Wisdom for the Heart

So, we're in a series in the Book of Proverbs this month.

There are five Sundays in March, five messages that we're going to look at the Proverbs, and pretty much, I mean, there's 31 chapters of Proverbs.

You can't cover that in five sermons.

We're picking five of the best, most important, and helpful parts of the Proverbs to focus on.

Today, we are looking at Proverbs 4, verses 20 to 27.

And you might like to get your Bibles out.

I always liked having a physical Bible in the hands to hold on to.

Last week, Jonathan preached for us a message titled The Foundation of Wisdom.

And if you are listening to the podcast right now, or you're online, please pause this podcast, go listen to that sermon twice, and then come back.

It was an epic sermon last week.

In my kind of listening to that sermon, I thought I did two main things.

Firstly, the message last week defined wisdom.

Mike has already reminded us that knowledge, rightly applied, is wisdom, and wisdom leads to life.

Wisdom is the way to live in God's world, a flourishing life.

Or my personal favorite definition is wisdom is how to live well.

How to live well.

The second thing that last week's sermon did was lay the foundation of wisdom from verse 7 of chapter 1.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.

The fear of the Lord is awe, admiration, and amazement at God.

It's not just beholding God with a jaw dropped, but it is being compelled to move, to act differently because God is real and because of his qualities.

So today, this message is titled for the note takers, who are my favorite types of people, and they tend to hang out over here.

For the note takers, Wisdom for the Heart is our title this morning.

We're going to build on the definition and the foundation of wisdom from last week.

The other thing is for the note takers, just because I love you guys so much, this is the outline of the sermon.

The feed, the heart, the flow.

The feed, the heart, the flow.

Probably equal space between all of them, but that's up to you.

We're going to begin in an unusual place and that is the middle.

We're going to begin with the heart.

Proverbs 4 verse 23, Solomon says, Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.

In the world view of the Proverbs, the ancient Hebrew thought, they didn't really have a conception of the brain.

They knew that they had this thing in the head, but the brain wasn't where thinking lived in the Hebrew thought.

Thinking lived in the heart.

In fact, Bible Project have this fantastic video on the heart that outlines four broad categories of things that the Hebrews thought the heart did.

Firstly, the heart was the center of thought.

You see phrases, phrases where someone reflects in their heart on what they will do.

They are thinking in the heart.

Secondly, in the Hebrew world of the Bible, the heart was a physical organ.

They knew that there's a thing inside that beats and pumps blood throughout the body.

Thirdly, the heart was the seat of emotion.

Throughout the Bible, you could be troubled in the heart or joyful in the heart.

Emotion lives in the heart.

And finally, choices come from the heart.

You see the phrase throughout scripture.

Someone set their heart on a particular course of action.

Most simply and most helpfully, I think the heart is the center of being.

The center of your being.

Solomon says, above all else, guard your heart for everything you do flows from it.

That means that if you were to take everything you do and follow it upstream to its source, that's the heart, the human heart.

And as we see this theme develop throughout scripture, we see a couple of key verses.

One of those verses is the Shema.

Deuteronomy 6 verse 4, it's the prayer that Israelites would pray multiple times a day.

It says this, hear, O Israel.

That word here is Shema in Hebrew, so it's called the Shema.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

Thousands of years later, when Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment in the whole Bible is, he went to that one.

He said, that is the greatest commandment.

And then he said, and love your neighbor as yourself.

We see in the Book of Exodus that Pharaoh's heart becomes hard.

That's a recurring pattern.

Remember, David was a man after God's own heart.

I did a word search for heart in the Old Testament, and I kind of summarized pretty much all the different ways that the word is used, and I think we see, across the Bible, you can lose heart, take heart, break a heart, ache a heart, test a heart, rest a heart, dull a heart, and kill a heart.

But ultimately, the Bible's conclusion about the state of the human heart is this, from Jeremiah 17.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and beyond cure.

Who can understand it?

That's a bit of a bummer thing to say.

The heart is deceitful above all things.

