The Beginning of Wisdom

Mothers are talking in to come into church on Mother’s Day, but Father’s Day are making excuses to be out of church. Getting the family out of church. So let’s change that, right, guys? All the men in here that are fathers, let’s change that. Make it a priority to serve the Lord.

Put him first. Amen. So glad that you’re here with us today. If you are new, we’re thankful that you’re with us here on this Sunday at Salt church. Salt always makes a difference.

And a little bit of salt goes a long way. That’s what we believe about every individual in the kingdom of God. That you are salt, that you have purpose, God has a plan for your life. And we’re thrilled to be a part of that process. If you have, there’s a connection card online@saltchurch.

org card or you have the blue card here, you can put your information there. If you’re first time, second time visitor, guests, or if you just need a prayer request, you’re a regular, just need a prayer request. Just, just put that down and let us know, Let us know what you need. We’re here to serve you. We’re here to minister to you.

Amen. Amen. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Summer is starting off.

We’re kicking off, just a few little announcements here. First of all, we have, we have, coming up, July 6th, July 6th, which is July 4th weekend. We’re doing a Sunday fun day. Okay. A Sunday fun day.

All right. So what that will entail, I just felt like, you know, I grew up in churches where they had potlucks, you know, where you had all the food and you had the spread. So what we’re going to do this Fourth of July weekend coming up in a few weeks is we’ll still do a service, we’ll still have some music and worship, but I want to focus on fellowship a little bit more. So this is an opportunity for you to bring your friends, bring your favorite fourth of July dish. And we’re going to do a table and we’ll provide hot dogs and hamburgers, some of the main stuff.

And if you want to bring a side, just bring anything. Let’s come together and fellowship and, you know, if you have games, 4th of July games, bring those in, we’ll set them out. Hopefully it won’t rain that day. Let’s pray. We’ve had some bad, bad luck with rain on these, these type of days where we’re trying to fellowship and enjoy each other.

But just come in, we’ll eat together and get to know each other a little more. Some of us don’t have a chance to connect with each other during the week. So this is a good time just to be at church and fellowship on Fourth of July. Amen. Amen.

That’ll be July 6th. Also, as you saw up here, kids camps and teen camp. We have the elementary camp that’s happening and the teen camp that’s happening happening. And you can grab a card that’d be happening later on late July, last week in July. So for kids camp and then youth camp, the teen camp is before that.

My kids will be attending. So if your kids wants to attend, let us know. If you need more information, we’ll connect you with more information. But you can scan that QR code and it’ll give you all the information about cost and plans and stuff like that. And if you are somebody who says, I can’t afford to send my kid to camp or I don’t have, that’s a little more money.

The church would be glad to help you to get your kid to camp. Amen. And if you want to volunteer to serve kids, you can as well. So if you don’t know, we are part of Redemption Ministries as a network of churches here in eastern Virginia. And there will be a lot of kids coming from different churches to be there.

So it will be a crowd of kids, probably bigger than our church right now. You know, as far as kids, you know, kids will be there and it’ll be an awesome experience. And I will tell you, I started attending camp five years old. I was five years old when my mom and dad sent me to church camp. Five years old.

Five years old. Can you believe that the kids were going to five years old. I remember being in a room with a bunch of kids, five year old kids. Some of them were crying because they missed mommy and Daddy. But we had some wonderful counselors that were there to love on the kids.

And I tell you, one of those kids that was crying for mommy and Daddy, I remember because I grew up with him and I still know him today and he’s a great man of God. And never miss camp after that, never miss camp. They just experience God’s presence and they just. Trayvon’s a great man of God, evangelist, is a very anointed speaker. He’s going to have other speakers come in as well.

It’s going to be an amazing, amazing time. So if you want to volunteer, send your kids to camp. We want to get them there this summer. Amen. I just believe in it so much.

Getting Getting kids connected to the power and presence of God with their peers. Praise God. All right. We are starting a new series today. It’s a summer series.

We do our Summer of Salt every year. And I kind of wanted to go another direction with this year. Usually we do random messages and just let speakers come in, and that will continue to happen. We’ll have our bishop come in one week and speak, our superintendent, our overseer, and we’ll have some other people step into the pulpit as well to speak during this series. But we’re going to focus primarily on the wisdom proverbs and proverbs.

