Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

Now that is indeed our heart’s great hope and desire is it not that our family should be this picture of blessedness of the Psalms. To that end, today’s sermon text is found in Proverbs chapter 23 beginning at verse 12 through Proverbs 24 verse 4. Proverbs 23 beginning at verse 12. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Proverbs 23, beginning in verse 12.

Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to words of knowledge. Do not withhold correction from a child. For if you beat him with the rod, he will not die. You shall beat him with the rod and deliver his soul from hell. My son, if your heart is wise, my heart will rejoice. Indeed, I myself. Yes, my inmost being will rejoice when your lips speak right things. Do not let your heart envy sinners, but be zealous for the fear of the Lord all the day, for surely there is a hereafter, and your hope will not be cut off.

Hear, my son, and be wise, and guide your heart in the way. Do not mix with wine bibbers, or with gluttonous eaters of meat, for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and drowsiness will clothe a man with rags. Listen to your father who begat you. Do not despise your mother when she is old. Buy the truth and do not sell it. Also wisdom and instruction and understanding. The father of the righteous will greatly rejoice.

And he who begets a wise child will delight in him. Let your father and your mother be glad. And let her who bore you rejoice. My son, give me your heart, and let your eyes observe my ways. For a harlot is a deep pit. And a seductress is a narrow well. She also lies in wait as for a victim and increases the unfaithful among men. Who has woe, who has sorrow, who has contentions, who has complaints, who has wounds without cause, who has redness of eyes, those who linger long at the wine, those who go in search of mixed wine.

Do not look on the wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup when it swirls around smoothly. At the last it bites like a serpent, stings like a viper. Your eyes will see strange things. Your heart will utter perverse things. Yes, you’ll be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea, like one who is at the top of the mast, saying, “They have struck me, but I was not hurt. They have beaten me, but I did not feel it. When shall I awake that I may seek another drink?” Do not be envious of evil men, nor desire to be with them. For their heart devises violence, and their lips talk of troublemaking. Though through wisdom a house is built and by understanding it is established, by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.

Let’s pray. Father, it is our desire that this house here, your extended family, that our own houses where we come from and dwell in, that the civil house as well in which we dwell here in this city, this county, in this state, in this country, that all of these houses and dwelling places may be places of great beautiful things, pleasant things, rare things, and delightful things.

To that end, Lord God, we know that we have no ability in ourselves to accomplish this. We have no wisdom of our own selves or of our own intellect, but rather we turn, Lord God, to your wisdom, and we ask that your Holy Spirit would open our hearts, open our ears to hear these things, that indeed we might conform our lives to them in the power of the spirit that we might be filled with the wisdom of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ as your children. Help us, Lord God, then to know things, to obey them, to rejoice in them, to have our lives lived out skillfully and beautifully toward the ends that you have told us are proper using the means that are wise. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. Well, that beautiful picture from Psalm 127 and 128. And you know, there’s all these talks about the Christian family and what a delightful thing it is. And we’ve said this before, but in an excellent article, I believe it was called “The Sermon in the Lunch,” C.S. Lewis talks about what a lie so many of those things can be. That is, at least if we mean by that that we can easily appropriate these things. And if our family doesn’t look like the family in Psalm 127–28, that somehow we’re way off the mark.

All too often, our families are the worst places to dwell in. Because in our families, we have the confidence of knowing through various mechanisms that we’re going to accept each other and we probably won’t leave each other. So we feel free to sin in ways which are really horrific. But that’s the way it is all too frequently. We desire our families to be reformed. We desire for our families to be places of great peace and beauty. And we know that apart from the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, we can’t do that.

Now, we’ve been talking in John’s gospel the last few weeks about these middle sections where he enters into these long debates with the Jews and over and over again he tells them that he’s the son and he’s doing what the father has revealed to him. The relationship of father and son is where we left off in that series on John’s gospel where we ended up in chapter 8. When I get back from Poland a month from today I’ll be in chapter 9 where we get to the healing of the blind man. But remember, we’ve been talking in John’s gospel about the glorious liberty of the sons of God, the children of God. We want to explore some of that—what it means to be correct children to a father, us to our father in heaven, our children to us.

We have in the gospels the portrayal of the father that can be an assistance to fathers of homes with children rather. It can be an assistance to fathers who have oversight or management responsibilities at work. You’re to be a householder at work, so to speak. Cott Mather has a wonderful book that he wrote called *Beneficus*, on doing good, and there’s a separate chapter in there just for men who have businesses to sort of see the responsibility to correctly father, in a sense, the people at their place of work.

We have fathers at church, so to speak, fathers in the civil government. The role of father is an apprehension by the spirit of God of the fatherhood of the Father in heaven and to be good children—which we all are—in either a functional relationship to the state or to the church or to a business or certainly to our own children growing up—you know, to be a proper son God gives us the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is a spirit of sonship.

So we have our roles rather properly defined by a contemplation of the heavenly Father and a contemplation of Jesus in his ministry on earth as the Son. More than that, what we have is the empowerment of God through these roles, so to speak, through these different persons of the Trinity that equip us to do these things.

I’m going to talk today about the Proverbs and the very heart of the Proverbs. But you know, in a bad way, what you could do with this sermon is go away and try to be better. Try to put more strength and energy into doing what you’re supposed to do and to do that in the flesh, so to speak, without a reliance upon the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Remember that after the feeding of the 5,000, they asked Jesus, “What work do we have to do to get these neat blessings?” And he says, “The work of the father is to believe on the one that he sent”—with kind of a double meaning. This is the father’s work. You can’t do it yourself. The father will give you this. It is his work to bring you to faith in Christ. But your part, your work is to believe. And you’re to believe that this relationship of father and son that’s portrayed for us is now yours through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And I believe that worship is about putting into your lives these attributes of God, the communicable attributes. And specifically, it’s through God’s word and sacrament today that you will become better fathers, that you’ll become better children. I’m not saying you don’t have to work at all. But I’m saying that it would be really wrong to have moralism where there’s an external obedience to certain commandments that somehow don’t flow from a proper heart attitude or aren’t being done and accomplished in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ and the power of the spirit of Christ. It doesn’t do any good to just tack some things on to an otherwise secular view of things.

