Clough Proverbs Lesson 34
Three Requisites to Spiritual Responsibility –
Proverbs 4:20-27
Proverbs 4:-
Now we’ll finish
Proverbs 4:20-27, and a very important section and this deals with the three
things that a young man must have before he is considered spiritually
responsible in the Old Testament.
Responsibility is something that grows.
God holds a man responsible for what he knows, not what he doesn’t know,
and responsibility is a relative thing, it’s absolute once it’s there but it
grows, it expands, and it is in proportion to God-consciousness.
For an
illustration of how the responsibility grew historically, if you’ll turn to
Matthew 19:1-9, here we have God not holding people who are committing adultery
responsible. Verse 3, “The Pharisees
also came unto Him, tempting Him, and saying unto Him, Is it lawful for a man to
put away His wife for every cause,” or not?
Now the Pharisees are coming out of a false motivation. One of the great things about Christian
doctrine is that it is rationally consistent.
It is rationally consistent but oftentimes you’ll have people like the
Pharisees who pick on this criterion and attempt to discredit Christianity by
it. And so they are trying to trap Jesus
by claiming his teaching through contradictory things. They are claiming that Jesus Christ is
teaching one thing on the second divine institution and Moses, who was also
teaching the Word, who was also inspired of God, was teaching another thing
about the second divine institution. And
so they set up this problem here.
Matthew 19:4, “And
Jesus answered and said unto them, Have you not read that He who made them from
the beginning made them male and female.
[5] And He said, For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother,
and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. [6] Wherefore, they are no more two, but one
flesh. What, therefore, God has joined
together, let not man put asunder.” And
with this, in verse 6 Jesus Christ is teaching no divorce apart from the
problems of death and so on. However,
immediately the Pharisees jump in and say all right, but, in verse 7, “They say
unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to
put her away?” In other words, Moses was
equally inspired of God and he’s teaching something that appears to be in
conflict with Christ. And they are
accusing Moses of teaching that adultery, which would be defined as the
breaking down of the second divine institution for illegitimate reasons and the
tearing off of two other people is an adulterous act and they’re saying now
look, Christ, how can you say that when Moses allowed the divorce. And so Jesus Christ says all right, verse 8,
“Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, allowed you to put away your
wives,” “put away” is the word for divorce and it means the right of
remarriage, and therefore He is saying that Moses judged by the standards
originally given for the second divine institution in creation is permitting
adultery of a sort, and the reason is because in verse 8 “the hardness of your
heart, he allowed you to put away your wives, but from the creation it was not
so.” In other words, that was from
before the fall, after the fall then God deals with man, who is not only finite
but man who is also sinful.
And so here’s the
picture of a teenager in Proverbs 4, he is growing up and he has a certain
amount of God-consciousness; now this God-consciousness is going to expand as
he grows spiritually, but at any given time He is held accountable for only
what he is conscious of, not what he is unconscious of. And for example, under the Old Testament you
had the rise of polygamy. Now, polygamy
is not God’s perfect norm. Where do we
get God’s perfect norm? We get God’s
perfect norm from Genesis 1 and 2, from the original thing. We get God’s perfect norm from the pages of
the New Testament. And so polygamy is
basically an adultery, and it is in violation of God’s law. But under the Old Testament economy, where
God accommodated Himself to the sinfulness of people He allowed it to go
on. And he did not hold the people
responsible in this area because they did not have laws. And so we have God accommodating Himself to
sinful men.
Now God does not
lower His standards but He does, and here’s why the cross of Christ is
important, here is the given individual, let’s make the square the perfect will
of God for that’s person’s life. Let’s take part of that square and say that’s
how much that person knows at the given moment, God-consciousness. Now this person, whenever he does an act
that’s out here, that’s in violation of something out here, let’s take an Old
Testament saint, he marries three women, so he has three wives. Now basically from the ordinance of creation
he’s committing adultery. But according
to his God-consciousness, under the Mosaic Law that’s permitted. And since it’s permitted, God does not hold
him subjectively responsible in this area.
However, it is still an act of adultery, and therefore Jesus Christ,
when He dies on the cross takes that sin upon Himself. Now here’s where grace enters in, something
that believers sometimes forget, God is a gracious God and it doesn’t mean He
compromises His righteousness or His justice.
The righteousness and justice are handled by the full atonement, the
complete work of Christ on the cross.
So we can take
David, for example, who had many wives.
David committed adultery with those wives as well as with Bathsheba, but
the sin of adultery that David is held accountable for is the one with
Bathsheba, not with the other women.
Why? Because God at that point in
history isn’t holding David subjectively responsible for that act. God is holding him responsible for Bathsheba
but not for the others and the reason is the way, the situation at the time, in
which David is existed, and the amount of revelation available to him and so
on. Now that does not mean that this
wasn’t sinful, and it doesn’t mean that Christ didn’t have to pay for it on the
cross. That is a sin objectively and
Christ still has to pay for that sin on the cross, whether David knew of it or
not.
