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NewCity Orlando Sermons
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NewCity Orlando Sermons
Winter Wisdom | Proverbs 2:1-8
Associate Pastor Kenny Dyches continues our brief Winter Wisdom series, preaching on the contrast between worldly wisdom and godly wisdom, using a compelling story about a man who built a successful business but struggled with spiritual emptiness. The man’s journey, shaped by a vivid dream and an encounter with a preacher resembling Jesus, highlighted the challenge of surrendering earthly pursuits for true fulfillment in God. Drawing from Proverbs, Pastor Kenny emphasizes that wisdom is not just intellectual knowledge but a lived experience of God, requiring a heart posture of surrender and obedience.
He outlines practical steps for obtaining wisdom: receiving, treasuring, inclining one's ear, calling out, and seeking diligently. He stresses that wisdom is cultivated not in isolation but through relationships, community, and submission to God. Using relatable examples and personal anecdotes, Pastor Kenny encouraged the congregation to pursue godly wisdom, trust in God's guidance, and live out their faith in all aspects of life.
Hello everyone. This is Pastor Damian. You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City, orlando. At New City, we believe all of us need all of Jesus for all of life. For more resources, visit our website at newcityorlandocom. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1:Please join me as we ask the Holy Spirit to illuminate our hearts. Living God, help us to hear your word with open hearts so that we may truly understand and believe, and believing that we may follow in faithfulness and obedience. Through Christ, our Lord, amen. Today's scripture reading comes from Proverbs 2, verses 1 through 8. 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 treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom. From his mouth come knowledge and understanding. He stores up sound wisdom for the upright. He's a shield to those who walk in integrity, guarding the paths of justice and watching over the way of his saints. This is God's word.
Speaker 2:Good morning. Let me tell you a story. So there was a man from Orlando who grew up in a loving, faith-driven household. He had a relatively modest upbringing and while in college faith-driven household he had a relatively modest upbringing and while in college he did well academically. He even participated in campus ministry, did sports. However, in college he lost his way after his mother died of cancer. The loss led him to date aimlessly, party excessively and neglect his studies, nearly jeopardizing his academic career and standing. And so he was lost, without direction and he struggled to envision a fulfilling life.
Speaker 2:One night he dreamt of building a successful business. It was a vivid dream, envisioning a family and a community that would also benefit from that success. So upon waking he was excited. But he took a moment to glance at his Bible and he felt a different voice urging him to follow me. But he dismissed it, so captivated was he by his dream. The next day he immersed himself in self-help books, wealth building strategies he saw on social media, and he kept up that trend throughout the rest of his college career, which meant sacrificing, at times, deeper connections, spiritual growth and ultimately looking at a worldly vision of wisdom and ambition. After graduating he actually launched that booming business, and it did. It greatly benefited the community.
Speaker 2:He was generous with his money and widely acknowledged as a wise and business savvy man. However, he began questioning his faith and his relationship with God. Memories of his mother's early death haunted him, bringing a fear of mortality. He realized that for all his net worth and business savvy, he didn't have the spiritual wisdom he needed to find the hope and security he was looking for. When he heard then about an influential preacher who was going to be discussing the path to heaven, he drove an hour to attend After the sermon. He was still desperate for assurance, and so he went up to the preacher explaining his hard work and how, his faith background and what he'd been questioning. And he said what more do I need to do to know that I'm in the kingdom of God? And the preacher looked at him with understanding and said you lack one thing. Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven and come follow me.
Speaker 2:Conflicted, he was silent. The preacher started talking to other people. He left, kind of hardening his heart against the preacher's invitation, and that same day as he was driving home, there was a lightning storm and he received news, alarming news, that his business had actually burnt down when it was struck by lightning. And as he was processing this and the wind was blowing, the rain was coming down in his car. Then he received a text from his bank alerting him to major fraud. And he was just overwhelmed with despair as he drove home and shaken, and then, all of a sudden, he heard that preacher's voice echoing in his mind, but with new words that said fool, this night, your soul is required of you and the things you have prepared whose will they be?
