Seek and Find

Sermon Transcript

Years ago I heard stand-up comedian Dane Cook joke about how when he was a kid, quicksand seemed like a real existential threat to his safety, only to now realize it’s not a terribly common issue. Another feature of children’s stories that now probably does not seem super relevant to most of us is the proverbial treasure hunt. I’ve been on earth for over 37 years now, and I still haven’t heard the true story of the person finding a buried chest full of treasure that they now get to keep. Nonetheless, the truth in those stories is that we do tend to fervently seek that which we value. I once knew a bourbon aficionado who fervently sought rare bottles of bourbon. Archeologists today do still fervently seek for ancient artifacts like treasure chests. Astronomers fervently seek knowledge of distant galaxies. Some fervently seek the next investment that is set to blow up.

 

But this morning we’re looking at chapter 2 in the book of Proverbs, and in it, the author, Solomon, writes to his son and tells him to fervently seek something else: Wisdom. He goes so far as to say that he should seek it like silver, and search for it as for hidden treasure. Do you seek wisdom like that? If an impartial observer were to look at how you use your time, energy, and money, would they conclude that you value wisdom the way the bourbon aficionado values bourbon? In this passage we are told to fervently seek wisdom like that, because if you fervently seek wisdom, it will fervently protect you. As we go through this passage, we’ll look first at the seeking, then at the protector, then at the protection.

 

The seeking

 

Our passage is one big, long, conditional sentence in the original language. A conditional is an “if/then” statement, and this one is the sort of “if/then” statement that has the effect of a promise: If you do x, then y God promises y will happen. Verse 1 begins the if: If you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you. What Solomon specifically has in mind here are the words of wisdom he plans to share in the book of Proverbs, and he doesn’t want his son to simply treat them like we treat the words we hear in commercials: In one ear and out the other. He wants him to receive those words and treasure them up with him. If you were to ever find treasure that you could keep, what would you do with it? You’d store it up in a secure place. Solomon is telling his son to treasure up these commandments inside him, as the Psalmist says to the LORD: “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you” (Psalm 119:11).

 

Continuing in verse 2, Solomon describes the “if” as making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart for understanding. To incline your heart to something means to aim it at something. If an archer wants a deer, he inclines his arrow toward it; he doesn’t aim his arrow where he pleases and then hope the deer will come running into his trajectory. And right here we encounter one of the things that can trip people up when it comes to seeking wisdom. People often come to a church gathering, a Bible, or a pastor with a conclusion already fixed in their minds. Their arrow is already aimed, as it were; their heart is already inclined to a desired conclusion, rather than to understanding, as verse 2 puts it. They aren’t coming to be taught; they’re coming to be affirmed. They are holding out their arrow and telling the deer, “Hey, I’m not going to chase you around. You come to me,” and the obvious result if an archer tried that strategy is that they’re very unlikely to get a deer. And the obvious result if you approach the church, the Bible, or a pastor with that attitude is that you’re very unlikely to get wisdom. You aren’t really seeking it! You have to incline your heart to it, rather than trying to incline it to your heart.

 

And you have to call out for it, verse 3: If you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding. When you are fervently seeking something, you do not just wait for it to come to you. One of the simple ways to assess whether you are really seeking wisdom is, are you asking for it? First, do you ask God for it? Do you recognize even in coming to read the Bible or listen to a sermon that unless God opens your mind to understand the scriptures, you won’t understand? Do you recognize in how many situations you just are not really sure what the wise thing to do is, and does that compel you to cry out to God and ask him for wisdom? James 1:5 says, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.” Fervent seeking of wisdom means fervent prayer for wisdom.

 

And it means asking questions. It is a good sign that someone is seeking wisdom when they come up to me after a sermon and ask a question about it, or when I get an email during the week asking a question about something someone was reading in their Bible that week. Sometimes people preface their questions with qualifiers like, “I know you’re busy, but…” and I’ll often tell them, “This is the very thing I want to be busy with! It’s kinda why I’m here” and I don’t have a monopoly on wisdom; my point is that fervent seekers of wisdom are proactive in their search for wisdom. They’re always asking questions. They bug the wise with their questions.

 

Often when Tom DeLucia and I meet, Tom has a list of questions in his phone he wants to cover. When we had dinner with a guest speaker, Chad Van Dixhoorn, a few months back, Tom had a list of questions and asked for his email to follow up. When we’re teaching a Sunday seminar and break for questions, Tom does his best to give other people a shot, but if it’s dead air, he’s going to fill it with a good question. What’s he doing there? He’s calling out for insight, and raising his voice for understanding. If you really want to gain wisdom, get good at asking yourself, “What don’t I know about what I just heard? What don’t I understand?” The wisest people are often not necessarily the smartest people; they are simply the most demanding people, and by that I mean they demand to understand; they don’t settle for surface-level knowledge.