So we’re going to be proverbs this summer, and we’re going to just walk through these things. If you don’t know about the book of Proverbs, it’s a group of different wisdom quotes, much like you pull out your fortune cookie. Although that’s. And you see that proverb, that Chinese proverb. These are God proverbs.

These are the real proverbs that we’re going to look at. Now, we won’t be able to deal with all the proverbs, obviously, because there is a lot of proverbs, and they’re all in random and in different. They’re not even categorized. And I’ll talk about that in a minute. But so I’ve already planned out a few of them, and I’m still kind of working through because there’s so many good ones to talk about for this summer.

So we’ll be dealing with that for the next few months, and it’s going to be beautiful and wonderful, and I’m excited about that. But Solomon wrote the proverbs. He also wrote Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon. And God appeared to Solomon in a dream. He gave Solomon an opportunity to decide what God wanted to gift him.

So God says, what can I do for you, Solomon? What’s one thing that I can give to you, Solomon? Solomon could have asked for riches. He could have asked for the kingdoms of the world. He could ask for power and prosperity and whatever that looked like.

You know, he could have asked for anything. Yet he asked for wisdom. He asked for wisdom. Solomon didn’t ask for riches. He didn’t ask for wisdom.

He didn’t ask for prosperity. He asked for wisdom. And there’s a lot of knowledge out there. Let’s just like y’ all could pull up a phone right now as I’m preaching, and if I say something, I want to find out if this is true. And you could pull it up and you can Come to me after service and say, pastor, actually I AI’d this thing.

And this is what AI says and this is what the website says. And I’ve already pulled together all the information. So as you know, there’s a lot of knowledge out there. We’re pretty smart people. We get inundated with data all the time about and we can go on.

If you’re like me, you go on rabbit trails into, like, little things just to find out more behind something. Maybe you’re watching something on TV and you’re like, I’ve never heard of that before. It’s a history channel. And then you start digging deeper. Who is that person and who are they related to?

So you can do anything you can to obtain knowledge. We have everything you need. And AI is just growing. And there’s so much information, whether it’s true or not. Some of it’s not true.

Let’s just be honest. And there’s a lot of dumb people with knowledge. You can have all the information. Will has testified of that. And Matt in the back, can I get an amen?

I got a lot of knowledge, but more knowledge doesn’t make you wise. More knowledge doesn’t make you wise. Wisdom is when you properly apply knowledge. It’s when you properly put knowledge into practice. Look at what the Proverb says in 4, 7 proverbs.

4, 7. Wisdom is supreme. Therefore, get wisdom, though it costs all you have. Get understanding. You need wisdom.

Solomon saying, do whatever you can to obtain wisdom. If you have to give up everything that you have to get it, you need wisdom. One person said, wisdom is skilled living. It’s skilled living. It’s taking the knowledge and practically putting it into place.

It’s not what’s in your brain and is how you apply it. Here’s some good ways of thinking about the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge constructs a titanic. Wisdom avoids the iceberg. Knowledge builds a house.

Wisdom builds a home. Knowledge understands God. Wisdom walks with God. Wisdom walks. We can understand God.

We can know everything we can about God. Knowledge is out there, right? Knowledge of the existence of God and how God operates. But if we don’t walk with God, that’s where wisdom comes in. Wisdom comes from above.

I love how Billy Graham says it. He says knowledge is horizontal, but wisdom is vertical. It comes down from above. And there’s a trend in the church today to lean toward the wisdom of man rather than God, that we’ve incorrectly and we’ve misrepresented God because of the knowledge of man. We speak.

In fact, a Lot of people speak on behalf of God when God never asked him to speak on the behalf of them. They make decisions about who God is. They teach who God is based on their experience, based on their situation, based on their context, based on the culture, that God isn’t the same God that wrote the Bible, that he somehow changed. And that’s okay. But the God that we know has never changed.

The God we know, when he put something in place, when he put wisdom into this very existence, it’s there. It’s able to be grabbed ahold of and applied, right? He didn’t change. He doesn’t change at all. And people have manipulated and even perhaps denied God and His Word and His wisdom and his very statements that never change based on it being maybe an outdated book.

Or things evolve over time, or God evolved over time. Maybe God didn’t even know what he was saying at the time. Or maybe there’s just no God at all. But what we learn in Proverbs 26:12, it says, do you see a man wise in his own eyes? These are men that are wise in their own eyes.

