By Simon ManchesterSunday 22 Sep 2024Christian Growth with Simon ManchesterFaithReading Time: 1 minute
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Transcript:
We’re thinking today together about the battles that we face. Maybe this week you have had some battles already. Relationships or circumstances. Maybe some temptations, maybe some hardships. Maybe some failures this past week.
And we’re going to get our help this morning. Not from me and not from some guru. But we’re going to get our help from the Old Testament Book of Proverbs. And I’ve given you an outline. A large A4 sheet, if you would like to use it as a help.
If you’ve ever had helpful advice from a parent in the past or a friend, a mentor or a boss, you can imagine how wonderful it is to have the living God give help for living for Him. The wonderful thing about God, my friends, is that He stands above the world and he sees all the paths that are in front of us.
Wisdom provided in Proverbs
And He can say to us, this is a good path. This is a troublesome path. This is a dangerous path, and he can actually guide us into the best path. That’s the greatness. It’s as if he is a fatherly sat nav, a personal, fatherly loving sat nav telling us the best path to go.
By way of background in case you were not here last week. The Book of Proverbs is one of the five wisdom books in the Old Testament and the books of wisdom in the Old Testament. Assume that God’s people have entered the gate and are in the family of God, and now he’s helping them on the path of life. Sometimes the Old Testament wisdom books are what we call neat.
You may have noticed one in the reading this morning that, uh, if you live well, things will go well. If you’re lazy, says Proverbs, you’ll go hungry. That’s what we would call neat wisdom. It’s kind of simple, brief, almost too brief.
And then there are other wisdom books, like The Book of Job or The Book of Ecclesiastes, which are called Radical Wisdom. Why does job who’s so faithful suffer so much? Or the book of Ecclesiastes says, I work and I work and I work and I work and I die – what’s the point?
And we need both the neat and the radical wisdom in the wisdom books. Now Proverbs, as we heard last week, provides us with about 901 liners. It’s like a giant fruit salad. And so what we tried to do last week was we tried to pick out some of the verses to do with God as if we were picking the grapes out of the fruit salad.
This week, we’re trying to pick out some of the verses that have to do with Battle, as if we are picking the Berries out of the fruit salad. But before we look at the text, I just want to give you two introductory truths. And, uh, first the first one is this. Why should any of us care about the proverbs or taking them seriously? Why should we care? Do you not sometimes think as you look at the rest of the world? And my wife and I were walking through a street in the city last night and we were watching all the people having an absolutely wonderful time with the various pubs and the music, and everybody was just as happy as happy? And do you not sometimes say to yourself.
Why is it that the people of the world are often so happy and the Christians are so chewed up and tied up and stressed. Now, part of the answer to the question of why we should care about the Book of Proverbs is that the Christian has been woken up by God to the issues of life and death. We do see life and death a little more seriously than most people in the world.
And especially we see life and death in the light of eternity. We have come by the grace of God to see that God is real. We’re no longer asleep in the world. Just eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. We’ve been woken up. Christ has brought us salvation. He’s brought us to discipleship. We call him Saviour. We call him Lord. We seek to live with the facts. We can’t go back to sleep.
That’s one of the reasons why we take these things more seriously. We don’t believe that any path is fine. We know that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. We don’t believe as Christians that morality is optional. We don’t believe that morality is settled by ourselves or by popular vote. God has built gravity into the world as a fixture, and God has built morality into the world as a fixture.
And if that were not enough, the path that he calls us to is the path of peace, the path with a future. So God you see has not taught gravity to harm us. He’s not taught morality to harm us, but to help us. So why do we care? Well, because God cares. Second question, Why is it that in the battle, the Christian battle, the spiritual battle? Why is it that it is such a losing battle?
How come the Christian life is so hard? Where is the freedom? Where is the victory? You know, Do you sometimes sing the hymns and think the rest of the people sitting in this building are probably just going along so smoothly and so easily and so faithfully?
And for me, it’s a complete struggle. Failure, mess. Why is it so difficult? Now part of the answer to this is that we have not been set free from the fight. We have been set free for the fight. Think of a man who goes to sleep tonight, turns off the light, tucks himself in and falls asleep.
