This morning we're going to be considering several verses from Proverbs 12. We're not going to try to cover every single verse in the book of Proverbs, but we're trying to cover enough of the verses that we interact with all of the primary topics which come up in this book and enough verses that we get a sense of the overarching message of the book. I would however like to read all of Proverbs 12 this morning, even if I don't comment on every verse, because there's benefit in the mere reading of God's Word.
And then after we've read the chapter in its entirety, we'll go back to a couple of key sections and take a closer look at what they have to say. So let's begin then by reading Proverbs chapter 12. Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid. A good man obtains favor from the Lord, but a man of evil devices he condemns. No one is established by wickedness, but the root of the righteous will never be moved.
An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, but she who brings shame is like rottenness in his bones. The thoughts of the righteous are just, the counsels of the wicked are deceitful. The words of the wicked lie in wait for blood, but the mouth of the upright delivers them.
The wicked are overthrown and are no more, but the house of the righteous will stand. A man is commended according to his good sense, but one of twisted mind is despised. Better to be lowly and have a servant than to play the great man and lack bread. Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.
Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits lacks sense. Whoever is wicked covets the spoil of evildoers, but the root of the righteous bears fruit. An evil man is ensnared by the transgression of his lips, but the righteous escapes from trouble.
From the fruit of his mouth, a man is satisfied with good and the work of a man's hand comes back to him. The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice. The vexation of a fool is known at once, but the prudent ignores an insult. Whoever speaks the truth gives honest evidence, but a false witness utters deceit. There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing. Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue is but for a moment. Deceit is in the heart of those who devise evil, but those who plan peace have joy. No ill befalls the righteous, but the wicked are filled with trouble.
Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who act faithfully are his delight. A prudent man conceals knowledge, but the heart of fools proclaims folly. The hand of the diligent will rule, while the slothful will be put to forced labor. Anxiety in a man's heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad. One who is righteous is a guide to his neighbor, but the way of the wicked leads them astray.
Whoever is slothful will not roast his game, but the diligent man will get precious wealth. In the path of righteousness is life, and in its pathway there is no death. This is God's word. Let's go to him in prayer. Lord, you have promised that if any of us lack wisdom, he has but to ask for it, and you'll give it generously and without reproach.
So, Lord, we lack wisdom. We ask you to give it to us. We ask in faith, believing that you're a good father who gives good things to your children when they ask. Thank you for your goodness to us. Thank you for your word. I pray in Jesus' name.
Amen. Well, there seem to be three primary topics discussed in Proverbs 12. One of them is the topic of speech. We've already spent significant time in some of the earlier chapters of the book considering that topic, topic of speech, and this is a topic that's going to continue to be a prominent subject throughout the book of Proverbs, and no doubt we'll come back to it again and again as we make our way through the remaining chapters.
But today I've chosen to focus instead on the two other topics that receive a lot of attention in Chapter 12. They have to do with how we respond to instruction and criticism and how we respond to work. The verses we're going to look at describe first the benefits of hard conversations and then secondly the benefits of hard work. Let's begin then by considering how wisdom responds in the face of hard conversations, difficult conversations. How do wise people respond to the verbal input of others? Sometimes that input from other people is constructive and positive. At other times it's constructive but negative. Still other times the verbal input of others into our lives can be inaccurate.
It can be destructive. It can even be downright hurtful at times. A wise person is not so focused on himself that he can't see the input from others for what it is and respond rightly. He's able to discern what sort of communication he's receiving and he's able to respond appropriately, righteously, to the correction and the compliments of others as well as to their criticisms and disapproval. First we see the wise person responding rightly to correction in verse 1. Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid. The words discipline and reproof are parallel in this sentence and they refer to the kind of instruction that's necessary when a person is erring in some way. It's corrective. It's intended to fix an error in knowledge, in judgment, in behavior. It's those uncomfortable conversations when someone has to pull you aside and say, can we talk?