Speaker 2:Suddenly he awoke, realizing it had all been a dream, and then, determined, he rushed to that church early, desperate to see the preacher. There was already a crowd, but before he knew it, the preacher had stood up and locked eyes with him. He approached, he laid his hand on the man's shoulder and then he actually invited himself to dinner at the man's home. The preacher's eyes were filled with warmth and understanding and tears welled in the man's home. The preacher's eyes were filled with warmth and understanding and tears welled in the man's eyes as he surrendered, saying my home is yours, my business is yours, my family is yours, and wept into the preacher's shoulder the man in our story.
Speaker 2:He seeks out worldly wisdom for worldly success, but he finds that he must choose between worldly wisdom and godly wisdom, the latter ultimately offered by the preacher, who, in our story, is Jesus Christ. Mahatma Gandhi, a devout Hindu activist, said Jesus was one of the greatest teachers humanity has ever known. Many others, across the religious and philosophical and thought spectrum, of course, would agree with Gandhi. However, jesus's invitation and the invitation in Proverbs today, is to seek wisdom with everything in all of life. On the other hand, you might not be feeling the urgency to become wise. If the cost is so great, why not just go to Google, chat, gpt, tiktok teachers and just kind of fake it until you make it right? There's a lot of people who live that way. I've done that at times, but for one you might do some crazy things like ingest Tide Pods or bake chicken in NyQuil. Those were both trends on social media for a while. Don't look them up, though.
Speaker 2:But in all seriousness, what do you do when life happens when you're not happy with your job but then you get a job offer and you're not really sure what awaits you and you know it means a move for your family? What do you do when your spouse, a good friend or a family member is struggling with something and there's no clear way to comfort them, there's no clear way to solve their problem? What do you do when your kids are no longer listening to you and discipline isn't working? I think about that one every day. What do you do when you need to pick a major in college or take a year off, or when you can't find a job? What do you do when you receive an uncertain medical diagnosis and you're just trying to figure out? How do you move forward? Well, if you've become wise, you can begin to answer some of those questions.
Speaker 2:The book of Proverbs tells us that wisdom is a voice that calls out to us, but there is another voice, the voice of foolishness and worldly wisdom, which leads us to ruin. And so do you know which one you're listening to? They both call out to us, but if we don't fully give ourselves to God's wisdom, then the inertia of our flesh pulls us towards foolishness. However, god in his goodness freely offers us wisdom. So the more we know God, the more we become wise. I'll say that again God in his goodness freely offers us wisdom. So the more we know God, the more we become wise. The question then is how? How do we know God and receive wisdom from him? And the good news is, our passage tells us exactly that.
Speaker 2:If you go ahead and open your Bible or your Bible app within the verses we'll look at verses 1 through 8, there's actually a very clear-cut structure. It starts in verse 1. It says my son, if you receive my words, and so that, if there's several verbs that cascade after that, so it's if you receive words, treasure them up, make your ear attentive, incline your heart, call out for insight, raise your voice, seek it like silver, search for it like hidden treasures. Right, so you have that. If you do these things, then you will understand the fear of the Lord, find the knowledge of God. And then in verse 6, for the Lord gives wisdom you have. If you do these things, then you will receive understanding, the fear of the Lord and wisdom, for this is who God is. Right. I mean, it doesn't really get better than this. Oftentimes we go to the Bible for answers and you know it's hard to know where God is leading us. But we have if, then for, for, right here. And the great thing about these verbs is that you really see this emphasis in all of life. Do all of these things and you will find what you're looking for. So we'll go ahead and walk through several of those verbs in verses one through four. But some context.