What happens? There is more hope for a fool than for him. There’s more hope for a fool for somebody who just chooses just to do wrong and do the wrong things just to do the wrong things. There’s more hope for them than the person who trusts in their own wisdom outside of God. And it eventually comes back to bite them.

In fact, people who are walking and making decisions opposite of God, you don’t have to do a whole lot. Eventually it comes back to bite them and they come back to God. Solomon even said that at the end of his book, he strayed away from God and he came back to God and he says, you know what? There’s nothing more that we can want than God’s wisdom. And on his deathbed, he repented and gave his life back to God and said, I’ve tried everything, but only God’s wisdom works.

The only thing that really works is God. And they have to learn the hard way. So we’re going to look at this. We’re going to spend the next few weeks digging into pieces of wisdom that God provides for us. So it’s 31 chapters.

The first nine chapters, kind of like a case study, kind of showing you what different type of people and what different type of wisdoms and lack of wisdom is. And then the last 10 chapters are just random proverbs all over the place. Solomon must have just received something from God. It was inputted and he just decided to pull open his book. And he’s like, okay, I got to write that down real quick, you know?

And that’s what we have in those 10 chapters. So every line is a different topic. They’re not categorized. So we’re just going to dig into some of these and look at them. Now let’s look at chapter one through nine.

If you’re following along with me, you have some notes there. And I’m not going to walk through one through nine necessarily, but I’m going to give you four different types of people that we find in Proverbs, okay? Four different types of people. As he starts off this book setting people up for God’s wisdom, he talks about these people that are the simple. The simple.

That sounds like a bad word, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it? Somebody says, he’s just simple. She’s just simple. There’s.

They’re simple. These are people who are naive. These are people who are clueless. They just don’t know. They don’t have it all figured out yet.

They don’t have all the information there. It’s not that they’re not smart and maybe even educated in some way, but they just don’t have it all there yet. They haven’t figured out life. These are usually younger people, people from their teenage years all the way up to 30, 30 are trying to figure out, they say that 20 year old people in their 20s, they’re trying everything, they’re trying everything to figure out who they are. And once you learn your expertise in your 30s, you actually nail it down and you start working within that pocket.

But when you’re in your 20s, you’re trying to figure it out. So you don’t know it all yet. In fact, Proverbs says it like this. I saw among the simple and I noticed among the young men a youth who had no sense. Okay, now how many of you that have teenagers and young adult, y’ all can testify to that, they just, you know, no sense.

No sense. It’s not bad. They’re just not there yet. And they always have people in the background saying, no, don’t do that. Don’t go there, don’t make that decision.

Don’t walk into that place. Don’t, don’t put yourself, don’t set yourself up for those temptations, okay? Just don’t do it. Ah, I know better. You don’t understand.

You’ve never been a teenager before. You don’t understand what it’s like to be a teenager. You don’t understand what it’s like to be in your 20s. I mean, you’ve got all these things, dad, you just don’t know, mom, you don’t get it. You’ve never been to high school before.

You’ve never been in college with all this pressure on you before. You’ve never, you’ve never done that before. They just don’t know. And sure enough, it comes back to bite them and come back to him when they make those decisions and they just don’t listen to anybody. Then they come back.

I love how even Taylor Swift got it right on a lyric. She said this. When you’re 15, somebody tells you they love you. And you’re going to believe them. You’re going to believe them.

You’re going to believe that they love you, but they’re lying. They don’t love you. They don’t know what love is yet. They just don’t. They’re too young.

They’re too young to understand. My soulmate. You’re my soulmate. He’s 15, 16 year old. Oh, I found my soulmate.

No, you don’t know. You don’t know. And nine times out of 10, you’re not going to marry your high school sweetheart, okay? It’s just not going to happen. And after you live a long time, you start knowing, you start seeing.

And you need people in your life to guide you and help you. You need mentors to help you make the right decisions. And I think it’s very, very important, pastors and parents and mentors in your life. You need to put people in your life that help you grow, that you’re willing to be open and teachable, and you have to be intentional about those things you do. You have to reach out to people, say, I need a mentor.

I need somebody to speak into my life. And when you’re going through those difficult things and those difficult situations, you have somebody to help navigate you through those. And you receive advice from those people. But ultimately, I’m going to give you these points and I’m going to give you a cure. So what is the cure to the simple?