Because they have something difficult that may be confrontational that they need to say to you. And here's the point. The wise person, the person who wants to increase their knowledge and understanding of life and how things work, actually loves this correction. While the person who has no interest in growing and maturing and deepening their understanding of life hates correction. Now I want us to notice that this proverb, verse 1, implies that everyone, the wise and the fool alike, need correction at one point or another. Nobody is omniscient.
Nobody is perfect. Every person needs others to come alongside them from time to time and critique and correct and instruct and discipline. The question is, how will you respond when that correction occurs? If you're wise, you'll accept that correction and even love that correction. Why?
Because without it, you'll just continue doing wrong-headed things, immoral things, ignorant things, destructive things. The last thing you want to do when confronted with your need for correction is to get resistant and defensive. You can't tell me what to do.
I'll take care of it myself, thank you very much. You don't know what you're talking about. Who put you in charge? These are the attitudes of the unteachable, the incorrigible, the stupid, according to verse 1. The word stupid refers to someone who is animalistic. They blindly follow their instincts, their gut, because they simply refuse to be self-critical. And why would a person refuse to be self-critical?
Why would someone not welcome the corrective instruction of another person? Well, most likely because of pride. Pride blinds us from realizing that we don't always know what we think we know. It gives us an inflated sense of our own understanding of the situation or of our own ability to navigate the situation. And it prevents us from being able to appreciate the fact that sometimes other people know more than we think they know. Sometimes other people can see something about us that we can't see.
They can see our blind spots because, well, they're blind spots to us. Church, this is why the Book of Proverbs makes such a big deal about the importance of humility and the danger of pride. In fact, here's just a sampling of what the Book of Proverbs says about pride.
I'm going to paraphrase. Proverbs says, don't lean on your own understanding. Don't have haughty eyes. When pride comes, disgrace comes. The Lord tears down the house of the proud. Humility comes before honor. An arrogant heart is an abomination to the Lord. Pride goes before the fall. The reward of humility is riches and honor and life. Don't promote yourself in front of the king.
It's better to be told, come up here, than to be told, go down there. Don't seek your own glory. There is more hope for a fool than for one who is wise in his own eyes. You see, pride makes you unteachable and unteachability makes you stupid. Humility, on the other hand, makes you receptive to criticism rather than threatened by it and puts you in a position to learn what you need to learn and change what you need to change.
Verse 15 makes a similar point. Verse 15 says, the way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice. In 1999, a couple of psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Krueger, made an interesting observation from a study they conducted on the relationship between people's self-perception of their own abilities and their actual abilities, the difference between how people saw themselves and what was actually there. It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect. What they found was that people with limited competence in a particular area tend to overestimate their competence, while people with extreme competence in a particular area tend to underestimate their competence. In other words, we think we're better at stuff that we're not that great at.
Have you met these people? You are these people. And we think that we're worse at stuff that we are great at. Ignorance makes us overly confident, while knowledge makes us more modest in our self-perception. This played out in my own life as a young boy. Early one Saturday morning, I was at a track meet with some friends, and we were walking around the field inside the track where there was just random hurdles set up on the grass waiting to be hurtled. Now, I had never jumped a hurdle, but I thought to myself, how hard can it be? This is the Dunning-Kruger effect. Ignorance makes us overly confident. Well, I sprinted toward the hurdle, and just as I got within range, I lifted my front leg over the hurdle, only it didn't clear the hurdle. It went through the middle of the hurdle, sending me face first into the grass.
So the hurdle and I laid there all tangled up together like a pile of coat hangers in a laundry basket, and my friends' unsuppressed laughter in the distance confirmed that I had overestimated my hurtling abilities. The tendency of ignorant, proud people in intellectual pursuits, in spiritual pursuits, in moral pursuits, and even in athletic pursuits like hurtling, is to think they are better than average. And so they discredit to their own harm the instruction of those who are actually better than average. We live in a culture that makes self-confidence the supreme virtue, when what would be immeasurably more helpful is teachability, the willingness to listen to wiser, more experienced, more gifted people. Solomon told us long before Dunning and Kruger that teachability in the face of correction is a mark of the wise person.