Speaker 2:Old Testament scholar Lewis Goldberg says, reflected in Old Testament, wisdom is the teaching of a personal God who is holy and just and who expects those who know him to exhibit his character in the many practical affairs of life. So wisdom is not only God's teaching, it's living it out in all of life and exhibiting his character. It's God's teaching lived out in all of life. However, in the ancient Near East, as opposed to Israel, wisdom was often in schools of thought. It was for academics, it was for professionals. They would pass this wisdom down over generations and a millennia, holding a whole culture's wisdom in their hands. However, in Israel it was in the home. In Deuteronomy 4 and 6, we see that Moses commands people in their homes to teach the law to their children, to live it out in all of life. And so there's a familial and a collective nature to the wisdom of God, which is caught and not just taught through life in the community. There's relational formation in discipleship and this is versus head knowledge.
Speaker 2:A lot of us here are really good at, you know, reading books. I'm not as good at this one, but you know a lot of people will try to read a hundred books in a year, which is just insane to me. But I know people who do it. And others of us, you know, we scroll through TikTok and we find people who seem to know what they're talking about, right, and we take some of what they say hopefully not the things like the Tide Pod Challenge, but really those people who write those books, those TikTok teachers, right, we don't really know who they are when they turn off their screen. We don't really know who the author is behind the books. We can't disciple ourselves to them. See their families, know their children, know their communities, right, we can't be in that familial, relational context with them. However, god, we see, calls us into wisdom that is lived in communion, community and commission, right, it's when wisdom is taught in the family, it's lived in community, as we're in communion with God and living it out together, that that wisdom seeps in and fills all of our life.
Speaker 2:So what does this look like? Well, firstly, we hit receive in verse 1, which says my son, if you receive my words and notice it says my son right. So that is very intimate language. A father inviting his son to receive his words and receive is really a posture, and so this word receive really sets up the following verbs in verses one through four. Now, if you receive something right, if someone's talking to you, if someone's giving you a gift, if you're standing, you know, like this, it really doesn't seem like you're paying attention at all, right or if you're ready to receive anything, in fact, it looks like you're distracted. However, if you're giving someone your full attention, if you're posturing yourself towards them, they know there's an intimacy, there's a connection, there's a full engagement in what's going on. So this father is inviting his son to receive these words as a children with his father. Likewise, god is inviting us to receive these words.
Speaker 2:A practical application of this is the All of Life Guide. It's a resource that we have. You can find it in the app and it takes a while to do. But the All of Life Guide basically, what it does is you're looking at the pattern of your life, you're assessing. What does it look like? What am I doing day in and day out, in my families, in my relationship, in my work. And then you're inviting God to speak into that and then inviting him to help you make a rule of life, to pattern your life, to receive what God has for you in all of life. And that's what we want to do. We want to be people who receive God's words and, secondly, we want to treasure them up.
Speaker 2:Now, what does that look like to treasure something? Well, you might ask yourself, what you really enjoy and what you really want, right? And so something I really enjoy is coffee. So what do I do? I go to the lineage and I sit there with my coffee and I sip and I enjoy it, right. And then I enjoy every sip. I enjoy all the tasting notes. I ask the baristas what they're doing and how they do it. I go home and I do it myself and I watch YouTube videos and I dream of coffee and I do my latte art Lots of things.
Speaker 2:A little fanatical, but I'm treasuring it, right, I really enjoy it. It's in my mind, it's in my heart, I'm experiencing it. I'm doing it with others, right? This is what it is to treasure something. When you love someone, you treasure them, you listen to them, you spend time with them, you do things that please them and you really posture yourself to get the fullness of who they are right. So my question is are we doing that with the Lord? Does our time in the scriptures, our time in prayer, our time in community, does that look like a full posturing, a full engagement, a full treasuring of who God is? Are we spending time thinking about and pursuing him and valuing what God has to offer us like it truly is worth more than lineage coffee, which it is, although they complement each other, you know. However, we tend to treasure ourself and our autonomy.
Speaker 2:Disney tells us to listen to our heart. Someone might say you do you? And our Declaration of Independence says that we're entitled to the pursuit of happiness. The problem is that can leave us kind of like a colander. Right, we can receive wisdom from multiple sources, but only take what we want. It's our prerogative. We think to not have to commit, but to treasure something means you're truly committing to it. Right, you're valuing this above all else, and that's what God is inviting us into.
