Real Wisdom in an Age of Information

Well, hey, hey, Church on the Move. So good to be with you this weekend. If you're new around here, or if you just forgot who I was over the last few weeks, my name is Whit, and I am the pastor here, and it's so good to be back with you. Obviously, I've been out the last couple of weeks, had a little bit of time off, did a little bit of traveling. Was in Ireland, actually, doing a little ministry there. Not the whole time we were over in Europe, but part of the time we were there with Pastor Andy and Victoria. In fact, I brought a picture, thought I'd show it to you for a couple reasons. One, I was easily the biggest person in Ireland. I don't know if you remember the old Disney classic, Darby O'Gill and the Little People. It came to life while I was there. But that's Pastor Andy and his wife, Victoria, who are doing an incredible work. Let's just say the Lord is doing an incredible work through them in the northwest of Ireland. Got to preach there a couple of weeks ago. What an honor just to see the Lord, like the book of Acts, building his church out of nothing. And you're gonna hear more about this church, I'm eager to tell you, kind of in the future, ways that we want to partner with them. God's doing something special there. And the gospel is being proclaimed

to people that desperately need it. So it was really great to be there with them and get to do a little ministry. But it's so good to be back. I am really excited to be here. Been eagerly waiting for this weekend and looking forward to being back with all of you. We're starting a new series this weekend called Life Lessons. And the tagline is really what's important. Biblical wisdom or what the Bible says about a life well lived. Now this wasn't what we were originally going to teach this fall. We had some other ideas of kind of what we might teach. But the story of how we got here is interesting. So some of you will know long time church on the mover, precious man and saint, Gary Shotton. He passed away this week, early Thursday morning. Gary served here faithfully for so many years. Been around here for 30 plus years. Serving faithfully behind the scenes, just willing to kind of do whatever. An amazing guy. When I kind of talk about heroes of the faith and people that when I stand before the Lord in the next life, Gary will be way, way to the front of the line in front of me. It's just that kind of guy. The humble service and the willingness

to just follow the Lord wherever he led. It was really something to witness in Gary's life. Fought long and hard with ALS and this week went home to be with his king. And he's free and healed and doing really well today but we miss him and the family misses him and the church misses him. One of the kind of positive outcomes though of this last season that Gary walked through was that he had some time to reflect. Time to reflect on his life and at the prompting of his daughter Shauna decided to write a book just sort of cataloging God's faithfulness to him over the decades. And the book is called Step by Step. We had some copies in the bookstore. They're all gone. We'll have more next week. But this is just a story of Gary's life. Following the Lord. Gary asked me when I met with him a couple of months ago if I would look through this and read it and give an endorsement. Of course, I was happy to do it and the book is phenomenal. It moved me so much just looking through this book and reading through it that I said, you know what, we need to pivot because it's the story of just people applying really basic, simple, biblical wisdom

and seeing God show up in amazing kinds of ways. If you're looking, by the way, for just a story of God's faithfulness, how it plays out in real time and what it looks like to follow the Lord, I can't recommend this book enough. It's awesome and you'll be able to pick it up next weekend out in our bookstore. But Gary's life was a living example of what it means to just walk with the Lord in the simplest of ways. You don't have to be a Bible scholar, you just have to be willing to follow and walk step by step by step by step and that's really what this series is going to be about. We're gonna take biblical truths, biblical wisdom and just share it with you because a lot of this stuff is stuff that's been taught around here for a long time, seems for some of you will be a review, for others of you it'll be life-changing, lights-on kind of moments like you will see what it's like to follow the Lord in new kinds of ways, ways that you can put into practice and like Gary, it will change your life. As we stood in the living room of the shot in the house, the day that he'd passed, was there with the family, Pastor Lee, Pastor Chris, we were there and above the fireplace were the lyrics.