I’m going to be speaking on the seven deadly sins in Poland and also on the seven letters to the seven churches. A children’s outline on the reverse side is a little word search on the seven deadly sins in Gilligan’s Island. I sort of regret almost doing that, but it kind of makes the whole thing rather comedic. You know, the characters on Gilligan’s Island are a portrayal of the seven deadly sins. On the other hand, it makes it practical for those of you familiar with the show. It’s a way to remember some of the manifestations of that.

And these Proverbs we’ll look at today clearly have the seven deadly sins involved in them in major fashion—at least six of them in a very major way. So I’ve put that on the back. But the way we get away from the seven deadly sins is what Revelation 2 and 3, the seven letters to the seven churches tell us. And you’ll remember, if you were here when I preached through that or from your own Bible reading, that Jesus goes to each of these seven churches and he says, “This is who I am.” He gives an attribute of who he is. Then he tells them, “You’ve done some things good and you’ve done some things bad. And the things that you’ve done bad, what you need to do them right is this attribute that I’ve just described to you.”

So he says, “I have the sword, right? I’m going to give you the sword,” and to a particular church whose difficulty was they weren’t willing to discipline people. But see, he gives them his power to rule and have exercise authority through discipline. So Jesus calls us together and never brings us to conviction of sin without at the same time portraying who he is. And he says, “This is the gift I give you today. I give you the gift today specifically of sonship. I am the perfect son.”

When we read of the son in Proverbs, that’s Jesus Christ ultimately—the wise son. That’s who he is. And as fathers, he gives us today fatherhood. God the Father gives us those attributes of what a true father is like. The way he acted toward the Lord Jesus Christ. So that’s our goal today: to become better fathers and sons and, by implication, mothers and daughters. And then this has application even if you’re not part of a family these days at this point in your life. It has application to the workplace, to the church, and to the civil state as well.

We don’t want moralism. So believe in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we pray that God would give us that work today.

Now, I said that we’re going to deal at the very heart—I believe it’s the heart of the book of Proverbs. Proverbs is an exceedingly important book, now more than ever in the life of the church. Proverbs is given to make a prince into a king. You know, the beginning and ends of books are important. Genesis begins at the garden and the fall. By the end of Genesis, the whole world is brought to salvation through the work of Joseph, picturing the culmination of the salvation of the whole world through the greater Joseph, Jesus.

Exodus begins in slavery in Egypt. It ends with freedom, but the freedom is explicitly freedom to worship. Because the last half of Exodus they’re at Sinai, they’re receiving all these instructions on how to worship God and they’ve entered into Sabbath rest at Sinai and worship. So they’ve moved from slavery to Sabbath, right? So beginning and end.

Well, Proverbs begins by talking about a son and it ends with some king that we don’t know the historical identification of—Lemuel—who has become now a king who has received wisdom from his mother and now says what the virtuous wife is. The son needs a good wife and he needs to avoid the wrong kind of wife. I think Doug H. said that probably the most important thing for our young men and young women is to marry well. The book of Proverbs is about that. It’s about how to obtain the right wife. It’s about how to become a king, how to rule correctly.

And there are these progressions in the book of Proverbs and its different sections where you go from sort of simple stuff and then stuff about the family and how to become your own family man and then how to become a king.

In the bulk of the book, chapters 10 through 22, the formal collection of Proverbs of Solomon, 375—matching numerically his name, intentionally edited for that purpose—the first half of the book, you don’t hear the word king or Yahweh with any kind of significance because you’re moving toward that. In the book of Proverbs, you’re moving. You’re a teenager. You’re moving toward getting a wife and a family, exercising rule and authority there, and then eventually becoming kings in the context of church, state, business, etc. So that’s the movement of the book of Proverbs.

And Proverbs has five very well-defined sections to it. There’s a couple of introductions in the first nine chapters. And then there’s the Proverbs of Solomon, a collection, chapters 10 through the middle of 22. I think this is on your outlines. Yeah. Proverbs of Solomon, chapters 10 through 22a. And then there’s the Sayings of the Wise in 22b. In 22, beginning in verse 17, it says, “Now I’m going to give you some sayings of the wise.” These are the words of the wise. And there’s a little introduction that says, “Open up now. Get ready to receive these words of the wise.”

And in fact, this particular part of this book, the author says, “Have ready on your tongue at all times these words of the wise, have ready on your tongue to speak them forth at all times.” These are memorizing sort of things here—at least the concepts if not the actual verses. Have them ready. They’re going to be fairly simple but critical to moving you ahead.

After this, Hezekiah’s men brought together a collection of Solomon’s Proverbs that begins in chapters 25 and goes through 29. And then there’s two conclusions or appendices at the end of the book. The Ager in chapter 30 and Lemuel in 31. So it’s a very well-defined structure. And if we see these two major collections of Solomon’s Proverbs after the introduction and before the conclusion and then we see right at the middle of that are these words of the wise, you see it’s the pivot point of the book. That’s what I believe.

Now your translation may not say it and I don’t want to get into all the reasons why. But one of the problems of course with the Hebrew text is we’re not sure what some of the words mean. This is true in Proverbs. And there’s a verse that talks about “Haven’t I given you excellent sayings?” But most modern translations think that it indicates that there are 30 sayings of the wise that are given here in this section and then there’s a few more sayings tacked onto the end. Okay. So for purposes of this sermon, just think about this: The center is the words of the wise. The words and the wise—the bulk of them are a listing of 30 separate sayings—and I believe they’re in sections of 10 sayings a piece.

Now what I’m going to talk about today are sayings 11 through 20, if you want to look at it that way. This is the heart of the words of the wise. Okay. Words of the wise are the heart of this book of Proverbs. Proverbs is exceedingly important to know what father-son relationships are supposed to be like and to move children to reigning and exercising authority as kings.

