Listen Up
What you listen to shapes your heart, and your heart sets the course of your life. So listen attentively to the words of wisdom.
Resources:
The Book of Proverbs (Chapters 1-15, NICOT), Bruce Waltke
Proverbs: Wisdom that Works, Ray Ortlund
St. John Chrysostom: Commentary on the Sages: Commentary on Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, translated by Robert C. Hill
Proverbs, Charles Bridges
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Sermon Transcript
What’s the first thing you do when you get out of bed in the morning? Maybe you use the restroom, get dressed, brush your teeth, take a shower, put on deodorant, unload the dishwasher, and so on. But before we do all those things, you know what we really do first? We start thinking. Our brains got a little break overnight, maybe gave us some weird dreams, but once we’re up, they’re back on, and thoughts start coming in: “I’ve gotta get up so I can get my kids up in time.” “I want to read my Bible this morning.” “I shouldn’t have stayed up so late last night.” “Ugh; today’s the day I have to have that meeting.” “Wow; God is good.”
Those thoughts then set a certain path for your day, don’t they? They affect how you feel, what you plan, what you want. But where’d those thoughts come from? That’s a good question, and one that can’t be answer quickly, but in this passage we’ll see that at least one place from which they come is what you listen attentively to, and that makes sense if you stop and think about it. At a minimum, we could say those thoughts are in a certain language, and how’d you learn that language? First by listening to it. We’re continuing our series this morning through the book of Proverbs, and the whole book of Proverbs is about wisdom, which sets us on a path toward life. How can we grow in wisdom so that it shapes our thoughts and desires? Listen attentively to the words of wisdom, and we’ll see three reasons to do so in this passage: They’ve stood the test of time, the reveal the path to life, and what you listen attentively to will set the course of your life.
They’ve stood the test of time
Our passage today begins with the command to hear a father’s instruction, and to be attentive, that you may gain insight. Basic to gaining wisdom in the book of Proverbs is attentive listening to the words of wisdom. We can see this in each of the three sections of this chapter. This chapter is made up of three different speeches, each from Solomon, the father, to his son or plural sons, as in verse 1. We’ve already looked at verse 1, the beginning of the first speech, but now look at verse 10, the beginning of the next speech; what command leads it off again? Hear, my son, and accept my words. Fast forward to verse 20, the beginning of the next speech; what command leads it off? My son, be attentive to my words.
How do you really become wise? How do you really change for the better? We all change over time; that’s part of being human. But what can you do to cultivate change for the better, toward wisdom, rather than away from it? Well we saw back in chapter 1 and we will see throughout Proverbs that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the LORD. But verse 7 also makes a statement about the beginning of wisdom. The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom. Simple enough, right? Go to your financial advisor and ask, “How can I become wealthy? Where should I begin?” What might be a simple answer? “The beginning of wealth is this: Get money.” Now you might leave wondering why you paid for such obvious advice, but sometimes the obvious answer is the right answer. It takes money to make money, and it takes wisdom to become wise.
So while the fear of the LORD is the necessary beginning posture of getting wisdom, the beginning of the actual process of becoming wise is listening attentively to the words of wisdom. The process doesn’t stop there; you won’t become wise just by listening attentively. We see in verse 4 that you need to also hold fast the words you hear in your heart, and then keep the actual commandments you hear. But you can’t love and do a wisdom you’ve not first heard.
Ok, but why listen to these words of wisdom in the Bible? The reason Solomon gives in verse 2 is because they are good precepts, and then he starts talking about how his father did the same thing with him. He describes a time when he was a son with his father, tender, the only one in the sight of his mother. So Solomon is thinking back to a pretty young age here, and he’s saying even at that young age, his father taught him. Dads in the room, are you teaching your sons like this?