Providentially to the song that we just sang. We didn't plan to sing this song this week in honor of Gary, but the song that says, all my life you have been faithful. All my life you have been so, so good. And then this particularly poignant lyric, with every breath that I am able. If you know anything about ALS, you know that it greatly inhibits the ability to breathe. And Gary lived this out. With every breath that he was able, his life bore witness to God's goodness and faithfulness. So, thank you Gary for inspiring this series, and I'd like to dedicate it to him as well. Would you bow your heads and close your eyes as we get started this morning. Father, thank you so much for the truth of your word, a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. We humble ourselves before it, knowing that you have wisdom that we don't. We need to hear from you. We don't know what we're doing, we are sheep. So we look to you, our shepherd, our king, our father, our great, gracious God. We're listening, open our ears, open our eyes, to hear and see what you wanna show us. And we will be careful to obey. It's in Jesus' name we pray. And everybody said, amen. Well, if you have a Bible,

the first passage I wanna direct you to is Proverbs chapter four. We're gonna be looking at verses seven through nine. We're talking about biblical wisdom, that's really the theme. And while this series isn't a exposition of the book of Proverbs per se, I think we have to start here. If we're talking about wisdom, we need to go to the book of wisdom, and that is Proverbs. This is Solomon writing, and look what he says. "'The beginning of wisdom is this.'" I love how simple this is, get wisdom. "'And whatever you get, get insight. "'Prize her highly, and she will exalt you. "'She will honor you if you embrace her. "'She will place on your head a graceful garland. "'She will bestow on you a beautiful crown.'" The imperative here is simple, get wisdom. And the implication, if you're paying attention, ought to be clear. Wisdom must be acquired. You don't natively have wisdom. I like this quote from Ray Ortlund. He puts it like this. Sorry, friends, but we are not born wise, none of us. We get into wisdom the hard way, through the Lord's instruction and discipline, through being chastened and corrected.

We don't like that, it's humiliating. It's hard to admit when we're wrong, but we make progress in wisdom to the extent that we are teachable. So the imperative to get wisdom assumes that you don't have it. It has to be acquired. That's the first step in acquiring wisdom or getting wisdom is recognizing that you don't have it. Now, here's what's interesting. And I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, but we're living in such interesting times. What many have called the age of information or the information age. And it's not hard to understand why. You look around and we are surrounded, inundated by information. Books everywhere, podcasts everywhere, opinions and social media being shared. You wanna know how to do anything? Just consult YouTube. How to dress, how to fix an old car, how to repair a leak in your bathroom. Anything you wanna know about, you can find virtually online. In fact, I thought about it this week. Could you come up with any topic at all that hasn't already been discussed online ad nauseum? Such is our age, there is much information. But here's the way I would say it.

While we have plenty of information, we have very little wisdom. There's a lot of information out there, but there's little wisdom. And wisdom and information are not the same thing. Why do we lack wisdom? There's a couple reasons for this, some of which we're gonna get into as we teach through this passage in this sermon. But one reason I'd like to offer is what Carl Truman, who is a professor, a historian, a thinker, and an author, has called the reversal of the flow of knowledge. Now that sounds complicated, but it's really quite simple. He gives this illustration. His mother, who's older, lives in a home in the Cotswolds in England. If you watch any of the BBC shows set in kind of sort of quaint England, it's probably in the Cotswolds, those kinds of homes, old homes. And she lives in the home of an old weaver, someone who would work at a loom, weaving threads of woolen threads together to form a fabric. And he invites you to imagine that the old weaver is sitting there at his loom, working. the loom with the shuttle back and forth, weaving the threads together to form fabric, and his child comes in and says, Father, what is it that you're doing? And he would begin to explain how the loom worked and how to operate it. What's

happening here? Knowledge is being transferred from the older to the younger. And for most of human history, this is how life worked. If you wanted to know anything, if you wanted to attain knowledge or wisdom, you had to go to someone older than you because wisdom and knowledge were accrued over time, life experience. But in our modern context, this has shifted. It's actually reversed. Why? A couple of reasons. One, we're living in a scientific age that prioritizes the present and the future. What do we mean by that? Well, science is sort of built on this idea that we're progressing, right? That things are getting better, that we're learning more about our world and our bodies. And so the idea is that, you know, things are good now and are better than they have ever been and are only getting better into the future. That's sort of the idea behind science is that we're making progress. But the other one has had, I think, a bigger effect would be the rapid increase of technology and how quickly we're advancing. So think about this for a second. If you were born in, say, the year 1500, there would be very little difference in your life between the way you lived and the way, say, someone born a hundred years later than you lived. Not much in the world would change. Life would be as it has always been. Change happens, but very, very slowly. Now imagine the difference between your life today and the life of someone in 1926. How different is our world today? How would you explain a cell phone or much of the technology, AI? How would you even begin to explain that to someone living a hundred years ago? By the way, this is an explanation for the generation gaps that we see. The reason is because we're living in literally different ages because technology means that the world changes in dramatic ways. And what it means is that culturally we prioritize youth. Let me show you how this works. Same home in the Cotswolds, but now a scene a couple hundred years later. Carl Truman, the author here who's writing about this, describes being in his mother's home. His mother is older. She's asked him for some help. I need help recording this rugby match on my DVR. I don't know how to do it. Can you do it? So he's not terribly technologically literate himself. He's fumbling around with the remote, can't figure it out. In walks his young niece.