Now, I say it’s a particularly important book for the church today because the church is wildly immature. R.G.M.’s book *Revolt Against Maturity* is a picture of our culture, but it’s primarily a picture of the church. Churches, you know, we want to get together and sing, you know, make believe that we’re six and seven years old, sing choruses. Now, some choruses are good. I don’t want to put them down in total, but when that’s the bulk of what you do at many contemporary worship services—is to act, you know, like you’re seven or eight years old and can’t sing meaty, theologically significant, musically intricate, and beautiful hymns—it’s just a picture of what’s gone wrong.

You know, wisdom is the correct application—knowing how to apply the law of God to a particular goal with particular means. You know, classical education: you learn a bunch of memorization of data and then when you get older, you learn to apply that in rhetoric and dialogue with people, right? But you think of the law and wisdom that same way. Can’t have wisdom without knowing the law. Solomon meditated on the law. He’s the king of Israel, the covenanted people. The background for Solomon’s grasp of Proverbs and his ability to communicate wisdom is understanding of covenant theology and the law of the covenant—all that stuff.

So we’ve got to memorize the law, understand what the law is, and then wisdom teaches us how to apply that law with wisdom, trying to reach particular goals, to act out our lives skillfully and beautifully applying the law of God. Well, the church today has rejected the law. So it doesn’t even have step one. See, I would that we would all be teachers by now, but you’ve got to go back to milk. You’ve got to learn the primary things. So the church today desperately needs to understand God’s law. And then it desperately needs to attend to a book that’s written to teenagers because that’s the way the church is immature today. And we’re no different.

We can hope. We can see our difficulty as men in this church and as women, adults now. But just because we see the difficulty doesn’t mean we’re delivered or escaped from that. This is the context in which we have our lives, in which we exist. It’s our ethos. And so we need it as well. We need it as well. This book is important to us.

And so at the center of this book, the words of the wise—and I think at the center of the words of the wise, these 10 sayings—and these 10 sayings move (and I’ve got this on the outline) to move a son to become a householder. The first 10 sayings are about law and diligence. And we’ll touch briefly on that maybe in the sermon, but these middle 10 sayings explicitly say, “Father, son stuff. Listen to me, son. Be wise.” And by the end, the last of the 10 sayings says, “A house is established by wisdom and filled with beautiful things.” So the father’s telling his son how to get to be his own householder and have his household reflect beauty and grace and delight and skillfulness.

And the last 10 sayings—the next 10 sayings, which we won’t deal with today—the next verse after these talks about strength and a king ruling through strength. And those last 10 of the 30 sayings, they’re all about a king and Yahweh. Again, the same way Solomon’s Proverbs move through general law stuff into father-son stuff and then into king-Yahweh stuff, the Sayings of the Wise do the same motion. They begin with 10 sayings of general lawkeeping and diligence. Then it moves to son to householder. And then after you become a householder, then you can consider reigning in the civil government or in a business or whatever it is. So that’s mature stuff. We’re not ready for that yet.

And today I want to really focus on what I think could be seen, at least from one perspective, as the heart of the wisdom given to us in the Proverbs telling us of this father-son relationship. And I’ve got a summation statement there for you: What we have is basically warnings against bad company, drunkenness, and immoral women. Wine, women, and song. Well, what’s the song? Song—you sing with other people, get together, and you sing songs. So wine, women, and song—those are the dangerous things.

Why are those dangerous? By the way, you know, in our immaturity as a church, we tend to say that’s because all those things are bad. Wine’s bad. Women are bad. Song’s bad. Don’t sing a whole bunch. Don’t carouse. Don’t have a good time. Don’t drink wine. It’s awful. It’ll get you drunk. And women—well, we have to have these relationships with women and men because we’ve got to have kids. But yeah, it’s a kind of a bad part of our existence as people and yeah, you know, we’re embarrassed about all that part of it. So we don’t like to hear much about the Song of Solomon and all that sort of stuff.

We’re Greek. We’ve said this before. We’re trying to get rid of the Greek attitude. And the Greek attitude was either—don’t, you know, the body is awful. Well, either way, it said the body was awful, that the true truth is spiritual truth as opposed to having to do with creation. And because of that, you’ve got to get rid of it either one way or the other: just forget tasting anything tasty or engaging in sex at all. Or on the other side, they said we’ll get rid of the body by just indulging these things to the nth degree. Both those ways are wrong. Those are both ditches in the road.

Christians know that wine, women, and song are great gifts from God. Marital relationships are a wonderful thing. Wine is given to us to make our hearts glad. And song, companionship, and communion is certainly very important in the life of who we are. But we go about getting those things the wrong way. So when our kids become men, they’re tempted to drunkenness. They’re tempted to sexual immorality. They’re tempted to hang out with the wrong sort of people and sing the wrong songs. You see?

So here at the heart of the book, if you want to have wisdom, young men, if you want to be kings, if you want to have that wise goal of having influence in our culture, attend to this section that is the center of the book itself. This is how you get there. You get there through certain warnings against wine, women, and song. These are set in the context, however, of admonitions to have a correct relationship between parent and child. The establishment of a home by wisdom is the goal.

So there’s an attitude that starts off this section: father-son attitude. Have the right attitude toward your father. Fathers have the right attitude toward your sons. In Adam, we have wrong attitudes in both those ways. So get that strength. Understand that the ethos, the system, the air we breathe—all this wise stuff—must be one of a self-conscious effort to bring those the power and transforming ability of God the Father and God the Son into our homes that we might portray father-son relationships correctly. And then in the context that we want to direct our sons to the right kind of women, the right kind of wine, and the right kind of song. And the end result of that—we have this attitude in the family, we have these specific admonitions set out—the end result is our children will establish homes filled with precious and excellent, tasty things.

So there’s attitudes, there’s actions, and then there’s the aim. If you want to look at it as a three-point alliterated outline, there’s an ethos—a parent-child relationship. There’s an ethic—what things you should and shouldn’t do in terms of wine, women, and song. And the eschatology is portrayed for us here. The end result of this, applying this ethic and this ethos, is the establishment of the son into a Christian householder. So that’s where we’re going. Okay.

So first, then, this ethos—this attitude, parent-child relationships. And what I’ve done in your outline is I’ve sort of taken the parent-child stuff out of the order of the verses and kind of lumped them together to think about them together. Okay?

