Proverbs - The fear of the Lord

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Good morning, church. It's wonderful to see you all here this morning. I want to start with a story. As many of you would know, prior to becoming a pastor, going to Bible college and doing some study, I was an audiovisual technician, which is a fancy way of saying I was a button pusher and stage builder at music festivals. And yeah, so this is some of the stuff I used to work on. That's one of the stages that we did from some festival somewhere. But as part of my job, one of the things that I had to do was rig. And that's just a fancy way of saying I put the bolts and stuff in the stage to make it stand up. But to do that, that's a high-risk activity, okay? And so there's training involved in that. You have to go and get your high-risk work license. You have to go and do courses to get your rigging abilities, and you're working at heights and all of this. There's days worth of training. There's advice and rules and instructions for how you are supposed to do this and do it safely, instructions for how to climb and put the things in the place properly. And I remember very clearly the first stage that I ever had to climb, the first time that I got harnessed up and went up there. And I was fearful. It's a scary thing, because those uprights, they're not super sturdy. They're held down with concrete blocks, and they kind of wobble if wind comes through. And I'm a big guy, so there's a lot of weight on one side when you're going up. I was a little bit fearful. And because of that, I was cautious and aware. I had done all my training. I was harnessed up. And very intentionally, I made sure I knew where my hands and my feet went. I made sure I knew where I was hooking off to to make sure that I would not only get up there and do the job, but I would get down safely. But as time went on, I became a bit more comfortable. See, I'd done this before. I could climb up fairly quickly, hook off, get the things in the places where they needed to go and life was good. It wasn't as scary as it used to be. I didn't have this sense of fear. Every time that I went up to it, because it was just part of my job. I could almost do it on autopilot. Just go up, get it done, come down, have lunch. I share this story because we're going to come back to it. I think there's a lesson that we can learn from that that ties into what we're talking about this morning. Term 1 started. Kids are back at school. Teachers are ready and going. Term 1, week 1, done. And that means that for us as a church, we're going to be starting a new sermon series. We're going to be looking in the book of Proverbs over the next 10 weeks. And our focus as we look through the Proverbs will be seeking wisdom for living life as disciples of Jesus. But before we dive into any of this today, would you join me as we pray? Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you that in a very real way you have revealed yourself to us. Lord, we pray that as we seek you this morning, as we stop and seek to know you. Lord, would you be at work in our hearts by your Holy Spirit reveal to us what it is that you want to say this morning? Lord, would you help our hearts be ready to respond? We ask in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. This morning's sermon is very much an introduction to what we're going to be doing over the next couple of weeks. And when we start a new book, it's helpful for us to take some time just to briefly look at some context. And so Proverbs, in general, aren't just a Christian thing. It's not just found in the Bible. Proverbs are just wise sayings. In fact, Cambridge Dictionary defines a proverb as a short sentence, usually known by many people, stating something commonly experienced or giving advice. There's so many different Proverbs out there in the world. And yet it's fascinating that in our Scripture, in God's Word to us, we have a book of Proverbs. And in the same way, the book of Proverbs is filled with short statements that reveal truth and wisdom for living. And throughout the term, we're going to pick up on some of the themes that are prominent throughout the Proverbs. We're going to seek God's wisdom for living as disciples. And I don't know about you, but when I go, okay, we're going to be looking at wisdom, I kind of want to make sure that what we're reading is coming from someone wise. That makes sense. I don't want to listen to the wisdom of fools, because that's not going to help anyone. And so it's helpful to know that not only is the book of Proverbs God's Word, that means that it's inspired by his Holy Spirit, but it's also primarily authored by King Solomon, the son of David. This is important because this King Solomon is the person of whom God said in 1 Kings 3 verse 12, I will give you wisdom and discerning heart, so that there will never have been anyone like you, nor will there ever be. Here we have God's declaration that he would reveal to Solomon more wisdom than any other human on earth, with the exception of Jesus, because he is God in human form. And so it comes from a good source. If you got your Bibles there, I'll invite you to open up to the very beginning of Proverbs. We're going to read chapter 1 verses 1 to 7. This gives us an overview of the purpose of the book of Proverbs that we're going to be exploring over the next 10 weeks. It says this, the Proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel, to know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight, to receive instruction in wise dealing, in righteousness, justice and equity, to give prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the youth, let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance, to understand a proverb and disaing, the words of the wise and their riddles. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. This morning as we launched this series, there's something really important to unpack. See, I believe that Solomon in writing these first verses provides a key for us, the reader, to ensure that we're able to gain knowledge and understand wisdom. The key that he gives us to understanding everything that is to come is found in the first part of verse 7. He says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. The fear of the Lord. This phrase is important. I went through throughout the week, my tally should be pretty good, but if you find more, please let me know, because I'm sure I may have missed some. But to my count, this phrase, the fear of the Lord, occurs explicitly in Proverbs in that order 13 times. 13 times directly this phrase, the fear of the Lord, is stated. I'm going to put them up on the screen for your reference, but I'm going to read them out just all as we go. The first verses are there. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fills despise wisdom and instruction. Because they hated knowledge, they did not choose the fear of the Lord. Then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. The fear of the Lord adds length to life, but the years of the wicked are cut short. In the fear of the Lord, one has confidence and his children will have a refuge. The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life that one may turn away from the snares of death. Better a little with the fear of the Lord than great wealth with turmoil. The fear of the Lord is instruction in wisdom and humility comes before honour. Through love and faithfulness, sin is atoned for. Through the fear of the Lord, evil is avoided. The fear of the Lord leads to life. Then one rests content, untouched by trouble. Humility is the fear of the Lord. Its wages are rich with honour and life. Do not let your heart envy sinners, but always be zealous for the fear of the Lord. Thirteen times explicitly this phrase is used throughout the whole of the Proverbs. Additional to that, there's at least seven times where there's a variation of this same phrase. I'll read them now. Do not be wise in your own eyes. Fear the Lord and shun evil. To fear the Lord is to hate evil. I hate pride and arrogance, evil behaviour and perverse speech. Whoever walks in uprightness fears the Lord, but he who is devious in his ways despises him. The wise fear the Lord and shun evil, but a fool is hot-headed and yet feels secure. My son, fear the Lord and the King, and do not join with those who do otherwise. Blessed is the one who fears the Lord always, but whoever hardens his heart will fall into calamity. Charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Here with both explicit phrasing and variations, we have at least 20 times in the Proverbs that this phrase, this idea of fearing God comes up. It's prevalent and it's important that Solomon puts this at the beginning. I truly believe this is a key note for us to take in order to get the most out of our exploration of the Proverbs. Of the long list that I just read, we're going to focus in on two this morning, which I believe capture the essence of what is being communicated. The first we read in Proverbs 1.7, the first part of that verse says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. And then in chapter 9, verse 10, we get this statement. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. If we can dance all of this very, very simply, we can say it like this, if we want to gain knowledge and wisdom for how to live life, we must start with the fear of the Lord. And all of this begs the question, I'm going to ask this morning, do you fear God? And before you answer that, I think it's really important to clarify what we mean when we talk about fear in this context. The Miriam Webster dictionary has two prominent definitions of fear. The first, they define fear as an unpleasant, often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger. Anxious concern or unpleasant alarm. And I think if we're being honest, when we hear the word fear, that's the first thing that comes to mind. Whatever phobia we have, like, if a crocodile or a snake was up here, I would be fearful. I'd want to disappear because that's an unsafe situation. The second definition they give is that fear is a profound reverence and awe, especially towards God. And while I think that one's better, it actually captures the entirety of what we're talking about. It's important to highlight that fear isn't just a negative emotion when we talk about it. It's not just something that we want to avoid for all of our lives. And so I want to suggest my definition of fear for us this morning. Is that fear is a profound reverence and awe towards God, coupled with a healthy awareness of the danger brought about by our sin. And so with that in mind, I'll ask this again. Do you fear God? I asked myself this question during the week, and if we're being honest, my guess this morning is that many of us would actually say no. Not really, and definitely not to the