We hear today, out in the world, the advice, follow your heart, or the heart wants what it wants, so follow your heart.

I don't think from Scripture, or even from logic and reason, that is very good wisdom.

Because if we have 200 people in a room, and we say, follow your heart, do whatever you want to do, I don't think that creates a flourishing, selfless, loving society.

We hear this wisdom to follow your heart, but the Bible says, the heart is the problem.

The heart is deceitful above all things.

If you read the Old Testament, read the New Testament, read the Gospels, look in a mirror, the heart has a problem.

And we need a heart that is transformed.

And I think this morning, as much of a bummer as that is to say, it is important that we're honest about the bad news, that the heart is broken, because it makes the good news all the more better.

That God, throughout scripture, through the prophets, promised to do something about the human heart.

In Ezekiel 36, God says, through the prophet, I will give you, he's talking to his people, the people of God, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you.

I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

That's the promise that the Old Testament kind of ends with.

One day, God will act in human history to transform the hearts of his people.

And when we turn the page from the Old Testament to the New, we see that is exactly what God did in Jesus.

That Jesus took on himself all of his people's broken, stony hearts, and he let it kill him.

He took death in our place.

And when he rose again from the dead, 40 days later, he breathed his spirit, the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, into the lives, into the hearts of those who trust in Jesus, meaning they have a living heart.

We have a new heart, a heart that is beating and responsive to the Spirit's touch.

So this morning, I want to invite you to check your pulse.

Not this one.

Check your spiritual pulse.

Do you know that you know that you know that your heart has been made alive with Christ?

Ephesians 2 says, we, on our own, were dead, spiritually dead in our transgressions and sins.

But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, has made us alive with Christ.

So check your pulse.

Do you know that your heart has been made alive?

I want to tell you the good news this morning that your heart can be made alive if you will trust Jesus.

The invitation is eternal life.

We want to be a community of faith, of people with living, beating, spirit-responding hearts.

And we want that because Solomon says, above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from the heart.

Everything you do flows from your heart, so check your pulse first, which brings us to the flow.

Verse 24.

Keep your mouth free of perversity.

Keep corrupt talk far from your lips.

Let your eyes look straight ahead.

Fix your gaze directly before you.

Give careful thought to the paths for your feet.

And be steadfast in all your ways.

Do not turn to the right or the left.

Keep your foot from evil.

Everything you do, Solomon says, flows from your heart.

And so that's what I mean by flow.

I mean everything you do.

Your life is the flow from your heart.

When you look at this passage, notice the body language.

Mouth, lips, eyes, feet.

This is wisdom for living well in the body.

Wisdom for how we make a flourishing life in the midst of this kind of stuff.

Did you know that across the Book of Proverbs, there's something like 800 different proverbs?

800 unique proverbial sayings, and a massive theme across the Book of Proverbs is wisdom for how to live well in this.

Living well in the body.

Wisdom like keep your mouth free of perversity.

That's a good thing to hold on to, to live well.

Keep corrupt talk far from your lips.

Let your eyes look straight ahead.

Fix your gaze directly before you.

Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways.

Don't turn to the right or the left.

Keep your foot from evil.

This is wisdom for living well in the body, and Proverbs is full of that.

The danger is that we could spend our entire life trying to deal with these issues, trying to apply every one of the 800 Proverbs, trying to curb the flow of our life, trying to squeeze ourselves into a person who is good and right and wise all the time.

In fact, that's what religion does.

Religion is a lifetime spent trying to transform yourself to live a wise life.

But Solomon would say here in Proverbs that all of your life flows from the heart.

It's not about the flow of your life, but it all comes from the heart.

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.

The way of Jesus is not a list of things that you need to do, and do, and do, and do.

The way of Jesus is an invitation to life with God, and life with God involves transformation.

That means that the gospel, the good news, is not about behavior modification, it's about heart transformation.

I'm going to say that again for the note takers.

The gospel is not about behavior modification, it's about heart transformation.

Maybe you've heard the quote before, Jesus didn't come to make bad people good, he came to make dead people alive.