She says, what are you doing? He says, trying to record the rugby match. She says, here. Rolls her eyes, sighs, takes the remote, and in two clicks of the remote has it all set up. What's just happened? The flow of knowledge has reversed. Now, and you're living this. Some of you are older. This is exactly how it works. For you to even navigate the world, you have to go to somebody younger. I don't even know how to make sense of things. Can you explain to me the world that we're living in? So what this means is it puts a priority on youth, and that's exactly what we're seeing in our culture. Look at the voices that we prioritize. Look at who we platform. It's people who are young, who are vibrant, who are, I would argue, sexually desirable because that's what we care about in our world. So we have people with very little life experience who have a big platform and a big microphone. Meanwhile, people who have lived a great deal don't have much of a voice. Now, let me just make a little caveat here. Being old does not automatically make one wise. You can be a young fool and an old fool. However, wisdom is not acquired in a moment, so you're not likely, almost impossible, to be wise at a young age. That's why we have the phrase, he's wise beyond his years, because wisdom doesn't come quickly. It takes time, and yet in a world that is obsessed with youth and a world that believes that the past has almost nothing to teach us other than to sort of look at who was the oppressor and who were the oppressed. Such is the world that we live in. We care very little about history. All we care about is the now and the future. What we have is information. What we need is wisdom. So then where do we get wisdom? Well, great question. I'm glad you asked. That's point two. Wisdom comes only through relationship with the Lord, and I've highlighted only for a reason. Solomon writes this in Proverbs 1.7, the fear of the Lord is the beginning. the beginning of knowledge. In other words, the entrance, the gateway into wise living starts with a consideration of the Lord. Fear, reverence, and awe of one's maker. This is more profound than you might think.

He drills down on this idea in the very next chapter when he writes this. For the Lord gives wisdom. Notice the kind of framing of the language. It all comes from him, from his mouth come knowledge and understanding. He stores up sound wisdom for the upright. He is a shield to those who walk in integrity. What this means, and this is easily the most important thing I'm gonna say to you today, and I'm gonna try to pack this the best that I can. You cannot detach wisdom from a relationship with God. Not really. Because he is the source of wisdom. This means, then, that wisdom is more than a life hack. It's more than just having the perfect morning routine. It's more than just living according to the sort of health and wellness standards and vice and quote unquote wisdom of our day, as some of us are obsessed with. There's no shortage of different things that you can put in place, things you ought to be. You need to be cold plunging. Need to get into a sauna, need to hang from a bar for a couple minutes a day, need to walk around barefoot, ground yourself to the earth. Like this is all over. Maybe this is on your feed. Maybe you're seeing some of this. This is the wisdom of our day, and it is everywhere.

But real wisdom, biblical wisdom, is more than just life hacking. It is about a relationship with God. Well, why is that? Because he is the fountain of all wisdom. And if you're a Christian, this makes sense. Do you believe that there's wisdom somewhere that God does not have? Oh wow, what a great idea. I just heard that on that podcast. I'd never thought of that before. Do you think that there's wisdom apart from God? The answer is if you're a Christian, no. He's the fount of all wisdom. So if you wanna be truly wise, you gotta go to him. Now does this mean that people who don't believe and God can't be beneficiaries of God's wisdom without believing in him? Well, yes and no. We can and we do benefit, and I'm gonna demonstrate this to you here in just a second. We can benefit from God's wisdom even without believing in him, but we won't ourselves become truly wise, not ultimately speaking, because we are not connected to the source of wisdom. Now let me walk this out, and I'm gonna invite you to put your thinking cap on here because this requires a little bit of thinking

and considering. So in the early 2000s, we saw the rise of what were called the new atheists. Some of you maybe have heard of these people, people like Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens, author of the book God Is Not Great, Sam Harris, who wrote The End of Faith. These are atheists who popularized the idea of atheism. Atheism had been around for a while, but with the rise of the new atheists, here's what's interesting, the kind of category, that small subset of the population, very small, very few people historically have identified as atheists, but with the rise of the new atheist movement, that started to increase. More and more people started to identify as atheists, and more religious people started to identify as having no particular religious affiliation. Now here was their basic premise. They basically argued that the world would be better off without religion. What they did was they looked around at the world, and they said, look at the wars that have been started and fought in the name of religion. Look at what's happening around the world. Look at all the evil and the violence. If we could just get beyond religion, then somehow we could usher in a kind of secular utopia, and the world would be a better place.