 

You say, “Well Mike I’m just not a deep thinker like that; I like things simple.” Well, here’s the reality: Wisdom is simple in a sense, but it is a simplicity on the other side of complexity. You must be willing to think deeply if you want to become wise. And the cool thing is, if you’re new to that, you should have no problem finding a bunch of questions that you’ve never asked before! Here’s something you could try this week: Try going to your Citygroup with a question about this passage or its application to your life. Your Citygroup leaders always come with questions; trying bringing a question of your own. Just say, “Hey before we start tonight, can I just ask a question about Proverbs 2?” What are you doing there? You’re calling out for insight. Dianne, Andrea, and Savanna used to stay after Citygroup ended for an hour or so asking questions and we’d talk about them; it was awesome. Savanna and Katy would bring a notebook and take notes on the Citygroup discussion as it was happening; why? They were receiving the words, treasuring them up.

 

But you know, you’re probably already sensing that all that requires time and energy. It does; remember verse 4: If you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures. To fervently seek wisdom is costly, but we are willing to pay the cost for something valuable. You already give your time and energy to what you value. The bourbon aficionado values bourbon, so he gives his time and energy to it. If you value fitness, you find the time to get to the gym. If you value money, you find a way to work hard at your job even when you don’t feel like it. If you value experiences, you find a way to budget and plan for that next vacation. So if you notice you don’t typically give the time and energy necessary to seeking wisdom, don’t despair, but do ask yourself, and maybe even ask some trusted brothers and sisters in Christ to help you evaluate this: To what am I giving my time and energy? And why do I value that more than wisdom? If you find you never “have time” to read the Bible or attend church gatherings, with what are you filling that time?

 

Consider ways to not only give your time and energy to seeking wisdom, but to even give your money to it. If you don’t know how to read, I would encourage you to learn to read. If you know how to read, I would encourage you to spend your money on good books, and to spend your time reading them. The book of Proverbs tells us that you can grow in wisdom through words; verse 1 of our passage talks about receiving words as a means of receiving wisdom. The Bible is the ultimate wisdom source book; we’ve even printed out some copies of the Bible reading plan I use to help you get started on reading the Bible if you’d like. But there are also a lot of other good books that will help you understand the Bible better. There are a lot of bad books out there too; don’t trust google or amazon to lead you to good books. Charlie’s a newer attendee here who did something very wise a couple weeks ago: He grabbed me after church and said, “Pastor Mike, can I text you this week about a book I’m thinking about reading and you tell me if you think it’ll be good or not?” Again, not saying I have the monopoly on that, but books are generally one area pastors can be uniquely helpful to members in filtering because we spend so much of our time keeping up with them.

 

There are bad books about there, but there also a lot of good books, and it is worth your time to read them. Listen to this quote from Pastor John Piper on reading: “Suppose you read slowly like I do, about 200 words a minute…If you read 15 minutes a day for one year, you’ll read 5,475 minutes in a year. Multiply that by 200 words a minute, and you get 1,095,000 words that you would have read in a year.

 

Now, an average serious book might have 360 words on a page. I counted a bunch of them. So you would read 3,041 pages in one year during that 15-minute slot a day. A serious book would average maybe 250 pages? Lots of books are just 150 pages, but let’s just say a good, solid, serious theology book would have 250 pages. I just flopped one open yesterday that I got in the mail. It was 250 pages. That’s 12 very substantial books, all in 15 minutes a day for the average slow reader.”

 

With this in mind, I’ve even prepared a list of 12 books that I think would help any Christian grow in wisdom if they read them. If you’re like, “I don’t know where to start,” I’d recommend starting with those books. Gareth Weakly is one of our deacons here, so we’ve officially recognized him as wise, and one more evidence of that is when I came back from sabbatical Gareth told me about multiple substantive books he read while I was gone. I didn’t tell him to read them; he just did it because he’s seeking out wisdom like silver. Shannon Capps is our other deacon, also very wise, and Shannon works full-time as a professor of engineering, but while doing that, Shannon spent her time and money to get a Master of Arts in Counseling at Westminster Seminary because she wanted to grow in wisdom. In the years I’ve known Shannon, I’ve seen her spend her own money out of pocket multiple times to attend conferences on counseling or theology simply because she wants to grow in wisdom. A lot of people who meet Shannon want to become more like Shannon; guess how you do that? Give your time, money, and energy to seeking wisdom like Shannon does.

