Good morning, everyone. You endure me for this last Sunday of the year, and then it's back to our regular scheduled broadcasting with Pastor Will, so stick with me, and if you will, take your copy of the Word of God and go to Proverbs chapter two.

As Will has indicated, I am charged with bringing you an encouragement to be in your Bibles for this year, for this upcoming year. We're looking at the year 2026, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. 2,000 years ago, over 2,000 years ago, the Lord came. And it could be that 2026 is the year he comes back. So if I were at the dinner table with my kids, I'd ask them, how is he gonna find you? Are you ready? That'd be a good question for all of us to think about.

Well, Pastor Will wants me to encourage you to read your Bible this year, and especially to read the whole Bible in a year, if you can. I'm gonna go beyond that and say, don't just read it, but study it. So Proverbs 2 is gonna be a great encouragement to us in this regard because it gives us both how to study the Bible and then the rewards that we will receive from that study. It communicates to us what we can expect if we give ourselves to the diligent study of God's word.

So I hope that when you leave this service and go home this afternoon, when everything is said and done here, that you have a Maybe you could say a renewed pep in your spiritual step to be in the word more and to give yourself even more wholeheartedly to it.

Let me read this text. I'll read the whole chapter here and then we'll pray and then jump into it.

Proverbs chapter two.

My son, if you will receive my words and treasure my commandments within you,
Make your ear attentive to wisdom, and cline your heart to understanding.
For if you cry for discernment, lift your voice for understanding.
If you seek her as silver. and search for her as for hidden treasures.
Then you will discern the fear of the Lord and discover the knowledge of God.
For the Lord gives wisdom. From his mouth come knowledge and understanding.
He stores up sound wisdom for the upright.
He is a shield to those who walk in integrity, guarding the paths of justice,
and he preserves the way of his godly ones.
Then you will discern righteousness and justice and equity and every good course,
for wisdom will enter your heart, knowledge will be pleasant to your soul,
discretion will guard you, understanding will watch over you,
to deliver you from the way of evil, from the man who speaks perverse things,
from those who leave the paths of a brightness to walk in the ways of darkness.
who delight in doing evil and rejoice in the perversity of evil,
whose paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways.
To deliver you from the strange woman, from the adulteress who flatters with her words,
that leaves the companion of her youth and forgets the covenant of her God,
for her house sinks down to death and her tracks lead to the dead.
none who go to her return again, nor do they reach the paths of life.
So you will walk in the way of good men and keep to the paths of the righteous,
for the upright will live in the land, the blameless will remain in it,
but the wicked will be cut off from the land and the treacherous will be uprooted from it.

Please pray with me.

Heavenly Father, we are grateful to be here as your people, considering your word, worshiping and rejoicing in the victory of your son, our Lord, over sin and the grave, and eagerly looking for his return, which we pray with the whole church would be soon. Lord, please equip us by your spirit to worship you rightly now in understanding and delighting in and perceiving you rightly through your word, which we desire to know more. We ask for your help in this in Christ's name. Amen.

So we're gonna break this down into two sections. They're a little unbalanced, but we'll probably, sometimes I say we'll spend most of our time on the first section, that's not true. So I'll just say we're gonna leave it unbalanced and we'll see how this goes. 

If you look at verses one to four, you'll see this is really how to study the Bible. And it comes to us as an if-then structure. And so verses one to four provide the if, if you do this. And then verses five through 22 provide the then, what you can expect. So we can call that the rewards of studying God's word. 

So look at verses one to four here and Notice that Solomon who wrote this under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, he's not urging us with commands, he's encouraging us to give ourselves to studying the Word of God because it will certainly provide wisdom. It will give us wisdom. What is wisdom? Wisdom is, if you wanna know the Hebrew, I don't know if that's interesting to you, but it's hochma, and you got a clear throat when you say the C sound in the middle there, hochma. And it's not just intellectual knowledge. It's intellectual knowledge about the right way to live. and the right conduct that follows it. It's really holistic, but it's about knowing the right way to live and then living it. 

