Transcript

Let's take our Bibles. We're going to go through this week, all six sessions tonight, Lord willing. And Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday mornings, we're going to study the book of Proverbs. And if you open with me to chapter four, this whole week is going to be surrounding the offer that God makes in chapter four, the fourth chapter of Proverbs.

 Let's stay on the text verse 18 of Proverbs chapter four, but the path of the just... remember being justified freely by His grace through the redemption is in Christ Jesus. Justification is probably the greatest doctrine in all the Scripture. It's even in the Old Testament. It was all pointing toward what Christ would do, but the path of the just- Remember, the book of Proverbs is not a whole bunch of great ideas to, to help us live a better life.

It is God saying his offer to those who are justified. Look at this is like the shining sun.

Verse 18 says, that shines ever brighter to the perfect day life as God intended it to be. Is the ever brighter?

Life as God intended it to be, it's the pathway to an ever-brighter life. So that's the first picture God gives. Think of that, the path of the shining sun. Just think about the glories of the sunrise, the glories of that light and the shine. And when you know, even sunset, sometimes it's too bright to look at.

But look at verse 19, the way of the wicked is like the darkness. Total contrast. In fact, the whole book of proverbs, the word proverbs means like it's kind of like this.

This whole idea of God comparing to bring his divine wisdom down to where we are so that we can understand it. Look what he says. The way of the wicked is like darkness. They do not know what makes them stumble. So, here's God's offer. He's got the ever-brighter path or that downward into the darkness, stumbling and ending up.

Luke 1:78-79 says, falling into the pit, into the darkness. Remember Jesus when He came in, Zachariah's prophecy said, I'll read it to you. Luke 1:78 says this through the tender mercies of our God, with which the day, spring or sunrise from on high has visited us to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death and to guide our feet into the way of peace. Jesus came to the people, all of us on that road of darkness, headed to the precipice and falling into everlasting darkness in Hell. And He came and shined as the sunrise from on high.

This is God offering the ever-brighter path of life. That's the message of the book of Proverbs.

So, the whole book of Proverbs is built around this contrast. Wisdom, the just the path of light, it gets better and better, and brighter until the perfect day as contrasted to those who are on the path of darkness.

There are 915 verses in Proverbs. There are 140 different topics. I'm only going to get to cover six. Of the 140 with you all. But let me show you what prompted this. My wonderful wife, Bonnie, right there, my best friend and the one person in the whole world I'd like to spend all my time with she bought me a present now to the man who has 7,200 books.

She bought me a book and I went, oh, thanks honey. And I put it on my- I told her thank you and gave her a hug, and I put it on the shelf, and it was about a year ago. And I really didn't pay any attention to what it was and because we're coming and going and traveling. But just about, we got home at Thanksgiving, and I went and looked and I said, honey, you gave me this really neat book.

And I opened it up and it didn't have any words in it. For the man with many books, a book with no words. How clever. And then I read in the front what it is, and this is what it says. It would be up there.

In Deuteronomy 17, Moses leaves a final instruction concerning the future of Israel. In verse 18 of Deuteronomy 17, Moses said the King, the one that's coming.

Remember there wasn't a king yet. He was talking about the future King. The King that was coming was commanded to not simply get a copy of the scriptures that we all carry around, not just go and buy one. He was to hand copy his own copy. So, this what Bonnie got me, it is actually Proverbs and it says on there the 17:18 series.

It's a blank book with what chapter and what verses and the little numbers of the verses. And you actually copy the whole book by hand. So, you can see how far I am. See there are words. I have never done that before. Did you know it's overwhelming? For one thing, it takes forever. There are some words I've never written before, ever in my whole life.

I was in school from 1962 to 1999. Unbroken, never out of school. From 1962 to 1999, when I finally graduated from Dallas Seminary, I was in school for 37 years, always in school and working and, married and pastoring and everything else. I've never copied the Bible word for word. I just finished this. This is my second one. I did Revelation first.

Have you ever spelled chrysoprasus or sardonic? Or how about abominable and abomination and everything else? That's, all that stuff. But here's the bottom line. 3,400 years later, educators have discovered that students that physically write out their notes by hand have a much greater retention rate than simply hearing or visually reading the information. This is still what's written in the front of this. It's called a Journible like journal only Journible, like journal and Bible put together. That's what they call these things.

Apparently, God knew this to be true of the kings of Israel also, and so they started this idea of having people write down the Bible. So, Bonnie wanted me to do it, so of course I did my favorite book first, Revelation. And then I discovered as I was looking at my shelf that she had already bought me Proverbs and I started writing this out.