But not all input is critical. The wise person also knows how to deal with positive input from others. Compliments, commendation. Verses 8 and 9 address matters of commendation. Verse 8 says, a man is commended according to his good sense, but one of twisted mind is despised. In general, morally upright and wise behavior makes a person well-liked and respected. Good people, truthful people, wise people get praised. Bad people, liars, fools, generally get despised. Now, we've pointed out previously that proverbs are generalizations, right?
This means that there are exceptions. There are times in a twisted fallen world like ours when good people are despised and twisted people are commended. There are times when commendation is misplaced and someone who is praiseworthy does not get praised or commended, but is overlooked, even despised. Ultimately, fools will be condemned and the righteous will be rewarded at the second coming when Christ says, well done, good and faithful servant.
But in the meantime, how do wise people deal with misplaced commendation? Verse 9 shows us. It says, better to be lowly, and that word means not well-regarded, not highly thought of, better to be lowly and have a servant than to play, pretend the great man and lack bread. The principle behind verse 9 is that reality is more significant than reputation. What a person actually is is of far greater importance than what he is perceived to be because perceptions can be wrong. The application of this principle is that we ought not live for the commendation of others. We don't need to be enslaved to the need for praise and respect.
Instead, we ought to pursue steady faithfulness and wisdom and contentment. Just as it's better to have material wealth even if no one notices than to not have material wealth even if everyone thinks you have it, so it is better to be wise even if no one notices than to have the reputation of being wise when you're really just a fool. The wise person cares more about reality than reputation because he is not a slave to commendation.
And I think an implied lesson we can learn from verses 8 and 9 is that commendation is not always an accurate measure of a person's character. Just because someone is thought highly of doesn't mean they actually live up to that opinion of others. So don't measure yourself by other people's compliments. Appearances don't always match reality. Well, the flip side of this is also true. Don't measure yourself by other people's insults.
Again, because appearances don't always match reality. And this is what verse 16 is about. It's about how the wise deal with criticism.
Look with me at verse 16. The vexation of a fool is known at once, but the prudent ignores an insult. So the word vexation refers to being upset or incensed at something. Someone does something that upsets you or makes you angry or offends you. If you're a fool, you'll let them know immediately that they've upset you. One pastor said fools flag themselves with their pugnaciousness. You've seen those people who were hired to dress up in a costume and spin some sort of banner around at the edge of the street in front of a business in order to drum up customers.
They're hired to draw everyone's attention to themselves. The fool draws attention to himself by losing his temper. He's advertising his foolishness by letting everyone know how emotionally charged he is over insults. Contrasted to that is the prudent person who, verse 16 says, ignores an insult. The prudent person knows that the consequences of losing his temper will not be worth it. And so he restrains himself. He ignores the insults.
Now, I think there are probably a couple of motivations that lie behind the prudent person's ability to control his temper. First, perhaps, is the concern over giving his enemy's insults credibility. The easiest insults to ignore are the most ludicrous ones, right, the ones that aren't true. If someone accused me of, I don't know, vanity over caring too much about what my hair looks like, I could very easily laugh it off because of how obviously untrue the accusation would be. But if I got incensed because someone was talking about my hair, I would be announcing to them that they've hit a nerve.
Their insult is valid because it's obviously bothering me. A good coach knows that the body language and attitudes of his players have a huge impact on the morale of the opposing team. And so he's going to warn his players not to give any indication to the other team that they've gotten into their heads.
One theologian I read put it this way. He said, there is benefit for those who do not let their rivals know how upset they are. If one's intent is to hurt another person, then the victim's immediate display of negative emotion will be received and celebrated as a victory. Prudence is the ability to regulate one's emotional display for one's own advantage. Prudence is the ability to regulate one's emotional display for one's own advantage.
