Category: sermon-archive

NOT FITTING

Proverbs 26:1 NET.

Like snow in summer or rain in harvest, so honor is not fitting for a fool.

Today’s passage is another standalone proverb from the book of Proverbs. It is not part of a series focused on a specific theme. I chose this verse because it is highly relevant to our modern 21st-century culture. We have a biblical responsibility to speak into our current culture and shed light on it with the principles taught in God’s Word. If we don’t do that, we might give people the impression that the Bible has nothing to say about what people are discussing in the public arena.

We need to be cautious when we do this so that we don’t give the impression that we agree with people because we oppose their opponents. This often happens when Christians speak out in the political arena. If we advocate for compassion for refugees, we might be perceived as aligning with Democrats. If we oppose abortion, we might seem like Republicans. However, Christians can support both positions because our understanding of justice is based on the Bible, not the platforms of either major political party.

So, please understand that what I am saying this morning does not come from the right or the left. It is not from the red or the blue. It is a biblical proverb, and those are meant to teach all people how to make appropriate decisions in their lives. In the Bible, the wise choice is not based on strategy. It is not based on majority rule. It is not based on economics. In the Bible, the wise choice is the morally correct choice—always.

The fools will think you are a fool if you do the right thing. The mocker will mock you for being naïve. The sluggard will accuse you of acting recklessly. The schemer will criticize you for not being devious enough. But if you focus on doing what is morally right, God will smile on you. You may not get rich quickly, but you will never have a reason to feel guilty or ashamed of your actions.

Some things just don’t fit right.

Today’s proverb begins by discussing two things that don’t belong together. They are out of place. First is snow in summer. We might expect snow in the cold winter months. But seeing snow on a summer day means something is off. The weather isn’t right for snow. I grew up in Florida, and I remember it snowed once. It landed on the ground but melted right away. The only place it stayed was on the tops of the cars. So, we kids collected it from the car tops to make snowballs—which, of course, is what snow is for. If we got snow here in Delco during the summer, I bet it would melt fast. The point of the proverb is that snow in the summer is out of place.

The second thing that is out of place is rain during harvest. You don’t want it to rain then because it would interfere with the harvest. You need dry weather to get the crops in before they spoil. Once again, the point is that such rain would be out of place. It wouldn’t be fitting.

The thing that these two similes point to – the thing that is not fitting – is honoring a fool.

Some people we should honor.

We know from the Bible that God should always be honored and glorified. He is our creator and sustainer. We are also told that the Son should be honored as well as the Father, so Jesus is worthy of our honor and worship.

The fifth of the Ten Commandments tells us to honor our parents. It is the only commandment that promises that those who follow it will have things go well with them and that their lives will be long.

The Bible also encourages younger people to honor and show respect to the elderly. When my family lived in the Philippines, we got used to younger folks placing their hands on their elders’ foreheads as a sign of respect and blessing.

The Bible also encourages respect and honor for the governing authorities. This includes more than just paying our obligatory taxes. It also means showing community, state, and national leaders respect for their offices. We could use a lot more of that in our society today.

The Bible also encourages believers to honor their church leaders. Some faith communities do this very well, but many of our evangelical denominations are so careful not to idolize their leaders that they wind up not showing respect for church offices at all.

The Bible also encourages us to honor the institution of marriage. We often find this challenging. So many marriages fail. Many of our marriages appear to be under attack, both from outside influences and internal struggles.

The Bible also encourages us to make note of those whose lives reflect God’s wisdom and righteousness. We should honor such people and make them our heroes. We should pattern our lives after theirs.

The Bible also encourages believers to treat one another as equals – especially when it comes to honor and respect. In fact, the command is for us to honor one another above ourselves. That means giving deference to others instead of our own opinions and backgrounds.

With all these instructions about honoring others, it seems odd that the Bible would teach us not to honor someone. But this is the case. There are two reasons why honoring fools is not fitting.

Honoring fools encourages their foolishness.

Fools despise wisdom and instruction (1:7), so if we honor them, we affirm their choice to remain ignorant. They have chosen careless ease when they should have chosen diligence. To honor such a choice is to dishonor the wise. They have chosen the path of destruction, and the more honor we show them, the more they will continue down that path.