That's a great quote.

Unfortunately, it was Ravi Zacharias who was credited as saying that.

And if you don't know who that is, he's a very prominent Christian leader who's died now, but he had a significant moral failure.

It seems like maybe Ravi Zacharias had the second part of that sentence and not the first part.

It would seem like, and I don't want to sit in judgment because I, of course, never knew the person, but it would seem like he professed a sincere faith in Jesus as Lord, that he was a dead man come alive.

But I don't think he got the first part, that a dead man come alive is supposed to make a bad person good.

Now, it's not that we throw out the first and hold on to the second, but that we get the order right between the two.

Religion says, make yourself a bad person come good, and then you'll get the prize.

But the gospel is that we have been made alive with Christ.

Therefore, that heart of living, beating, spirit-filled heart will work itself out into our life.

It will affect the flow of our life and make a bad person good.

We have to get the order right between these two things.

It starts in the heart and flows from there.

And this, I think, is the essence of the Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew 5-7, Jesus constantly takes it back to the heart.

Remember the six antitheses, the latter part of chapter 5.

Jesus says six times, you've heard that it was said, but I tell you.

He says, you've heard that it was said, you shall not murder.

But I tell you, Jesus says, the heart of God behind the command to not murder was not only that we would not kill other human beings, but that we would be formed into a person who doesn't hold others in contempt.

When Jesus says, you shall not commit adultery, yes, it's about stopping sleeping with people who aren't your spouse, but more so, it's about the transformation of a heart that would not lust at another person, that would not objectify another human being made in the image of God.

The entire Sermon on the Mount, Jesus takes a surface level command that the Pharisees were tempted to hold, and he gets to the heart of the matter.

In fact, Jonathan Pennington, who's a commentator on the Sermon on the Mount, he says, the heart of the matter is the matter of the heart.

Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus takes it to the heart, and the vision of life that Jesus offers is one of a renewed heart that is made alive by grace through faith in Christ.

But it doesn't stop there.

It works out into the rest of your life.

And so I invite you to consider your flow.

Consider the flow of your life.

What is your life like?

The decisions you make, the circumstance that you live in, it's flowing from your heart.

And all of us, I know, all of us struggle with the things that Jesus talks about in the Sermon on the Mount.

Envy, lust, greed, idolatry, anger, all these things.

So consider the flow of your life.

And consider, is that reflective, is that consistent with a heart that is made alive by grace through faith in Christ alone?

Consider that.

And we might pray, we will pray later on, that the Holy Spirit would make that living heart transform us from the inside out.

Which brings us to the feed, Proverbs 4 verse 20.

And so we've skipped back to the top of the passage.

We started in the middle, then the end, now we're back at the start.

Proverbs 4 verse 20, My son, pay attention to what I say.

Turn your ear to my words.

Do not let them out of your sight.

Keep them within your heart, for they are life to those who find them, and health to one's whole body.

The heart, the flow, the feed.

The question that Solomon raises in these few verses is, who are you listening to?

Whose voice is loudest in your life?

In other words, what wisdom are you feeding on?

We're kind of working with an implicit metaphor of a river here, that your heart is somewhere in the river, and everything you do flows from that, but the river of your life is fed from a thousand streams.

So, what are you feeding on is what Solomon is asking us.

The first two words he says is, my son.

If you're familiar with the Book of Proverbs, you'll know that this father-son, parent-child motif is dominant throughout the entire Book of Proverbs.

In fact, Proverbs 1 verse 1, the first verse of the entire Book, the Proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel.

And so, we are, I think, invited to read the Proverbs as the gift of wisdom from father to son, and from son to son to son to son.

But it all stems from God.

These are some of what the early chapters of Proverbs talk about in the father-son relationship.

My son, do not forget my teaching.

My son, do not let wisdom and understanding out of your sight.

Listen, my sons, to a father's instruction.

Listen, my son, accept what I say.

My son, pay attention to what I say.

My son, pay attention to my wisdom.

Now, then, my sons, listen to me.