And why is Solomon telling his sons this? The actual substance of what his father taught him, which he relays to his sons, is not much different from what he’s been saying already in Proverbs. So why’s he bring up his father now? He seems to think that by appealing not only to himself, but to his father’s authority, his sons will be further induced to listen attentively to the words of wisdom he is now sharing with them. He’s showing that the words of wisdom he is now sharing with his sons have stood the test of time. He’s saying, “This is what my father taught me, and now I’m passing it on to you.” Solomon has now lived enough life even to test out his father’s words and he has tasted and seen they are good. His father told him they were good, his father told him that they would place on his head a graceful garland and bestow on him a beautiful crown, and now, having lived many years by that wisdom, Solomon still calls them “good precepts” and seeks to pass them on to his sons.
Here’s a way to think about tradition that I’ve adapted from an illustration by Michael Bird: When you go on a walk with your grandma and your grandma tells you, “Don’t eat that mushroom; it’s poisonous,” you might ask, “Well how do you know that grandma?” and she might say, “My mother taught me.” But you’re a smart modern westerner, so you say, “Well how do you know your mom was telling you the truth? Shouldn’t you have run your own experiment and assessed the results objectively?” So you say, “I’m not going to be some sheep who lets others tell me how to live; I’m going to try the mushroom for myself,” and then you die, because guess what? It was poisonous. Was that wise? No. Wisdom respects tradition. If your grandma says the mushroom is poisonous, and if that’s what her mom told her, she’s probably telling you that because it is, and she doesn’t want you to have to learn the hard way. The fact is, someone in the past did run the experiment, and died, and the people around that person made sure to pass on to future generations the knowledge that such a mushroom is poisonous, and people are still saying it because, guess what? The mushroom is still poisonous. If a bunch of kids in your grandma’s generation had eaten it and not died, she wouldn’t still be saying it to you. It stood the test of time because it’s true. Listen attentively to the words of wisdom because they have stood the test of time.
Tradition is not inerrant, sometimes falsehoods last for a while for other reasons, but it is wise to respect tradition, to give it greater weight, and that respect should be especially present when that tradition is a tradition within the people of God. If Christians have all agreed for thousands of years on something, and the Jews before them all agreed on it for thousands of years before Christ, you should be pretty hesitant to question it. Solomon isn’t just telling the story of any old dad; his dad was King David, described in the Bible as a man after God’s own heart. King David wasn’t just passing on to Solomon his good ideas; he was passing on to Solomon the knowledge of God’s revelation which he had made of himself to Israel. We should respect tradition even while recognizing its fallibility, we should respect the tradition of the people of God even more, while recognizing that it too is fallible, but we should respect the tradition handed down to us in the Bible above all else, because it is actually inerrant! The particular words of wisdom we have in Proverbs 4 are not just Solomon’s words or David’s words, but they are God’s very words, which is why they are printed in our Bibles. These are the words it always safe to follow, the words it always safe to trust, because they are God’s very words.
And, they have stood the test of time. You ever think about how crazy it is that we open this book, read it out loud, and listen while someone stands up and talks about it for 45 minutes? And we do that every week? I mean, maybe in the corner of some university there are occasional lectures on Homer or Virgil’s writings and 10 students gather around and listen attentively for 45 minutes, but I doubt that happens weekly, and it certainly isn’t the case that people from various tribes and languages and peoples and nations and socioeconomic classes and educational attainments and so on are all gathering for it like we have just in this room today, and there are tens if not hundreds more of these meetings happening right now just in this city in other churches, and thousands upon thousands more throughout the world.
Why? Because generation after generation has tasted and seen that these precepts are good. They’ve stood the test of time. New ideas often seem exciting, but in just a decade they’ll be called ridiculous. If you mainly listen attentively to the voices of your own generation, you will be, in the words of Ephesians 4, “tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine” (Eph 4:14). Instead, let us listen attentively to the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints, let us contend for it, (Jude 3) and let us take the things we’ve heard, teach them to our children (Psalm 78:4-8), and entrust them to faithful men who will be able to teach others also (2 Tim 2:2).