Now we also see
this in Christian sanctification and we’re going to see, I’ll explain this to
you because of a phase in Proverbs
Now that should
hit some of you right between the eyes because some of you are so fouled up on
your concept of grace that you think that you have to be morally perfect to
have unbroken fellowship with Christ and if you want to really think that way
you’d better think again because you’re never going to get two inches in the
Christian life. The only reason we can
have fellowship with Christ at any time is that God is overlooking even that
moment, sins that we are committing.
Now what becomes
an issue is that of all possible sins those that are the known sins, those are
the issue, and God holds us responsible.
And when the conscience is aware of the sin, and we know that it’s a sin
and we go negative volition toward it, then we are out of fellowship. But if the sin is unknown there cannot be an
act of volition because the volition has nothing to act against; no content, and
therefore unknown sins do not count as far as being in fellowship or out of
fellowship is concerned. But they do
count on an absolute moral scale of perfection and Christ has to pay for the
unknown sins as well as the known sins.
And what John is saying here in verse 8 is that you can be rocking along
and have no known sin in your life but don’t you come to the conclusion you
have no sin absolutely in your life.
Wrong. And there’s always this
danger, so we want to remember the grace principle, that God is gracious and he
has relationships with us even though while He is having that relationship in
time we are committing sins outside.
There is a sphere
of responsibility and that sphere grows.
When you are an unbeliever you have some God-consciousness, that’s
Romans 1. There are some things, no
matter how hard you try to tell people, oh, I didn’t know that was a sin, you
know it. And that is a minimum corpus
and it is spelled out in detail in Romans 1:20-32. That is a minimum. However, as the gospel is preached in a
society even the unbeliever’s area of responsibility increases because he hears
the gospel, for one thing, and he knows the gospel, and he becomes responsible
for the gospel; he becomes responsible for a lot more things. And when he becomes a Christian at the point
of positive volition he gets even more responsibility and that circle
grows. And so now after being born again
he can be in fellowship or out of fellowship at any given time based on the
response to what he knows to be right, what he knows to be wrong. But nevertheless, even at the time that he
becomes a Christian he still has to grow, there are still things out here that
are wrong that he is not yet aware of.
And as he grows in the Christian life and his circle expands he becomes
responsible for those things.
Now this is where
legalists can never seem to get this through their head, and every congregation
has their share of legalists. And here’s
what happens. We have some person become
a Christian over here and he knows about that much, that’s His
God-consciousness, that’s how much his conscience holds him responsible that
moment. Let’s say, February, 1973
believer A is held responsible for that.
Believer A may have had a raunchy background; believer A may do things
that will just jolt your teeth because you may be believer B down here and
you’ve been listening to the Word for some time and your area of responsibility
is like that compared to the area of responsibility of believer A. And you know hundreds of things here that you
see A doing that you know are wrong. And
you’re certain they’re wrong and it bugs you that believer A can do these
things and get away with them and you can’t.
The reason is that believer A is lower down on the maturity totem pole
than you are, and God is not going to hold him responsible for that. He will later on, but He doesn’t hold him
here responsible.
But the tendency
of a legalist is to say well I’m going to go over here and I’m going to
straighten out believer A and I’m going to unload all my goodies that I’ve
accumulated for 10 or 15 years and dumps it right on his back, so in 15 minutes
he is going to have to learn everything it’s taken him 15 years to learn. And we have volunteers that have this
ministry of straightening out people.
And every once in a while I have to straighten them out and this is
where this stuff gets started because we have people that do not understand
grace. So having understood, I hope,
since in 1 John 1 that it is possible for a person to commit acts which are
absolutely wrong by the Word of God and not be held responsible at all for
them.
Turn back to
Proverbs 4 and watch the minimum responsibility that was expected in the Old
Testament of a son. This is the father
addressing the son again and he wants his son to understand certain
things. And when his son understands
these things his son will be accounted as spiritually responsible and until his
son does, then he is not responsible.
You might test yourself as you read from verses 20 to 27, do you know
these things? Are you able to perform
according to these criteria? If you’re
not, regardless of whether you’re a teenager or you’re not a teenager, you’re
not responsible, spiritually.
Now let’s look,
Proverbs 4:20, “My son,” this begins a new section; as always these sections in
Proverbs begin with “My son.” “My son,
attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings. [21] Let them not depart from thine eyes;
keep them in the midst of thine heart.
[22] For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all
their flesh.”
The word “attend
to my words, incline thine ear unto my sayings,” is a command given under the
authority of the third divine institution.
The third divine institution is the basis for all authority in society. Now logically the basis for all authority is
God, Jehovah, and that’s what the word “fear” means in the Old Testament. The third divine institution is respect on a
chronological scale; in other words, chronologically you first run into
authority, or you should, in the third divine institution. It is the authority of the parents that is
the issue. And when we have schools or
other forms of the fourth divine institution that are trying to subtract the
authority from the third we are in trouble biblically. But the third divine institution originally
was the only area of authority. Think of
it, before the flood there was no fourth divine institution and therefore all
authority resided as paternal authority.
