How does a person go about obtaining wisdom? What's the mindset we must have if we want to be wise?
How desperately do we want wisdom? I love that word acquire. It's a little soft in the English language. It literally means to seize. It means to grasp.
It means to clutch for. There is this sense of desperation. He isn't just saying, well, take it or leave it. I'd like to have a little wisdom.
Sure, it'd be great. No, this is I must have it. Wisdom isn't guaranteed with age, but it can transform your life. The Book of Proverbs offers powerful, life shaping truths to guide everyday decisions.
What makes Proverbs unique among scripture and why is it called godliness in working clothes? This message explores how Solomon's wisdom shines light on relationships, choices and navigating life's challenges. You'll learn what wisdom really is and how you can pursue it. If you're ready to grow wiser, stay tuned. Somebody sent me a list called The Perks of Getting Older. And since I am, maybe some of you are too, I thought I'd read them. Maybe you can appreciate them as I can.
Here's the first one. In a hostage situation, you are likely to be released first. I don't want to test that.
People call at 9 p.m. and ask apologetically, did I wake you? You no longer think of speed limits as a challenge. We'll see about that. Your investment in health insurance after all these years is finally paying off. You can sing along with the elevator music. You know all the words.
Here's a good one. Your secrets are safe with your friends because they can't remember them either. You know, it's one thing to get older. It's another thing to grow wiser. I have read that the book of Psalms tells us how to get along with God. The book of Proverbs tells us how to get along with people. The book of Psalms helps us know how to worship, while the book of Proverbs helps us know how to walk. While the book of Psalms is and can be easily read in church, the book of Proverbs can be read with one eye on the text and one eye on the daily news. A sentence or two in the middle of a quick lunch break at the job can sort of shape the rest of your day. This inspired collection of God's wisdom can help us sort of navigate our way through the fast lane of life.
Derek Kidner wrote in his commentary, the book of Proverbs doesn't really take you to church. It calls across to you in the street about some everyday matter. It points things out at home. It's function in scripture is to put godliness into working clothes.
It's good. Warren Wiersbe wrote it this way, Proverbs is a book that tells you how to become skillful in the lost art of making a life. This book indeed is a veritable hidden treasure of wisdom and it is available for every treasure hunter who cares to dig beneath the surface. Let's start before we dive into verse one and we're not going to go through every verse of every chapter.
We're going to treat it thematically but let me just kind of introduce it and we'll cover the first few verses as he sets the stage for us. What exactly is a proverb? Well, it comes from the root word mashal which basically means to represent. It can even in its verb form mean to rule or to guide. There isn't any doubt that the book of Proverbs contains rules or we could call them principles which generally represent the best way to live and it gives guidance to life. The English word proverb tracks back to the Latin word that actually came from the Vulgate when Jerome translated it.
It's a compound word, a proverbium, pro meaning on behalf of and verba meaning words. You put the two together and you have a proverb that is a short statement on behalf of many words. The truth is proverbs have been one of the key ways to teach great truths in a very concise way in every culture and in every generation. We're familiar with a number of them.
We use them often. Look before you what? Leap. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. A stitch in time saves. I have no idea what that means and I don't really care to know but at any rate that's a proverb we talk about. Here's a little longer one that I've often thought of before making a hasty decision.
Better to be standing on shore wishing you were sailing than sailing wishing you were still on shore. Mark Twain provided a proverb that President Harry Truman liked so much he framed it and hung it in the Oval Office. It was this proverb. Always do what is right. This will gratify some and astonish the rest. A short saying or proverb I put to memory recently is this one.
You are most likely to hang yourself on the loose threads of life. Another one that's worth remembering that I tucked into my memory some time ago. It says a lot in a very short space of time.
Your silence may be misinterpreted. It will never be misquoted. A proverb is a small statement with great significance.
They sort of stand in the place of longer speeches. You don't have to have a lot of words when you have a proverb that sort of says it all and sums it up. None, however, no matter what culture you've been in or what generation, none are more significant or important than the list that's bound in leather or in some cover on your lap because God gave us these. God is the giver of wisdom. In fact, he is the personification of wisdom and his spirit led Solomon to compose and to collect these.
These are ones for us to hunt through. He's going to give us weighty words on a lot of different issues, isn't he? He's going to reveal wisdom regarding our hearts, our minds, our tongues, our spirits. He's going to talk about what we shouldn't be but we are, what we should be but we aren't. He's going to delve into relationships.