Speaker 2:Thirdly, he says to incline your ear. He says in verse two, jesus would often say Well, when you hear someone talking, there's a difference between hearing and listening. You can see this in your children. Maybe, if you have children, kids they might hear what you're saying, but they really want something else. They want the candy on the counter. So you might be telling them about what they need to do to earn the candy, and it just goes through one in here and out the other. And so, likewise, when we are in the scriptures, when we're listening to the Lord, are we truly posturing ourselves to want what he wants, to want God? Are we willing to put aside the things that we value, even if they're good things work, responsibility, food and family for the sake of pursuing what Jesus has for us?
Speaker 2:In the Gospels, at one point, jesus visits the home of Mary and Martha and he comes in, and in that culture, hospitality was really important, and so Martha is being a good host, she's living up to the expectations, she's preparing the meal, she's preparing the table, she's doing all the things that are required, and her sister, mary, is just sitting on the floor listening to Jesus. And so you might have been in this position before. Right, you're working hard, other people in the family are doing who knows what, and you're just getting everything ready and you're just like where the heck is. Everybody else. I've done all the dishes, I've done all the food prep and I'm starting to get frustrated. And so that's what happens with Martha.
Speaker 2:She goes up to Jesus and she says, hey, tell her to do her job, like this is her responsibility, like my way of loving you is to fulfill this. And Jesus looks at her and he says Martha, you're anxious about many things, but only one thing is necessary, and Mary has chosen the better portion. Do we choose the better portion? Are we willing to put aside things that are good to make room for Jesus to speak into our life, so we can submit all of those things to Jesus? One way to do this is just three times prayer. You can set an alarm on your phone and it just invites you for a moment, for a few minutes, to be with Jesus, to remember that Jesus is with you in whatever you're doing and he has a desire for you in it. If we would just but stop and listen.
Speaker 2:Fourthly, he says in verse 3, if you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding. I love this because there's this audacity to this right, there's this calling out for, there's a raising your voice Again, like children are such good illustrations, because children do this all the time. Right, they're good at asking for what they want, of raising their voice and asking like, hey, dad, can I have another cookie? I'm like, you've had three today, you don't need another one. And then, five minutes later, hey, but what if I had a chocolate, which is not a cookie? And you're like, uh, no, you can't have another one.
Speaker 2:And so he keeps raising his voice and again going back to verse one my son, if you receive my words where God invites us to raise our voice to him because he's a good father that desires us to ask right, desires us to ask for understanding so that he can respond. So one way to practice this is petitionary and intercessory prayer to pray God's promises. What does God promise us in Scripture? To pray God's character, who is God? And to ask him for specific things. Right, we're children and we have a good father who loves to give us good gifts. He says in Matthew 7 and Luke 11, to those who ask him Practice being a child to him and asking for what you need. Next, he says if you will seek it like silver and search for it as hidden treasures. This reminds me of Jesus's parable of the treasure hidden in a field in Matthew 13. The one who finds it sells all that he has to purchase the field.
Speaker 2:So I know a guy who, you know, while he was driving around Orlando, saw a dumpster behind a school. They were getting rid of a lot of things and he wondered to himself what is in that dumpster. So, of course, what did he do? He went and checked the dumpster. Now, if you know anything about this person, you'll know that he loves to do jujitsu and he loves to teach people jujitsu. I hear some chuckles in the back, and this person loves to go to the park and invite people to do jujitsu with him, and it's a blessing to those who get to participate. He builds community, he teaches them about what he's doing. So he goes up to this dumpster and lo and behold what does he find? He finds wrestling mats, professional wrestling mats, probably at one point used by the wrestling team, and they're huge, right. And so he thinks to himself well, I really want these wrestling mats. And so what does he have to do? He has to jump into the dumpster, he has to invite someone to help him pick up these mats because they are huge, and he has to use all of his strength to get them out, find a way to put it on top of his car and bring it home. So much did he treasure these mats, he was willing to get his hands dirty and jump into a dumpster, regardless of what people would think, and then bring it home, using all of his strength and ability to do that and even inviting others into it.