It's again and again and again throughout Proverbs, this kind of invitation from father to son to listen to wisdom.

Listen to the wisdom of those who've gone before like a son learning life from a father.

When I think about learning wisdom from my father, I think of lots and lots and lots of significant things.

One of the less significant things has to do with tyres, as in tyres of a car.

Now, I've not lived very, very long on this earth, but I've had more than a lifetime share of tire-related issues in my life.

One time, I mean, dad's always said, don't change a car's tire on a hill.

He said that.

That's what my father said.

Wisdom from my father.

And mom and dad live in Mount Kola, as in Mount Cola.

And one time, I had a tire-related issue, and I tried to change the tire on the hill.

And as soon as you jack it up, the wheels lift, the entire car lurches forward, jams the jack, the whole thing's a mess.

It's impossible to get the thing undone, roll bumpily down the hill to the bottom and replace the tire.

Another time, dad said, You should probably wear shoes if you're going out driving for a long time.

I would go out for big drives when I was a teenager.

And I was like, That's good wisdom, yep.

But it wasn't until I had a tire-related incident in my teen years, and I had to stand on the scaldingly hot asphalt, changing a tire, that I learnt you should wear shoes when you drive.

The third time, the third piece of wisdom about tires I've learnt from my father is, when the mechanic changes tires, sometimes they put those bolts on so tight that you cannot get it off by yourself.

So he said, You should probably keep a bit of leverage, like a pole in the car, that you can do it.

And it wasn't until I was barefoot trying to jump on the thing, or trying to get this wheel undone, that I realized my father has wisdom that I can learn from.

That's Proverbs.

Proverbs says, Don't pay your own dumb tax.

Learn from not only father, community.

Learn from people who went before you, so that you don't make the mistakes that they did.

We are invited to desire wisdom.

The truth is that if we are not intentionally seeking wisdom, we are unintentionally listening to a hundred other voices, and they won't be wise voices.

So think about what you feed on.

Think about what your heart feeds on.

I was reflecting this week on the fact that I find it a little bit scary that the home page of any social media platform is called the feed.

Every social media platform has a feed, and it is feeding us.

Some more than others, probably generally lower younger generations.

But social media is feeding us.

Now years ago, when I was a teenager, I remember that social media used to be chronological in its feed.

So you'd scroll on Instagram and it's like, oh wow, somebody's at the cricket and someone's had a baby and someone's engaged and you're scrolling.

And then that glorious moment, you get to the bottom and it says, you're all caught up.

And so you close your phone and you put it in your pocket, and you think, I've connected with my virtual friends around the place.

Then they changed it from a chronological feed to an algorithmic feed that has no end.

It literally doesn't end.

The algorithm is feeding you what you want to see, what you respond to, what you seem to like, and it never ends.

And that stuff is coming into our heart.

And if we believe the wisdom of Proverbs, it is coming, it's coming into our heart and out of our heart again.

Affecting the way that we think.

Do you know what the Oxford 2024 Word of the Year was?

Brain rot.

The teenagers are in the room, so ask your nearest teenager what brain rot means.

Brain rot, as I understand it, is when you are just mindlessly consuming very low-level content, it rots your brain.

But you get stuck because it's so entertaining.

This is the world that we live in, the world that we are moving towards.

Brain rotting, that we are feeding on stuff that is killing us from the inside out.

And I'm the worst of them all.

No judgment from me.

Here's a cool story.

Professor Larry Gross in the US ran a huge study of a massive amount of Americans.

He surveyed their responses, their opinions, on key divisive social issues, the kind of things that people have really different opinions.

And, of course, in a sample of thousands of people, you have conservatives tend to think this, progressives tend to moderates the full spectrum of human opinion.

But then they looked at how much television those people watched.

And they found that the more television a person watches, the more their views tend to be confined to a narrow range, the range of what the view is that's being put forth from the TV.

And so what they found, and they were kind of intrigued by this fact, they pushed deeper into the data, they found that knowing how much television a person watches was a better predictor of the way that that person would think on a given key social issue than who they voted for in the last election.