And as I was writing it out, I got to where we just were and I thought, God wants me to walk on a path like I'm facing the sun. And the sun is shining and it's getting brighter and brighter and it's coming toward a perfect day, and I'm walking in the midst of a world of people that are all going the other direction.

They don't have sunlight. They're in the shadow. They're in darkness. They're stumbling. They're falling. That's Florida today. That's the world you just lived in today. Every single person you saw is either going this way on the brighter and brighter path, or they're on this way in the darkness and they don't even know what's going on, and they're scared of the tariffs on, whatever. It's on eggs or lumber. I don't know what it's on. It's just all the time. It's different, but it doesn't matter.

They're scared about it or they're scared about the nanoplastics that we've all been ingesting. Right? Have you been paying any attention? And just the last year they found out that tires make nanoplastics.

We're breathing them it's going in the oxygen exchange. In our lungs. It gets into our blood and is filtering out in our brains. All of us, every one of us, unless you're from the moon, you have plastic, and I have plastic in my brain right now. It's in my bloodstream and it's scaring people. Now they're understanding why the cancer rates.

It used to be that people my age had colorectal cancers and everything else. It's moved down. It's unbelievable. It's now becoming huge. In the thirties, the people that have their whole life been eating plastic. I don't think we ate as much plastic because, there wasn't as much to eat and breathe it in back then.

So, the pathway, okay, let's go through this. God offers the ever-brighter pathway. That's the message of the book of Proverbs, verse 18. The path of the, just those who know God's wisdom gets brighter and brighter, doesn't say it, gets more and more comfortable. Doesn't say it gets more and more pleasant. It just gets brighter.

You see, a lot of times Christians think if you follow Proverbs, if you follow something, it'll make your life. Easier. They haven't really read it. You know what Paul said? He said All that are godly in Christ Jesus. Everybody that stays on the path will suffer, what? Persecution. If you're not being persecuted, then not enough people know that you're on the bright path going that way.

And see that's, it doesn't say it makes life more comfortable or easy, it just makes it brighter. So, every book in the Bible is about God and his desires for us. For example, Genesis is about how we all got started. Did you read what The New York Times, I don’t know if you guys read The New York Times. I don't know if you read Bloomberg.

I don't know if what you read, but New York Times just announced this week that the archeologists have finally found out that a group of people that were horse riding fierce warriors spread out from the area around the Caucuses mountains.

Basically, it's the area around what, from Genesis six, seven, and eight and then in nine to be where the Ark settled after the Flood, mount Ara that's, in modern day Turkey and near the Georgia and all those little areas in the south of Russia. From that area, a civilization emerged about 4,000 years ago, and you should see the maps that they have, and they spread out and it said one half of all the people alive on Earth genetically go back to that group of people that spread out from that area.

Oh, I thought are they reading the Bible? We know that. Probably it's the Japhetic line, Japheth. And they were spreading out over the Earth as it says in Genesis 10.

But Genesis is God's desire for us to understand the origin of the Earth, the origin of the universe, the origin of sin, salvation, Israel, and nations.

That's what Genesis is about, if I was even teaching that Proverbs is God's desire for us to understand how to live life His way. Why is that important? All we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone to what? Yeah, I was born hardwired to not go God's way. I want to go my way.

In fact, I don't know where Bonnie and I have been so many places in the last, we were in Houston a couple weeks ago. We were in Los Angeles earlier this week, and now we're here. And so, I wake up in the morning and I'm not sure where I am but somewhere where we were, someone was talking to Bonnie about disciplining children and everything and then Bonnie talked to me about it and I said, oh, I know all about that.

I used to get paddled almost every day when I went to school. To public school. That's how old I am. I was paddled by the principal. You're talking about a board that was probably not quite three feet long, but you know, maybe two and a half and about that wide and about that thick, and you had to lean over their desk and they'd go, boy, if they were still alive, I could get a lot of money in a suit for what that is got to be, something you could sue for. I'm just teasing. I deserved it.

And Bonnie looked at me, she said, what did you do? I said, which time? The one I remember the most that they didn't give me one whack. I think they gave me two or three. I wanted to see what would happen. I took matches to school, and I lit matches, and I put 'em into the trash cans in the boys' bathroom. Do you know what it does? It ends school. Smoke started coming and the fire department came, and I was just with everybody else. Wow. Wonder what happened? And they didn't even have security cameras back then. And someone told on me, and I got paddled.