In fact, Proverbs tells us that the wise person will inherit honor himself, but he is instructed to hold fools up to public contempt (3:35). It is not wise to simply ignore the foolishness around us. We have to expose it. If we do not expose it, the foolish will never learn how ridiculous they are. Children do silly things, but if their parents are wise, they will rebuke and even punish their children so they know. It is not healthy or loving to ignore it when the child acts up.

The Bible encourages us to choose wise friends so we learn to act wisely as they do. It says, “The one who associates with the wise grows wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm” (13:20). As teenagers, we learn that if we run with a bad crowd, we will find ourselves doing the bad things that our friends do. Imagine that!

We need to be discerning about who we spend our time with. Both wisdom and foolishness feed on the approval we give them. If we choose to be around foolish people who do irrational things, not only will we learn those behaviors, but the fools will never learn to do anything else.

Honoring fools spreads their foolishness.

The second reason that honoring fools is not fitting is that it turns the wise into fools.  If we stay around people who have chosen to live ungodly lives, that ungodliness will spread to us. The people we listen to and learn from will make us like them. They can infest us with their foolishness.

I believe this proverb is highly relevant for our 21st-century audience because we now have many different ways to invite someone into our lives. In the past, if you wanted to establish a connection with someone, you would have needed to visit them at their home or ask them to come to yours. Today, people connect through many different methods. The old ways of mail, television, movies, and the telephone have now been supplemented by texting, email, streaming, and social media.

One of the things this entails is that there are now various ways we can be influenced by people we don’t know. If we don’t know them, we don’t know what their attitude toward God and his word is.

Let me present another analogy to illustrate how risky this is. Imagine you took a bunch of pills and stored them all in one box. You grabbed some pills from your medicine cabinet, others from mine, and some from the local pharmacy. But you don’t recognize any of the pills, and you have no idea what they’re for or their side effects. Would it be wise to open the box, pick a random pill every hour, and swallow it with a glass of water? Anyone would agree that this isn’t a good idea. When it comes to our medicine, we prefer to take only what a trusted doctor prescribes, and even then, we want to know all potential side effects, the condition the pill is meant to treat, how often we should take it, and when we should stop. Pills influence our health, so we are very discriminate about which pills we take.

I hope the Lord comes back soon, but if he delays his coming, I think people will look back on this period of human history and characterize it as one in which the population as a whole was indiscriminate in whom it chose to honor. We let just anybody in to speak to us and tell us what to eat, who to love, what to buy, and how to live.

Some people think we are on the wrong road by introducing artificial intelligence into our culture. That may be true, but it might also be that the human intelligence we have been relying on is already faulty and corrupt. How do we know what we know? If we have no standard to determine whether a statement is true or untrue, how safe is our knowledge?

One of the most elementary ways to show respect to someone is to trust what they say. But in a world full of fools, sluggards, mockers, and schemers, it is not wise to trust everyone. It is not wise to honor everyone. Some of the people trying to educate us deserve public contempt. Some who are trying to lead us need to be voted out of office. Some who are trying to gain a following should be censored because they are telling lies. We can defend their freedom of speech without allowing them to teach our children. We can protect their freedom to believe what they want without allowing them to indoctrinate our children. Respecting them as citizens does not entail our honoring their influence.

We should be asking ourselves how the next generation will evaluate us. Will they consider us wise? The apostle Paul said that Jesus gave the church its leaders so that we could become mature, no longer like children, “tossed back and forth by waves and carried about by every wind of teaching by the trickery of people who craftily carry out their deceitful schemes but practicing the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into Christ, who is the head” (Ephesians 4:14-15).

He envisioned a world in which believers matured so they could be influencers. That is what Jesus said he wanted, too. He told us that we are the light of the world.

The world has enough fools. Are you ready to become wise and spread God’s wisdom? Are you prepared to let God change you so that he can then use you to change others? That is what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

HEAVY LIFTING

Proverbs 12:25   Anxiety in a person’s heart weighs him down, but an encouraging word brings him joy.

Tuesday, we began reading through the book of Proverbs, two chapters a day. Some time ago, we spent several months studying the Proverbs in our Sunday evening Bible Studies. For that reason, I don’t think we must cover everything the book has to say in the two Sundays we have for sermons on Proverbs. Instead, I will summarize some of the main ideas in Proverbs while considering the teachings of just two verses that I believe are especially relevant for life today.