Verse 12, then, is, I think, the beginning of this next section. I won’t go into all the reasons for that, but I have good reason for believing that. Verse 12: “Apply your heart to instruction, your ears to words of knowledge.” Shama—shama is the Hebrew term. “Hear, hear, O Israel. The Lord your God, the Lord your God is one.” The great Shama is that statement from Deuteronomy 6 that talks about the child’s need to hear, O Israel, to hear. And here the child, the son, is being directed to hear the words of knowledge. “Apply your heart to instruction, your ears to words of knowledge.”

So we’re supposed to go out of our way to have diligence to hear the word of the father. Now, remember Jesus has just told all those Pharisees in John chapter 8, they can’t hear the father because they don’t love the father. “Whoever desires to do the father’s will, he’ll know the truth.” You see, he’ll hear these things. His ears will be opened and circumcised to the word of the father. So Jesus is the model here. He always wanted to know what the father wanted him to do. And young people, you should have this as your model. Jesus was the right model. You should have your model to hear what your Father in heaven is telling you. And at this stage in your life, that primarily comes through parents and other extended authorities as well.

Devotion to the word of the father is the beginning place of this setting of this ethos or attitude of correct family relationships. It’s your heart intent but it reflects itself in hearing specific words, using the created organ of the ear to hear the word. Now there must be a diligence.

The whole thing starts with exhorting diligence. Turn to the end of chapter 24. Proverbs 24. And you know, one of the ways to look at points of emphasis in the Bible in a particular section of the Bible is to certainly look to see if there is this structure that we’ve been talking about where there’s a middle hinge point. But sections of scripture also build, and usually the last thing said in a section of scripture will also have a heightened significance for us.

Just before the words of the wise, it’s very interesting how the first half of chapter 22 kind of caps off the Sayings of Solomon, the first collection. But here in chapter 24, we read how this ends. It ends in verses 30 through 34. So the middle section of the book of Proverbs, the Sayings of the Wise, this is how they come to an end.

“I went by the field of the slothful, by the vineyard of the man void of understanding, and lo, it was all grown over with thorns. Nettles had covered its face thereof—board of thorns and nettles. It’s the curse of God. I don’t mean literally that will happen to a piece of property neglected. But what it’s saying is here’s slothfulness in anything you do. Entropy is a fact of life. The curse starts to work itself back in. So he, the slothful man who’s not diligent, finds himself being affected more and more by the curse of God because God intends to happen to those who aren’t obedient and working in the power of the spirit.

“I saw, I considered it well. I looked upon it and received instruction. Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. So shall thy poverty come on thee as one that traveleth; thy want as an armed man.”

You’ll be beat up and robbed by these curses that God has built into the created order. Now the point is that the words of the wise conclude with a strong statement against the dangers of sloth, which its correlary is strong understanding and motivation to diligence.

Diligence—so diligence to attend to your parents is number one here as this middle section starts. Diligence—we won’t go to it now, but in the first 10 sayings, diligence was a very important part of it. The middle of those first 10 sayings says: “You see the man skillful in his work. He’ll talk to kings. He’ll talk to great people.” Work, work, work. Diligence is one of the main themes of the whole book of Proverbs, repeatedly found in the fourth slot in a series of 10 sayings because it’s the fourth commandment. We come together in Sabbath rest. But we must always remember the other part of the fourth commandment is “Six days shall thou labor—diligently labor.”

So children, the beginning of setting this proper atmosphere, this ethos, is a diligence in your heart with your ears to hear instruction from your parents. Hear the word of the father.

Saying number two: Parents, discipline your children. Next verse says, “Do not withhold discipline from a child. If you punish him with the rod, he will not die. Punish him with the rod, save his soul from death.” So here the first thing that parents are instructed to do in this relationship is to discipline your children in verse 13. And then specifically, don’t be afraid of applying corporal punishment to your child as you’re bringing him up.

You know, dads are warned against being softhearted, you know, toward their sons. Sons are warned to not be hardhearted toward their dads, right? We’re—God gives us what we need. He preaches to our weaknesses. And he’s spotted the significant weakness in young men: they will not have a softness of heart toward their parents. Expect that. Don’t think it’s you, mom or dad. That’s the Adamic relationship of son to father, right? The son is hardhearted toward dad. So the son is admonished to be softhearted to the father.

Fathers are typically too easy on their sons. So they’re admonished in this beginning of wisdom and setting this ethos in the family to be engaged with their sons, to discipline him, and specifically to rod him when he needs it. Now, that’s what the word of God says. And we must never give up our understanding of how biblical discipline looks because of the political correctness or incorrectness of such an action in the civil state. This stuff is illegal in some countries now. It’s increasingly difficult here. Too bad. The Bible says not only will you not kill him if you rod him in the way God says you should rod him. So that means you shouldn’t be inflicting permanent damage, but it actually tells us not only will you not kill him even though he wails like he is dying.

You know what it says? You will actually save him from hell. Not only will you not kill him, but deploying the rod properly will save his soul from death. In fact, you will kill him by being too softhearted to him. That’s the intent of this proverb. So if dads refuse to understand that a big part of who they are as fathers is the need to engage their young men and, if necessary, with corporal punishment, then they failed the first test of setting the proper ethos in place so that we can have a mature population in Christian church developed.

Saying number three: Verses 15–16. “My son, if your heart is wise, then my heart will be glad. My inmost being will rejoice when your lips speak what is right.” So you know, we’ve gone now from your heart as reflected in open ears to now the dad applies the rod to now your heart is supposed to desire wisdom and your tongue, your lips, are supposed to speak what’s right. So we’ve got ears and heart and now lips and heart, and in the middle, but I suppose, is one way to put it.

So you know, the body here is very significant in the discipline of what God says to do. So wisdom in the heart, wisdom to hear the father, to be softhearted toward him, wisdom on the father’s part not to be too softhearted toward the son, and wisdom on the son’s part to be able to speak what’s right. And the end result of that’s portrayed for us here is joy. And this means there’s an implication to the parents: to rejoice in your children.