Proverbs is God's desire for us to understand how to live life His way instead of our way on the ever-brighter path.

Okay, what does God say this looks like when we get to be our age? Okay, I just turned 69 and Bonnie told me that mathematically, I'm not 69, I'm 70. She said, you've already lived. She said when you have your 69th birthday, you're 70. Do any of you agree with that? Yeah, because I started it, one month, two months. And when I was 1-year-old, I'd finished the one year when I had my first birthday. I was already done with that year. I was starting my, so I was two when I turned one. Right. In your second year? I was in my second year.

Okay. And so, let's turn to Psalm 92 because Psalm 92 illustrates Proverbs four. And if you've never underlined this is one of my favorite. Bonnie and I started out in ministry many years ago. In fact, we were just there at Grace Community Church where we started out and my very first assignment, and we're going to Psalm 92. My very first assignment when I got to Grace Community Church, it was, John MacArthur told me, you're going to pastor the Bereans. That was the name of the class. I said that my full-time job. He said, yep, Bereans. I said, a Sunday school class? He said the Bereans, there were 864 of them and they were all over 60. Now we checked, I think they were all over 70, maybe 75. It was the oldest group at Grace Community Church. Their Sunday school class, almost 900 strong and growing every day because as soon as you hit 65, you graduated up to that Berean class.

And when I got there, it was an amazing group of people, and I had to change the way I taught because I was a youth pastor. And I went from talking to junior highers and high schoolers and a few college kids to talking to octogenarians and up. And here's my theme. Look at Psalm 82. Psalm 82, starting in verse 12.

By the way, this is one of the few Psalms that every Jewish person hears every week because the Jewish synagogues put Psalm 92 as a weekly repeated reading in the synagogue. So, every week in the synagogue readings, this is one of the- that's what Ezra designed when he designed the synagogue readings. Ezra from the Bible? He started all that.

Look what it says in verse 12. This is what every Jewish person hears growing up. Every time they go to the synagogue, this is what they're reminded of.

Verse 12, the righteous shall flourish like a palm tree. Now before we had Florida and golf courses and transplanting those things, palm trees only grew in areas that were maybe harsh weather, like here, the hurricane weather or over in the Arabian Peninsula, the desert kind of thing.

And there were clusters of palm trees in these oasis and it shows that you can thrive in a harsh environment. So, look at verse 12. The righteous will flourish like a palm tree. That means it works- Christianity and God's plan in a harsh environment.

Look at the next part. He shall grow. Verse 12 says, like a cedar in Lebanon. What's that? The mountains of Lebanon on the Mediterranean Sea are one of the fiercest weather places in the world. Those huge storms hit the mountains of Lebanon, and it causes this. That's why the Temple was built, Hiram of Tyre sold and started harvesting the lumber to build the Temple, and to David, and to Solomon and Solomon cut them up and Hiram floated them down.

Why were the Cedars of Lebanon so important for the building of the Temple? Because that wood grew in the storms. It was a very strong and stable wood. It's oak, that goes through the bad weather. So, the righteous are going to flourish like a palm tree in harsh deserts. He shall grow like the cedars of Lebanon in the stormy mountains.

How? Verse 13, those who are planted in the house of the Lord. Planted in the house of the Lord. They can't get enough of it. They're planted there. They love it. Remember back then the tabernacle was the visible earthly presence of God, the Shekinah, and all the different elements.

And you would come there to meet with God, and you'd bring your offerings and God said, don't take them anywhere else. They go there. And for us on this side of Christ coming and death, burial, and Resurrection, we now have become the Temple. And our Temple is supposed to always not forsake the gathering together with all the other living, walking, living stones of God in His Temple.

So planted basically in fellowship with God and His people. Look at this. They will flourish in the courts of God. What is the courts? That's beyond just going to the temple. It's getting inside, the court of the women, the court of the men, all those different parts that's getting as close you can to God's presence.

So, Psalm 92, and I might as well finish reading it says this in verse 14, they shall still bear fruit in old age. That's why I shared it with the Bereans. I told those 864 dear senior saints at Grace Community Church; they were at the crescendo of their life financially. Most of 'em, their houses were worth a million dollars. You remember how LA just mushroomed and even little, tiny houses became worth a million dollars in California. It just was unbelievable and a lot of them were kind of amazed by all this.