But true prudence that comes from a wise heart does not display self-control merely out of a desire to confuse his opponents. No, true prudence in the face of insult is able to exercise self-control because, again, there is enough humility in his heart to not be overly bothered by insults. If the insult is unfounded, the humble person can just absorb it and move on. If there is truth to the insult, the humble person can acknowledge his faults and deal with them.
In either case, criticism does not undo him. Someone who is undone by the criticisms of others is demonstrating the lack of teachability that is a characteristic of a fool. How, then, do you respond to correction, to commendation, to criticism? Are you teachable? Can you handle both commendation and insults appropriately?
Are you easily offended? You know, your answers to these questions reveal if your life is tempered with humility or charged with pride, if you're a wise person or a fool. If you struggle to respond rightly in these situations, I want to remind you first that if you are a believer, you have the Holy Spirit indwelling you. God has given you his spirit for the express purpose of growing in grace, of improving in, of becoming more Christ-like in areas where you naturally aren't wise or self-controlled or humble. That's what sanctification is all about.
And brothers and sisters, becoming more and more holy and faithful and conformed to the image of Christ is God's purpose in our life right now. I'm sure you don't want to be enslaved to a short temper or enslaved to the opinions of others. I'm sure you want to be unthreatened by constructive criticism. So if you struggle with this, make it a matter of earnest prayer. Ask the Lord to put a guard on your lips and your heart.
Don't let your mind indulge in private mental temper tantrums. Take your eyes off the critics and the insulters who may mean well, or maybe they mean ill toward you, and fix your eyes on God, whose assessment of you is what really matters. If God wants to humble you through the criticism of someone who is your lesser, receive that as coming from a good and kind God. If God wants to encourage you through the praise and commendation of another person, receive it as from the Lord, who is graciously shaping you into the saint that he has already declared you to be. If God accepts us, what can man's commendation add to us?
If God accepts us, what can man's criticisms take away from us? Let your security in God enable you to navigate the hard conversations of life. Well, next we come to the topic of hard work. What is the wise person's response to work, to labor? Several verses address the topic. Let's start at verse 11. It says, whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits lacks sense. A few verses later, Solomon will address the matter of laziness. And in fact, he's already addressed it back in Proverbs 10, verse 5, where he condemned the son who sleeps when he should be harvesting. So laziness is bad, but that's not what's being addressed in verse 11. It's not lack of work that verse 11 condemns. It's misdirected work, following worthless pursuits. You see, there are some very hardworking people who spend a lot of time at work and expend a lot of energy doing their job, but the problem is they're spending their time and energy on the wrong things, on worthless things, empty things. Now, don't think that this means wise people spend their time and energy doing spiritual things while foolish people spend their time doing material, temporal things. That's a false dichotomy. The contrast that's held up in opposition to worthless pursuits of the fool is working the land, producing bread.
These are very concrete, material sort of labor. Worthless pursuits are pursuits that don't turn a profit, that don't feed your family, that don't yield the necessities of life, both spiritual and physical. I think of a man in Jesus's parable who buried his one talent in the ground instead of taking wise risks and investing what he had been given. In the end, he lost what little he had because he proved to be unfaithful. The wise man pursues wise, profitable work.
The fool squanders his time on worthless things. Verse 12 says, whoever is wicked covets the spoil of evildoers, but the root of the righteous bears fruit. This sentence is a little bit vague, but I think if we map the points of correspondence, as we've been learning to do here in the Proverbs, between the first half of the Proverb and the second half, it becomes more clear what's being said. The wicked who covets in the first half is compared to the root that bears fruit in the second half. A root that bears fruit is a healthy, stable root.
It's well connected to the nutrients and the water that it needs to grow and produce fruit. The opposite of this stability, which is a characteristic of righteous living, is the instability, the unrootedness of wicked living, a life that is spent wanting what others have. The wicked then are unstable and spend their time wanting what they lack.