He's going to stick his nose in family business. He's going to talk about parents, children, friends, neighbors, co-workers and even enemies. He is going to tell us the truth about temptation, lust, greed, gossip, hatred and disappointment.
He's going to talk about finances and freedom, rebellion and relationships and he'll say each grand truth in just a few words at a time. The book of Proverbs is not the sum and substance of all wisdom but it is sufficient to allow the reader and the student to walk in wisdom. In fact, Solomon clearly delivers that purpose statement for this Old Testament book of the Bible.
Turn to chapter 1 and let's look at verse 1. The Proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel. Alright, so what's the purpose of these Proverbs? Well, he's going to give us seven treasures that come as a result of reading and studying these Proverbs.
Let me give it to you first. First and foremost, the overarching treasure of wisdom. He says, I'm giving you these to know wisdom.
In other words, I have given you these, this collection, to develop in you, to describe for you wisdom. In a world that has no idea what wisdom is, I'm going to show you in living color what it's all about. The Hebrew word for wisdom is shachma.
This is the ability to make the right decision for the right reason at the right time. Wisdom sets the human being apart from any other created being. The intellect and reasoning capacity of human beings has long been a source of debate as to where that wisdom came from.
Where does wisdom come from? Well, the Celtic religions believe their goddess Kerdwin created it. The Romans believe that Minerva created it.
The Hindus point to their goddess of wisdom known as Saraswati. The Greeks believe that wisdom in their long drawn out mythologies came from the offspring of Zeus. Zeus was evidently, according to their belief, he'd heard a prophecy that his wife was going to have a daughter and he wasn't happy and so he swallowed his wife whole, which wasn't a very nice thing to do. However, when it was time for the child to be delivered, Zeus got a headache and his head opened up and Athena stepped out. And because she came from his head, his mind, she was considered the patroness of wisdom.
So, of course, the Greeks bought into it and named Athens after her and built the Parthenon in her honor. She was represented by her sacred bird, the owl. It gave rise to the superstition that lasts to this day, that the owl is a wise bird. In fact, another word related to the owl that was adopted by the Greeks and used to this day, a group of owls is not referred to as a flock.
The word that is used to speak of a gathering of owls is the word parliament. We, as believers, know wisdom comes from God. It is first and foremost who he is.
It is his attribute. He is the all wise God, Jude 25. He is the only wise God. The written word of God imparts the ability to make the right decision for the right reason at the right time. See, Paul reminded Timothy of this when he wrote, But you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you wisdom, not only unto salvation, but a couple verses later, so that you can know how to walk equipped for every good work, 2 Timothy 3, 15 to 17. In other words, wisdom is developed as a result of hearing and obeying the scriptures. Listen, a wise person is not necessarily somebody who is the smartest person in the church.
No, it is the most submissive person to the scriptures. It is what the Bible considers to be a person who is wise. This is the point of Solomon. I am delivering truths to you so that you will have this treasure, which is wisdom. Notice, Solomon also says in verse 2, he gives us another treasure for the seeker of truth. Wisdom at verse 2 says, And instruction, to know wisdom and to know instruction.
The word instruction carries the idea of a parent's instruction or discipline that builds character. One Jewish commentator pointed out that mussar, which is the word here, refers to gaining knowledge based not only on hearing the truth, but learning from the mistakes of others. Solomon is saying, you read this book and you can learn from the fruits of other people's experiences. See, it isn't necessarily the best way to learn to experience everything. Well, you know, you just had to experience that.
I don't know. One of the best ways to learn is to read it or see it in somebody else's life and learn from it and avoid it. You ever learn from somebody else's mistakes? Probably did. I remember my three brothers and I learned a lot of things from each other's mistakes. I remember being convinced that a person could jump off the backside of our garage roof, which sloped down to about 10 feet above the grassy backyard without getting hurt if they just carried an umbrella.
I had watched Mary Poppins too often, evidently. I wasn't quite sure of the hypothesis and all of the engineering facets regarding this experiment, so I convinced my younger brother to do it. It'll work, Timmy. It'll work. So he got up there on the back of the roof there at the back end and had his umbrella, and I said, okay, don't worry about it.
It'll work. Jump. He jumped immediately. It went inside out and he hit the grass. I was able to learn from that experience.