And I came to them, and I said, this is the greatest time of your life. You are supposed to be flourishing and bearing fruit in old age, you shall be fresh, verse 14, and flourishing. You notice how many times it says flourish that I've read to you. It says flourish in verse 12. It says flourish in verse 13. It says, flourish in verse 14. Do you feel flourishing?

See in America? Yeah, everyone's trying to live forever. Maybe not everyone, but the people that have money are why they don't want to die. They don't want to talk about death. They don't want to wear down, they don't want to deteriorate. There's a guy in Silicon Valley who's getting blood transfusions from his son because he's trying to- and they just this week announced that they found a genetic way to alter aging, that they can actually genetically tinker with humans and change your clock that is causing aging. That would mean I wouldn't lose- I wouldn't have lost my hair. They would turn the clock back and it would've stayed and not fallen out and all that stuff. That's the world they're trying to get away from. The reckoning of living a life and standing and announcing to God what you did with it.

They should be fresh and flourishing. Verse 15, to declare that the Lord is upright. What's the greatest thing people our age are supposed to be doing? Telling the world that sun shining in my face is the ever-brighter day I am going to meet my Creator. It doesn't matter what messenger He sends to call me to His presence. Whether it's, thoracic or pulmonary, or if it's an endocrine breakdown, or if it's just, some form of cancer that starts multiplying. It doesn't matter what it is. To depart is far better.

Do you really believe that to depart, Paul said, is far better. Nevertheless, it's needful for me to remain to do what the Lord called me to do, but to depart is far better. Verse 15, He is my rock. So, declare the Lord is upright. He's sure. He's my rock.

That's in the old world. Rocks were a place of safety; you know that you could go to and hide and everything. And there is no unrighteousness in him. He's good. See, we're supposed to be walking, facing the sun on that brighter and brighter path, telling everybody around us. The Lord is upright. He's my rock. There's no unrighteousness in Him.

Bonnie and I came in headed this way today and we stopped on the way up from the airport. We stopped a citrus, something Chipotle, and we're sitting there eating it was my first meal since yesterday, other than my little Cheerios I had last night. And the music at Chipotle was so loud that I could hardly hear. I could only hear Bonnie. I couldn't hear anything else. And she was smiling and finally she said, do you hear that? And I said, hear what? I said you mean that raucous sound? She said, no.

She said, you don't hear that over there? I said, no. She said, it's a group that just came from church and they're so excited about the Lord that they have turned and they're talking to the table next to them, telling them their testimonies, and the table next to them is actually listening and quite interested. And they're telling the older fella that was the Christian was saying, oh, the Lord has transformed my life and he's going through kind of like verse 15. Now, this is someone they'd never seen before. They're eating at a loud music Chipotle, and they are saying they're declaring the Lord is upright. He is my rock, and there's no unrighteousness in Him. Now, why would they do that?

Because God's message in Proverbs is twofold. God's way of salvation is wisdom man's way, that heads to damnation, is foolishness. So, when you read Proverbs 42 times, you'll hear the word fool, foolish. That's talking about the people that are walking in the dark, stumbling and headed toward destruction, or far more times you'll see wise.

Wisdom, those that are just, and all of those are describing the ones that are headed on the brighter path.

Just like Jesus's Sermon on the Mount-. Do you remember Jesus talked about the broad way and many there be that are headed toward destruction and the narrow difficult path. Do you remember that in the Sermon on the Mount, His longest sermon? Matthew five, six, and seven. That's what Jesus talked about.

Now, let's go to Proverbs chapter one. 'cause I want to show you the same concept in chapter one, verse seven. Prover1:7ven says this, you all know this, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Now remember, that verse is repeated. In chapter nine of Proverbs verse 10, and in that one it says, the fear of the Lord is beginning of wisdom. So, it's both the beginning of knowledge and wisdom. Now, how did Jesus put this? Do you remember His prayer in John 17:3? And this is life eternal, Jesus said, that they may know thee the only true God. Knowing God is salvation. This is life eternal that they may know thee the only true God. Look at verse seven. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge of knowing God. And when you know God, what He reciprocates with, He gives us wisdom.

So, on the slide up there, what you see is salvation is a way of wisdom. It's narrow. Proverbs 1:7 said it's the start, but look at chapter nine and verse 10 that I was just alluding to. It says in 9:10, the fear of the Lord is a beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy one is understanding. All of a sudden, we start understanding what's going on.

You see, we're the only ones in the world. The path is getting brighter and brighter. We understand life. We know why we're here. We know where this is headed. We know why everybody around us is stumbling and has so many problems and so many fears. Ezekiel the prophet talks about Israel, and he says that they're buried under the avalanche of their sins.