The righteous are stable and spend their time producing what they lack. So this Proverb speaks to the value of working for what you need rather than for wishing for what you want. And it speaks of the value of steady, consistent work.
Longevity in our labor makes us grounded, rooted in very profitable ways. This brings us to verse 14. From the fruit of his mouth, a man is satisfied with good, and the work of a man's hand comes back to him. Some Proverbs are not trying to draw a contrast between two opposite things.
A lot of them are, but some of them are instead taking a truth that applies to one arena of life and extending it into another arena of life. By way of analogy, verse 14 does this. The first half of the Proverb applies to speech. The second half applies to work. It's saying that just as there is a correlation between a man's speech and the consequences of that speech, for good or for bad, so there is a correlation between a person's work and the consequences of that work, for good or for bad.
If I go around tearing people down with my words all the time, I'm not going to have a lot of friends. If I go around encouraging others with my words and speaking the truth in love, I'm going to bear the fruit that comes with that good speech. In like manner, if I work diligently and honestly and pursue valuable work and stick to it faithfully, I will get the profit that comes from working righteously.
Verse 24 makes the principle of verse 14 even more specific. The hand of the diligent will rule, while the slothful will be put to forced labor. If you want to be the boss, don't be bossy. Be diligent, and if on the other hand you're not diligent in your work, you will forever be serving your colleagues who are diligent. One of the commentaries I read put it rather bluntly. It said, the diligent will rise to the top, the lazy will sink to the bottom. Verse 27 then gives us one final sentence about hard work. It says, whoever is slothful will not roast his game, but the diligent man will get precious wealth. And this closing verse sort of brings it full circle. In verse 1, the fool was surrounded with an abundance of reproof, and yet he remained stupid.
In verse 27, the fool is surrounded with an abundance of food, and yet he remains hungry. He doesn't benefit from the hard conversations of life because he refuses to learn. He doesn't benefit from the hard work of life because he refuses to labor. Some of us here this morning need to learn to work harder than we do. We need to labor with greater diligence, greater joy and contentment in our work, greater perseverance and faithfulness. We have been put on this earth to tend this magnificent garden that we call creation, and there are countless ways to engage in that divine mandate. We are called as bearers of God's image to exercise dominion over this world, like God exercises dominion over us, in righteousness and goodness, with mercy and grace. We're called to be fruitful and multiply, to raise children and have families and feed those families and make disciples and teach those disciples to love God and fear him. We need to learn to embrace the work God has given us with thankfulness for that work and contentment in the rich fruit it produces.
Moms and dads don't grow weary in your domestic duties. Workers, labor in your work as unto the Lord, knowing that in all labor there is profit when it is done for his good pleasure. Young people, learn and grow and serve as if you're learning and growing and serving are acts of worship to your creator because they are acts of worship to your creator.
Some of us here need to be exhorted to be teachable and not so easily offended. God brings hard people and hard conversations into our lives sometimes to smooth the rough edges, to humble us, to make us less sinful and more holy. If our attitude is to say, I already know that, I've got it all together, how dare you try to correct me, we're missing out on some of the beneficial blessings that God intends us to have.
Learn to take God's work in your life more seriously than you take yourself and you'll begin to enjoy a whole new freedom in dealing with difficult people and difficult conversations. And finally, beloved, don't ever forget that we pursue these goals not in order to earn merit with God. No, we obey God's good commands, His instruction because God already loves us. The directives of the book of Proverbs are given to us from a God whose delight it is to give us the kingdom. His commands are not burdensome. They're good and they're right and they're full of pleasures forevermore. So let's be teachable saints. Let's pray. Father, thank you, thank you for instructing us this morning in the ways of wisdom and where our lives don't align with what we've heard from you. Please, by the power of your Holy Spirit in us, change us, produce in us the very likeness of Jesus Christ our Lord, in whose name I pray, amen.