Now, I know all your children. I don’t know them as well as I wish I did. You know, they move. They grow up so fast. At my age, you know, some of us older folks, it’s hard to remember who they are. They’re looking so different week to week. But I know most of them, and I can tell you that there’s much reason to rejoice in your children.

If all you do is attend to what was just said about discipline and not being softhearted to them, and you fail to enter into the joy of your children, you’ve communicated a message that is radically different than the ethos, the attitude of proper parent-child relationships as portrayed for us in the center of Proverbs. The very part of who you are toward your children has to be a desire to discipline and to get out the foolishness in them. But it must be a rejoicing in who they are and in the wisdom and in their tongue and in their open ears that they exhibit to you on a regular basis.

You know, frequently, you know, one parent or the other will only see the good stuff and the other parent will only see the bad. And what you need to do is be a team raising your children to rejoice in them openly and overtly. You can’t promise this: “I’ll be glad when you’re wise and be glad when you say good things,” and not practice it. Our children should know that as they move in the wisdom of the Proverbs, their parents will be happy folks. Be happy folks. So it’s very important that the proper ethos or attitude includes parents being rejoicing people in who their children are, you know.

Okay. So now that’s what parents are supposed to do. How well are you doing it? Some of you need to rejoice more. Some of you need to spank more. Some of you need to speak more, to discipline by way of instruction your children. Some of you children need to have more of a soft heart toward your parents, no matter how foolish you might think they might be. Wisdom is to know that they’re wise even though they don’t look like it to you.

See, I don’t know what it is when you become a teenager, but frequently in our Adamic nature, it just doesn’t seem right what our parents are doing anymore. Well, trust God. Remember, your work today is to believe. And these Proverbs are the inspired word of God to you. Have belief. How can you become the right son? Lord Jesus has given you belief in his word today. Believe his word.

Understand, young men and women, you need to have more open ears to hear your parents’ instruction. You should be desirous of pleasing them. That was Jesus’s whole deal: was pleasing the father. He wanted father to rejoice in who he was, and he did.

Okay. Now also note here that parents engage in a personal appeal to the son, right? So the dad tells the son, “My son, please be wise. I’ll rejoice when you speak good things.” A personal appeal to the child, affirming relationship and affirming also that you’re trying to accomplish their life and not their death. Okay? So a father who is going to raise his children with a proper attitude and ethos brings these two systems together: of discipline and love and commitment and rejoicing.

Okay. So part of these attitudes—saying number six—is found in verses 22 to 25 and again here this falls in this section of child relationships. Verse 22 says, “Listen to your father who gave you life. Do not despise your mother when she is old. Buy the truth, do not sell it. Get wisdom, discipline, and understanding. The father of a righteous man has great joy. He who has a wise son delights in him. May your father and mother be glad. May she who gave you birth rejoice.”

Okay. Same basic themes repeated here, too: for the son to attain after wisdom, for the parents to rejoice in the son. We have the personal appeal again being made by the father to listen to the father, and there’s the added reason given in here: that they gave him life. The father gave you life. And that’s at the end of that section. The last verse I read—verse 25—your mother who gave you birth. So wisdom for the son is understanding that life itself, in the providence of God, has come by mechanism of the father and the mother. And so they gave you life when they were young. Now, as they are older, respect them and honor them.

Now that your mom’s old, don’t despise her when she’s old. You see, they—you know, this is like you know, cradle to the grave. You’re supposed to give honor to your parents and to have open ears to hear their instruction. Listen, shama—big ears, children—to what your parents have to say to you from when they give you birth to the time they’re old.

“Buy the truth. Do not sell it. Get wisdom, discipline, and understanding.”

The middle of this says to have great value, place great value on wisdom. And so here that that wraps up these sayings that set the correct attitude or ethos to the parent-child relationship. Okay.

Now, some specific instructions and warnings from the father to the son. And now we go back to verse 17 for the first of these sayings.

The first big deal here is to avoid bad company. “Do not let your heart envy sinners, but always be zealous for the fear of the Lord. There is surely a future hope for you and your hope will not be cut off.”

So this begins this series of specific admonitions. Now remember, we’ve set an attitude. Now we want specific things to attend to so that our teen boys might be established as householders and, by implication, our teen girls might be established in homes and might then perhaps move on to rule in the context of the culture. So these are not just a few things you need to know. These are central—young people—to what it is to mature in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And the first thing is: Do not let your heart envy sinners. Bad company corrupts good morals. So the Bible tells us that whoever you hang out with, you’ll become like those people. I noticed this years ago. I used to just despise the fact that one of my siblings, you could see this person obviously imitating the speech patterns of her friends. Well, the older I get, the more I realize—we—I’ll do that. We all start talking about people we hang around with who start using the same expressions.

I could probably give you a dozen people that I see reflected in my current way of speaking, mannerisms, voice inflections, etc. It’s the way it is. God didn’t make us big, rugged individuals totally cut off from one another. You know, as Doug W. says, we’re like leaves on a tree. We’re not like little ball bearings rolling around unrelated to one another. We reflect each other. That’s proper and good.

The problem here is not imitation. The problem here is not being like somebody else. The problem here is not being affected by who you hang out with. The problem for our young people is: who are they hanging out with? Are they being reinforced and given new giftings, new inflections, new mannerisms, new truth so that they might be more wise, so that they might be more established? Or are they being given mannerisms and part of a youth culture that is in radical disobedience?

You see, so the problem isn’t company. The problem is bad company, and the psychological motivation here is said to be envy. We like what the sinner ends up with. You know, God has this test of us. These people have a lot of external glory. The sinner does. There’s things about them that appeal to our Adamic flesh. There’s also things about them that appeal to our redeemed nature. We like glory. We like knowledge. We like rejoicing, life. That’s all good and proper, but we don’t go after it in a perverted way.

So there’s things we want that they have, and we resent it. We resent them for it. That’s part of what envy is. It’s desiring something strongly, resenting somebody. Then you sort of want to be like them in that desire and resentment. Young people, this is, you know, again, God doesn’t tell you this for no reason. He tells you this because whether it’s good guys or bad guys or whatever, if they’re not Christian, they’re not wise. You have to be exceedingly careful of what friends you hang around with.