You see, we can't see sins. We can see, the guy that was just killed last night or the night before in Oklahoma for killing his family with a baseball bat or something, and they shot him. Did all of you see that on Nightly News? The first one by firing squad in 15 years killed, and they described it in grizzly detail.

They put a great big red target like you shoot arrows at. They put a great big red one right over his heart so that the executioners with, they had sniper size bullets. They showed all this on the news, could stand there at five yards and shoot the big sign. And then they described how rapidly he died. That was awful. And I said, honey, we rarely watch the news. It was just last night, we were in this hotel, and we watched the news, which is never what we do.

It reminded me of Ezekiel. Ezekiel said, you're buried under an avalanche of your sins, and they are sticking to you, and they are going to be what you are punished for forever.

Now, do you understand what Hell is? Why Hell is eternal? Everyone that dies on the dark road headed to destruction. Every sin they've ever committed is still stuck to them. Sins are spiritual. They can't disappear, they're stuck. They're a debit in God's eternal accounting system that can't be erased except by the perfect sacrifice of Christ.

So, all those lost people have every sin they've ever committed, and they're still on them. And they're headed toward destruction on the Broadway. Proverbs 1:26 describes that. So back up to chapter one in verse 26. This is what God says. I'll also laugh at your calamity. I will mock you and your terror comes. Verse 27, when your terror comes like a storm and your destruction comes like a whirlwind and distress and anguish come upon you, then you will call on Me, but I will not answer. You will seek Me diligently, but you will not find Me. Verse 29, because you hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord.

Two ways in Proverbs, the narrow way, the brighter path, all sins removed at start out by saying the, just in verse 18 of chapter four, the other path, the wicked carrying all their sins headed toward destruction. Don't even know why they're stumbling and falling. That's the book of Proverbs.

Now, basically what it does is Proverbs tells us that there are fools, everyone who doesn't know God and wise, everyone who does. When you talk about wisdom, you're not just talking about one of the subjects of Proverbs.

By the way, wisdom and this whole thing is the first of six topics in Proverbs we're covering tonight is wisdom. Wisdom is not just one of the subjects of Proverbs. It's the subject. What God says is this, the most defining reality that can be declared about those who know God is their wise.

Now, look what the very first book of the New Testament. What was the first book written in the New Testament? It was written by Jesus earthly brother. And he was the pastor of the first church in Jerusalem, and his name was James. And he wrote, even before Paul, Paul wrote, to the Thessalonians, which is the first of Paul's epistles. But prior to that in the book of James and let me get there.

James 3:17. Here's what it says, but the wisdom that is from above is first, pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield full of mercy and good fruits without partiality and without hypocrisy.

What James was saying is that when you and I come to Christ, He downloads on us what I like to call a personality transplant. There's a lot of people that don't have very nice personalities. They're mean.

We, Bonnie and I, are in public so much traveling. We bump into a lot of these mean people. They're mean everywhere. They're mean to the person that's checking them in at the counter of the airline. They're mean to the poor flight attendants that are trying to balance all the. Stuff you have to do. They're mean at the airport pushing everybody to get their bag. There are a lot of people that need this personality transplant. What is that? Jesus transplants, his personality. You know what it's called?

You all know it, but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy. Do you understand? That's when I start behaving like Christ. How does that happen? James put it this way. It's the wisdom that is from above. And that's what Proverbs is all about.

What happens to those who start allowing God to download his wisdom into their life?

It's His, God's Way, is wise, man's way is foolish. God's way is wisdom. Chapter one verse seven. Man's way is foolishness. Chapter one, verse 29. The saved are on the narrow way. Look at chapter one of Proverbs in verse 23.

I love this verse. God says, verse 23, turn at my rebuke. Surely, I will pour out my spirit on you. The whole book of Proverbs is God talking about what he wants to do if will but respond to him if will, but. Let him transform us. Now a lot of people are saved and they're just resisting the transformation.

And you know what we call that? We say they're not growing spiritually. We say that they're, sometimes we say they're back slidden, and other times we say all these things, but you know what it is. Verse 23, they're not willing to turn at his rebuke. What is that turn? The New Testament defines it.

The saved are on the narrow way. Chapter one verse 23 says they turn at God's rebuke. What's the Greek word for that? Meto. You know what that means with the mind? We have a change of mind that leads to a change of behavior. That's what repentance is. I was going this way in the dark and I thought it was great. I didn't mind going in the dark, stumbling and thinking it's awful.