A wise person is not just somebody who can point you in the right direction, but somebody who's going the right direction as well themselves. So their whole conduct is encouraging you to live the same way. The book of Proverbs, and the Ecclesiastes as well, and there's other books that are part of the wisdom books of the Bible. And Proverbs is designed to bring us into knowing the right way to live, so that we'll then live it. And it starts with giving yourself to a study of the word of God. The encouragement here is study the word of God so that you can be wise and live rightly. 

So how to study? Well, the word here tells us, gives us the characteristics or maybe the flavor that would mark the kind of studying we'd be engaged in. And it's really this, it's a labored, disciplined, persevering, close study. It's not just a perusal or a broad awareness or a skimming the surface. And this, it's not a leisurely activity. This is perhaps the danger built into a read the Bible in a year plan, right? Is that you can quickly turn it into a, and there's actual check boxes on our plan that you can pick up from the back. So you can turn it into a check the box kind of task list and say, well, I read those chapters, so I'm good, I'm moving through. And so often our eyes can move across the page, but the Word isn't moving through our minds. We know this, right? I'm speaking from experience, and I'm sure you know this as well. 

Solomon here, and the Lord through Solomon, wants us to do more than just move our eyes across the page. He wants us to know the Word of God. So he's encouraging us to devote ourselves to a labored, disciplined, persevering, close study. Now, why do I say that? Well, look at these words here in verse one. My son, if you will receive my words. So accept them. Accept them as what they are, the word of God, the source of wisdom. Also in verse one, treasure, or if you have the King James would be hide, hide in your heart, the commandments that he is giving, treasure them. Treasure it's it's something valuable value this above all other kinds of knowledge right every one of us needs to know a lot of things in order to conduct ourselves in the life that the Lord has given to us.

Some of us need to know very technical things in our lines of work. Some of us need to know other kinds of technical things. If you're a stay-at-home mom in here, especially if you're, like many of the women in here, and now you're milling your own flour, you need to know all of that world, which is entirely, just seems entirely foreign to me. There's a special science to all of that as well. We all have to know so many things in order to live the lives that we have been given by the Lord.

There's a particular knowledge that needs to be treasured above everything else. And that's knowing the word of God. Treasure my commandments within you. Consider this to be of extreme value. Pay attention. That's what he says in verse two, make your ear attentive to wisdom. Discipline yourself to pay close attention and know what it is that you're reading. Make your ear attentive to wisdom and then incline your heart to understanding.

Also in verse two, discipline your mind, the heart and the mind are conceptually the same thing. The heart in the Old Testament, it's always spoken of as the heart and it's where you think, it's where you desire, it's where you make decisions, it's where you make judgments and discernments about right and wrong and what's good and what's less good, what's good and what's evil. And in the New Testament that it's often used, and the Greek language tends itself to this direction, it's the mind. The mind is where we think.

In contemporary Western society, we put the heart and the mind against each other. And we talk about the heart is where all of your emotions are, and the mind is where your rational thinking is. And if you're thinking in terms of the kind of the enlightenment mentality, then the mind needs to trump the heart. And more and more today, it's the heart needs to trump everything else. But in the Bible, the heart thinks and the mind thinks, and they're the same thing.

So if you're going to incline your heart in the second part of verse two to understanding, then you're going to discipline your mind to be free of distraction and absorbed in the task of reading and studying God's word. You're going to take the mind, which if you're like me, wants to think about anything easy and fun and interesting, but has to be grappled and basically yanked into thinking about the Bible. And then it takes 20, 30 minutes. of just forcing my mind through this until finally I find a rhythm, and then I can stick with it. But it takes a good chunk of time and dedication to pay attention to what you need to pay attention to.