Proverbs is a collection of wise sayings compiled by Solomon, the son of David. This compilation occurred approximately a thousand years before the birth of Christ.  There is only one hero of the Proverbs. This is the wise person. Wise people learn wisdom from their parents and live the right sort of lives so that they avoid the pitfalls of being unwise.

There is only one kind of wise person, but there are very many different kinds of unwise person. The unwise people are the villains of the book of Proverbs. They appear throughout the book and take different names. Each name identifies the way in which this particular kind of unwise person deviates from the wisdom the book teaches.

So, here is a roster of the villains in Proverbs:

The Stupid Villains

The book of Proverbs refers to these people as fools. They are fools because they choose to ignore God’s wisdom. They disregard the instructions of wise people, whether from their parents or other leaders. They “despise wisdom and instruction” (1:7). They hate knowledge (1:22). They live carelessly, even when making decisions that can potentially destroy them.

I saw a cartoon once that illustrates the power of stupidity. It was a Hägar the Horrible cartoon. There is a character in this cartoon called Lucky Eddie. Lucky Eddy has a bow and arrow. He has pulled back the bow, getting ready to send the arrow to its target. But there is something wrong. Eddie has the arrow pointed not away from him, but directly at his own face. A passerby sees this and tries to intervene. He wants to tell Eddie that the arrow is aimed in the wrong direction and it could kill him. But Hägar stops the man from intervening. He explains, “No, that’s the only way he’ll learn.”

The point of the Proverbs is that these fools are making choices that will inevitably lead to their own destruction. Wise people must intervene because the fools are making unwise choices, which will lead to disaster.  The fools are convinced that they are right, but they are not only wrong; they are often mistaken with a loud voice.

The Psalms tell us that fools convince themselves that there is no God (Psalm 14:1; 53:1). They begin with a practical atheism that renders them incapable of approaching wisdom. The Proverbs teach us to stay away from such fools and not to listen to their babbling.

The Scoffing Villains

The second type of villain introduced in Proverbs is the mockers. They are arrogant and disrespectful, and distrustful. If we try to correct the scoffing villains, they will insult us (9:7). When I was growing up, we used to say about such people that they were too big for their britches. The Proverbs warns such people that “The eye that mocks at a father and despises obeying a mother — the ravens of the valley will peck it out and the young vultures will eat it” (30:17).

The Slothful Villains

The third type of villain in Proverbs is not foolish because they are ignorant or arrogant. They are just too lazy to learn the correct way to live. These are the sluggards.  They are not motivated to do anything, so they will not amount to anything. They should learn the lesson from the ant and be industrious. But the way they are going is going to lead them to poverty and destitution.

The Scheming Villains

The final type in my little roster today is the scheming villain. They may seem to be our friends, inviting us to share in their table. But there is always an angle to their kindness. They are trying to get rich by taking advantage of others. If they give a party, we should politely decline their invitation.

But the book of Proverbs is not always trying to get us to avoid the villains. Often, the goal is to teach us how to be the heroes of our own lives. The goal is not simply to avoid foolishness, but to act wisely. Wisdom is about learning to do the right thing and making wise decisions. Today’s verse is an example of that.

It talks about anxiety, but the Hebrew word used is not the same word that is usually translated as fear.

Fear is a gift, but anxiety is a curse.

There are, of course, some abnormal fears. We call them phobias. But normal fear is actually a gift. It is a heightened sense of danger that can trigger in us the adrenaline we need to either fight off the threat or flee from it. Normal fear is a gift from God, and it is not something we should try to eradicate from our lives.

But the anxiety that today’s verse talks about is something else entirely. It is a sense of dread that lodges itself inside the human heart. This anxiety sits in the heart and weighs it down. It removes the everyday happiness that makes living a joy and working a blessing.  It creates its own gravity, sending every thought downward into depression and disillusionment.

The heart in the Bible is a symbol of the central thoughts and desires of the human being. When the heart becomes weighed down, its owner feels as though there is no longer any reason to live. Many commit suicide because they stop having any hope of things getting better. They see only despair and disappointment in their future.