And while he’s asleep. A burglar sneaks in one of the windows of the bottom floor of the house and he is asleep. He is completely unaware. It doesn’t concern him. It’s a non-issue. And then a neighbour who happens to be looking out the window, who sees the burglar creeping around, rings his friend and says, I think somebody has just broken into your house.
Suddenly the man is awake. He’s not been set free from the trouble. He’s been set free for the trouble. His hand goes to the phone. He rings triple O, his other hand, goes to the golf club behind the door, and he steps forward for the fight, not from the fight for the fight. So you see, the unbeliever has no real awareness of the fight. The believer has been freed in order to fight, and therefore we must thank God, if we are conscious of the battle, you may have come to church this morning. Conscious of great failures this past week, Why does it worry you? Part of the reason is because you’re conscious of the fight. These things matter. Now the battles that you fight, my friends, are not deciding your salvation Jesus decided your salvation at the cross.
It’s because you are saved. It’s because you have been set free to fight and you’ve been set free to fight the good fight. So with those two thoughts in mind, why should we care? Because God cares about us. And why does the fight seem so tough? Because it is a good fight that we have been woken up to.
I want to now talk about two broad areas of battle. You can see them on the outline. The first one is temptation. We’ll spend a few minutes on that and then a closing minute on relationships. First of all, temptations, I cannot for a minute think that the subject of temptation in the Book of Proverbs is irrelevant. I was looking through my paper yesterday, and I noticed that a man, a financial planner, has spent $3 million of his client’s funds on gambling, and he’s now in big trouble. I noticed that it costs $1000 an hour to get a divorce lawyer.
I notice that a beloved entertainer who I think has just died, has said in the paper that for 10 years his life was ruined by drink. This Proverb is dealing with reality,
And God’s word is precious. It’s costly to avoid it. And the first nine chapters of Proverbs are like a father talking to a son, telling the son how to take the best path to the best goal. So Proverbs three. Verse 21 the father says to the son, Take hold of God’s wisdom and you will walk safely. Proverbs, Chapter four, Verse 18. God’s path gets brighter.
The path of the wicked will get darker. Proverbs, Chapter five, Verse 12. Don’t be like those, says the father to the son who don’t listen, then lose everything and say, I wish I’d listened. Well, it’s a sad reality, isn’t it, that we think we’re better than God. I often fall into the trap of thinking I’m better than God, and I bet you do as well we say to ourselves something like this. Unconsciously we say, well, God’s word is nice that I think I can have the best of everything. And so we turn our back on the word of God and we find that he is right and we are wrong.
We think that we can pick and choose but God is actually wiser than we are. We discover then that the road of sin actually does get quite dark. We discover as we walk the road of sin that our faith begins to fade. Our hope begins to fade. Our prayers begin to fade. And God is exactly as he says.
Now, perhaps for a while, down the path of sin. It’s fine and quite good fun, but it soon loses its sheen. And like the prodigal son in the Providence of God, we may come to our senses and we may come home. The greatest tragedy of all is the person who goes down the road of sin, loses all interest in Christ and never wants to return.
That is a terrible tragedy. Proverb 7 describes a simple boy walking at night down the street, drifting along fairly clueless and meets a prostitute. She persuades him to come into her home, and we read in Proverb 7, as an ox goes blindly to slaughter as a bird flies to the snare, he did not know this would cost him his life.
Now please don’t mishear me. If you’re conscious of failures, they can be forgiven. That’s what the blood of Christ does. But when you set yourself the commitment and the policy to have nothing more to do with God, nothing more to do with Christ. You’ve committed yourself to the path of darkness and you sell your soul.
Now proverbs talks very generally about temptation, but it also talks very specifically. For example, I’ve put as an example on the sheet, uh, the subject of wine and drink. There’s a very long section about wine and drink in Proverbs 23 and I know this will affect some people here this morning, and it will be of no interest to other people. But it is true, isn’t it, that those who give themselves to wine they give their heart, mind, soul and strength to wine will suffer? Proverbs 23 says your eyes will see strange things, and your mouth will say strange things. Well, that’s true, isn’t it? And then it says it bites like a serpent. It stings like a viper.