So in America, you have Democrats and Republicans.

It doesn't matter who you voted for in the last election, if you watch a lot of TV, you will think the same way as somebody from the other party who watches the same amount of TV.

The point is, the science is showing us that what we feed on, forms us.

We believe the lie that it's just entertainment that goes in one ear and out the other, but it goes in and it stays in there.

We are being formed from the inside out.

And in one sense, this is kind of new research, but it's what the Proverbs have been saying all along.

Guard your heart.

Because what comes into your heart flows from your heart.

So guard your heart.

What is your heart feeding on?

What are you watching?

What are you reading?

What are you thinking about?

What are you putting before your eyes?

I want to invite you to curate your feed.

Curate your feed.

And I mean, in social media terms, you know the little dot, dot, dot, I want to see less of this?

That's really helpful.

Over time, you can kind of curb some of the more outlandish things that you get shown.

Kind of curb it a little bit, but honestly, it's probably a lost cause social media.

I mean, more generally in life, curate your feed.

Because if you are not curating the things that you listen to, somebody else is.

And I guarantee they're not curating it based on the wisdom of Scripture.

You are responsible for what you put in front of your eyes and what you dwell on.

Paul says in Philippians 4 verse 8, finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about those things.

Paul gets it.

He knows that what comes into us forms us and flows out of us.

So, he says, think about good things and that will transform you.

For me, that's why I make a habit of reading the Sermon on the Mount almost constantly.

I've decided to try and memorize the Sermon on the Mount and I'm about a third of the way through.

And that is because I do have an Instagram account and I do like movies, I do like TV shows, and if that is forming me, then I need the voice of Scripture to form me louder.

I need the influence of godly things to be stronger than the influence of the world.

And we all need that.

So I invite you to curate your feed.

Proverbs 4, 23.

Above all else, guard your heart for everything you do flows from it.

The feed, the heart, the flow.

And so I want to leave you with these three things.

Check your pulse.

Do you know that you know that you know that you have been made alive in the heart with Christ?

And all I mean is, have you trusted Jesus with your life?

Have you in repentance said, God, I can't make anything out of this life.

I'm dead in my sin.

But you have done what is necessary on the cross to make me alive.

Check your pulse.

Secondly, consider your flow.

Look at your life.

The things that you struggle with, the good things.

Everything about your life.

Is it consistent with the heart that is made alive by grace through faith in Christ alone?

Consider your flow and curate your feed.

Don't go with the flow of the algorithm.

Control it, curate it, dwell on good things, and that will transform you in partnership with the Spirit.

And ultimately, these are the words of Jesus.

This is the invitation for us.

Jesus said in John 7, verse 38, whoever believes in me, as scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.

That's the invitation of Jesus.

That by trusting in him, your heart would be made alive.

That you would think on excellent things, praiseworthy things, godly things, and that the flow of your life would be like a river of living water in your family, your marriage, your workplace, your school, your university.

A river of living water flowing from you to the people around you.

Don't you want that?

A river of living water.

That's the invitation for us.

So let me pray now as the band comes up.

I pray that the Holy Spirit might do a work in our hearts to make us alive and to transform us from the inside out.

Let me pray.

Lord Jesus, we acknowledge that we are dead in our transgressions without you.

We can't try hard enough, give enough, pray enough to earn our place before you, but we thank you, Jesus, that you came down from the Father to become like us, to take our death on yourself and to rise again.

And when you breathed your spirit in us, you quickened us to life again.

And so, now we have spiritual life in the heart and we are grateful for that, Lord.

And we ask Holy Spirit that you would continue that work, renew us from the inside out, that our life would be different.

Help us in the 200 different places that we're coming from, to walk in step with the Spirit.

Help us to curate our feeds, to think on excellent and praiseworthy things, that you might be glorified.

God, our heart is that you, Holy Spirit, would make us like a fountain, a river of living water, that your life, your grace, your love, would flow from us to this world that you love so much.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

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