Speaker 2:So the question is, do we want god's wisdom? We want relationship with the lord, enough to seek it like silver, to search for it like hidden treasures. And so one application of this is communities and circles. It, communities and circles have real costs. To attend community, if you're a parent, you have to find a babysitter. Then you have to pay the babysitter. Then, in a time when you're already exhausted and you just want to be at home just watching Netflix or checking out, you're going to a community meeting new people that you may or may not see a week from then, and it can at first not feel life-giving. It comes at a cost. Circles also they're weekly. It's a place where you can be known, where you can know in relationship and follow Jesus, but it also comes at a cost. And yet these are places where we can seek the wisdom of the Lord like silver and like a hidden treasure. Amen.
Speaker 2:So my second point, then, is that if you do all of these things, if we pursue God and his wisdom in all of these ways, then we will understand. He says Then in verse 5, you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God and wisdom it talks about in verse 6. That wisdom, that fear of the Lord and knowledge of God, it's a receiving and responding to God and experienced relationship. So receiving and responding to God in the way that he's laid out, experienced in relationship with him, that is what leads us to wisdom. And so I want to share a story about how I've experienced this recently.
Speaker 2:A few weeks ago, it was cold in Orlando. Remember when it was cold here, it was exciting. We don't get that very often, and that week it had started to even snow right up north in the panhandle and it was supposed to dip into the 30s at one point. And so right about that night, when it was dipping into the 30s here, my heater decided to die on us and we have three children. If you don't have children and your heater dies, you're like oh you know, we can get comfy and cozy together in the sheets, it'll be fun. If you have three kids, it's not so fun, and one of them is a one-year-old and we can't put blankets on him. And so we were in trouble and we didn't know what to do, and it was late in the day when I found this out, and so I was like, well, if I call an AC guy to come look at it, he's either not going to be able to come or he's going to charge us an arm and a leg. And so I didn't know what to do.
Speaker 2:But earlier that week I had been in one of the circles that I'm in. I'm in multiple circles and I can ask my wife about how she experiences that, but in this circle we were talking about the Sermon on the Mount and what it looks like to give and receive mercy, and we talked about how, in our culture today, oftentimes receiving mercy can even be harder than giving mercy. And so as I was sitting there and thinking about that conversation and praying, I realized I just need. The first thing I need to do just needs to be to ask my community for help, which is vulnerable for me. I don't often love to do that, but I did. I said, hey, this is our situation, does anybody have any help they can offer? And within minutes, really, somebody offered us to stay in their apartment with them our big, messy family in their apartment with them, which was a huge blessing and which we took them up on later that night. And then someone else offered to send somebody that they knew over to the house to check on our AC to see if he could fix it, which ultimately led to needing a new AC, but getting one at a fraction of what we would have paid otherwise. And so it was immensely gracious of the Lord to not only give me the opportunity to live out that wisdom that I received from the scriptures and that I received from my brothers in Christ, but to then invite my community into that space as well, to invite them to be God's blessing to me as I lived out of that wisdom and then to experience God's goodness as they did that with me. And so all of that shows how wisdom is the experience of God as we receive from him, as we respond in community, in communion and in commission right. This is lived experience of the goodness of God. And finally, my last point for the Lord is good. Verse six for the Lord gives wisdom. So if we posture ourselves as a child to his father, seeking to live and seek his wisdom in all of life, then we will understand and receive the wisdom and knowledge of the Lord, for the Lord gives wisdom.
Speaker 2:The Westminster Shorter Catechism. It takes the Bible and gives you a Q&A, to kind of summarize much of what we believe about the Bible. And so it asks what is God? And answers God is a spirit infinite, eternal, unchangeable, and his being wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth. And this is good news. And so we see this in verses six through eight. In verses six through seven we see God's being his wisdom and his knowledge. What does God do with that knowledge? Does he hoard it for himself? Is he just sitting up in heaven, you know, like a professor asking you a question and waiting for your response? No, god gives us that knowledge and understanding. He speaks it to us.