Listen attentively to the words of wisdom because they’ve stood the test of time. And next, listen attentively to them because they reveal the path to life.
They reveal the path to life
On to the second speech beginning in verse 10, and in verse 11 we meet this language of a way, or a path. It’s an image that shows up throughout Proverbs and the Bible, but in the rest of this chapter it’s especially prominent. Everyone’s life is on a certain path, and in verse 11 Solomon says the path he has taught his son is the path of wisdom and uprightness. The words he has shared with his son and with us in the book of Proverbs are words of wisdom, and so if you listen attentively to them in such a way as to store them up in your heart and do them, you will be on the path of uprightness. What’s that mean? He tells us in verse 12: When you walk, your step will not be hampered, and if you run, you will not stumble. The path of uprightness is the one in which you can keep standing, walk, and even run, without hindrance. And remember, this path is a metaphor for your life—if you really listen attentively to these words so as to get them into your heart and do them, they will give you endurance and strength for life in the real world.
On the other hand, verse 14 reveals that there is another path available to us: The path of the wicked. The wicked are described as those who cannot sleep unless they have done wrong and made someone stumble. Evil and violence are like their very food and drink. When Proverbs describes the wicked like that, it isn’t speaking in theological terms of how all of us are sinners. It is thinking of those sinners who are flagrant in their sin, who are so bold in it that they recruit others to it and eat, sleep, and breathe it. And you say, “Well I’m not one of those”; ok, maybe not, neither was Solomon’s son, but he still warned his son about their path, because sometimes, it does look attractive. Most notorious sinners don’t say, “I sure am miserable.” No; they make it all seem enjoyable. They make it seem like you’re the miserable one because you don’t “get to” enjoy all the evil they enjoy. You ever feel that from the world?
Well, this passage tells us what to do with a such a feeling: Don’t give it an inch. Do not enter the path verse 14 says, do not walk in the way of it; avoid it, do not go on it; turn away from it and pass on. Note the repetition; he basically just found four different ways to tell us “Keep out!” If you take one step down a path, it becomes easier to take another step down that path. When Mike McKinley was here a few weeks back and preached on Matthew 9:9-13 we saw that Jesus himself ate with tax collectors and sinners; so this does not mean there is no way in which to be a friend of sinners. But it does mean we must be wise in how we do so, so as to ensure that we do not become friends of sin in the process of being a friend to sinners. 1 Corinthians 10:12 warns anyone who thinks that he stands to take heed lest he fall. There are some events to which you may get invited that it wouldn’t necessarily be sinful to attend, but that still may be unwise for you to attend because they are so centered on sinful activity or the celebration of sin. You must make peace with the fact that the more flagrant someone’s sin becomes, the more it is what they eat, sleep, and breathe, the less of a friendship you’ll be able to have with them. You’ll just find you don’t have much to talk about or do together, because they don’t want to play basketball or go for a hike or grab lunch; they want to smoke up, gamble, and hit the strip club. Don’t assume you can just go along for the ride for all that without getting off the path to life.
Verses 18-19 add to the picture by depicting the path of the righteous as light, while the path of the wicked is darkness. The path of the righteous is like the light of day, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. Take one step on the path of the righteous, and things start to get clearer in your life. Take another step, and they get clearer still. Take another step, and they get clearer still. As you accept the words of proverbs as your perception of reality and live in accordance with them, you actually begin to perceive reality more deeply. Let’s try another random proverb exercise to see this; this is when in my sermon prep I flip to a later part of proverbs and use the first one I see. This time it was Proverbs 12:20 – “Those of crooked heart are an abomination to the LORD, but those of blameless ways are his delight.” Ok, so let’s listen attentively to it. What’s a crooked heart? It’s a heart turned from the path of wisdom. It’s the opposite of one whose ways is blameless. Now, you might be naturally prone to see a crooked heart and still be drawn to the person because perhaps they are physically attractive or wealthy. Or you may even be prone to make excuses for the person. But here’s what Proverbs tells us about such a person: They are an abomination to the LORD. On the other hand, a blameless person you may naturally have some aversion to: Maybe you’d call them a goody two-shoes. But here we see those of blameless ways are God’s delight. So you start trying to become more blameless and less crooked, and you start to see people more clearly: You’re less drawn to physical beauty and wealth and more drawn to character, since that’s what God cares most about. So slowly, over time, your friendships improve because you’re valuing what God values in a friend. Your parenting grows because you’re aiming at character more than intellectual or athletic achievements. Your reputation improves because people see that you actually live consistently with what you profess to believe, and so on. That’s just the random proverb example, but can you see how that path brings more and more light over time?