If you've ever listened to John Lennon's song, Imagine, it's the same idea. If we could just get beyond these sort of religious divisions that keep us from being in relationship and loving one another, we could have a sort of humanist utopia. That was at least the idea. And for a while, it seemed like they were really gaining steam and traction. But what's been ironic is here recently, all of that tide has started to turn. Because the humanist promise and the secular promise hasn't really delivered on what it put forward. What we found is that things haven't gotten better. They've actually gotten worse, to the point that even these noted atheists are now backtracking on what they've said and are saying, look, I still don't believe in God, but you know what, that Christianity thing is really not so bad. This is a direct quote from Richard Dawkins, who said this, I do think we are, speaking of England, a culturally Christian country. tree. I call myself a cultural Christian. That does not mean a Christian in the sense that you and I mean a Christian. It means that he likes the sort of culture that Christianity produces. What sort of culture does it produce? Let's see, human dignity, human rights, care for the poor, not oppressing people, the weak should not be oppressed by the strong, shouldn't be a racist. You know, just basic stuff that we take for granted and think that we in our human wisdom have invented. The rejection of slavery and the obliteration of slavery happen in a Christian society. That's where these things came from, Christian ideals.

So here's what he's arguing. He's saying, look, I like what Christianity produces. I just don't want the sort of religious dogma and belief that goes along with it. I'm not a believer, but there's a distinction between being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian. What he's trying to do is get the fruit of Christianity without the root. And you could see it if you're halfway smart at all. This is a fool's errand. It's like trying to plant a tree that you've cut the roots off from. It won't live. And that's exactly what's happening to Richard Dawkins and to the country that he lives in. As he is advocating for more kind of Christian norms or a Christian view of morality. As if you're an atheist, you have no moral objection, not at the core, not foundationally for, let's say, murder. You can't tell me that it's wrong everywhere all the time for one person to murder another. You can't tell me that racism is wrong. If there is no God, then these are just opinions. There are no divine rules that I should hold to. Rape isn't wrong. Dawkins would admit that, but he said, I would rather live in a world where rape is wrong. Now that's fascinating because he's not really living out what he actually believes. So there was another atheist that came well before Richard Dawkins, a guy who, quite frankly, I have a bit more respect for in Friedrich Nietzsche, who was no fan of Christianity, but he had the courage to live by his convictions in a way that many modern day atheists do not. And here's his critique of people that called themselves sort of being beyond the Christian faith. Here's what he said, when one gives up the Christian faith, in other words, you're going to tell me I don't really believe in all that superstitious Bible stuff anymore. Well, you also, when you do that, give up the right to a Christian morality. It comes out from under your feet. You don't get both. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together by breaking one main concept out of it, namely the faith in God, one breaks the whole. Nothing necessary. In other words, everything is permissible. If you're going to get rid of God, then there is no moral code and there is no right and wrong, not fundamentally, not at the sort of baseline level, not at the universal level. There is no real right and wrong. There's only a system of rules that we've invented that we call sort of right and wrong. But I think deep down, none of us actually really think that's true. Because when you look at the evils visited upon one person to another in our world, there's something in us that like knows deep down that is wrong. We know what Hitler and the