Now the Bible tells us that God has given us wine to enjoy. It’s a gift we’re told in the New Testament that Jesus on one occasion famously made gallons of wine at a wedding.
But it is lovingly true, isn’t it? As the father speaks to the son, or God speaks to his people that if we are to give ourselves to the mastery of drink or alcohol, it’s going to be very damaging and a terrible, terrible waste. Drink is a wonderful servant, terrible master, and we need help, don’t we? To escape if we’re in the grip of it. And even those who are wonderfully helped out of the grip often are very vulnerable. Another subject, which, uh, proverbs raises is the subject of laziness or being a slugger. And there’s lots of quite humorous verses in proverbs about being lazy. Now does this matter?
The famous proverb 66 says that we, if we’re lazy, should go to the ant and study the ant and see how industrious the ant is storing up food for the future or Proverbs 14 says there’s a neglected vineyard that the writer is looking at. It’s all overgrown with weeds, and the walls have collapsed and this neglect is going to lead to poverty. The vineyard will be fruitless.
Well, now, is this a battle for some people? Certainly true, isn’t it? That some people just drift and drift and drift into trouble. Too much free time can be a danger. And if you find yourself or find people who hate discipline and hate work and hate doing anything that they’re told, they can easily fall into other traps. And that’s what proverbs is warning against.
A third temptation is pride or arrogance, and, uh, we read in Proverbs 11. With pride comes shame. With humility comes wisdom or proverbs. 16. Pride is an abomination to God. He hates it. Proverbs 16, Verse 18 Pride goes before a fall. That’s where the famous proverb comes from.
And it is a form of insanity to be proud, isn’t it? Because suddenly you’ve inflated your head and you’re giving credit to yourself, which really belongs to the giver of everything. And, of course, pride is the great sin that separates friends. There are lots of temptations, you know. Drinking would be one that actually brings people together. But pride tends to separate because there is a superiority and an inferiority and a greatness and a smallness which separates.
So those are some of the sort of simple temptations which are raised in the Book of proverbs, and there’s others like speech and despondency and fear. But the two big killers I would imagine for many people would be money and sex and proverbs is not afraid to take on these two subjects. So when it comes to money or wealth, there are many warnings in proverbs about money. I mean, how do you save a greedy person who cannot stop thinking about money?
I remember hearing a story of a lady, a wife who pushed her husband in the middle of the night and said, Turn over. And he just immediately responded. 70 million. That’s all he can think about. Money is on his mind the whole time.
How do you save a greedy person? Well, the answer is with difficulty and Chapter 11 verse four of Proverbs says riches do no good in the day of Wrath. We all know, of course, people say you can’t take your money with you. That’s perfectly obvious. But that doesn’t stop people getting as much as they possibly can so that they can live as well and fast as they can, and then it’s all over. But that’s not what the proverb said. The proverb says there’s a day of wrath, and the money will be no good on the day of wrath. Imagine standing before God and saying, I’m a multimillionaire and he says yes, but what did you do about the greatest gift you could possibly have had – my Son?
Proverbs 23 says. Be careful of money cos riches are soon gone. They fly away like an eagle. So if you are a person for whom this world is everything, money will be seen as the passport. But if you’re a person who’s been brought to see that there is a resurrection and an eternity, which is much bigger and better than this very short life, your money will be seen as a servant and a servant of the Gospel. I would say in pastoral ministry, over 43 years, I’ve seen money absolutely ruin families, a husband who’s offered a job and then decides that he must take it because it’s so prestigious and it’s so well paid and drags the family off to the other side of the world and there’s no fellowship, there’s no teaching and they begin to crumble apart.
But I’ve also seen so many families in pastoral ministry for whom money is a servant under control, wonderfully used for lives transformed, and proverbs is carefully warning against the trap.
Another big area in proverbs, of course, is sex. Physical relationships. Proverbs raises this a lot. Um, it’s a good gift from God. Sex turned by many into a god, an ultimate. That’s always the danger, isn’t it? Where we take something that’s good and make it ultimate place that it doesn’t deserve. And sex itself can be a tough master, a very tough master. Proverbs 6:24 says the seductress sees you as a loaf of bread. Isn’t it interesting that, um, in the reality the reality of proverbs? Let’s imagine. The man sees the woman as a piece of meat, and the prostitute sees the man as a loaf of bread. Both are demeaning. Both are dreadful.