If you’re a simple person here today, what is the cure? Time. Time. It takes time. As you grow, as you mature, you grow in your knowledge.

Therefore, you gain wisdom. So be open to receive wisdom and help guide you. Secondly, we have the fool. The fool is similar to the simple, yet the fool knows what to do and just decides not to do it or knows what not to do and decides to do it anyway. They know and they just are expecting the consequences to come you know, if it’s wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Heard that statement before, right? I don’t want to be right because I. Man, this is good right now. It’s happening right now, and I’m going to do whatever I can to get my feel, you know, get it going on. And you know what?

I know it’s going to cost me some things in the future, but I want it now. All of us have a little bit of that in us, don’t we? I got to spend that. I want to sleep with that. I want to do whatever.

I want to take that. I want to drink that, whatever it looks like. But why do we do that? Why do we do that? Because it’s fun.

It’s fun. God’s trying to take my fun away from me. I want to have fun. I want to enjoy. I want to enjoy life.

And I just. Armageddon reference. If y’ all are Armageddon people, I just want to have a little fun before I die. Steve Buscemi, some of you are like, what is he talking about? It’s a famous statement in Armageddon.

You know, back in. Pulling out my 90s background here. Just want to have a little fun before I die. Is that my. That a good Steve Buscemi impression there?

Okay, good, good. Trying to take away my fun. You know, what’s going on here? I’m going to preach the rest of the message like Steve Buscemi. Okay, okay, okay, okay.

I want. Might get in trouble then. Proverbs 10:23 says this. A fool finds pleasure in wicked schemes. A fool finds pleasure.

Hebrews says, sin is just good for a season. That ultimately, I mean, it could be good. Sin’s good. Sin’s good. Let’s just be honest.

Pleasure, sin, it’s good. But ultimately it comes back to get you. God’s wisdom keeps you from harming yourself. It keeps you from lacking in prosperity and moving forward. God has something special for you, and he’s doing these things.

He’s giving you his word. He’s given you his wisdom. He’s given you his law. He’s given you all these things so that you can be prosperous in this life. Proverbs 13:20 says this, and this is a very important note.

Walk with the wise and become wise. For a companion of fools suffers harm. So my question is, fools, who are you hanging around with? If you’re a fool, if you’re someone that stands in this category, how did you get there? You probably look back and say, because I surrounded myself with the wrong people.

And they made me or caused me or I made some decisions based on what they said would. It’s not going to hurt us. It’s not going to do. This is fun, you know that we need to surround ourselves and fathers, fathers. The greatest piece of advice you can give to your kids is surround yourself with wisdom.

Surround yourself with the right people that put into your life, that encourage you. Surround yourself with friends that lift you up, not put you down or not cause you to do things that you know will be disastrous in your life that help and encourage you. Surround yourself with the right people. The fool. What’s the cure for the fool?

Unfortunately, tragedy. Tragedy. I bet there’s many people in here today that would say, you know what? I walked away from God and I made some wrong decisions in my life. But.

And I got to a desperate, desperate, desperate place. And the reason I’m here today, you would say that many of us would say that is because I didn’t know where else to go. I didn’t know what else to do. I was in a very deep, dark place. Left, right.

Maybe you lost a loved one or something tragic happened in your life, or maybe you lost your job or lost a relationship or something happened and it was so tragic that it was the most devastating thing you’d ever experienced in your life. Who else are you going to run to? Are they. Are they, they, they? Yeah, maybe for a time.

But really, God is the only answer to our deepest, darkest places. Because if you look at this world, you see how dark it is. And that’s the moment we see people surrender to God. I heard it said, every tragedy has a lesson equal in significance to its heartbreak. Every tragedy has a lesson equal to that heartbreak that people have faced.

If you let God use your tragedy, he will take it and shape it so that he can produce something powerful in you, in your plan, the purpose he has for your life. Every tragedy, every dark place that people have gone through, God has used it for his glory. And I can tell you, even my ministry what led me to being up here today is because I’ve gone through dark times and I’ve gone through tragedy in my life that led me to. To this very moment where I am today. God has a plan for your life.

Trust him even in the darkest place. But the only place to go to is God and His plan. The third person is the mocker. The mocker. Some translations call it scoffer.

The scoffer. And I think of, I’m going to go back to my 90s again. And pull up Academy Award winning Happy Gilmore. Okay, just playing. Just playing one of my old time favorites when I was a teenager.