 

One brief aside here and then I’ll move on: Our Citygroups are currently reading through a book on discipling relationships, and one way of thinking of a discipling relationship is one in which I am spending intentional time with someone to pass wisdom on to them, in hope that they will then pass that wisdom on to others. God does not require anyone to have that kind of relationship with everyone, and if you try to have that kind of relationship with everyone, you will spread yourself so thinly that you will functionally have it with no one. So an important question arises: With whom should I initiate such a discipling relationship, and I mention it here because a person who fits the description of verses 1-4 is the kind of person you want to disciple. It’s someone bugging you for wisdom, not someone you have to bug to meet. It’s someone asking you questions, not someone to whom you have to ask all the questions. We owe everyone love, but you only want to devote intentional time to passing on wisdom to an individual if they are an individual who wants wisdom. And if you’re sitting there thinking, “I’m kinda just looking for someone to disciple me,” work on becoming the kind of person described in verses 1-4, ask the Lord to provide someone wiser than you, and in the meantime, spend intentional time with peers who can at least be a mutual encouragement to you, and read good books.

 

Ok, so that’s all just the “If”: If you fervently seek wisdom, then what will happen? Verse 5 begins to tell us, and in it we meet the protector.

 

The protector

 

So if you fervently seek wisdom, what do you get? You understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God. If you seek wisdom, you find…God? Wouldn’t you expect it to say if you seek wisdom, you’ll find wisdom? Why is that if you seek wisdom, you will find the knowledge of God? Well, verse 6: Because it is the LORD who gives wisdom, and from his very mouth comes knowledge and understanding. If you were thirsty and going around your house looking for water, what would you likely find first? The faucet. Why? Because from the faucet comes water. So if you go looking for wisdom and fervently seek it, you will find God, because it is from the LORD that wisdom comes.

 

The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas demonstrated how this happens in a general sense if you search for the first cause of everything. If you don’t settle for surface level knowledge but start asking questions like, “How’d we get here?” you obviously go back to your parents, and then to their parents, and so on. The current scientific consensus is that all came from a big bang, but before that consensus even developed, Aquinas pointed out that everything with a beginning must have a cause, and therefore, if our universe has a beginning (and the big bang actually agrees that it did), it must have a cause that itself has no beginning. You know what the word is we use for the being who has no beginning, who caused everything else? God. Dig deep enough on anything, and eventually you will hit him. Sometimes people today say they don’t believe in the existence of God because they can’t accept things by faith; they are critical thinkers who don’t accept surface-level claims; they’re too skeptical; they always dig deeper. But their problem, you see, or your problem, if that’s you, is not that you’ve dug too deep; it’s that you haven’t dug deeply enough! You say, “I could never believe in a God who allows so much evil,” but where’d you get your concept of evil? You say, “I could never believe in a God who doesn’t let people have sex with whomever they want,” but where’d you get the idea that was wrong, and why should God have to submit to your idea? You say, “I could never believe in a being whose existence can’t be proven by observation,” but can you prove by observation the idea that a being’s existence must be able to be proven by observation for it to exist? Dig deeper. Doubt your doubts, and you may begin to see that all these ideas of rationality, beauty, justice, the reliability of our senses, all of it only makes sense in a world made and ruled by God.

 

But Solomon isn’t really talking here about metaphysical speculation; he’s saying if you seek God’s wisdom by listening to God’s words, then you will understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God. And that’s because, if you remember back to the first passage in the book of Proverbs, we saw there that the fear of the LORD is the beginning, or the foundation, of knowledge (1:7), and we talked about the fear of the LORD: It’s a loving fear, a fear that draws us closer to God and makes us want to please him, like a son wants to please his father in a healthy relationship while remaining aware of his father’s power and authority over him. The son isn’t trying to change his father; the son is happily submitting to his father. That’s the fear of the LORD.

 

Here in addition to the fear of the LORD we get this concept of the knowledge of God. Fervently seek wisdom, and as you get back to the source, you will get to know God himself. As Mike McKinley showed many of us in his Sunday seminar last week, the God of the Bible is a God who can be known. He is not some impersonal force that you connect with through meditation techniques or some other such ritual. You can know him personally, and you find that as you fervently seek wisdom, you must get to know him personally, because he is the foundation of wisdom. He’s the giver, and from his mouth comes knowledge and understanding. He made the world, he rules the world, and therefore he’s the one who knows how the world works and to what end the world is heading. So if you are still resisting him and fighting him, you’ll also be resisting and fighting wisdom, trying to incline it to your heart instead of inclining your heart to it.