While on the other hand the way of the wicked is like deep darkness, such that they do not even know over what they stumble. Listen attentively to wisdom and it will mark out a path that brings more and more clarity to your life. Reject it and instead walk on the path of the wicked and it will mark out a path that brings less and less clarity. You’ll be stumbling because you’re on the wrong path, but you’ll be so blind that you won’t even be able to tell on what you stumbled.
Humans are naturally very good at telling when something is wrong. If you stumble, fall, and bang your knee on the ground, you won’t need someone to tell you that you hurt your knee. You will feel it. We are naturally good at telling when something is wrong, but we are not naturally good at diagnosing what is wrong. That takes wisdom. So those on the path of wickedness know they’re stumbling, but they don’t even know over what they stumble. And since we do a poor job of diagnosing what’s wrong, we often run after solutions that feel like they’ll work, but don’t address the root issue. This happens all the time. You’re living your life, going to school or going to work day-by-day, until one day, you begin to feel restless. Maybe you notice you’re getting more anxious, or you aren’t as happy as you were last year, or your relationships don’t feel as rich. You sense something is wrong; we’re good at that part. But then you go looking for explanations, and what do you come with it? It’s this dang job I have; it’s just not quite the right fit for me. So you go take another job, and 3 years later, what happens? Same feeling hits. Maybe it wasn’t the job? That’s one common mistake: You blame your circumstances, then you try to change your circumstances only to find out it wasn’t the circumstance that was causing your stumbling.
What’s another? You blame a person. You say it’s my spouse or my boyfriend or girlfriend or my boss or whoever’s in political office (often when we look for a person to blame we do blame someone in authority over us (cf. Num 14)). So either you try to change them or try to get rid of them and find someone else, only to find the same problems reoccurring. How many times do you have to do that before you realize you’re the common denominator?
If that sounds at all like your life, here’s a hypothesis to consider: Maybe you’re on the wrong path. There are only two paths, and the path of uprightness is marked out for us by the words of wisdom. So listen attentively to them, and finally, listen attentively to them because what you listen to will set the course of your life.
What you listen to will set the course of your life
Ok, so there are only two paths: the path of the righteous leading to life and light, the path of the wicked leading to pain and darkness. What determines which path you will take? Well in the third speech starting in verse 20, we encounter the now familiar exhortation to be attentive to the words of wisdom in verse 20, and then the reason given in verse 22 is because they are life to those who find them, and healing to all their flesh. What determines which path you take? The words to which you listen attentively. Look at verse 21: Keep them within your heart. That’s what attentive listeners do with words; they keep them within their heart. What you listen attentively to, what words you put into your heart are a really big deal. Verse 23 summarizes: “Keep your heart will all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.”
The heart in the Bible is not a reference to the organ; it’s a reference to what the Bible elsewhere calls the “inner man”. The heart especially contains two things: Thoughts and intentions (cf. Heb 4:12). So when the Bible elsewhere speaks of the mind, it’s not talking about a separate organ in your head; it’s referring to thinking function of the heart. So don’t think mind = thoughts, heart = emotions. Think instead of humans as embodied souls. The organs of our hearts and brains are parts of our bodies, but inside all that there is an unseen, immaterial soul that thinks and desires, and those thoughts and desires are reflected in the organs of our brains and hearts and in our actions. And that soul can be called in the Bible the heart. So the heart is where you keep those words to which you listen attentively, and from it flow the springs of life.