And as a parent, you know, our first warning to our young people is: watch out who you hang out with, who your friends are. Rather obvious point, but very significant in this maturation of a son to a householder.

And built into this particular warning is the way to avoid the warning. It’s the way to avoid the warning. Says, “Don’t envy sinners, but be zealous for the fear of the Lord.” That’s basically the same word—envy and zealous. Don’t have great passion for the way you see sinning people and what the wicked do, but instead have great passion for your Father in heaven, for the covenant God, Yahweh here. Be zealous for the fear of the Lord.

You know, don’t, you know, don’t consider your friends. Don’t look down so much as look up, right? Don’t look down at men who reflect the fallen image of man. Look up at Father in heaven by means of being represented by your father on earth and godly people, you know. Don’t look down. Look up. And don’t look at the present. You’re envying something in the present, but the text says there’s surely a future hope for you. Your hope will not be cut off. It says there’s an eschatology to your actions one way or the other.

So don’t look back or don’t look at where you’re at right now. Look ahead. Don’t look down. Look up at Yahweh. Don’t look at the present. Look at the future as you consider what sort of friends you build and what sort of actions you enter into.

It’s interesting that this same basic truth is given to us in 1 Corinthians 15. And this sort of broadens it out a bit. In 1 Corinthians 15, verse 33, we have that proverb that I just spoke: “Bad company corrupts good morals.” That’s in verse 33. Now, the interesting thing is that Paul, a couple interesting here. One, he’s quoting a Greek philosopher. This is not a biblical proverb in its origins. It’s rather a Greek philosopher named Menander—philosopher, poet, playwright. He wrote comedies about 300 years before Paul’s time. And Menander was a Greek guy, and this is what he wrote in one of his plays.

So here’s God taking what a pagan Greek wrote and bringing it into the inspired text of scripture. That’s interesting to me. And Paul, but it comports, of course, with what we’ve just studied in Proverbs. Don’t envy sinners. Don’t hang out with the wrong sorts of people. Bad company corrupts good morals. And Paul is saying that in 1 Corinthians 15 in the midst of an argument about the resurrection.

You know 1 Corinthians 15. Probably most of you do. A lot of you do. It’s about the resurrection. And Paul’s saying if there’s no resurrection, then you know why not just eat, drink, and be married? That’s what he says in the verse just before: “Eat, drink, and die” in verse 32. So what he’s saying is you have to be careful who you hang out with. Not just in terms of “are they going to go incite you to theft and wickedness?” but “are they going to incite you to wrong doctrines?”

You see, there’s a movement—hyper-preterism today—that says that Jesus isn’t coming back, came back in AD 70, that was the end of it. And it sounds close to the preterist position that we believe, but it’s a heresy from hell. And that’s the kind of wickedness or sinfulness that we’re not supposed to envy or hang out with either. You see, Paul applies this basic idea: Bad company corrupts good morals. And we could say that he’s saying that bad company corrupts good doctrine as well.

So you have to be careful of what associations you have doctrinally with other people as well. And heresies such as that there’s going to be no resurrection of the dead and that Jesus is never coming back—these are heresies. We should not want to hang out with people that believe those things unless we’re instructing them and maturing them along. Bad company corrupts good morals.

So that’s the first great warning: this warning about bad company. And that’s interesting because it’s set in the context of those who say, “Let us eat and drink for tomorrow you—not you—die.” Paul goes on to say, “Then become sober minded as you ought and stop sinning, for some have no knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame. In other words, he’s saying you’re already hanging out with some people like that.

Young people, if you’re hanging out with people that have a deleterious, a bad effect upon you, don’t do it. Don’t do it. Hear your parents’ instructions. Bad company corrupts good morals.

On the converse, Proverbs 13:20 says, “He who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will be destroyed.” You see, there it says that it’s a good thing to be influenced by your friends. Be companions with the wise because then you will be wise. Hang out with people that are wise, and you’ll become wiser still. Okay.

Second great warning is a warning against drunkenness and gluttony. Saying number five, 19 to 21. “Listen, my son. Shama. Be wise. Keep your heart on the right path. Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat. For drunkards and gluttons become poor and drowsiness clothe them in rags.” Okay.

So the warning here is against both drunkenness and gluttony and we have a need to instruct ourselves in these things. That’s why it’s interesting that Paul put his admonition to not hang out with bad company in the context of those who say, “Let’s eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” No thought of how we eat and drink. We’re to eat and drink to the glory of God. Do all things to the glory of God.

Here again, God is instructing us in terms of things that we need to hear as young people and as an immature group of men. Why do we have drunk—this in the context of America when the culture moves away from Jesus Christ? Because when you move away from Jesus Christ, you move away from wisdom. You become fools. You become like teenagers again. And teenagers, the first time they can get alcohol in our culture at least, they want to go out and drink it right away. It’s a tradition. It’s a custom now in our culture for 21-year-olds to go out and drink on the night of their birthday. Big deal, because the civil state says you can’t have, you know, distilled spirits in public until that age.

Now, I think if we got rid of that law, what effect would that be—would that go away? You know, if Christian kids just grow up sort of knowing about alcohol, then that isn’t such a big deal. And so many kids don’t go out and get drunk on their 21st birthday. But what a picture. And you know, we—everybody that goes out on the 21st birthday doesn’t get drunk. It’s not a bad thing necessarily to exercise that liberty for your birthday. But I’m just saying in our culture, frequently when you turn 21, you’re supposed to get drunk. There’s all kinds of birthday cards bought in the store. There’s all kinds of inducements to do it. That’s what people do. They take a 21-year-old out and they think this will be fun. Let’s get them drunk. See why? Because our culture is terminally stupid and terminally immature. Immature. We’re fools.

Young people, understand that again that God preaches to your need. And parents, understand this as well. If you’ve not been given wine and now you get to the place where you start to drink wine and have fun, you don’t know how to handle it. And the Bible here says there’s great warnings against drunkenness and gluttony.