So this is paternal authority and paternal authority is always the
fundamental form of authority. And so
verse 20 is an exercise of paternal authority in a teaching situation and shows
that you cannot teach anyone until you exercise authority over them.
“Attend to my
words, incline thine ear unto my sayings.
[21] Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of
thine heart.” Now verse 21 is another
one of these verses that is an exhortation to take the teachings of the parents
and apply them. But the interesting
thing is that beginning in verse 21 is that we have a lesson in spiritual
anatomy because different parts of the body are going to be described and as we
go through the different parts of the body you want to remember that in the
Ancient Near East the people did not think abstractly, they thought
concretely. That means that they didn’t
think of thought occurring in their head.
You can’t feel thought in your head.
The only kind of feelings you can feel in your head is when you have a
headache. But other than that you don’t
have any feelings in your head.
And so therefore
there’s no physical sensation of anything in your head. And this is why, with the exception of one
book in the Bible there is not one reference in all of God’s Word to thought
ever occurring in the brain. The one
exception is the book of Daniel. But
apart from Daniel all books of the Scripture emphasize thought in connection
with your physical heart. Why? Because the biblical authors are naďve and
they actually think that there are neurons in the heart that are of the same
kind as the brain and range in the same system and that all thought occurs in
the physical heart? No. The people of the Old Testament knew that
when they thought about something that was exciting it affected their
pulse. And so they monitored by
sensations their bodies, and when they would think about something they
wouldn’t just think about it as abstract from them but they would think about
something as to how affected them physically.
And so “heart” came to be associated with thought, is that you couldn’t
do something significant with your thinking without it affecting the rest of
your body. It is certainly sound, after
all, when the heart pumps, every time it pumps blood where does most of the
blood go? It goes to the brain. So the heart is very, very much in charge of
thought and has a lot to do with it. The
brain in the Bible is downplayed as just a simple tool in the process.
So when it says,
“Let them not depart from thine eyes,” and “keep them in the midst of thine
heart,” we encounter our first word pair for this morning—eyes and heart. Now let’s look at word there because this
will occur again and again in Proverbs.
Eyes and heart; not both parts of verse 21 are parallel; it’s poetic
parallelism, both the first part and the second part of verse 21 refer to
identical things, some slightly different perspective but generally
identical. So when it says, “Let them
not depart from thine eyes” it means let them not depart from that which you
constantly see. The eyes, the physical
eye is always looking at something as point of reference. So it has come to mean, the physical eye in
Scripture has come to mean orientation, your basic orientation, or that which
occupies your attention. Perhaps it’d be
easier for most of you to understand what the Bible means by “eyes” to rethink,
every time you see the word “eyes,” attention, does it have my attention. So the word “attention” very much corresponds
to the use in the Hebrew of the word “eye.”
To see this turn
to Matthew 6:19, during the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus spoke of the
eyes. Jesus is talking about your basic
commitment in life and He’s talking about the believer’s attitude toward
things. And so He says in verse 19, “Lay
not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt,
where thieves break through and steal, [20] But lay up for yourselves treasures
in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not
break through nor steal. [21] For where
your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Notice the first set of the word pair; we’re
studying the word pair, “eye” and “heart.”
What does Jesus say in verse 21, where your treasure is your heart will
be. We’ll come back to “heart” in a
moment but what does the next verse, verse 22, say? “The light of the body is the eye; if,
therefore, your eye be single [healthy], your whole body will be full of
light. [23] But if your eye be evil, the
whole body shall be full of darkness.
If, therefore, the light is in thee be darkness, how great is that
darkness!”
Now what is Jesus
talking about? Obviously from verses
19-21 he’s talking about the idea of having a center point of interest in your
life. And what is the eye? The eye is looks at that which occupies your
attention, namely, your treasure. And
Jesus makes two statements about the eye in verse 22-23; the eye can be good or
the eye can be evil. What is the
difference between a good eye and an evil eye?
An evil eye is simply making something that is idolatrous the center of
your life, whereas the good eye is making God the center of your life. Now, the eye, then, we can say from this,
means the organ of orientation; it refers to you spiritual orientation in life. Put another way, the priority system that you
have, the eye. And it means what
occupies most of your attention.
Let’s turn back to
Proverbs 4; when it says, “Let them not depart,” “them” referring to the
teachings of the Word from the Father, “Let them not depart from thine eyes,”
means that the son is urged to take the teachings that he receives from the
Word and that he remember them and put them into practice over and over. He has gotten up to his teenage years and now
after the teenage years he’s going to have more responsibility and he’s going
to have more opportunity to put them out.