This feeling can happen at any stage in a person’s life. This horrible gravity can weigh down both young people and older individuals. It can inflict its damage on a person anywhere along the spectrum of intelligence. It can attack a man or a woman, a boy or a girl. The rich are not immune to its power. People experiencing poverty cannot avoid its influence.

Many live with the pressure of anxiety.

In 2021, they did a survey that discovered that anxiety was the most common mental disorder and affected an estimated 359 million people in the world. Between 1990 and 2019, the number of people being affected by anxiety increased by over 55%. They discovered that people at a higher socio-economic level are more likely to suffer from anxiety. Poverty can cause depression, but wealth is no defense against it. They also discovered that anxiety disorders are becoming more and more prevalent among adolescents and young adults. Age can lead to depression, but youth is not a defense against it.

But the heaviness that today’s verse talks about is not just the result of a mental disorder. The Proverbs seems to be discussing a problem that any one of us can experience. Anxiety can lodge itself inside our hearts, putting pressure on us and keeping us from seeing any way out or any hope for recovery.

That is the problem. However, the Holy Spirit never introduces us to a problem without revealing an answer to it. In fact, every situation presents an opportunity for us to make a wise decision that alleviates the problem. The solution to the problem of a heavy heart I an encouraging word.

Our encouragement can help.

This is where the heavy lifting (from today’s title) comes into play. Our friends, our family members, and our fellow church members are in danger of falling prey to the heavy heart syndrome. They can become victims. That means that we have the opportunity to become the heroes of their stories.

The book of Job is a lesson in how not to deal with personal anxiety. Job suffered loss, disaster, and despair. His wife was no help. She just told him to curse God and die. His friends were no help. They just lectured him about his hidden sins that supposedly led to his troubles. Job’s story is a lesson for all of us in how not to lift the heavy burden of anxiety from a hurting heart.

But today’s verse tells us how it can be done. It says that an encouraging word brings joy to the anxious person. That is what we have the opportunity to do. We can replace the heavy heart with a joyful heart.

There are probably as many ways to encourage someone as there are ways to become discouraged. Here are some ways to encourage a person with a heavy heart.

We can encourage them with our testimony. If we have ever experienced the kind of anxiety that the victim is experiencing, we can tell our story, showing them that rescue from that predicament is possible. One reason that anxiety can be so damaging is that it convinces its victims that they are the only ones who have ever felt this badly. But by sharing our testimonies, we let the victims know that we were once there too, and by God’s grace, we were able to overcome it.

We can also encourage them with our prayers. Even if we have never experienced the kind of pressure that our anxious friends are facing, we can show them that we care by interceding for them in prayer. I, myself, have been there. I have been going through a rough time, and when my friends prayed for me, I saw no immediate result of the prayer. But as soon as they prayed, I felt the result in my heart. The heaviness I had felt began to lift slightly. Prayer does change things, even when the prayer does not seem to be answered. The act of praying itself can be a source of encouragement.

We can encourage them with the promises from the Bible. The devil wants to destroy people with anxiety. He wants them to feel like they are all alone in their problems, and God is somewhere distant. But the promises of God can lift that burden. Psalm 23 shows how the psalmist encouraged himself by meditating on God’s promise to guide him as a shepherd.

We can encourage them by reminding them who God is. They need to know that there is a power greater than the problem they are currently facing. They need to be reminded that God is Almighty. There is nothing too complicated for him. They also need to be reminded that God is loving and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in mercy and faithfulness.

But what if we still cannot find the words to say? My advice is – wait it out. Stay with our hurting friends and give them the gift of our time. At some point, the God of all comfort will provide us with words to say to lift the heavy loads of anxiety from the hearts of our friends. While we wait for the words to say, we can be silently praying for those encouraging words. Jesus commands us to ask, and he promises to give what we ask for. Surely, he wants us to minister to those of a heavy heart.

Encouraging those who are feeling anxiety is just one of the many ministries that every believer can be involved in. You do not need a seminary degree. You do not need an impressive church title. You don’t have to be on the church board. You don’t have to possess a special spiritual gift. Today’s text tells us that all we need is an encouraging word. It seems like a tiny thing. But most of us can share our own experience when we were weighed down with anxiety, and somebody came along and just said the right thing to lighten our load. Let’s be that somebody for somebody else.