Now, these warnings, as you can see in your outline, are doubled. In other words, at the end of this text, there’s going to be another warning against hanging out with bad company. And correlating to this warning against drinking and eating too much is a great long extended section on the dangers of wine. We need to hear that, and we need to tell our young people: just because you have liberty as Christians to enjoy the good things of God and wine is a wonderful thing, understand that there’s danger to it. You can become drunk, and that’s not a good thing. So these bad companions can lead to bad practices both in terms of food and in terms of drunkenness.

The third great warning is against the immoral woman. This is saying seven, and I note on your outline that this is interesting because the seventh commandment is a warning against adultery, of course. And when we see the Proverbs of a king, we would expect him to track in certain places the ten commandments, and he does that. I’m convinced from my study of the Proverbs.

Well, here, this seventh saying is a warning against the immoral woman. Verse 26: “My son, give me your heart. Okay. Give me your heart. Let your eyes keep to my ways.”

Young men, what do you do with your eyes is what’s being talked about here. Verse 27: “A prostitute is a deep ditch, deep pit, and a wayward wife is a narrow well. Like a bandit, she lies in wait, and multiplies the unfaithful among men.”

How does, you know—there’s a relationship between the young men’s failure to heed this warning. He goes out and does his own thing in terms of relationship with women and fall into a deep pit, into a terrible thing, a narrow well. You can’t get out of those things. In other words, when I was in BAM for our 20th wedding anniversary, big glacier up there, and there’s these huge crevasses underneath the glacier. You go walking along unheeded. You can fall through the snow into a crevasse, and you’re dead within probably a couple of minutes. You’re dead before they get the helicopter there to get you out, because it is desperately cold.

Well, this deep pit is that. The immoral woman is that. The Bible says that one of the great warnings in the first nine chapters of Proverbs, the warning it ends with, is that, you know, she looks good, but her way is the way of death. There’s an old movie, *The Shining*, and Jack Nicholson is tempted by this beautiful-looking ghost, and he kisses her or something, and he sees her, and all of a sudden she turns into an old ugly hag.

Well, that’s a ripoff from Dante’s *Purgatorio* where he writes about the seven deadly sins. And when he writes about lust, that’s what he says. You see there, you see the beautiful woman. But you see her correctly, and she’s a hag. She’s an awful witch. She is this deep ditch. She is this immoral woman who brings death and not life.

So our eyes are important here. Job said that he made a covenant with his eyes not to look—unmade—to be careful with what we see. Young men, you know, this is a very real admonition to you, and now of all times with the internet. I opened an email last night and saw a bad picture. I just opened the email. I didn’t go to any site. It was an email sent with a photo attached. So I can’t open anything now unless I absolutely know who the sender is. Can’t open any kind of email that might have HTML text embedded.

The prostitute—the one behind the prostitute—the devil, he is out, you know, to eat your lunch. And he is out there now actively pursuing you to bring you into a violation of this admonition to avoid immoral women. Immoral women are coming at you in the home while you do your work on your computer. That’s bad. It’s gotten worse. It will get worse as this culture continues to fall away from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Parents have a heightened obligation with young men and young women to help them avoid the sin of lust. To help them avoid the sin of lust. And one way to do that is to recognize the eschatology. She is not something good. She will ruin your life. She will ruin your life. She lies in wait. And not only will she ruin your life, but there’s a cultural implication. She multiplies the unfaithful among men. And so incorrect sexual relationships is one of the great warnings that men must give to their children.

If one of the most—if not the most important thing—for a young man and young woman to do is to marry right. And that’s what Proverbs is all about: marrying the right woman as opposed to the wrong, marrying the right man as opposed to the wrong. Then what bigger sin, what bigger difficulty, what bigger trap could lie in front of our young people than somehow getting involved because of sexual temptation with the wrong woman, the wrong man, the one who will bring difficulty to us instead of blessing?

So parents have a tremendous obligation to warn their young men, and young men must have a tremendous commitment to avoiding this horrific sin. Now the thing is, it’s a wonderful thing. Marriage is a wonderful thing, and that’s the problem. You give into sexual sin in your formative years of becoming a man or a woman, and that affects your relationships with whoever you might end up marrying a wonderful girl. But it will affect those relationships in your mind and in your heart. You’ll be tempted to sin in various ways that’ll plague you the rest of your life.

Do not burden your proper marital bliss and relationship with sexual sin in the context of your teen years. Do not do it. You know, this is we—this is kind of a one of those center—we’re at the center of the book, words of the wise. We’re at the center of the words of the wise. And here at the center of the words of the wise, the central warning is against the wrong woman. Against the wrong woman. This is big stuff.

Young women, you know, this has an implication for how you dress. You know, I just hate it when pastors talk about lust and crank on young women in the way they should dress—they shouldn’t dress like prostitutes or whatever, they shouldn’t dress in a sexually alluring manner. I don’t like that because it seems to me the text is obviously explicitly written to young men. However, there is a valid implication, and I would not be doing my job as a pastor in this church if I did not exhort you young women to modesty. Modesty and how you dress. Modesty is how Christian women should dress, not in a sexually alluring manner.

You’re tempting men for the wrong reasons. You’re likely to be seen by godly young men as you’re being focused on sexual relationships as opposed to the purity that we’re supposed to have as Christians and wisdom. So you’re going to be seen wrong, from a wrong perspective, from the godly men and from the ungodly men that populate our church. There will be some in the context of that. You’re going to be seen as a target, pure and simple.

I remember when we bought our van four years ago, I went to the bank with the guy that had it to exchange the money and all this stuff. And there was a young girl clerk at the bank, and I thought to myself, “This woman must have no idea—young and foolish and naive. She must have no idea that nearly every man that walks into this bank is ogling her and having sexual thoughts about her. Why would a woman do that?”

Now, some would, but this woman didn’t seem like that. This young girl, she was just foolish. I’m going to tell you—we have to warn our women, our young girls who are growing up into women, of the dangers of this sin. They increase the unfaithfulness of men, even not intending to, by dressing in a sexually explicit way.