I didn't need to try that anymore. Solomon is going to show us not just good decisions. He's going to show us bad ones. Solomon goes on to deliver another treasure. He says in verse 2 to discern the sayings of understanding. Not only do you get wisdom and instruction, but you're able to discern the sayings of understanding. The word discern, the verb here is describing an ability to distinguish between opposites, that which is honorable and that which is dishonorable, that which is good and that which is evil, that which is right from that which is wrong. Discernment then is activated by the living word through the indwelling written word and the spirit of God, the living word, as we submit to it and him and live it out.
Solomon adds a fourth treasure. He writes in verse 3 to receive instruction in wise behavior. That's why I'm giving you these proverbs. This is why his behavior looks like. He tells us here it looks like this, righteousness, justice, and equity.
You live right, you treat people right, and you work with fairness. The younger generation is now, one author wrote, living on the moral edge. I pulled a book out by Josh McDowell with statistics and he gave some new statistics. Listen to these, every day in America 1,000 unwed teenage girls become mothers. Every day 1,100 girls have abortions. Every day 4,219 teenagers contract a sexually transmitted disease. Every day 1,000 teens take their first drink. Every day 500 teenagers take their first fix. Every day 2,200 teenagers drop out of school. Every day six of them take their own lives. He went on to write, the government says the solution is better education, job opportunities for graduates. Activists say we need to eradicate oppression and injustice. Others say we need more police punishment, prisons, and social programs. They're only dealing with the symptoms, aren't they?
These are just better Kleenexes for life-threatening pneumonias. What you will discover in Proverbs, Solomon is saying, is that the answer is a radical infusion of wisdom from the Scriptures, which is then demonstrated in life and communicated to somebody else. Here's how to live, here's how to walk.
Now let me show you how. Solomon adds a fifth jewel for the treasure hunter. Proverbs have been delivered to you, verse 4 he says, to give prudence to the naive. The word prudence can be translated with the nuance of shrewdness.
This is just thinking critically. This is helping others and yourself as you study this to discern, to be shrewd and wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove. The naive are gullible. He says I'm giving you Proverbs to deepen your thinking process so that you won't be naive and gullible, you won't go along with the crowd. Throughout Proverbs the naive are warned to think.
Frankly, our world is so gullible they believe everything they're told and as it relates to moral issues, they pay a heavy price. I've had this article in my files for quite some time that perfectly illustrates in a humorous way the gullibility of people. Richard Dimbleby of the BBC News was famous for pulling April Fool's jokes on the BBC radio April 1st.
But he normally covered all of the royal ceremonial events and he was just sort of the epitome of just a careful person and a circumspect person and so he just kind of fooled everybody. One year he did a current affairs program where he showed a film of a spaghetti harvest in Switzerland. The film showed trees dripping with long ribbons of white spaghetti while Dimbleby voiced over very plainly spaghetti cultivation here in Switzerland which was not of course carried on anything like the scale of the Italian industry. Many of you I'm sure have seen pictures of the vast spaghetti plantations in the Po Valley. Swiss villagers were shown carrying great baskets of harvested pasta.
They were laying it out to be dried in the sun. Workers were seen trimming the spaghetti out of the trees. He concluded the show by saying, For those who love this dish, there's nothing like homegrown spaghetti. The switchboards lit up. And people were asking how they could begin to grow spaghetti in their own gardens.
The BBC answer was, Place a sprig of spaghetti in a jar of tomato sauce and hope for the best. Another year, Patrick Moore, a British astronomer, he had everybody fooled. He told BBC listeners that in the morning the planet Pluto would pass directly behind Jupiter causing a slight gravitational pull on Earth that would make everyone feel lighter. He urged listeners to jump at precisely 9.47 a.m. At 9.48, the switchboards were blazing with delighted callers, this article said. They talked about how they experienced the floating sensation when they jumped. One woman said her entire coffee group of 11 women floated around the room.
I don't think they were drinking coffee as far as I'm concerned. Another man complained he had hit his head on the ceiling. Leave it to somebody to file a lawsuit over anything and so he was upset.
Can you believe that? Well, yeah, we can. As it comes to things that are really significant, the pull of the crowd, common sense, the status quo, the politically correct, these proverbs will help you take the stand that you need to take. Solomon goes on to deliver another hidden treasure found in verse 4 of the latter part to give to the youth knowledge and discretion. That word youth can be used for anyone on the threshold of maturity, anybody on the threshold of taking a new step. And that fits us all, doesn't it? Because we're not just growing old.