In other words, he’s going to have the choice of positive of negative
volition towards the Word of God. And
his father is saying listen, I can’t be with you to take care of you every
single hour of every single day. You’re
a mature young man; now is the time for you to put these things in your head
and keep them there and constantly apply them over and over and over and over
again.
So, “Let them not
depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart.” “Keep them in the midst of thine heart,”
again “heart” emphasizes the thinking, it is where the thought is sensed by the
pulse and is saying let that be the center of your heart, the center of your
thoughts. In other words, develop a
divine viewpoint framework. The divine
viewpoint framework is the center of all norms, it is the center of everything
that a Christian young person can have.
If a Christian young person does not have a divine viewpoint framework
he has no hope for him; he will be a sucker for all of the weird movements that
pass in Christianity, he will also be very ineffective as a believer. So the most important thing a young person
can build up in the mentality of his soul is a divine viewpoint framework. And this is an exhortation to build it up and
keep it there. The implication, by the
way, in verse 21 is that it takes effort to keep it there.
Proverbs 4:22, the
motivation behind this initial exhortation.
“For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their
flesh.” Notice again something that we
have over and over and over again in Scripture, and that is that there are
physical results of spirituality. When
we talk about spirituality and the believer’s relationship to the Lord, we don’t
mean to divorce that from physical bodies.
You express yourself, you express doctrine through your mouth, you
express your attitudes by the way you look in your face. You express obedience to the Word of God by
bodily action, so how can you divorce spirituality from your body. You can’t.
And when we talk about conscience we know that conscience has some sort
of link, which may or may not be well understood today medically, but
conscience has some link to the body, such that when you violate your conscience
immediately signals start going down and begin to work your body over and your
body pays a price physically for sin. It
does this two ways.
The first way your
body pays a price is what we’ll say is automatic; that is illustrated in Psalm
32, Psalm 38; Psalm 51. All those psalms
David describes the physiological results of a violated conscience on his
body. He describes the fact that he
feels awful; he describes all sorts of things from head to toe as to the price
one pays for this. A simple illustration
that should convince you of this beyond the shadow of a doubt is some forms of
ulcers are caused by worry, or aggravated by worry. Worry is a sin; let’s look at the
process. Before you start saying that
worry causes ulcers, there’s a mechanism.
You’re built to do this. Worry is
a sin, it’s a violation of 1 Peter 5:7, “Casting all your cares upon Him
because He cares for you.” Now if we are
made the way the Bible says we are made, then it means that worry, which causes
sin, is something for which we were not originally designed. Our bodies were not designed to take
worry. We’re never built that way in the
first place; we were built to have fellowship with God. We were built to cast our cares upon
Him. Now doesn’t it make sense if you
were built to cast your cares upon the Lord that when you don’t operate the way
you were built to operate you’re going to pay a price. And the price is in the physiological results
in the stomach and the G.I. tract as a result of this process, because you’re
not operating the way you were built to operate. So that’s one way in which these things can
be health or disaster to your body. A
violate conscience, you pay your price.
A second thing,
and this is what we would call direct discipline, this is when God Himself adds
the discipline by direct means. In other
words, He can afflict you in a miraculous way; He can bring something into your
body to afflict it because He is trying to get you to see the spiritual
issues. Now this is bad and this is
horrible but the reason is merciful because God considers it far more important
that you suffer physically than you suffer spiritually. He doesn’t want any suffering; God is not a
God who rejoices in suffering. But if he
has to choose between making you suffer spiritually and making you suffer
physically, God always will pick making you suffer physically. It is a milder form of suffering than
suffering spiritually. And so He will
use that to bring it to your attention.
All right, this is
why in verse 22 it says “they,” that is these commands that the father has
taught his son, “they are life unto those that find them,” “those that find
them” refer to volition, there are some that are never going to find them. There are some people that will listen to the
Word of God day after day and reject it, reject it, reject it, reject it and
they are never going to find the Word, and they’re going to be very
miserable. But “to those that find
them,” they are life and “health to all their flesh.” That is the physiological results of
obedience to the Word of God, “all their flesh,” there will be this carry
over. If you could just stop and analyze
in dollars and cents the benefits of obeying the Word of God physically to you
compared with the loss in medicine, in doctor’s bills and so on that you will
pay, literally pay to reword and undo the damages done by a violated
conscience, it make sense even to a materialist.
Now Proverbs
4:23-24, we have the first principle that this young man is supposed to
have. The first three verses, 20, 21, 22
are all motivation, all exhortation. Now
beginning in verses 23-24 he goes through one of the basic truths that he wants
his son to have. And he’s saying that
when this is true of his son, then he knows that his son is ready to live life
on his own. “Keep your heart,” the King
James says, “with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. [24] Put away from thee a froward mouth, and
perverse lips put far from thee.”
Now we encounter a
second word pair, “heart” and “mouth.”
That’s another word pair that occurs again and again in God’s Word. Let’s first look at verse 23, the heart. What does the heart do? “Keep thine heart,” well, first we have to
understand what the word “keep” means.