When the text says that from it flow the springs of life, it means that your heart is what sets the direction of your life, or to give it more detail, what you believe and what you desire determine what you do, and what you do reveals what path you are on. So when you get to the end of your life, if someone wanted to know how you ended up on the path on which you ended up, they’d look back to where you began, and where you began would be the heart. From the heart flows the direction of your life. From the heart flows which path, the path of uprightness, or the path of wickedness, you end up on. And therefore, you must keep your heart with all vigilance.
Note that it takes vigilance; all vigilance even, verse 23 says. Your heart is a hard thing to keep. For one thing, it’s less visible. Think about religion, for example. What’s the attractiveness of something like an eight-fold path in Buddhism or five pillars in Islam or seven sacraments in Roman Catholicism? You can just do them, and assure yourself that you’re on the right path. You can even have a living, visible monk or imam or priest tell you whether you’re on the right path or not. But the path to life in the Bible, the path of uprightness that God calls us into, isn’t so simple. It’s far deeper. It reaches deeper than our actions into our hearts, for the LORD sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart (1 Sam 16:7). What is going on in your heart matters to God. What you think and what you want matter to God. What you do matters to God too, but God knows that if you believe what’s true and want what’s good, you will also do what’s good. And on the flipside, God knows that if you don’t actually love him and love others from your heart, you may go to church services and pray and give alms, but you won’t actually forgive those who wrong you from the heart, you won’t actually tell the truth even when it brings you only earthly disadvantage to do so, you won’t actually rejoice in your neighbor’s prosperity and grieve his downfall, because it’s from the heart that the streams of life flow.
Here’s how Jesus said it: “Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? 18 But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. 19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. 20 These are what defile a person” (Matt 15:17-20). Jesus says if you want to know where evil deeds like murder, adultery, sexual immorality, etc. come from, look at the heart. And that is why if you want to walk the path of uprightness you really need to keep your heart with all vigilance. You need to pay close attention to your inner life, especially two things: Your thoughts and your desires.
J.I. Packer once put it this way, “We must learn to measure ourselves, not by our knowledge about God, not by our gifts and responsibilities in the church, but by how we pray and what goes on in our hearts. Many of us, I suspect, have no idea how impoverished we are at this level. Let us ask the Lord to show us.” Many of us are relatively unaware of what is going on in our hearts. Again, it’s hard work, so we opt not to do it. At our staff meeting each week one of the questions I ask the staff that I also answer myself is, “How’s your heart?” If someone were to ask you that today, would you even know how to answer? I’m not trying to shame you if you wouldn’t; again, it’s hard, and most of us have not been well taught on it. Here are some of the conditions of the heart the Bible says can exist: We already saw crooked in our random proverb, it could also be perverted, wily, wise, deceptive, anxious, sick, bitter, joyful, hurting, backsliding, peaceful, glad, sorrowful, cheerful, rejoicing, arrogant, haughty, intelligent, raging, pure, foolish, envious, heavy, evil, hard, soft, trusting, and that’s just in the book of Proverbs! Pay attention to how scripture describes the heart, and pay attention to your own heart, especially what is happening in your heart toward the LORD.
The heart will set the course of your life, and the heart is shaped by what words you keep within it. There are roughly two schools of thought in history on how people change most fundamentally, and you can see this debate from ancient Greek philosophy to modern psychology to even the Christian living section of a bookstore. I hope to unpack it more in our next Sunday seminar on spiritual disciplines, but for now I’ll just summarize the debate like this: Do people change most fundamentally from the inside out, or from the outside in? Do my habits or behaviors change the heart most fundamentally, or does the heart change your behavior and habits? From Proverbs 4:23 to Jesus to the whole Bible, the Bible firmly says that most fundamentally, people change from the inside out. The heart changes through the words it listens attentively to and internalizes, then the behavior changes.