 

But as you get to know him, as you incline your heart to him, as you go right to the source, he gives wisdom, and, verse 7, he is a shield to those who walk in integrity, guarding the paths of justice and watching over the ways of his saints. He’s the protector. In verse 8 there we get this language of a certain path; it’s come up once already in Proverbs and it will come up a lot more. Think of it like this: God has created the world, and in it he has placed certain paths, like a city builder builds the city with certain roads that lead one place or another. The paths God has put down are paths of justice, paths of wisdom, paths of righteousness, that lead to blessing. Wisdom is the art, then, of perceiving those paths and walking on them, rather than departing from them and trying to build your own. So when someone is truly seeking wisdom, they will go to the LORD, and from his mouth, he will tell them the proper path, and then he himself will guard that path to ensure that those on it do in fact reach blessing.

 

So we could say that God is the protector of those who fervently seek wisdom externally, like a shield that you hold outside your body. But he also is the protector of those who fervently seek wisdom internally, because look at where he puts the wisdom in verse 10: Wisdom will come into your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul so that, verse 9: You understand every good path. He’s watching over the path outside you, but then he also puts his wisdom inside you that ensures you stay on the path. You know people who have a good sense of direction? My wife is like that; I’m not. We can be in another city and come above ground from the subway and she already knows which way we need to go while I am opening my GPS app. If you fervently seek wisdom, God will give you an internal sense of direction in this world to sense the paths of justice, wisdom, and righteousness. He will tell you what the paths are, like he does in the book of Proverbs, but he will also work them into you, so that over time, little by little, you will become wise, and that wisdom will protect you.

 

Why do we often fail to fervently seek wisdom? Why do we often try to incline it to our hearts instead of inclining our hearts to it? Why do we often settle for surface-level knowledge and not ask the deeper questions? Isn’t it because we fear what we might find? We fear that if we fervently seek wisdom, if we actually incline our hearts to understanding instead of an already-desired conclusion, then we might find demands being placed on us that go against what we already desire. We fear that if we fervently seek wisdom, then we might find danger, but what God is saying here is no! If you fervently seek wisdom, then you will find him, and in him, there is real safety! He will watch over your path and he will pour his wisdom into you so that you actually become wise and stay on every good path.

 

So you say, “Oh good, if I just fervently seek wisdom, I’ll find God, and then God will protect me so that nothing bad ever happens to me.” But that’s not exactly the protection being offered here. So let’s turn last to look at the protection.

 

The protection

 

In the last 11 verses of this passage starting in verse 12, we find that if we fervently seek wisdom, God, our protector, will fervently protect us from two things, and for one thing. The first thing he’ll protect us from is in verse 12: The way of evil, and especially from men of perverted speech. They are those who forsake those good paths that God made, and who carve out crooked paths instead. They are not only those who do evil, but those who rejoice in doing evil, but the simple are often led astray by them, because they don’t come out and say, “Do you want to join us on the path to destruction?” Instead, they use perverted speech to lure in the simple.

 

There are a lot of really smart, really creative people in the world, and a lot of them, as it turns out, rejoice in doing evil. So guess what they do? They find smart, creative ways to talk about it so that it doesn’t look like they are doing evil. Take an example of someone who pretty much everyone now agrees delighted in doing evil: Adolf Hitler. You know at the height of his power over 8 million Germans, citizens of a civilized, modernized nation, students of the philosophy of “enlightened” German philosophers like Hegel and Nietzsche, were part of his Nazi party? Why, when it was so obviously evil? Well, he didn’t come out and say let’s do evil. He used perverted speech to instead talk about the glory of the German people, and especially the Aryan race, among other things. “Normal” people followed Hitler as he oversaw the genocide of about 6 million images of God, and at least part of the reason is because he led them astray with perverted speech.