It is a military term and means guard; it means to protect, and it means
and implies that if you do not guard your heart and if you do not protect your
heart you have got an enemy that wants to take over your heart. And so this immediately involves spiritual
warfare, and so one of the fundamental principles here, the basic consideration
of the heart and mouth is that the son be able to wage spiritual warfare. He must be able to sustain himself against
the spiritual enemies and the word “guard” or “protect” refers to the child’s
ability to protect himself spiritually.
Mommy and daddy aren’t going to be around to do it for him; he is going
to have to learn to do it himself. And
this is what is not taught; this is why we have so many spiritual disasters at
college. We have people that have been
brought up in Christian homes and you had the usual moral and ethical
teachings, and that’s all and the parents have never connected moral and
ethical teachings with the Word, they’ve never developed a divine viewpoint
framework with the result that the student has never been able to guard his
heart and finally he gets clobbered and wonders why. Well, he never learned the lesson in the
first place.
“Guard your
heart,” and then the King James “with all diligence,” but that’s not what the
Hebrew says. There’s a big discussion in
the Hebrew because there’s a difficult phrase here, and you can tell, even some
of the translators tried to fix the text up to make it come out this way but no
matter how hard you try you can’t get this translation, “with all diligence”
out of the text unless you change the text.
The text literally reads: “above” or “beyond” it can mean either one,
“above or beyond every guarded thing.”
“Guard your heart beyond every guarded thing. Now the problem translators have had, what is
going on with this “above and beyond” business.
And so they wanted to make it “with” or “by means of.” Then the “guarded thing” they converted into
the word “diligence,” “by means of diligence.”
That’s how that translation got started.
It started many centuries, incidentally, before the King James. But that isn’t what it means. “Guard your heart beyond every other guarded
thing that you guard,” that’s what he’s talking about. Said another way, simply, what it means is
that if you’re going to guard and protect and be obsessed by something, it may
be you have a business investment to guard and protect. It may be that you have certain interests in
schooling to guard and protect. It may
mean that you have certain other kinds of interests in people that you want to
guard and protect. But David is telling
his son, son, I want you to learn one principle, and that is that your heart
and its spiritual state should be guarded above every other interest that you
have in your life. The most important
interest in your life should be your heart.
“Guarding your
heart above every other guarded thing,” and then he says, “for out of it are
the issues of life.” Now let’s look how
to guard the heart. How do we guard our
heart? First of all, what is the
heart? When we start talking about the
structure of the human soul and the words that the Bible uses for it and we
come across heart, heart generally emphasizes the mind and the conscience. Those are the two things most emphasized by
the word kardia or the word lev, depending on the Greek or the Hebrew,
those two areas are the most vital, the mind and the conscience together make
up the heart.
Now how do you
guard your mind and how do you guard your conscience? There are two basic things to remember
here. First of all, to “guard your mind”
you must have divine viewpoint. There’s
no way around it, you cannot guard your mind and your conscience from
whom? From Satan, living in a falling
world with Satan as the lord you cannot guard your mind without divine
viewpoint. You cannot rely on anything
else other than divine viewpoint. So the
first thing must happen in order to guard your heart is that you have to
systematically take in divine viewpoint.
Now what does that mean? That
means, first of all, you have to have a systematic intake of the Word, but not
just that; there has to be a systematic intake of the Word and just to spell
this out clearly and loudly what I mean by systematic intake, I mean five to
six hours a week, through tapes, through teaching, through personal study on
your own at home. Now that’s a
minimum. That’s a minimum. I throw that out, not for legalism, not that
if you have five or six points you’re going to get ten big brownie points every
week. That’s not what I throw it out
for. I throw it out to give you an idea
of how well you are doing or not doing.
And if you’re not spending five or six hours a week studying the content
of the Word of God so you will become spiritually independent in the proper
sense of the word, if you’re not doing that you do not have any systematic
intake of the Word. That’s what I mean
by systematic intake.
Now besides a
systematic intake there has got to be some application. And so besides the intake of the Word of God
there has to be some outflow, some application.
The reason for this is that you can never test whether you really
understand what you took in until you can apply it. Right?
In spite of what some of you say when you meet an exam, oh, I know the answer
but it just doesn’t come to me now.
Well, if the answer doesn’t come to you on the exam the probably isn’t
there to come to you. That’s why the
answer doesn’t come to you. So it’s the
same thing here; if you can’t apply the Word there’s a question whether you
know the Word. So this is the other test
whether the systematic intake of the Word is really taking, because if you do
not understand how to apply it there is a doubt whether it ever came in.
Now what is the
result of guarding your heart in this way?