extent that I probably should. That's where I landed. Of course, I know that I should fear God, but in practice, do I actually fear God? And I don't think it's just a you and I situation. I think it's more broad than that. Because it seems as though this topic, the fear of the Lord is not something that's regularly discussed in Christian circles. It's not regularly dwelt on within churches. We tend to talk extensively and highlight the good news of Jesus, our savior and our friend. We focus in on God's salvation, which is amazing. That's good to talk about and to focus in on. But in doing so, we're often far too quick to move past the reason that we needed saving in the first place. And by doing so, I want to suggest that we not only miss out on that, but we make less of our salvation. Because we don't truly understand, we don't truly reflect on what it is that we've been saved from. In an interview, John Piper made this statement, and I think it's true for us today. He said, the fear of the Lord is a perversive and important topic. Pervasive and important topic, sorry. And I think it is needed today, because we are so quick, I think, to solve the problem of God's fearsomeness with the gospel that we may not give people a chance to really let them sink in how deeply sinful they are or how fearful God really is. We should fear in the sense that we seek refuge from God away from God's terrible wrath. God's grace in Christ is the refuge from God's wrath outside of Christ. There is a terror outside of Christ, and there is a different kind of trembling inside of Christ. I shared that in a previous life I used to rig and do that, got comfortable, got good at getting up and down and doing my job. And after about a year or so of rigging regularly, the fear of falling was completely gone. I had confidence in my ability. I could do this. Being up high was normal and a part of what I did. But see, with the consistency of doing that, with the confidence in my own ability, can complacency. Whilst no one ever actually acted on it, there was a joke amongst us rigors that you only ever really need a harness if you plan on falling. Thankfully, no one ever went up without a harness on. But I remember very clearly there was one gig that I was doing. We had set up the stage, we had done the festival all day, everyone was tired, but we needed to get some of the screen down before the night was ended. We needed to make sure it was good and ready to go for the team coming in the next day. And so I climbed up in my harness, hooked off, did everything I was supposed to do. But where the bolt was, I had to actually hang down from the truss, trusting completely in the harness to support me. As I reached out for the bolt, undid it, took it off. And that was fine. This is some of the truss we used to climb. You can see in it there's diagonal sections. And so we'd clip off, make sure we were all secure. Did the first bolt, no problem. And the second bolt was just there, just slightly out of reach. But the thing when you're hanging is you can kind of move and grab and undo whatever you need to do. And so I didn't think anything of it. I went, cool, I can reach that, just do a little bit of a swing, and we're good. What I didn't realize is one of my clips was on the diagonal. And it had been supporting my weight up here. And so as I shifted my body weight to move to the next bolt, the hook holding me slid down and moved probably only that much. But I tell you, I feared for my life in that moment. All of a sudden, I free fell for what felt like an eternity until the hook slid down and caught my weight again. In that moment, I feared for my life. I thought that the harness had failed, that I was falling and could possibly die or be severely injured. What was interesting, though, isn't the fall. It's the fact that after the fall, after the adrenaline had stopped, after I realized that I was actually OK, I wasn't dead, there was a renewed awareness. A renewed focus on what I was doing and a renewed focus on the consequences of doing it wrong. I remember undoing that bolt, putting it back in, and for the first time in a long time, I made sure I knew exactly where my hands and feet were on that truss. I made sure I knew exactly where I was hooking off to to make sure I got back down to the ground safely. In church, there's a danger for us as Christians, for us as disciples of Jesus to become complacent, to forget about the power and the awesomeness of God our Creator, God our sustainer and God our Savior. There's a danger to make small the very real consequences of our sin. To brush them off as though they're not as big as they actually are. The Bible's very clear that the consequence of our sin is death. The Bible's very clear that God is a good and just God, and he punishes sin. And if we become complacent in this, it leads us to think of God as less than he is. It leads us not to regard him with the reverence or respect and gratitude that we ought to. And yet the Proverbs are very, very clear. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And knowledge of the Holy Spirit is understanding. Church, sometimes we need to remind ourselves of how big, how great, how awesome our God is. We need to remind ourselves how we are not God, how we don't have it under control even though we might be comfortable. We are God's creation. We cannot obtain anything that God hasn't already made. It's all His. Each and every breath that we breathe is a gift from God. And when we start to think about who God is, what He's done, we realize how small and unpowerful we are in comparison. We realize that actually I cannot control my life. I don't have the ability to control nature, to make sure that I make it through this day safely. I don't by myself have the ability to guarantee that I will breathe my next breath. Because it's a gift from God. Just like my slip while ringing, as disciples, it's important that we refocus our attention, hopefully in a less traumatic way, and give ourselves time to reflect and build a healthy fear of the Lord. Not a fear that God's big enough to get me. No, God is good and just. And because of that, He punishes sin. Reality is worth sinful. And yet God is so big and so powerful that He made it possible for us to be reconciled to Him again, something that we could not do. If you've got your Bibles there, can I invite you to turn to Proverbs 2? We're going to read the first 15 verses. I think He gives us some guidance for what we are to do in response. Proverbs 2 says, My son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding, yes, if you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. For God gives wisdom from His mouth comes knowledge and understanding. He stores up sound wisdom for the upright. He is a shield to those who walk in integrity, guarding the paths of justice and watching over the way of His saints. Then you will understand righteousness and justice and equity, every good path for wisdom will come into your heart and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul. Discretion will watch over you, understanding will guard you, delivering you from the way of evil, from men of perverse speech who forsake the paths of uprightness, from men in the ways of darkness who rejoice in doing evil and delight in the perversiveness of evil, men whose paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways. Let's read verse 4 and 5 again. If you seek it like silver and search for it as hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom from His mouth comes knowledge and understanding. Church, as we make our way through the Proverbs, it's important for us to be reminded of the healthy fear of the Lord. But how do we do this? We need to actively be seeking God. How do we gain a fear of God that's healthy? We know who He is and what He's done. Well, how do we get that? We spend time with Him. The simple answer is one that you've already known and have been practicing for the last couple of weeks. Very simply, we respond to God's command in Psalm 46-10, where He says, Be still and know that I am God. If we want a healthy fear of the Lord that leads to knowledge and wisdom, don't get it mistaken. We cannot have true knowledge and wisdom without a healthy fear of the Lord. If we want a profound reverence and awe towards God coupled with a healthy awareness of the dangers brought about by our sin, we need to stop regularly and seek God. Seek His wisdom, His insight, His revelation about Himself to us. He's given it all to us in His Word. And so the response for this morning is very, very simple. Be still and know God. As we go through the next 10 weeks, the past as we pondered this together, how can we help everyone to stop, to be still, to seek God, to grow in a good and healthy fear of God, who He is, what He's done, how He's designed us to live as we unpack the wisdom that He's given to us. And so on your way out there at the front and back door, we've put together a daily Bible reading plan. Just five days of the seven. If you read Monday to Friday, you can have a break Saturday. Sunday we'll be preaching from the Proverbs. But can I encourage you, our prayer for this is that it's going to supplement your journey through the book of Proverbs. There's so much wisdom that God gives to us here. Make time to stop and seek Him intentionally. Because wisdom and knowledge begin with the fear of the Lord. Would you pray with me? Heavenly Father, we thank You that very truly You are God and we are not. Lord, thank You for the pressure that relieves from us. Lord, we don't need to know everything. We don't need to do everything. We don't need to have all the answers. Because we are not God. We thank You that You are God and that You have a plan for each and every one of us. Lord, thank You that You've given us the wisdom of Your Word so easily accessible. Lord, thank You that You are a good and just God. Lord, that You do punish sin and evil. Thank You that through Jesus You have overcome the consequence of our sin. Thank You that You've made it possible for us to be reconciled to You, our God. Thank You that we are Your creation. Thank You that You love us, that You invite us into a relationship with You, our God. Lord, help us not to take that for granted this morning. Help us not just to hear this morning and forget it tomorrow. Lord, help us to take You up on Your gracious offer of relationship. Help us to cling closely to You. Lord, by Your Holy Spirit as we read through Scripture, as we seek You, would You reveal Yourself to us? Would You lead us in the ways in which You would have us walk? Lord, would You help us to grow a healthy fear of You? Lord, would You reveal to us wisdom and knowledge for how we are as Your people to live as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior? We pray all these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.