Lord willing, we are growing up. And so this could refer to us. And that's exactly what Solomon describes in verse 5. Look there, a wise man will hear and increase in learning. And a man of understanding will acquire wise counsel. I love that word acquire.
It's a little soft in the English language. It really means to seize, it means to grasp, it means to clutch for. There is this sense of desperation. He isn't just saying, well, take it or leave it. I'd like to have a little wisdom.
Sure, it'd be great. No, this is I must have it. Give it to me. I must have wise counsel. How desperately do we want wisdom?
How ready are we to seize wise counsel? Solomon adds one more treasure in his purpose statement. Verse 6, to understand the proverb and to figure the words of the wise and their riddles. I think that Solomon is referring to the riddles of life. You go back to Solomon's day.
In fact, you go back about 500 years before the time of Christ and the world was mesmerized by the newest riddle, Sophocles, the Greek writer who lived 500 years before Christ's birth had written of the Sphinx, this fallen angel. She had a lioness body and wings of an eagle and the face and head of a woman. And she would stand in the marketplace and she would offer these riddles and if you got it right, good. If you didn't, she killed you.
So you avoided the marketplace when she was around. Well, her famous riddle was this. What has one voice and yet is four footed in the morning two footed at noon and three footed in the evening?
If you get it wrong, you're dead. This is a reference to a baby who in the morning of life crawls on all fours midlife standing up on all twos in old life got a cane and three footed. I think Solomon hears when he talks about giving us wisdom he's not just talking about can you figure that one out. He's talking about can you figure out the riddles of life because they're coming at you fast.
They're coming at you furiously. Are you ready for the riddles of life? James Dobson wrote an article that I filed away for later use. He told the story of a friend of his that was flying a small single engine airplane toward a country airport a few years ago. He was behind schedule and he arrived flying overhead about the time the sun had dropped behind the nearby mountains. By the time he maneuvered into a position to land the field was dark. It was hazy at best. He couldn't see clearly enough to risk a safe landing.
There was no one on duty at the small local airport. No lights along the runway. He circled the runway for another attempt to land the darkness had become even more impenetrable and now it was too late. For two hours Dobson writes he flew his plane around and around and around the clearing. He knew it was below that small airport and grass runway. But the darkness of night had swallowed him up. He knew that if he didn't land he was going to face certain death when his fuel ran out.
But by now he had no way to even determine which way the landing strip was heading. Great panic gripped him. Then a wonderful thing happened. A neighbor who lived near the airport had heard the continual droning of this man's plane engine and realized his predicament. He hopped in his car and he drove out to that grassy airstrip and he raced back and forth and back and forth and back and forth a number of times until he was certain the pilot had spotted him and he had. Then this man drove to the end of the runway and put on his high beams so that that plane could see and that man was able to safely land his plane.
This man's kindness serves somewhat like the book of Proverbs. It's dark out. It's very dark.
Here are the guidelines. Here's the direction of the runway. Stay within the guidelines of this inspired light, these high beams of divine revelation which will guide you to not only land safely but live wisely. This is the purpose statement of Proverbs. Would you like to be wiser than an owl?
Here's the answer. Let me give you several observations before we wrap it up. Number one, a person is not considered wise because he knows everything but because he longs to learn more. Number two, a person is not considered wise because they know what to say but because they know how to listen. One more, a person is not considered wise because he knows everything but because he obeys what he knows. Proverbs offers life-changing principles to navigate challenges and grow in understanding.
That was Stephen Davey and this is Wisdom for the Heart. Today's message is called, Wiser than an Owl. We'd love to hear from you. Has our teaching ministry helped you in your spiritual journey? Do you have a story or testimony to share about how these daily lessons are helping you walk wisely?
Your experiences encourage us and we'd love to hear how God's using this ministry in your life. We're also here to assist you if you have a comment, question, or need more information. Whatever you need, there are several ways you can reach out to us. Our email address is info at wisdomonline.org. That's info at wisdomonline.org.
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Box 37297, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27627. We'd love to hear from you, whether it's a story of how this ministry has blessed you, a question you need answered, or just a comment, we're here to listen. Reach out to us today via email, phone, or mail, and let's connect. Before we leave you today, I want you to be aware that Stephen has the content of this series available as a book. If you'd like to have a resource to help you walk wisely through life, this book is for you. It's called The Quest for Hidden Treasure, and you'll find it on our website, or you can ask us about it when you call. Join us back here next time. Thank you.
