2/16/25 Proverbs 11:3-10 “Who Is In Your Dugout?”

13 Feb 2/16/25 Proverbs 11:3-10 “Who Is In Your Dugout?”

2/16/25     Proverbs 11:3-10     “Who Is In Your Dugout?”

Last week we talked a little about the fear of the Lord being the beginning of wisdom.  I hope that you are beginning to ask yourself our core question for this series “Is what I am doing right now, the wise thing to do?”  I think that one of the biggest detriments to wisdom in our world today is our electronics, our computers, and our cell phones.  Now all these things can be a huge benefit to us and many of us use these things wisely.  However, every time you sit down to use one, you should ask yourself if what you are going to use it for the wise thing to do.  Is it wise to text while driving or at work or at school?  Is it wise?  Is it wise to waste time on the computer with games or porn or some other vice?  Is it wise?  These machines can add tremendous value to our lives if we use them wisely.  Today, we are going to take a look at just who can have wisdom and how wisdom will affect your righteousness.

Sometimes we use wisdom and we don’t know what the results will be and we just place it in the hands of God as in this story of a street corner preacher who preached to all who walked by.  A street person approached him and the preacher asked if he could help him.  The bum said he could.  Then the preacher asked if he would like him to tell him about Jesus.  The bum said ‘no.’  The preacher asked if he could pray for him and the answer was again, ‘no.’  The preacher then asked that if he didn’t want him to do these things, ‘what did he want him to do?’  The bum then asked for his Bible.  So the preacher asked why he wanted the Bible if he had no interest in knowing more about Jesus.  The street person said he noticed that the pages of the Bible were very thin and he could use them to roll cigarettes.  The preacher suddenly became wise and said, “I will give you the Bible if you agree to read the page before you smoke it.”  The bum agreed and left with his new Bible.  A few months later a man in a three piece suit came up to the preacher on the street corner and asked, “Do you know me?”  The preacher replied that he had never seen him before.  The well-dressed man said, “Yes you have.  I’m the man you gave a Bible to about 4 months ago.”  Well the preacher remembered and asked, “What happened?  Tell me what happened.”  “Well,” the former bum said, “I smoked Matthew and then I smoked Mark and then I smoked Luke.  And then John smoked me.”  I don’t think that it was John who smoked him.  It was Jesus.  Jesus is in control and we should praise the Lord for that.

As we continue to look at wisdom, let’s see what the wisest man in the world, Solomon, had to say about it.  First of all, he tells us that there are 3 kinds of people who don’t have wisdom and there might be more.  I want to alert the young people here that you might not agree with some of the things I have to say right here but bear with me.  Solomon tells us that the young lack experience so they lack wisdom.  If you remember some of the children’s comments that I made in last week’s sermon, you may think that I’m might be wrong in this.

But I’m not.  The young do have a limited amount of wisdom as they gain it by some of the experiences they have.  But chances are we are not going to go to a teen, and I don’t mean to pick on teens, if we are looking for wisdom.  Most teens don’t have the experience yet to have a lot of wisdom.  In defense of the teens I know in some churches, they may be way smarter than us older folks and that is good.  It is a good basis to build wisdom.  As these young people grow, they will get wiser and wiser.

The second group of people who don’t have wisdom are the fools.   Solomon talks a lot about fools and he isn’t very nice.  The fool knows what is right and what is wrong but he just doesn’t care.  The fool knows that adultery is wrong but he or she does it anyway.  The fool knows that it is wrong to go out and get stinkin drunk every weekend but he does it anyway.  They know right from wrong.  They just don’t care.  This is the person and many of you have heard this person say that he will see all his friends in hell.  You’ve heard this.  They know they are on the path to Hades but they don’t care.  And by the way, they will not see their friends there because there will be no light.  They will see nothing!

Anyway, it is very important that you stay clear of these people.  They appear to have a good time and have it all together but they don’t.  These people are lost in this world.  They are crying out for help but won’t take it when it comes.  I like to call these people ‘good time Charlie’s.’  Don’t be drawn into their way of thinking because it is going the wrong way.  At least with young people we can nurture them to wisdom.  The fool won’t be nurtured for anything.  He is dangerous.  He is a fool.

The last person who doesn’t have any wisdom is one we also know very well.  He is the mocker who not only knows right from wrong but he is also critical of those who do right.  This is one that young people should be very wary of because he will make fun of you for going to church.  He will make fun of you for always doing the right thing.  They make fun of me for this broadcast!  Another name for this ugly person could be peer pressure.  It is out there everywhere.  We even have organizations in our schools who meet on Sundays and then thumb their noses at us in church.  These are the mockers.

As I mentioned, I’m not even immune to this beast.  Yes, I see young people and I know they will grow in wisdom.  I see fools and can only hope that Jesus will somehow break into their lives and save them from their foolish selves.  But the mocker is something else.  They tell me that the Bible isn’t right and we can’t rely on it.  They say that all the miracles didn’t happen.  It is only a myth.  Why am I wasting my time on this?  The mocker believes that we should believe in this part of the Bible but not this other part.  This is what is called cheap grace.  We have whole denominations that believe in cheap grace.  We will get into this more at another time but I want to tell you that grace is anything but cheap.  It’s expensive.  Ask Jesus.  He will tell you.  I gave up a lot of worldly things to be a pastor.  It was expensive in worldly eyes.  But I would do it again in a heartbeat because it was expensive grace and not cheap grace.  Beware of the mocker.  He is everywhere and he is dangerous.   I think there might be one or two other kinds of people who do not have wisdom but these will suffice for now.