Nazis did is wrong, unequivocally for all time, wrong. Not just because culturally we were conditioned to believe it's wrong, it's just wrong. Christianity, and this is where I have so much respect for Nietzsche, is he understood Christianity better than a lot of Christians. Christianity supposes, it's built on a presupposition, that man does not know and cannot know what is good for him. Wow. Think about that for a second because it's true. That is the basis of Christianity, is that you don't know what's best for yourself. That flies so in the face of our modern sort of identity narrative, that you get to form your own identity and be who you feel like you are on the inside. Nietzsche recognizes that's not true if you're a Christian. You don't get to determine what's good for you or what's evil. He believes in God, who alone knows it. In other words, the Lord has wisdom. He's the one that holds it. The only way to get it is to go to him. It has truth. If God is the truth, and this last line is really what I want to focus on, it stands and falls with faith in God. Now here's what's happening. As we in the West have sort of devalued and rejected belief in God, so too have we sort of lost ourselves. Such is the connection between God and man. I've said this before. It bears repeating, you will not understand yourself unless you understand yourself in light of your creator. Is it any wonder that in our age of killing God, we have lost the clarity of who we are? There's confusion about our own identities. We don't understand ourselves. We don't know what we're here for. One is, it's not an accidental connection. One is the result of the other. You get rid of God, you fail to understand yourself. Carl Truman wrote this in his book, The Desecration of Man, a book I highly recommend to you if you're interested in studying these kinds of things. Further, he writes this, the modern notion of man, in other words, our self-understanding in our time

as free and autonomous beings demonstrated by our ability, and this is so powerful, to transgress boundaries once considered sacred. Now, this is the world that we're living in. If you'll pay attention to this, you will see this happening around us. We are asserting our dominance over God by transgressing boundaries that used to be off-limits. What do I mean by that? Well, do you remember the Olympics from a couple of years ago, the opening ceremony? Do you remember what happened when a bunch of drag queens presented themselves in sort of the formation of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper? What is this, it's transgressing a sacred boundary on the world's stage. It is a man asserting himself over God. Used to be, and some of us in the room remember this, old enough to remember kind of the political discourse, that while there has always been for a long time a kind of two sides to the abortion argument, those pro-choice and those pro-life, it used to be that abortion was described as, by proponents of it, as something that needed to be safe, legal, and rare. No longer is the case. As you're seeing women flaunt abortions as though it were a badge of honor or a trophy to hold up as a sort of symbol of their autonomy as women and free sexual beings.

This is transgressing sacred boundaries, things that we used to say, that's not right. Now it's not just enough that we sort of kind of accept it, we have to celebrate it. You're seeing it paraded in the streets, put in front of our faces. This is who we are. This is man saying, I am God. I will make decisions for myself. And here's what Truman notes that I think is so powerful. He says, this paradoxically reduces mankind to nothing. Get rid of God, you get rid of yourself. If you desecrate God, you ironically end up desecrating yourself. And we see this in the sexual revolution of the 60s. Some of you are old enough to have lived through this. I myself was born in 1976, so I've only lived on the other side of the sexual revolution. But the promise of the 1960s sexual revolution was that we will break away from the old religious chains that bound sexuality to one man and one woman in a committed marriage relationship. That was the idea. We're breaking free and we're stepping into a new day. And the idea and the promise was that it was going to liberate us sexually. It was gonna make sex better for everybody and most notably women, freedom for women. And then you look at it 60 years on and you say,

has that worked? We in a better spot today? When you look at the rise of pornography and the sort of ubiquitous usage of pornography, sex has become something that has enslaved millions, perhaps billions worldwide. By looking mostly at women, we are objectifying them, reduced to nothing more than the quality or beauty of their bodies. Sex is no longer sacred. It is meaningless. It's nothing more than recreation. Doesn't mean anything. Isn't bound to a specific relationship. It's just something that you do when you feel like it, like an animal urge or instinct. It hasn't liberated us. It's made us slaves to it. But such is the wisdom of man. Man's wisdom always leads to enslavement. Paul makes this point so beautifully in a passage from Romans 1. Some of you will know this. This reads like a description of our time. Look at what he writes. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. In other words, the very evil way in which we live

distorts and warps the truth of who God is. For what can be known about God, Paul writes, is plain to them because God has shown it to them. How? attributes, namely his eternal power and his divine nature, have been clearly perceived. All you have to do is look at creation, and you can see that there is a creator. So Paul says they are without excuse. Now here's the part that I want to get to. Look at what he says, for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God. Remember Proverbs 1.7, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. I think we could reverse that and say the rejection of God is the beginning of foolishness. It's the pathway that leads to destruction. They did not honor him as God or give him thanks, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. And now if we can get to verse 22, which is I think the perfect summary of our age, claiming to be wise, they became fools. I mean, is this not what we're living in? When we live in a world that tells you in its wisdom that a biological man can be a woman and there be no real distinction between them, this is lunacy. It's not wisdom, it's foolishness, prideful foolishness. And I don't say this to sort of score political points with a largely conservative crowd. I'm telling you this to show you where a life without God leads. It leads to stupidity, calling up, down, right, left, and left, right. It's stupid and yet we call it wisdom. But this is what happens when man asserts himself over God. You wind up nowhere. Now while that's culturally true, let's just challenge ourselves personally. Lest we think that's their problem out there, let's look at it a little closer to home. The question I would ask is if God is the source of all wisdom, then who do you listen to most?