Speaker 2:God has been revealing the truth about who he is to us since the world began. The knowledge of truth to him is available to all peoples in creation, in his people and in history. And then what does God do with his wisdom? He gives it to his people for their benefit and the benefit of the world. God's wisdom is his self-revelation. It includes his commands combined with our obedience in all of life and in our passage we see that it leads to protection and the guidance of his people. And to that point God even shares his own being with us.
Speaker 2:Verse 1 and the following three verses share intimate language which ultimately points us to God's intimate relationship with us. He invites us to walk with him as he walked with Adam and Eve in the garden, as he dwelt with his people in the tabernacle and the temple, as he came to earth in Jesus Christ to teach, live, die and be raised for our sakes, so that we might be adopted and receive the Holy Spirit, that he might live with us and dwell with us forever. And then, finally, in verses 7 through 8, we see God's power, justice, holiness and goodness. God's goodness is who he is in ways that are beneficial to us. He desires to be a shield for his people, protecting them and providing for them, as well as guiding them into truth and rest, and his power means he's able to do it. He is a faithful creator.
Speaker 2:To that end, holland, my daughter, is really into princesses right now, which is great but also sometimes feels like a little bit much. She's always singing the Elsa song. She calls it. She's even into Encanto and she sings all of the songs in there as well. However, she's also here in City Kids. She reads the Bible with me every night, she prays with me every night and throughout the day we try to talk about what she's learning, about who God is. She even watches Bible programs on TV, which is a cheat code. Parents, you know, if you don't want to watch your kids, have your kids watch too much TV, but on some Bible TV and it justifies it a little bit, but and they enjoy it too. However, it's been really encouraging to see Holland begin to internalize some of it, even in small ways. The other day she was talking about Elsa and then she says God can make lots of things, but Elsa can only make a few things. And I know it sounds simple, but in her own simple way she's being attentive, right, she's treasuring what she's learning and she's excited to share it with her parents. She has her own childlike wisdom and she postures herself towards her parents and what we are teaching her, and so it's important to remember the more you know God, the more you become wise and can see that in all of life.
Speaker 2:Jesus says of himself that he is the way, the truth and the life, but he warns those who wish to follow him that they must deny themselves, take up their cross and follow him. In his first letter to the Corinthians, paul says this is foolishness to the Greeks, who were renowned for their culture and wisdom, yet it is a worldly wisdom that, like many, could not accept the cross of Christ. Paul says the foolishness of Christ is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men. We must be willing to be foolish in the world in order to be wise with God. To truly know God, we must embrace his life, death, resurrection and ascension, because the fulfillment of the Son seeking wisdom from the Father in our passage is experiencing him in fullness of relationship. That's the end of what he receives. The fulfillment of our seeking the Lord is experience of fullness of God in relationship.
Speaker 2:However, sin still reigns in our hearts and in the hearts of men, and it twists our hearts away from God and against his will. Oftentimes, the inertia of our flesh pushes us towards the voice of foolishness. However, god in Jesus Christ poured out his wrath on Jesus for our sin, meaning that we are forgiven, meaning that now we have access to God in Jesus Christ and in power and goodness. Jesus rose from the dead so we also might rise with him. He ascended into heaven to be our advocate so we could have full access to the knowledge of God, and he sent the Holy Spirit into our hearts so we can understand the things that he gives us. God destroyed the one who was perfectly wise. That wisdom might be poured out into us unto life with him.
Speaker 2:And so, to end, I'll leave you with the words of Jesus from Matthew 11, when he says I thank you, father, lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children. Let us, as little children, posture our whole lives to Jesus Christ. Let me pray for us. Heavenly Father, I thank you that you hear us, that you are with us, that you are a good Father, that you invite us to posture our lives to you, that you invite us to cry out, that you invite us to treasure your words, that Lord, that you are speaking to us and you're just waiting for us to listen, to receive, to respond, that you can pour your wisdom into our hearts. Would you help us to do that? Oh Lord, as we go throughout our week, as we seek you in all things, we pray this in Jesus' name amen.