Proverbs six, Verse 27 says. Can we take coals and put them in our lap hot coals and not be burned? It’s a big, big battleground, isn’t it? Huge, morally and spiritually,
And proverbs is warning God’s people against crossing the boundaries into temptation, calling the husband to be faithful to his wife, Proverbs five. Drink from your own well, don’t go drinking from other wells.
Proverbs might be speaking for many in the church and the world. When we read in Chapter seven, many other victories that immorality has brought down. The great Spurgeon said. Well, he often used to pay this prayer. “Oh, God, when I have the inclination to sin, take away the opportunity. And when I have the opportunity, please take away the inclination.” It’s a wise thing to pray. Jesus taught us in the Lord’s Prayer that we should ask on a daily basis that we would be delivered from temptation and evil.
Now, the big question that we have to ask in this battle is do we want to lose Jesus?
Are we the sort of people who will say, Look, I want what I want. And so if Jesus has to go, Jesus has to go. In which case what you’re doing is you’re grabbing something which is going to be so quick and losing the person who is your eternal hope. That’s the danger.
All sin is forgivable, said Jesus. All sin is forgivable, said Jesus, except turning and walking away from the Saviour, and we must seek his mercy for sins that we’ve committed, and we must stick to his instruction.
Now in the last minute this morning, a word on from Proverbs on relationships. Proverbs is very interested in relationships. It’s interested in friendship. It’s interested in neighbours. It’s interested in brothers. It’s interested in family. Proverbs 17:17 says a friend loves at all times.
Proverbs 18 says there’s a friend who sticks closer than a brother. Well, isn’t it wonderful that God provides us with friends who stick close when everybody else deserts us?
Proverbs three says, Don’t plan evil against your neighbour. And Proverbs 25 quite humorously, I think, says, Don’t call in to your neighbour too often or he will begin to hate you.
And then, in the matter of relationships, speech is so crucial. Proverbs 18 in the mouth of fools are their undoing. Proverbs 10. The lips of the righteous nourish Proverb 16, Gracious words are a honeycomb.
Proverbs 15 – A gentle answer turns away wrath and therefore proverbs 13 – Guard your mouth and guard your life. The New Testament tells us that we are incapable of controlling our tongue. But the Lord Jesus spoke perfectly, never a word out of season, and he is able to forgive us and help us to speak more helpfully. Now, as we finish this morning, I want to, uh, ask the big question. And that is, will proverbs do us any good?
Will we go out of church today and say, Gee, we heard a lot of stuff, but nothing’s really going to change. Is Proverbs a waste of space in the Bible? And the answer to the question is that we in Jesus have a Saviour, and Jesus being the Saviour makes us safe. Somebody has said that Christianity means remission and admission. Sins remitted, admission entry into God’s family forever. That’s beautiful.
Two simple words. When somebody says to you this week, what is Christianity? It’s remission and its admission – beautiful.
We also, if we’re Christians, have God’s spirit at work in our hearts, helping us and strengthening us to walk in God’s ways. But Proverbs is God speaking to us as a loving Father bringing comfort so that we might know he cares about us. And also bringing warning against very skillful lies and lies do come very skillfully. I re read this week of a man who’d bought himself a new huge television and a three month trial period of whatever it was 900 channels.
And he said, after being addicted to the television for three months straight, he came to this conclusion that what is being presented as the secular message is one an illusion. Two, temporary and three. It has no place for losers.
But Jesus stands above the world in his risen power. And he says, I’ll forgive you for the mistakes. I’ll give you my Holy spirit to live in you and help you to live for me. And I will give you the path and the pattern, which is best for you so that you will have peace and a future – where we couldn’t be more thankful.
Let’s bow our heads.
Let’s Pray
We do thank you, our Heavenly Father, for giving us a Saviour. And we thank you for giving us your Holy Spirit. And we thank you for giving us the Scriptures able to make us wise, comforted and in your goodness faithful. Please help us to hear and heed. We ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.