 

And you think, “Well we all know that’s evil now,” but the point is a lot of people didn’t then! So how can you become the kind of person who will be able to recognize it while it’s happening, even while it’s happening in 2024? Fervently seek wisdom. Fear the real God, get to know the real God, and so internalize his wisdom as it is revealed in scripture that perverted speech just doesn’t work on you anymore. And don’t think perverted speech doesn’t still happen in 2024. Think about how abortion has been marketed as a “women’s health” issue or “reproductive rights”. I heard “reproductive freedom” on the news just last night, all covering up the evil of taking away a helpless child’s right to live. Or think of the more day-to-day temptations you face: “It’s not getting drunk; it’s just having a good time”; “it’s not adultery; you’re looking, but not touching”; “It’s not idolatry; it’s just patriotism”; “It’s not greed; it’s being wise with your money”; “It’s not apostasy; it’s just deconstructing”. And sometimes such distinctions are meaningful, but where do you get the eyes to see real evil, even when it is covered up by perverted speech? How do you not get led astray from the good path to the crooked ones? Fervently seek wisdom, and as God pours it into your heart, you’ll develop an internal lie detector that just says, “But come on; however you dress it up, that’s just evil.”

 

The next thing God protects us from through wisdom is the forbidden woman, who we meet in verse 16. There is a lot more to come on the forbidden woman in Proverbs, but for now we can see that she is forbidden because she is an adulteress, who forsakes the companion of her youth and forgets the covenant of her God. Notice there that marriage is viewed as a covenant, not only with your marriage partner, but with God, such that to forsake the person to whom you married is to break a covenant with God. Verse 16 says the forbidden woman’s words are not perverted, but smooth. What’s she do? She flatters. She tells you how great you are, how much she wants you, how you deserve it, how no one will know, and so on. But wisdom is the art of perceiving reality and living in accordance with it, and the reality is, under all that smooth speech, there’s nothing but death. Go down that path and at the end of it is more lies, more fear, more shame, more hiding, and ultimately, judgment from God. Fervently seek wisdom, and it will fervently protect you from it.

 

It protects you from two things: Men of perverted speech and the forbidden woman, but finally, it protects you for verse 21: The upright will inhabit the land, and those with integrity will remain in it, but the wicked will be cut off from the land. In the time of Solomon, God’s people were dwelling in a land that God promised to give them, the land of Canaan in the middle east. God promised it to them, but God also put laws in place to ensure that the land was not defiled by the evil of the people. Here’s just some examples from Leviticus 20: “1 Say to the people of Israel, Any one of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech shall surely be put to death. The people of the land shall stone him with stones. 3 I myself will set my face against that man and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given one of his children to Molech, to make my sanctuary unclean and to profane my holy name… If a person turns to mediums and necromancers, whoring after them, I will set my face against that person and will cut him off from among his people. 7 Consecrate yourselves, therefore, and be holy, for I am the Lord your God. 8 Keep my statutes and do them; I am the Lord who sanctifies you. 9 For anyone who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death; he has cursed his father or his mother; his blood is upon him.” So the idea there is that if someone does wickedly, the people of the land were to stone him, and even if they didn’t, God himself would come and put them to death for their evil, thus removing them from, as it is called elsewhere in the Bible, “the land of the living”.

 

So why do you want to be protected from the men of perverted speech and the forbidden woman? Because those who go down their paths will be cut off from the land, while those who stay on the good paths will be protected for the inheritance of the land. But here’s the problem you and I have: We’ve already taken the crooked paths. So is there any hope for us? This passage says that through wisdom God will deliver you from men of perverted speech and the forbidden woman, but how will God deliver you from being cut off if you have already taken the way of evil? You can’t just say, “Ok God, from this day forward I will walk the path of wisdom.” The text doesn’t say, “The wicked will get a second chance”; it says, “the wicked will be cut off.” To be delivered from that you have to dig even deeper, to a deeper wisdom, a wisdom which has now been revealed in Jesus Christ.

 

Satan came to him with perverted speech: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread,” but he resisted. Satan came to him with smooth speech: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you.” You’re so great Jesus, God will command his very angels concerning you! I’ll even give you all the kingdoms of the world; look how great you could be! But Jesus resisted. He stuck to the path before him, the path of righteousness, justice, and equity, and yet what did he encounter at the end of his path? A cross. Here’s how one passage explains it: “He was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people” (Isaiah 53:8). He was cut off, not for his wickedness, but for ours, so that we could be declared upright and inhabit the land with him forever. His path went through the cross, but it did not end there. He rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and will come again to this land, to raise his people from the dead and live here forever in a new heaven and new earth with them.

 

So turn from your evil path and seek him fervently. Receive him, treasure him up inside you, and temptation, whether from the perverted speech of a man or the smooth speech of a forbidden woman, will have no power over you. As the hymn says, “I need Thee ev’ry hour, stay Thou nearby; Temptations lose their pow’r, when Thou art nigh.” Fervently seek him, and he will fervently protect you.