If we guard our hearts this way, we eventually have the term “Christ in
the heart,” that term that we expressed earlier, positive volition, the
enlightening ministry of the Holy Spirit, the erection of the divine viewpoint
framework, the experience of love and fulfillment. That is Christ in the heart built off of the passage
of Ephesians 3. And this explains why
Christian fellowship follows taking in the Word and you cannot have Christian
fellowship until you first have systematic taking in of the Word. And this is why we have all these extra
groups that want to short-circuit the local church’s ministry, which is to
teach the Word, and they want to go direct from positive volition to have a
little Christian hand-holding group. Now
Christian hand-holding groups may be fine but the trouble with them is that
they inevitably are trying to bypass divine mechanics by plugging something in
in place of this. And do you know
why? There’s no more profound reason why
people want to do this than a word, a four-lettered word, careful, lazy. That’s why, simple spiritual laziness. And this is the reason why we have reaction
against Bible doctrine. This is why we
have people in the city of Lubbock that are always downgrading Bible doctrine,
who go to mass meetings and go to anything on the face of this earth available
in this city apart from Bible doctrine.
There’s a campaign by a group of people in this city, they sell books
and everything else, that are oriented against Bible doctrine. And this is because we have lazy Christians
who do not want to spend the time studying the Word. It’s more important to do something else.
So we have
“guarding your heart,” systematically taking in the Word, systematically
applying it. Why? At the end of verse 23, “For,” motivation
clause, watch these motivation clauses in Proverbs. If you look closely enough you’ll always find
a motivation clause; never is there a command given to the believer without a
motivation clause somewhere. “For out of
it are the issues of life,” and this means not just the source of life but
orientation to life.
Turn to Mark 7
where Jesus picks up the same theme. I
want to show you, by the way, that Proverbs 4 must have been studied in His
humanity by Christ because Christ taught truths that area already here in
Proverbs 4. Mark 7:15, notice what Jesus
says: “There is nothing from without a man that, entering into him can defile
him; but the things which come out of him, those are the things that defile the
man.” Verse 20, “That which comes out of
the man, that defiles the man. [21] For
from within,” notice now what He links with heart, “For from within, out of the
heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, [22]
Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye,
blasphemy, pride, foolishness. [23] All
these evil things come from within, and they defile the man.” Now what Christ is talking about by defiling,
He’s talking about defiling the conscience.
And He is saying this is where personal sin originates, from the heart
of man. And notice the things that He
lists there, even acts, notice verse 22, theft, lasciviousness, foolishness,
these are acts, and you say acts coming out of the heart? Yes, because that’s where the thought
starts. So notice the emphasis, then, in
God’s Word upon the heart.
Turn back to Proverbs
4, that’s why you should keep your heart above every other guarded thing, for
out of it are the issues of life. Then
the second part of the word pair, [24] “Put away from thee a froward mouth, and
perverse lips put far from thee.” What
is the connection between the heart and the mouth in Scripture? Some references are given, I’ll just list
them, we don’t have time to consult them; in Deuteronomy 30 there’s a passage
and in Romans 10 there’s a passage that connects heart and mouth. Here’s the connection. “Heart” looks at the same thing as mouth but
from a different perspective. Heart
looks on the inside and mouth looks on the outside but because they are a word
pair they both have to refer to the same thing.
Therefore, to more accurately pinpoint what heart means you go to mouth
and that explains it. Jesus says what’s
in the heart has to come out and how does it come out? It comes out through the mouth and what is the
mouth? It is the organ of verbal
communication, including thought. So this
pinpoints, then, in the Hebrew, what that heart/mouth word pair is. It refers to verbal communication and
ideas. Ideas are everything in God’s
Word. Behavior is that which follows.
Now this
connection between the inside and the outside is a help that you can use to
test your own life. It goes back to the
test that I explained. Do you understand
the Word? Do you really understand the
Word of God? If you understand the Word
of God you should be able to apply it.
It’s just like engineering, if you really understand the calculus and
you really understand the problem you’ll be able to solve the problem. And if you can’t solve the problem there’s
something wrong somewhere. So instead of
hiding and pretending, oh I know the Word, just test yourself how easily do you
apply the Word to given situations.
That’s the test by which you can tell whether you understand the Word or
don’t understand the Word. And the words
and the mouth, verse 24, the reason why it says “put away from thee a froward
mouth and perverse lips,” this is talking about communicating human
viewpoint. And it says if you want a
test as to how well your guarding your heart is working, what is it that you
are saying? And what is it that you are
communicating.
Now as long as I
have taught in Lubbock Bible Church about the concept that the Word of God is
to be applied to every area of life, it’s most interesting that time and time
again we will have people take some area out here, maybe it’s their job, maybe
it’s some other compartment of life and they’ll start talking about this and
run a conversation on for 25 minutes sometimes, and I listen just to see if the
thought has ever possibly occurred that the Word of God could be applied to the
job and you listen and you listen and nothing comes out of the mouth to
indicate that there’s been a connection made between the Word of God and the
job. And then you can test some other
topics, and just listen; is there a connection between the Word and the particular
area. If there isn’t, then the connection
hasn’t been made in the heart either. So
the mouth and the heart in Proverbs should be a warning to us all, that we’ve
got right in front of us an easy way of measuring how well we’re moving along
in this department.
