this, too, because it happens to so many of us in our lives. If you have someone that loves you, you know, a parent or a husband or a wife, a family member, somebody that deeply loves you, a good friend, and they ever sit down with you and say these words: It is bad for you to spend time with this person or this group. If anyone ever says that to you, would you please ask God s Spirit to light up your conscience, because that is coming from God. It is coming from the wisdom of Proverbs. Here s why. Because think about the courage and love --- those two concoctions, courage and love is what it takes for a person to say those words to you. No one is ever going to say those words to you unless they love you and are willing to risk the relationship, because by saying those words that you should not be spending time with this person or that crowd, they re putting a fork in the future of your relationship. It s going to be a division and you re going to make a choice. Are you going to stay on the path of foolishness and get swept up in the folly of the fools, or will you be willing to risk loneliness and isolation to get over here to this road of wisdom? If anyone ever says that to you, my friends, it is a word from God and you need to change your company. That s what it says. That s what Proverbs is saying. You better be careful. TradeUp.#2.cassidy 16
This is the verse you ought to write down. Two days from now it ll be June 13 th, the thirteenth chapter. Let s read all this together. Those who walk with the wise become wise; the companion of fools suffers harm. Application Listen, this is kind of weird, we don t teach this way normally, but I think the genre is pushing our style of teaching. Here s what I want you to take away from this. This is why it s powerful to attach various ways of memory: Yeah, right and the wise guy. Because when we went through this when our kids were five, seven, and nine, we did this all summer long. We did eight or ten hand signs, we were all loaded up when school started, boom, it was a banquet of examples for the kids to see. And it was great. One of the harder things to do when you re teaching your kids is ---- they don t have to say, Yeah, right, that person s a fool out loud. That could cause bigger problems than you want. But anyway, the point is that when they were five, seven, and nine we went through this and we were pretty diligent about it. It kind of went quiet for a while and then later --- ten years later --- I can remember two stories vividly when the children were in their teens and became temporarily insane and we were going back and forth in the living room. It was Mom and I against one and it was back and forth and one of us just instinctively went like this [brushing away with one hand]. And right in the middle of telling us how stupid we were to believe otherwise, they stopped. Because I think all the wisdom of these Proverbs came back and reminded them, Oh, my. I ve been spending the last forty-two minutes saying, Yeah, right. And that was the end of the talk. That was the end of the argument. They just realized Oh, in this part of their life We never called our children fools. We said they were acting foolishly or playing the fool. But I m telling you, friends, this has power. They re simple proverbs, but you re underestimating their power. I want these proverbs to change the way we think so that it would change the way we live. Let s do that together. Let s pray. Picture this, this lovely beautiful queen --- oh, she s gorgeous. She has built her house. She has personally hand-carved seven pillars out front so that you would know her palace when TradeUp.#2.cassidy 17
you see it. She slaughtered her best beast, she mixed the wine herself and she sent out all her little friends to go to all the high points to say, Hey, anybody here naïve and want to learn? Anybody out there want to live the easy way? The fast way, the cheap way, the best way? Because I m having a banquet. Lord, I d ask that members of Grace Covenant Church would show up to that banquet, put the napkin in their lap, and have an all-you-can-eat buffet; that we would learn from the wisdom of Solomon and the other sages that put this book together, knowing that those words were from you; that we would live wisely; that we would glorify You by living wisely. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. TradeUp.#2.cassidy 18