Watching that over and over and over and over again in college, watching it over again with my friends and laughing our butts off, you know, with the slapstick comedy. And I remember the man in the background, right, okay, so let me back up. Some of you are like, what the heck is Happy Gilmore? Okay, so Happy Gilmore, a guy couldn’t make it in NHL, he wanted to be a hockey player, but he could kill a ball, you know, 400 yards in golf. And some somebody on the PGA Tour, Chubbs comes up to him and says, you know, says, I’m going to train you and I’m going to make you a professional golfer.

And you want to help his grandma so, you know, to make the money to get his grandma’s house back, which was being foreclosed on or something like that. And that’s kind of the story. That’s the background. And as he’s playing with Bob Barker, you know, not let’s Make a Deal as he suggested on the movie. But Price is Right, I bet you get that a lot.

And let’s Make a Deal, it’s the Price Is Right, Happy. There’s this guy that’s hired by Shooter McGavin in the background. He’s scoffing and he’s like, every time he tries to hit his, you jack leg. I’m going to use leg instead of the other word, right? You jack leg.

You’re never going to hit that ball. You’re never going to get that ball off the beach. You’re gonna have to get a blanket, some suntan lotion, because you’re never getting that ball off the beach. The club went further than the ball. And that’s the guy I think about that’s in the background.

Oh, I hate that, you know, guy. And I hate that Bob Barker, you know, if you know the movie, you know what I’m talking about. You got those trollers on social media all the time that are trying to pull you into conversations or trying to lead you into debates. And they love it. They want to engage you, they want to make you mad and they want you to insult them.

They want to pull the worst out of you. And this is what the mocker is. They’re people who love to just use their intelligence to get the best of you. And here’s what Proverbs 9 says. It says, whoever corrects a mocker invites insult.

Do you want to invite insult into your life? Don’t even deal with them, right? When they come on social media and try to say something that you know is wrong, they’re ready for it. Whoever rebukes the wicked incurs abuse. Do you want that abuse in your life?

Do you want that? But you’re inviting it in. When you try to rebuke the mocker and the scoffer, you can’t because it says, do not rebuke the mocker because they will hate you. They do. They hate you.

They don’t care about you. Nobody can help them anyway. You’re going to try to help them and correct them or lead them to God. When they don’t believe that there’s a God or they’re not even following God, they don’t know anything about God and you want to help them. Only God can help them.

Only God. So the cure is God. The cure is God. God can only help the scoffer. You can’t help the scoffer.

God’s got to do a work in their heart and in their life. And then the fourth person is, and this is who we want to be. This is who Solomon wants to be. And that’s the wise. The wise.

We all want to be the wise. It’s not the person that’s smarter. It’s not the person that’s more educated. It’s not the person who knows the Bible better than anybody else. They have everything memorized.

I’ve heard people talk about, you know, this so and so. They said this and mean so much to me, you know, from the Bible. And I’m like, that’s not even correct. That’s not what the Bible says. Or that’s.

They interpreted the that completely wrong. And everybody knows that as a Christian. Well, they know the Bible though. They got it all memorized. They know so many scriptures.

And we have people that are just looking for the opportunity to mess up a Christian right. They memorize the right verses, they do the right things, and they’re full of knowledge about the Bible. But when they apply it, they apply it all wrong and they just want to mess you up. But the wise don’t do that. The wise apply it correctly.

The application is important. It’s not knowledge, it’s wisdom. Proverbs 9. 9 says, Instruct the wise and they will be wiser still. Instruct the wise.

Somebody who is wise. When they receive instruction, they receive instruction. They want instruction so that they become wiser. And it says, teach the righteous and they will add to their learning, meaning they’re teachable. The wise are teachable.

The wise aren’t defensive and they value instruction over their independent thinking. They value a dependence on other wisdom they want to gain gain wisdom. So here’s the summary. Correct the simple, they won’t get you. Correct the fool and they will ignore you.

Correct the mocker and they will hate you. Correct the wise and they will thank you. Correct the wise and they will thank you. So in this series, I want to help you so that you can thank God that you can thank God that He’s helping you and he’s giving you instruction. You can say, thank you, God.

So where do we start? Where do we. Where do we start? We start today with the beginning of wisdom. Where’s the beginning of wisdom?