That said, biblical wisdom is nuanced in such a way that it also calls for action, and that’s where verses 24-27 come in. The heart is the foundation; that is abundantly clear from verse 23, and what shapes the heart are words; that’s why Solomon keeps telling his son to be attentive to his words and keep them within his heart. But to really be walking the path of uprightness, you must exercise your will to be a doer of those words. You change from the inside out; your beliefs and desires shape your actions, but the actions you then take can either reinforce or undo what is going on inside you. So look at verse 24: Put away from you crooked speech, and put devious talk far from you. Let’s say you listen attentively to this proverb (this one is not random): “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger” (Prov 15:1). Let’s say you listen attentively to it and your heart changes into a more peaceful, gentle heart, that is more inclined to give a soft answer when someone gets angry with you. But then, next time someone gets angry with you, instead of acting on that inclination, you act on the inclination to speak crooked, devious words, harsh words. What’d you do there? By your action you undid that heart work and instead gave more strength to the inclination to respond harshly. You can’t change your heart by just practicing soft speech. But your heart change won’t last if you insist on speaking harshly.
So put away or keep away from you crooked speech, and put devious talk far from you. Don’t listen to it, and when you feel the urge to talk in that way, just don’t do it. Tame your tongue. Consider your media intake or who you are even spending the most time with, what voices you are letting in, and guard your heart from them. What you listen attentively to does shape your heart, and from the overflow of the heart, your mouth will also speak. Guard your heart in what you listen to and in what you speak.
Verse 25 takes us from our mouths to our eyes: Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you. The righteous man Job said, “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” (Prov 31:1). “I’m looking but not touching” is a sure way to walk the path of the wicked. If in your heart you extoll the glories of marriage and sexual purity as the Bible presents it but then feast your eyes on sexually explicit material, you’re undoing all that heart work and looking away from the path of uprightness. If in your heart you extoll the glories of heaven and the life of the world to come but then spend your days scrolling Instagram looking at images of the great vacations, designer clothing, and other material possessions this world has to offer, you’re undoing all that heart work and looking away from the path of uprightness. So, finally, ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right hand or to the left; turn your foot away from evil.
It’s hard work to guard your heart; it takes all vigilance. It’s hard work to ponder the path of your feet; it’s easier to just follow every whim. It’s hard to hold fast a tradition; it’s easier to be tossed to and fro by what is new and popular. It feels freeing on some level, but the reality is that not all paths lead to the same end, and wisdom is the art of perceiving reality and living in accordance with it. There is a path that leads to pain and darkness, and a path that leads to life and light, and we know that now not only because it’s been handed down to us by Solomon, but by Solomon’s greater son, the son who would come generations later, Jesus Christ.
He walked the path of uprightness; tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. He turned neither to the right hand nor to the left, though he knew the path God had ordained for him included going to the cross, and do you remember what happened from the sixth hour to the ninth hour while he hung on the cross? Darkness. Darkness over all the land, darkness over even him. Why? Because he was taking the judgment the wicked deserved. Though he walked the path of the righteous, he suffered in the dark so that after he rose from the dead to everlasting life we too could be brought out of darkness and into his marvelous light. You want to be on the path to life? Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). There is one path of uprightness, one path to life, and it’s Jesus. Turn from your sins and believe in him, and you will be on the path to life. Reject him, and you will remain in darkness. It’s his words you must listen attentively to, for only he has the words of eternal life (John 6:68), and it’s only his word that ultimately has the power to change your heart (Rom 1:16-17, Col 3:16, Gal 3:1-5). The Bible calls that word the gospel. Listen attentively to the gospel, the word of Christ, and let it dwell in you richly. It is the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints, it has stood the test of time, it is the word of eternal life, and it will change your heart, so that from it will flow springs of living water, welling up to eternal life (John 4:14, 7:38).