We need to develop this kind of discipline and incline our hearts to this. And again, this is all framed in a if you will do this, if you will do this, and we're gonna see what we can expect. It takes concerted effort to not only bring yourself physically to sit down and read, but to keep ourselves in the seat and to keep our minds focused in order to learn what God is truly saying.

You know, just practically, to do this well, you're going to need to separate yourself from distractions. And if you have a smartphone, then you're going to have to separate the distraction from yourself as well. Get it at least on the other side of the room. And you're going to need to even bring yourself away from other people. because you'll never be able to grasp the word of God and truly get into it and study it and truly get the profit out of it if you're constantly in and out of conversations or starting and stopping your reading. or thinking about the responsibilities of the day that are coming up that you need to get to, that reading the Word of God isn't letting you get to.

So often we can think of it that way, that I gotta get through this task so I can get to these other tasks that really feel more pressing. So we end up shortchanging our study in order to do things that are really just, they feel urgent, but they're not that urgent. You know, the Lord Jesus told Martha, she was troubled with many things, but Mary had chosen the good portion by sitting at his feet.

Conducting our whole selves in a spirit of focused dependence on God for profit from studying his word is gonna take a removal of distractions and those things that our minds want to grab onto instead of the difficult task of reading and studying the Word of God.

Charles Bridges, who has an excellent commentary on the Book of Proverbs, also on Ecclesiastes, you can get them from Banner of Truth Publishers. He says this, we may read the scriptures in company, but to search them, we must be alone with God. I think all of us can agree with that from just our own experience.

Beyond this intentional effort in paying attention and prizing and accepting the word of God as the word of God and removing distractions, notice that in verse three, We also need to pray fervently, or you could say even pray passionately for the Lord to give you understanding from his word. Notice what it says. If you cry for discernment, lift your voice for understanding. If you cry out, if you lift your voice.

Matthew Henry, just really helpful statement on this, put it this way. We must cry out after knowledge as one that is ready to perish for hunger begs hard for bread. Faint desires will not prevail. We must be importunate as those who know the worth of knowledge and our own want of it. We must cry as newborn babes after the sincere milk of the word, which is obviously a quote from 1 Peter 2, 2, where he says to, just says, Henry quoted it, to cry as newborn babies after the sincere milk of the word.

And if you just think about that picture, You know, Albert is not a newborn. He's two days from nine months. But he still lets us know, and he lets the entire house know, when he's hungry. And he is not content to stop crying, just as every baby, until the food is in his mouth. Then he stops, because his mouth is occupied with something else. That is such a vivid and helpful picture of the kind of crying out to God that we should have for him to help us understand his word and to teach us from his word.

This all comes from the commandments of the Lord, from the words of the Lord. And if you look at verse six, it says, the Lord gives wisdom and from his mouth, what comes from your mouth? Your word. So from his mouth come knowledge and understanding. This is what his word teaches. This should be the, what we're crying after, what we're desiring for. Prayer is the means to accessing the truth of God. This is again, maybe rebuking us in our task list habit of how we read the Word of God so often. And the reading of the Word of God to truly understand and to truly be changed by it is done with prayer. is done with crying out for the Lord to teach you. Why can we say this? Well, just one verse that is helpful is John 14, 26. I'll read it. You don't need to turn there. But the Lord, Jesus, he's in the upper room. And you remember John chapter 13, he washes their feet and then he begins to teach them about basically the final things he wants them to know before his ministry comes to an end and he goes to the cross before he's taken from them. And he moves to telling them about this coming comforter who's going to be like him and is going to basically fill the void that the Lord Jesus' absence is going to leave. 

And in verse 25 of John 14, he says, these things I've spoken to you while abiding with you, but the helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you. The Holy Spirit brings to your remembrance and teaches you from the word of Christ. And the word of Christ is obviously most directly from what he's saying is everything that he'd actually told them in his ministry, but it would include his whole word, which is scripture, the word of God. It's the Lord, who opens your mind to understand the word of God. And he does that when you come to him and ask for it. Prayer is the means to accessing the truth of God. 