Where does wisdom come from? Proverbs 9, 10 says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. This is where the blessings flow.

This is where things really work. Gratitude, thankfulness. The fear of God is His love and his mercy and his justice and his grace. And all the attributes of God are packed into this. And it doesn’t mean that God’s a monster when we fear Him.

When we think of fear, we think of running away from something we’re scared of. But we’re scared of God in a different type of way. We’re scared of being out from under the umbrella of God. We’re scared of being. Looks like we got some music playing, I guess, right?

Hallelujah. We’re afraid of being out from under the care of God. The care of God. And that his ways are perfect and his ways are fine tuned in a way that will help us live life to the full. As Jesus said, you want to live life and you want to live it to the full.

You live it under God and His rule. So we should be afraid of stepping outside of the canopy of God. That should be fearful when we’re not under God’s supervision and his provision and his covering. There’s a lot to be afraid of because the world’s not going to give us what we need. Only God gives us what we need.

So let me give you three things real quick here. Now this may be simple, these things may be simple, but they’re so powerful. First of all, God is awesome. God is awesome, right? Y’ all say that’s awesome all the time, right?

That’s like a very casual statement to use. What is that? Oh, that’s awesome. The kids say that’s awesome. I say that’s awesome.

I grew up saying that’s awesome. You know, when I was a teenager, you know, what does that mean? It means daunting. It means great admiration. It means to stand in awe that I don’t have any words to speak of who God is because I can’t put it into words because he’s so bigger than me.

He’s so bigger than everything. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that God, he who abundantly does more than we can ask or think according to the power that is within us. I cannot believe he would do something like that for me or in me. I can’t believe he would produce something out of my life, out of my little life.

That’s how great God is. The psalmist says it like this. He says. He says, the whole world fear the Lord and let everyone stand in awe. When we fear the Lord, we just stand in awe.

We’re like, oh, I just don’t know. Why. Why do we do this? Isaiah 40, 28 says, do you not know? Have you not heard?

The Lord is what? Everlasting, Everlasting. He was and is and is to come. He always has been. That’s just enough to say, wow.

Wow. Nobody created him. Nobody made him. He stands alone. He has always been, always is and always will be.

He’s not temporary. He doesn’t have a timeline. He works in all things, through all things, in ways that we can’t know. He works out of space time. He works out of all this.

That’s enough to say, wow, he is awesome. And not only is he everlasting, he’s the creator of the world to the ends of the earth. He created the galaxies. He created everything. Wow.

When I look up through the heavens, I got to say, wow. He’s so awesome. And he does not grow tired or weary. He does not sleep. He doesn’t have to sleep.

Wow. God doesn’t sleep. God just keeps going. His mind’s always going. His work is always going.

And his understanding, no one can fathom. We cannot fathom fathom who he is. That’s because he’s awesome. He’s awesome. And then the second thing is, God is holy.

He stands alone. He’s separate from us. He’s not beside us. He’s above us. He’s way above us.

He created us, but he stands alone. He never needed us. He’s just a good God. And he created things to love because he is love that God stands along. And sometimes we make God like us.

Like, bro, he’s our bro. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with God being your friend? We see in the Bible he’s a friend, right? I am a friend of God. We used to sing that all the time, you know, about 15, 20 years ago, that was like the biggest song by Israel Hooten.

I am a friend of God. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I’m telling you, he’s not your bro. He’s your God. He’s not just the man upstairs.

He is God, okay? And a lot of times we trade. We trade or we sacrifice reverence for relevance because we want to be so relevant, right? We want to be relevant. And don’t get me wrong, okay?

There’s nothing wrong with attractional church, okay? We need to reach people. So we want to be careful when we start bashing churches with lights and great sound and all that. We do the best we can with what we got as a smaller church, Praise God. But there’s.

I mean, sometimes people go come here and they’re like, I ain’t got church because of lights and come in, have a coffee shop, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, guys, what are y’ all doing? What are you beating up on the church for, man? We got to reach people. But what I do see is that we can go too far and trade out our reverence or fear for God as our bro or a buddy or yada yada.

And we come to church like that, right? And there’s something to be said for Catholics and Episcopalians and all the high church and all the liturgical churches out there. We’re not a liturgical church. We’re an evangelical church. But we do do the sacraments.