And all of a sudden when I hear the voice of Jesus and when I respond in faith to him, He turns me. And I have a change of mind. I say, boy, I don't like that anymore. I don't like the darkness. I don't like stumbling like that. I like the sun, the ever-brighter path and met, oh, a change of mind that leads to a change of behavior.

And you know what the Scriptures say? We are supposed to be repenting. Every time we realize we're acting like we're walking in the dark and we say, oh, I don't want to go. I want to go this way. Now there is the repentance that leads to salvation, and then there's the repentance that corrects all these.

Going in the ditches we have in our life we worship God as 1:23 says, look at chapter 14 in verse 16 of Proverbs. You can tell I'm going to read to a lot of the 915 verses but chapter 14 in verse 16 says this, A wise man fears a wise man. Someone who is just someone who is what we would call saved, someone who has wisdom from above all that stuff, a wise man fears and departs from evil.

How did Paul put it? Titus 2:11-13. The grace of God that brings salvation, teaches us to deny ungodliness and worldly lust and to live soberly and righteously, ungodly in this present world. That's what God's way, the way of wisdom. We flee sin, we worship God. Let's go to 1 Corinthians 1:18, because this is what Paul says.

There's such an amazing correspondence between all the books of the Bible. You would think that there's one Author kind of orchestrating that. Oh, there was, wasn't there? It's the Spirit of God that unifies the Scripture. So, it's got a singular, integrated message.

Look what it says in 1 Corinthians 1:18. For the message of the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. Oh, Paul does the same thing that God does in the book of Proverbs because it's the same spirit inspiring both Solomon and Paul. And this is what Paul says, the same thing Proverbs says. The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.

Look at the rest of the verse. But to us who are being saved, did you catch that? There are several elements of salvation. There is the present. Salvation. There is the future salvation and there is the past event of what Christ did and when we believed on Him. But we are presently right now being saved.

And what that means is we are right here who are being saved. It is the power of God for it is written. And you can read verse 19 'cause I don't have time to go through it because our time is running out. Basically, there are only two people, types of people in the world, those who are perishing and they're in the dark and they're going this way.

They don't even know where it's going, and they're stumbling, and those who are being saved and the pathway is getting brighter and brighter. Last verse, Proverbs 3:5-6, best known verse in the whole book of Proverbs. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge Him and He'll direct your path.

What does that mean? He's going to give us the grace to keep going that way, to keep facing the sun, to keep getting on the brighter path, to be as Psalm 92 says. Flourishing. Now, let me ask you, do the people that bump into you at Publix or wherever you go, do they see what direction you're going?

Do they see that you believe your life is getting brighter and brighter? Not easier and easier, not more comfortable, and more comfortable, not healthier and healthier, brighter. And brighter onto the perfect day. What's that day? 2 Corinthians 3:18. But we all with open faces beholding us in a glass. The glory of the Lord are changed into the same image. It's the day when I see Him, and I become like Him because I see Him as He is. That's the perfect day when I'm glorified. That's the day we're looking forward to.

So, the book of Proverbs is about. This brighter and brighter path has 140 different topics. The first one we're looking at is wisdom. Boy, there's some other ones in there and we're going to start those Lord willing tomorrow morning and go through five more Monday through Friday. And maybe this, maybe the Apple computer will like Word of life, and you'll see all these pictures. But otherwise, I'll talk in pictures.

Okay, everybody stand and I'm going to close in prayer and then let Chip come up as you stand. I want you to know the whole book of Proverbs is postured as an invitation. God says, I want you to seek me like you dig for gold and silver. I want you to search for Me like you'd search for the greatest treasure this week.

My challenge to you from the Book of Proverbs is maybe your wife should make you buy you a blank book so you can write the words down, but whatever it takes. Search and you'll find more and more of the blessings of that brighter path.

Let's bow. Father in Heaven, I thank you that your spirit breathed out through your servant Solomon and a host of others that helped him. And we have these Proverbs. Thank You that they describe the way of wisdom, and You want us walking in the wisdom that is from above. And it's first pure, then it's peaceable and it's gentle, and it's easily entre, and it's full of mercy and good fruits. It's without partiality and without hypocrisy, and I pray that's how we would live to a very dark and stumbling world and share the Good News. Just like that sweet couple we're doing at Chipotle today, wanting to share the Gospel. Help us to want to live this truth and share this truth. For Jesus' sake, we pray, and all God's people said.