Where are you getting your wisdom from? See some of you, you're more obsessed with leadership podcasts, business podcasts, doctors on social media, people telling you how you need to live your life, what health and wellness stuff you need to get in place. For many of us, we're more familiar with those voices, we're more familiar with science than we are with scripture. We spend more time listening to influencers and people who've been platformed on social media telling us how we ought to live and parenting hacks and life hacks and how to set up a perfect morning routine and all the different things, thinking that that's somehow by optimizing our lives that we will arrive at wisdom. You don't get wisdom that way, you get it from going to the source. The only way to be truly wise is to go to the one from whom wisdom comes. That's the Lord. And contrary to the spirit of the age, wisdom is not bound up in youth and beauty and sexual desire. This is not to say that young people have nothing to offer, but it is to say that wisdom comes from walking with the Lord over time, a long time. That's how you become wise. You don't get it by listening to one podcast or watching a certain YouTube video, you get it by walking step by step by step with the Lord. Eugene Peterson called it a long obedience in the same direction. We'll talk about that next week, what it looks like to walk step by step by step with the Lord, but this is how wisdom comes. It doesn't come in a moment, you can't microwave it. It has to be marinated in a crock pot. Wisdom is far more like a crock pot than a microwave. It takes a long time. Now number three is this, and this is where I'm going to close. Wisdom is truth applied. Now this is where it gets good, and I realize there's a certain irony in this because I

just spent a lot of time kind of giving you a history lesson and a sociology lesson and kind of getting into sort of some bigger thoughts and abstract ideas, sort of theory, that kind of stuff, but ultimately that's not wisdom. Wisdom is not high-minded theological thought and theory. Here's why this is a good thing. It means that anybody can do it. Wisdom is just truth applied, and if you look at the book of Proverbs, it's an inescapably practical book. In fact, I think you could argue easily that it's the most practical book in the entirety of Scripture. There's some incredibly quirky, practical things in Proverbs. Maybe you didn't even know some of this is in the Bible. Proverbs 27, 14, whoever blesses his neighbor with a loud voice rising early in the morning will be counted as cursing. That's practical wisdom for you, is it not? I got a wife who needs a long time to kind of warm up in the morning. I wake up with words. I don't know if any of you are like this. I can wake up and like give me 10 seconds, I can have a whole deep conversation. That's where I'm at. I'm ready to talk. My wife, not so much. We celebrated, by the way, 20 years. 27 years of marriage a couple of weeks ago, thank you. You know how we did it? This. I'm learning, working on it, but like I've learned, don't talk to Heather early in the morning or you will be cursed, that's the idea. Proverbs 25, 17, let your foot be seldom

in your neighbor's house, lest he have his fill of you and hate you. Some of you live out in the country and you're like, amen. I'm okay with visitors occasionally, but I don't need them all the time, lest I hate you. That's the idea. I like people, just not too much people, right? How about this one? A continual dripping on a rainy day and a quarrelsome wife are alike. To restrain her is to restrain the wind or to grasp oil in one's right hand. I don't think this needs any further comment at all, just leave it right there. Wisdom. Truth applied. Here's why this is good news. You don't need a master's degree to be wise. It's not about the level of your intellect. It's not about how brilliant you are or how many books that you've read. It's not about what position you hold within an organization. It's not about the size of your salary, how much money you have in the bank. Wisdom just comes from being obedient. Just simple obedience. I will follow, that's it. And anybody can do that. If you can hear and understand, then you can obey.