We Communion and baptism and all the things that are required by the saints to do. You know, that the Bible teaches us. But there’s something to be said about when you walk into those churches and they have very organized liturgy. They have honor to God. They give honor to God when they walk in that building.

They may be hellions outside of the building, but when they walk in there that day, God is honored. In fact, I had a friend that he says, that’s the reason I can’t leave the Catholic Church, because there’s just such an honor I don’t see in the evangelical churches. And he would consider himself an evangelical because we’ve lost reverence. We lost reverence for God. We honor him, we respect him, we reverence him.

And we got to get away from this idea when what is God want to do for me? I mean, we write songs about it now. You know, there’s great songs out there. I’m not bashing worship music, but sometimes we get carried away with God. I’m sad God, I’m crying God this and that.

God listens to our needs. I’m not saying that, but what happened to those power songs, the songs of the ages, the holy, magnificent power of God lifting him up. And we need as a church to lift him up. Psalm 99. 5 says, Exalt the Lord our God.

Bow low before his feet, for he is holy. Hebrews 12, 28, 29 says, Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, guys, a kingdom that cannot be taken down, let us be thankful. Let us give thanks. Thanks. Hallelujah.

God, we thank you for your kingdom. And so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe. For our God is. What a consuming fire. If you stand before the Lord, you will surely die, is what he told Moses.

That’s how big our God is. That’s how wild and awesome our God is. Can we raise our respect for God when we come into this place? Can we lift his name up? Can we focus on him?

Can we throw away all the things that are out there just for an hour and just say, God, I’m gonna give you this time. That’s why I asked Alex to play the song and that we’re getting ready to sing again together after I make the final point. But Holy, there’s no one like you. There is none beside you. There’s no one like you.

God, there’s none beside you. When we sing that song, we gotta mean it. Don’t just sing it, mean it. What does it mean to be holy? There’s no one like him.

And number three, God is right. God is always right. Everything in here is right. Okay, if you’re listening to me today, if you’re looking, listen to me out there. You’ve been struggling whether the Bible is real.

I’m not going to give you an apologetics lesson today of why the Bible is accurate as opposed to not. But I will say this. I don’t care how you feel. God is right. I don’t care what you’ve heard, God is right.

I don’t care how smart somebody is. God is always smarter and always right. God will always be right. And there’s this trend against the Bible and Christianity that suggests that God didn’t get it right, that God is wrong. If God says something that goes against what I think or what I feel, it must not be right.

Did God really say that? Did God really say that? What does that. That sounds Familiar. The book of Genesis, the serpent said.

Did God really say that? Did God really say that? I think he’s holding back something. God is right from the very beginning. The very thing that opened the gateway for sin to pour into the world is that very question.

Did God really say that? Can we believe? Can we be a church that knows that God is always right? Psalm 19:7 through 11:11. The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.

The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. If you’re simple here today, you’re going to be wise. The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes. The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever.

The ordinances of the Lord are sure and altogether righteous. Be right. They are right. They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold. Solomon and David knew those things very well, didn’t they?

They are sweeter than honey, than the honey of a comb. By them is your servant warned. Warning. And keeping them there is great reward. Keeping them is great reward.

Proverbs 19:23 says it like this in the NLT. Fear of the Lord leads to life. Fear of the Lord leads life, bringing security, protection from all. That’s our God. So here’s your piece of wisdom today to take with you, following your nose if you’re not, write this down.

When I understand what it means to fear God, I can live fearlessly. I can live fearlessly. I don’t have to be afraid when I know what it’s like to fear God. Father. We thank you, God, for your word, Lord.

And we take it very seriously. Lord, you’re awesome. You’re holy. You’re right. Now pour wisdom in our hearts.

Pour wisdom in our lives, Jesus. And as we leave here today, let us not just set this Bible to the side, let us not set these notes to the side, but let’s live and apply it. I want to practice wisdom. I know where people want to practice wisdom. We want to be wise like you.

Who, Lord. But we know that there’s no greater God than you, Lord. That there’s always some, a being much greater, much wiser, much holier set apart than us, Lord. And that’s you, God. So today we magnify you and we sing Holy.

There is no one like you, there is none beside you. Could we just stand up and let’s. So let’s. We’re going to sing that together here as we end the worship service. And those of you who got here a little late and wasn’t able to sing with us.

Guess what? This is your opportunity to sing and be reverent to God and lift your heart to God today. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.