Notice also in Proverbs chapter two, verse four, that the kind of reading and studying of the word of God is a seeking her as silver and searching for her as for hidden treasures. This is the picture of somebody who's digging in a gold mine or a mine where there's some kind of precious metal. I guess for us that'd be something related to our computer technologies now and less so much gold. But the point is to be diligent in laboring to dig out the truth. We could put it this way, labor to know The passage is every detail. Labor to know all of its ins and outs. Don't be satisfied with just a little bit of knowledge. Strive to get every single last bit you can out of it. 

Charles Bridges again put it this way. He points out that a miner who's digging for ore is not satisfied with taking much, but determined to leave nothing. As I was thinking about this, I thought of maybe a humorous illustration. But you think of handing a five-year-old a bag that contains some French fries. And that child's going to make sure that every last fry is gone. They'll be searching the bottom of the bag to make sure there's nothing remaining. It's kind of a humorous example. What if that marked our study of the Word of God? That I'm striving to leave nothing unturned. 

George Whitefield, the famous preacher, serves as an excellent example of this kind of study. When he was a young man, he lived above a bookstore, and he was able to, he had an English Bible, and everybody back then who was educated was educated in the classical languages, so he also had a Greek New Testament. That would have just been normal for somebody who was educated. For us, that's not. And he was also able to acquire a copy of Matthew Henry's commentaries. And he was able to pay off the owner of the bookstore for that over the course of a year.

And from his diaries, we can put together a picture of what his daily habits would have looked like. And so Dallimore, who wrote his biography, says this. There he is at 5 in the morning in the room above the Harris Bookstore. He's on his knees and with his English Bible, his Greek New Testament, and Henry's commentary spread out before him. He reads a portion of the English, gains a fuller insight into it as he studies words and tenses in the Greek, and then considers Matthew Henry's explanation of it all. Finally, there comes the unique practice that he developed, that of praying over every line and word of both the English and the Greek, till the passage and its essential message has veritably become part of his own soul.

Now, you may not have access just in your own education to be able to mimic Whitfield's exact practices. But what if we labored to study the word of God and to be so involved in the understanding of it and praying fervently for the Lord to open it up to us that somebody could say of you that Your study of the Word of God was such that you didn't leave until it had veritably become a part of your own soul. Think about that.

So all through this, this is just how to read the Bible, how to study it, notice that Understanding the simple facts of the biblical text, it's just the beginning. I wanna say it's not enough, but we'll say it's just the beginning. That's just the start, you've only begun. The Lord is encouraging us to cry out for understanding. We come to the word of God. to truly know God through his word, to know its every detail and to understand its ins and outs. We're not desiring to be able to win at a Bible trivia game. We're desiring to know the word deeply and intimately and know God through his word and so to be changed by it. This comes through a careful, devoted and prayerful study of the word.

So what can you expect? If this is what you do in the year 2026, this is what you begin to practice is a regular close, devoted study of the Word of God, which includes reading it, moving through it, but also going deep into the portions that you're reading and just spending extra time trying to get at the meaning of it, maybe even picking up a good commentary series like Matthew Henry's in order to facilitate that goal. Here's what you will get. And this is not a, you could perhaps walk away having been benefited. That's not how the Word of God puts this. It says, then you will discern the fear of the Lord and discover the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom. From his mouth come knowledge and understanding. He stores up sound wisdom for the upright. He's a shield to those who walk in integrity, guarding the paths of justice. He preserves the way of his godly ones. Then you will discern righteousness and justice and equity and every good course.