That's the basic idea. Look at this from Matthew chapter seven. My brother pointed this verse out, this passage out last week, but it's worth revisiting because it's so good. This is Jesus speaking, and look what he says. Everyone who hears these words of mine, what are these three words here, church? And does them. He will be like a wise man. Whoa, how do I get wise? By doing. It's the doing that makes the difference. The application is the difference. He'll be like a wise man who built his house on the rock and the rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall because it had been founded on the rock. Look at the contrast. Everyone who hears these words of mine, what does it say? And does not do them. Will be like a foolish man. What's the difference? Doing. He built his house on the sand and the rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and beat against that house and it fell and great was the fall of it. That's why we're doing this series. Simple stuff that anybody, anybody,

I didn't even graduate high school, who cares? Can you hear and obey? Yeah, any of us can do that. But I don't understand everything. That's okay, you just gotta be willing to try it. It's one of the life lessons that we're gonna talk about over the next few weeks is that clarity often follows obedience, not the other way around. You don't get clarity and then obey, you obey and then clarity comes, understanding comes. Some of you have been walking with God long enough to realize that's true. Then often you don't understand what God's doing on the front end, it's only after walking through it that you go, oh, that's what the Lord was doing. It makes sense after the fact. Your job is not to understand and lead, your job is to follow. After all, what was Jesus' invitation? Follow me. He leads, we follow. I imagine those disciples, in fact I'm certain of it, had no idea where he was going. Had no idea what they would do. Had no idea what they would witness. Had no idea what they would become a part of. Had no idea how they would go down in history. All they were doing is taking one step of obedience at a time and that's what following God looks like. So over the next, I don't know, eight, 10 weeks or so,

we're just going to lay out basic biblical truths and say, here you go, put this in practice. And here's the cool thing, I've seen this happen time and time again, it'll change your life. You start living like this, there's so many church on the movers who did these things, have put this stuff into practice years ago and their lives now are different because of just following the Lord. One small step at a time. Can you hear and obey? Then you can be wise. Would you bow your head? Close your eyes. Let me pray for us. Father, again we thank you for your word. Illuminates our hearts and minds, our imaginations to who you are. Lord, we need to see you. Because we don't know who we are apart from you. You're our creator. You're the maker of heaven and earth, the one who was and is and is to come. You spoke the universe into existence. You uphold it by the word of your power. You are our great God, gracious, long-suffering, loving, not willing that any should perish. Lord, you've pursued us, you've saved us, you've pulled us out of our sins, delivered us and forgiven us,

and for that we are grateful. Now help us to follow you. Lord, I pray that we hear your voice over these next few weeks, just the simple whisper of the Holy Spirit, that what you ask us to do, we will be faithful to obey, to put the word into practice and begin to see it bear fruit. We recognize that we are sheep. We know not which way we should go. We're following our good, faithful shepherd. So lead on, Lord, and we will follow. Thank you, Lord, for speaking, we will obey. In Jesus' name we pray, everybody said, amen. At the close of the service, our prayer team's gonna be down front. Every week we do this. If you have a prayer need, perhaps you're going through something, we would love to be able to pray with you. They'll be lining the front of the stage all the way across, left to right. They'll be standing here, ready to receive you, hear what's going on in your life and pray with you. Now, maybe you're here, and I want you to just pay attention, don't leave just yet. Maybe the Lord's been doing business with you about your relationship with him. Maybe you're coming to faith for the first time,

awakening to the idea that Jesus really is Lord and you wanna live for him, great. Maybe some of you are in a spot where you say, I am taking my faith seriously in a way that I never have before. Would you be bold and courageous enough as well to come forward? We have a couple more teams down here. We would love to resource you with this little book that we wrote, just called, What Does It Mean to Be Saved? And it's really just an explanation of what Christianity looks like on a personal level. This is meant to help you. It's easy to read. We would love for you to be able to grab this. We're not trying to rope you in to coming back here every single week. We just wanna help you in your walk with Christ. If this is you, would you come forward, grab one of these from our team? They'll be down front, they'll be happy to give you one of these. Just say, I need that book that Pastor Whit mentioned. We'd love to give this to you. Stand to your feet. We're gonna close with this blessing out of Numbers chapter six. We do this every week. And we like to say it out loud together.

So it's on the screen. And as I start here, you can join with me as we kind of declare this blessing over each other and ourselves. Are you ready? Here we go. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. God bless you. I love you. We'll see you next week for week two of this series. You're dismissed. Thank you so much for watching this message from Church on the Move Tulsa. We really hope it encouraged you to take a step toward Jesus. Church on the Move is a family of churches in Northeast Oklahoma, each with its own in-person pastor. We love our Bibles, learning and community, and taking steps toward Jesus. If you live in the area, we would love for you to join us in person. For more information, check out our website at churchonthemove.com. Or we've got a few videos we think you might like. Check them out here.

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