So Proverbs
4:23-24, then, is the first thing that the son should have before he is
considered spiritually mature, and that is that he should have a basic control
of his heart, and I’ve explained that as the erection of Christ in the heart,
and proving it out by experience through the mouth, verse 24.
Now Proverbs 4:25,
the second thing that a son should have in order to be considered spiritually
responsible. “Let thine eyes look right
on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee.” Now both “right on” and “look straight,” it
refers to a standard and it refers to a primary orientation. Notice, “thine eyes,” we’ve moved now from
the heart/mouth word pair, verse 23-24, over to the eye, verse 25. And I prepared you when I discussed verse 21
to know what the eye means. The eye is
your basic orientation.
Now look at how it
fits together. The first thing is
guarding your heart; if the young believer is able to guard his heart by a
systematic intake of the Word that results in understanding, that shows forth
in his communication, and in his thinking, what’s naturally going to be the
second thing that follows, that will characterize the life of the young
be.
The second thing
that is going to follow is the fact that he’s going to have a basic
stability. God doesn’t lead like this. [Draws something on board]. And yet time and time again as pastor I hear:
do you know what God led me to do, God led me to do this, and then two years
later I talk to the person and they say, do you know what God’s leading me to
do now, He’s leading me to do this. Well
I often wonder, how can God be the one that’s doing all this kind of leading;
God isn’t that kind of a God. God
doesn’t anybody this way, God leads people in smooth paths. And God may have drastic changes to make but
even a drastic change that God would cause in your life, suppose it’s a
geographical move or something, even then you come along to that big thing and
God leads your life this way, even when you get through the drastic change you
can look back and see back here a continuity because back here, number one,
number two, number three, number four, that God has done in your life back here
to prepare you for over here. There’s
always a continuity in your life. God
doesn’t lead in jerkiness, all over the field; it’s always a smooth
leading. Now you’ve got to be open to
God’s leading, yes, but not this kind of stuff.
And over and over again this is passed off, God led me to do this.
Now be careful of
this. Do you realize that labeling that
kind of thing as the leading of the Lord is in violation of one of the Ten
Commandments? Some of you never even
thought of that before. Do you realize
that the commandment that says, “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy
God in vain” doesn’t refer to cursing.
The name, taking the Lord’s name in vain means to hang or raise up the
name of God as a label for an apostate or unspiritual cause or motivation. That’s what that commandment means. Some of you are all wet in your understanding
of that one. And this is a violation of
that. This is saying that God did this
and God didn’t do that; God isn’t anywhere near it, He isn’t within 20,000
miles of that kind of an operation, but to label that as God’s leading is
blasphemy, and you be careful about labeling God led me to do something, when
it’s this kind of a pattern you have.
So this is what
this means, “let thine eyes look right on, let thine eyelids look straight
before thee.” It’s a thing that would
have been easily understood because in verse 25 we’re dealing with a cultural
situation at the time which would have been riding a horse, we could say today
doing any number of other things, just walking, rowing a boat, getting out on
the water surface where you have very little orientation, you have to be very
careful of where your eye is or you can just go all over the place, in circles,
you have to have orientation.
When I was in
college I was on the crew, on the crew a long shell of 8 men, there’s a little
squirt that always sits on the back and he’s called the coxen, and the coxen’s
got one job to do in that boat, he has several jobs, but one of his main jobs
is to put his eye on some sort of reference point up ahead, he can’t look a
that lanes because they don’t have lined lanes in the middle of a river. So you can’t keep your lane that way, you’ve
got to keep your lane by the coxen and he has to have his eye on some target,
and he has to give the references to the stroke and so on and the men on the
work and the right, and give them the right commands to stroke that boat so
they’ll maintain the orientation. And
the coxen, one of the hardest things that I’ve been told by the coxens that
they have to get used to is to keep their eye constantly ahead; in the middle
of a race there’s always a tendency to look this way and to measure how well
you’re doing; you’re never to do that because if he gets his eye off that
thing, even for a second, that boat can begin to drift and when it drifts you
lose energy because you’re creating lateral motion. So the coxen’s big job is to keep his eye on
the target. And he finds after a while,
it takes many weeks for a crew to work together, it’s a very unusual sport in
the sense you can’t get 8 different men each afternoon for practice, you have
to have 8 men and it has to be the same men day after day after day. If one man gets sick, too bad, none of you
can practice. You’ve got to have the
same men over and over and over and over.
And so when the coxen first trains, his hardest job is to get his eye on
the target, to keep the boat in orientation, what the tendency is usually when
he gets in the boat is to look at the side, watch how fast we’re going, watch
how number three man is stroking, watch how number two man is stroking and
he’ll begin to criticize the crew and that’s fine, the crew needs it, but the
problem is that if he loses his orientation he can’t criticize the crew because
he can’t keep it oriented. So the coxen
always has to look way out, and get the big orientation and then everything else
follows and he’s got to fight himself for 3 or 4 weeks until he gets that down.