Verses five to nine gives us the first reward or the first benefit. And that's this. You'll gain discernment. You'll gain wisdom. There's actually just a slew of words here that all are different ways of kind of talking around the same concepts. And it's you'll discern, you'll discover, you'll have wisdom, knowledge, discretion, understanding. You will be made wise. you'll know the right way to live. You'll be able to make a judgment upon just the things in the world and be able to say accurately, that is wrong, that is right. You'll be able to diagnose even just the inclinations of your own heart because the word of God exposes your own heart and teaches you. A careful study of God's word in the manner that he's talked about in verses one to four will result in knowing the Lord, knowing the fear of the Lord, knowing, having the knowledge of God. I mean, that's the whole pursuit of the Christian life. is coming to know God. He's given us his word to put himself on display for us, to speak to us so that we can come and hear from him and know him.

In verse nine, you see these three terms, righteousness and justice and equity. I found the MacArthur Study Bible notes very helpful in explaining these. Righteousness is the application of God's standards in dealing with others. Justice is the ability to conform to the will and standard of God. and equity is the living of life in a fair and pleasing way. 

Some commentators, Matthew Henry pointed this out, have understood this as righteousness referring to the first table of the law, Commandments one to four, justice referring to the first covenant, to the second table of the law, commandments five through 10, and equity being talking about your sincerity through all and in all. I didn't hunt down those theologians and their comments in order to be able to say yay or nay on that, but it's about being able to live a life that is pleasing in God's sight, that is lawful, that is good, that is praiseworthy, that renders to everyone their due, that treats others as you would desire to be treated. 

James tells us the same thing where he says in his book, chapter one, verse five, if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God. that giveth to all men liberally, and appraideth him not, and it shall be given him. If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God. The Lord gives wisdom, and how does he give it? He gives it through his word. 

So let's just summarize this. Verses five to nine is telling us that if you give yourself to a close, careful, diligent study of the word of God, you will know how to live. You'll know what is truly good, what's truly right, what's true. You'll be able to look at the world around you and make moral judgments about it. You'll see things like the perverse entertainments of the world, and you'll be able to recognize that they're the fruit of hell. You'll see the supposed hope of big government or political figures for what they are, false Christs. You'll understand that everything tends to death because of the fall of humanity into sin from Genesis chapter three, which yields and sin yields the wages of death. And so you'll live life like Ecclesiastes says, which is in light of the fact that one day I'll stand before God. So you'll live wisely and eager to meet your savior. you'll know the right way to live because you'll be given wisdom. And so you'll also then be protected. 

And these are the next two sections here, verses 10 through 19 says that you'll be protected from evil people. And it's really evil men and evil women. So it's just evil people in general. And you'll see this that In verse 10, wisdom will enter your heart, knowledge will be pleasant to your soul, and then discretion will guard you, and understanding will watch over you to deliver you from the way of evil, from the man who speaks perverse things. 

In chapter one of Proverbs, Solomon had said, to his son here, that if sinners entice you, this is verse 10, do not consent. If they say, come with us, let us lie in wait for blood. Let us ambush the innocent without cause. Let us swallow them alive like Sheol, even whole as those go down to the pit, et cetera, et cetera. He says, don't go with them because they lie in wait for their own blood. But the wisdom of the word of God The wisdom that you receive from a close study of the word of God will enable you to be protected from the wicked people of the world who desire to lure you and tempt you and entrap you in their own sinful conduct.

I remember when I was in high school, I had a friend who was at David Douglas at the time, and she said that she was a target from the other students because she was not leading a sexually perverse lifestyle like the rest of them. And all the other students wanted to do was corrupt her, like them. That's our world. And that is what the Word of God will protect you from.

It will give you the wisdom and the understanding to know how to avoid and be safe from the perversities of the world, which if you think in the terms of how the Apostle Paul puts it in Romans 12, which seek to conform you, to stamp you into the image of the world. You resist this conformity by being filled and transformed by the Word of God, which Romans 12 to also speaks of.