So great warnings here all the way around. This is why we have courtship. This is why it’s very important. You know, we’re in the midst of a wind of this culture that blows against the doors of our house and finds its way in. It finds its way in through the movies we rent, through the television we watch. All these things are increasingly explicitly sexual in nature. We’re putting temptations at the heart of our lives all too often right in front of our young men’s eyes when this scripture explicitly says, “Don’t look to unfaithful women, but instead look to me. Look to your father, that I might direct you toward the right woman.”

You see, this is why I don’t care if you call it courtship, supervised dating. I don’t—the term is really bothering me these days, but there is no doubt that the way to obey this commandment right here at the center of what it means to move from a son to a householder is to have relationships of young men and young women carefully supervised by the parents involved.

I know firsthand of situations where parents were absolutely sure they could trust this relationship for 15 minutes in a ride in the car, and it went south. It completely changed young people’s lives. Completely changed young people’s lives. I’ve said this before, but unless you think you’re more committed to God than David, or you unless you think you’re wiser than Solomon, or unless you think you’re stronger than Samson, don’t think, young man, that you can avoid this temptation. Or young women, that you’ll be able to stop it either. Don’t think it. Those men all fell in terms of sexual sin.

Great warning right at the middle of the book. How do you become a godly householder? Well, you do it by taking warnings about who you have relationships with.

Okay. Then we go back to the flip side of the warning against drunkenness. Don’t need to read the verses, but understand there is a long section here about the dangers of wine. And in a church like ours that has talked about the great benefits of wine—it is a gift from God, it is a joyous thing—I pray for the day when our festivals, all our family camps, our festive days, all of them can have a proper sense of moderation and drinking at them: wine, beer, etc. I pray for that day because it’s a good gift of God, and it really irritates me that sin taxes are talked about when people are talking about taxing wine, beer, etc. It’s not a sin, but it can become one quite easily, young men.

You don’t need to hear from me how good wine is. This text, nowhere in these—in these at the middle of this book—does it tell you how good wine is. I mean, it sort of does. The implication—looks good, it’s wet, it’s red, it’s smooth, and it kind of gives a good picture of it. But nowhere here does it commend it to you because what you need to hear when you’re, you know, 16, 17, all the way up to 25 is: you need to hear, “Watch it. Don’t drink too much. This stuff will get you drunk.” And in fact, there are probably men in this church—all of us men—need to hear this same thing because, as I said, we live in a culture that is, you know, just awfully immature where men refuse to take responsibility, refuse to grow up. We need to hear these same warnings. We need to hear these same warnings, and they’re given to us on both ends of this.

Warning against women—here it is. Take this warning seriously. And then another warning against bad company concludes it. “Do not be envious of wicked men nor desire their company, for their hearts plot violence and their lips talk about making trouble.”

So here their hearts and their lips are contrasted with what we had earlier: your heart, your lips, make your dad glad. Their hearts and their lips are awful.

The end result of this—if parents have this correct ethos or attitude of joy and discipline, and children have open ears to their parents the way Jesus said “open ears to the father”—and if they focus on these specific areas (don’t sin in terms of wine, women, or community or song—whatever you want to put to it)—the end result of this is given to us in the tenth saying.

“By wisdom a house is built. Through understanding it is established. Through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures.”

Rare and beautiful treasures are what is in the context of all of these things. You know, the scripture uses these—this rare and beautiful. It means tasty. It means delightful. It uses those two Hebrew words in terms of music. Your house should be filled with wonderful, precious, delightful music. It uses it in terms of food. Your food is to be pleasant and nice. It uses it in terms of marital love. And in the Song of Solomon, your home to be filled with marital love and that kind of delightful, rare, beautiful blessing of marital love—you must eschew the wrong women and the wrong sexual activities in your youth.

To be filled with proper food, you want to eschew gluttony. You eat your food for good purposes. It’s delightful. But never can it become idolatrous to us. It’s precious and delightful. It’s used in terms of the word of God, which is sweet to our taste. It’s used by the things that God promises to bring in terms of his blessings to his people. The scriptures tell us that indeed our goal is not to have Puritan austere homes—puritan in the bad sense of the term—austere homes with very few pleasures in them. Just the reverse. At the center of this book, we’re told that our goal for our children, the father’s goal for the son, the Father in heaven’s goal for Jesus, was to give him a world filled with beautiful and precious things. And our goal for our children is to have homes filled with pleasant and delightful things.

But we do not get there by going after them too soon, going after them in an unmediated relationship, going after them apart from the wisdom, counsel, and direction of our Father. God says that these great warnings against wine, women, or song are the way to achieve the kind of great joy and blessedness we have and desire in the context of our homes.

The concluding comment on your outline: Note that these two great warnings found at the beginning and end of the introductory chapters to the book of Proverbs—bad company in chapter 1 and immoral women in 9—are repeated here. Note also that this set of 10 ends at the establishment of the house by wisdom, the positive theme of the conclusion of the introduction.

In other words, chapters 1 to 9 concluded by saying that wisdom builds her house. She hews out her seven pillars. And it warns you that there’s another house—a house of death, a house of stolen bread—that’s delightful and tasty. It’s the house of the wrong woman. It warns you against that. And chapter one began with a warning against bad company. So this bad company, bad women are the two great admonitions in the introduction, and they form two of the three great warnings here at the end.

Once more, we do not want to approach obeying these Proverbs in the power of the flesh in a way that says, “If we just work harder, we’ll do better at these things.” What we’ve seen here is a portrayal of the relationship of father and son—Jesus and his Father in heaven. That’s what God comes here today to give to you: to give to you as a son and a daughter the proper relationship to authority of Jesus. And he comes to you, Father, today. If you felt convicted of anything I’ve said as a son, a daughter, a mother, or a father, recognize God means to bring you to conviction to know your want so that he can fill it by giving you these character qualities in the context of worship because he desires this house to be filled with rare and delightful things.

Let’s pray. Father, we do rejoice, Father, before you for your great love for us, for your great rejoicing in who we are through our Savior Jesus. Help our homes to be more and more modeled after this relationship that you have with the Son and the power of the spirit. And help us, Father, to pay close attention to what you’ve given us here at the heart of Proverbs themselves, and how to move our sons to householders. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.