Well, it’s the
same thing in the Christian life; your eye has to be focused on some target out
here. And that target is the general
will of God for your life. I say
“general will” of God for your life, the general will because you’re not going
to know each specific detail. But each
one of you, if you’re a reasonably mature believer, ought to have some idea of
where God is leading you. Now we’ve
talked about spiritual gifts here, I’ve talked and talked about spiritual
gifts. And there are still people in
this congregation that look at you as though what did you say… what was that
word, we never heard that word before.
And you can just tell by the reaction that it still hasn’t sunk in, that
it’s something for the young people or something, a disease that young people
have. Spiritual gifts are for every
believer and if you would discern your spiritual gift you would have this long
range vision because you’d know exactly where you fit on the team. You wouldn’t know the details but like the
coxen, you would have your lane marked out for you. You would have things that would be
eliminated immediately. If you have the
gift of pastor-teacher you know your job is not evangelism. If you have the gift of helps you know that
your job is not to be teaching, unless you happen to have that gift. And positively you know what kind of training
and so on that you need.
So that’s verse
25, the second thing that the son is to have for spiritual maturity, a
stability based on his orientation to life.
Proverbs 4:26-27,
the third that a Hebrew son was to have to be considered spiritually
mature. “Ponder the path of thy feet,
and let all thy ways be established.
[27] Turn not to the right hand nor to the left; remove thy foot from
evil.” Verses 26-27 take another part of
the anatomy, they move down, we’ve dealt with the heart, we’ve dealt with the
mouth, we’ve dealt with the eyes, now we’re at the feet. “Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy
ways be established.” The word “ponder” pallam p-a-l-l-a-m, means to make level,
and it means to solve a road problem.
Now here’s what it means; you have point A and point B and you want to
move from point A to point B but you’ve got a series of obstacles here between
point A and point B. Now pallam is the word that means that you
figure out how to go from point A to point B and make a level road to get
there. So it deals with solving the
short range problem. So whereas verses
23-24 dealt with the central basic problem of the heart; verse 25 deals with
the stability of orientation to the general will of God, verses 26-27 deal with
systematic solutions to every day problems.
This is the short range, this deals with this obstacle. Let’s say you have 1, 2, 3, 4 obstacles; this
means that you deal with obstacle one from the standpoint of the word; you deal
with obstacle two, you deal with obstacle three, deal with obstacle four, and
notice to how logical all of these things flow.
I said the Hebrew
son had to have three things; could he have verses 26 and 27 without verse
25? No, because he’d have no general lay
of the land for his road. Verse 26-27
deal with specific obstacles but if he doesn’t have any general idea where he’s
going in life what good does it to do apply biblical solutions to specific
problems? Nothing. So you’ve got to have verse 25 before you can
have verse 26 and 27, it’s in a logical order.
And then finally,
notice something else about verse 27; after thy ways have been established, and
after there’s been a level place made for thy feet, notice what it says; this
is also part of the same third thing, “Turn not to the right hand nor to the
left; remove thy foot from evil.” In
other words, this means that when you have built your road and you’ve got it
through the obstacles, one last bit of advice: stay on the road. In other words, if you’ve gone to all the
trouble of solving your problems with a biblical solution, you’ve prayed that
God would enable you to follow that biblical solution, stay with it. Once you know it’s a biblical solution, then
remember what I said about increasing responsibility, here’s some problem in
your life, instead of going around the problem you’re going to solve it
biblically. You’ve worked out the
solution biblically; you’ve sat down, you’ve studied the Word, you know what
God wants you to do, with that problem.
You’ve mapped out a solution to the problem. Now after all of that… nah, I’m going to do
it my own way, now what’s going to happen,
you can’t do it your own way without negative volition against the Word,
because now, by the time you’ve got to verse 27
you know what God’s will is, so now God holds you responsible for that
solution. And now you can get actually
out of fellowship where you couldn’t have gotten out of fellowship before your
tried it. It’s one of those strange
things in the Christian life. The deeper
you get into the Christian life the easier it becomes to get out of fellowship
in this sense because God holds you responsible for more areas.
All right, what
are the three things then that a Hebrew son must have to be spiritually
mature: He must learn how to care for
his heart and his mouth—heart and mouth care.
And it’s not done by Lavoris. The
second thing: how to maintain a firm stable orientation through the details of
life. The third thing: how to solve the
day to day problems in the Word. You
remember the context, since we finished with chapter 4, next week we get on
chapter 5, we’ll do the whole chapter, remember this is in the context of a
father who’s already taught this son.
This does not come overnight.
There are some of you here as parents that have to do this for yourself
before you can do it for your children, do don’t expect the children to do this
if you haven’t. You are the leader.