In verses 16 to 19, it's protection from the evil woman. And this is the strange woman, the forbidden woman, the adulteress. And Proverbs 5 and Proverbs 7 go into more detail about this woman and about the blessing of being devoted to your spouse and not giving yourself to the forbidden woman. adulterer or adulteress. It's in the feminine here because Solomon's writing to his son. But it's obviously is anybody who is not your spouse who would seek to entice you to engage in a relationship with them.

And a diligent, close, prayerful study of God's word will furnish you with the knowledge you need to protect you from this kind of corruption as well, a corruption which desires to destroy you and to lead you to death. Verse 18, her house sinks down to death, her tracks lead to death, lead to the dead. And in Proverbs 7, the young man who goes into her house does not know that the dead dwell there. And that he'll go down to Sheol.

We get kind of a summary statement, which ends it on a good note in verses 20 to 22. And this is that you'll be guided into a good and moral life. You'll walk in the way of good men and keep to the paths of the righteous. The upright will live in the land, the blameless will remain in it, but the wicked will be cut off from the land and the treacherous will be uprooted from it.

Now we can take this in general terms. We understand this to be the general reality of the way God built the world. This does not contradict the fact that all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. We get that from Paul's letters to Timothy. Or that the Lord Jesus says, in the world, you'll have tribulation, but be of good cheer. I've overcome the world from John 16.

This expectation of God's love of being kept by the Lord and being protected and being established and living in the land. We don't have to do away with it by somehow saying, well, this is under the old covenant law, and so that's just how it worked back then, but now we're not under the law, so we should expect bad things. There's been some, sometimes you can get that kind of articulation from some people.

We should understand this as the general principle of how God has built the world. He's built the world to be established in righteousness. He's even, Romans 13 would tell us, he's even provided earthly authorities to protect good order and to punish wickedness. So to walk in the way of good men, to walk in the way that the Word of God teaches and the Spirit of God through the Word changes you to walk, to be Christ-like, to be godly, to be upright in your conduct, is a way of life. It's a way that is a way of life in the sense it's a pattern of your life, yes, but it actually is life. It's true life. It is, there's no shame in it. There's no guilt in it. There's no expectation of God's wrath in it. There's an awareness of living a life that is pleasing to the Lord, that is keeping his commandments, that is walking in the newness of life provided by the Lord Jesus Christ. 

And so what can you expect As a general principle, you can expect to live and to be established. The righteous life, you just think about this, the righteous person is not the person that's running around in a gang of high school students, robbing stores, and then ending up in jail, ending up with stiff penalties, or should be ending up with stiff penalties. the righteous person doesn't lead a life that flirts with death. He doesn't lead a life that runs afoul of authority. He doesn't lead the kind of life where, in general, where he has the SWAT team doing a no-knock warrant into his house. Again, in general, everyone comes with those exceptions of where those things have happened. 

In general, the righteous life is, it's commendable, lawful, praiseworthy, and noble, but it's the unrighteous life that's despicable, criminal, worthy only of condemnation, and runs to death. The word of God will make you wise unto salvation, will make you wise to know how to live, and how to live what you could call the good life, quite literally. a life that is good and honorable and pleasing to the Lord. 

So the aim of this sermon, as I just land the plane here, is this. I'm trying to compel you to give yourself to a disciplined, diligent, determined study of God's word as the pattern of your year, but as the pattern of your life. Proverbs 2 teaches us how to study, verses one to four, and what you will receive if you give yourself to that study in the following verses. 

So, what further application could there be? Then, to be urged to go, and I guess in the words of Augustine, take up and read. 

Please pray with me. Lord, we ask for your help and we praise you that you've given us this These scriptures, this is your word, which is able to make us wise and to lead us in the paths of righteousness, to show us the right way and to protect us from evil, enable each one of us to give ourselves to a diligent study of your word, that we would truly profit by it and be shaped by your spirit into Christlikeness. Go before us this week, Lord, and this year, And we ask with your church that your son would come quickly. And it's in his name we pray. Amen.