You may be wondering why we need to know this.  We need to know about these types of people and many other things that come up in life because of the time we have.  When you are 20 years old, you have a tendency to think that you will be around forever.  You will never be 74 because that is too far away.  I just want to remind everyone here today that we are not on this earth for a very long time.

What I’m about to say might seem a little harsh but it is what we are to do.  If I were you, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time trying to get a fool or a mocker to come to Christ, unless they are in your family.  In that case I would say, never give up.  But generally speaking, the fool or mocker will not come to Christ no matter what you do.  Therefore, I would give them the message of salvation and then move on.  All we can do is plant seeds and pray that God will come into their lives with His life changing grace, expensive grace.  The ‘young person’ I would continue to nurture but not the others.

Once again, the reason goes back to the limited time we have on earth.  Satan would like nothing better than we spend all our time trying to convince a fool.  There are over 8 billion people on this earth.  We don’t have a lot of time to spend on someone who won’t listen.  There are many people that are receptive to Christ.  They are everywhere.  They may even be your neighbor who you’ve never invited to our church.  So first of all we need the wisdom to not waste our time on some of these people.

What we should spend time on is trying to be righteous so the fool and the mocker won’t get to us.  I should say that we should spend our time wisely keeping our righteousness because righteousness is also a gift from God.  In Romans 1:17 we find that the one who is righteous will live by faith.  So to live by faith is to live righteously.  This means that we do not allow anything to get between us and Jesus.  This is the wisest way to live that there can be.  I want you folks to be wise, so let nothing get between you and Jesus.

I want to show you a little example of this.  One of my pet peeves is when young people today gather and you can almost rely that they will at some point all have their heads down looking at one of their electronic devices.  Now let’s skip back to my generation because we were also guilty of this.  You may not believe this but when I was young, we didn’t have television.  We got one sometime in my childhood.  My dad would always tell us that he didn’t want us glued to the TV.  Electronic devices may change but we had the tendency to bow our heads to the TV like people today do to their electronic devices.

And I want everyone to know that TV and all these; well most of these devices, are good things.  There are times when I get so tired that I look forward to sitting and relaxing with a little mindless TV.  I’m sure you can say the same things about these other devices.  However, and you know I wasn’t going to let you off scot free.  However, when you begin to allow these things to get between you and Jesus, the trouble begins.  Many people allow these things to rule their lives.  Remember the young people I talked about?  They don’t know any better.  It would be wise to teach them.  The fool doesn’t care that he will someday be heading to the wrong place and it is too late.  The mocker, well, he is just hopeless and that is a sad place to be.

The wise person will monitor their activities because anything that comes between us and Jesus hinders our relationship with Him which in turn hinders our righteousness.  I think that we should be able to fill in the blank on this because there is not one person here today who doesn’t allow this to happen in some degree, me included.  For some of us it may be our work, it may be our hobbies, it may be our children.  Satan is constantly trying to put things between you and Jesus.  Whenever you put something between you and God, you are not looking out for your own best interests.  I think that could be one of my new phrases because it covers so much.  Don’t you want what is best for you?  Of course you do.  Then why put things between you and God?

For those of you who have listened to one of my wedding sermons, you may have heard this before.  When you put God in the number one position in your life, ahead of your family, ahead of your job, ahead of your video game, then God will in turn put whatever you want in the #1 spot.  To the non-believer, this doesn’t make much sense but it should be perfectly clear to most of you.  God does the impossible.  He does miracles every day, even today.  He will do great things for you if you are wise enough to make Jesus #1 in your life.  That is a promise.

This in turn will help you in your righteousness.  You will find that suddenly you are using your spiritual gift or gifts in ways that are helping everyone.  You will find that your faith will get jump started.  And the best part will be that you will have your own best interests at heart.  You will be able to answer this question with a ‘yes.’  Is what I’m doing right now, the wise thing to do?

Wisdom is a gift from God.  You can have it if you want it.  All you have to do is ask for it.  This gift comes to you from the God who loves you and has your best interests in mind even if you don’t.  He never wants bad things to happen to you.  You are not perfect, not perfect at all.  Many things you do are flawed and you need Jesus every step of the way in life.  It is kind of like a baseball team analogy as described by Jeff Strite.  We have a local baseball team and they even won the state championship a few years ago.  Now as good as they were, what do you think would happen if they played the Minnesota Twins?  I don’t think that there would be any doubt that our local team would lose, even to the lowly Twins.  The reason would be that they are only high schoolers!  They can’t throw the ball as hard or hit as hard as even the poorest major league player.  They just don’t have the skills yet, kind of like the young people we have been talking about.  So the question becomes why have high school baseball if they aren’t good enough to play the big leaguers?  Of course we don’t think like that because these are only kids.  Their coaches don’t care if they can’t be as good as the Twins’ players.  They only want them to be as good as they can be.  They want their best.  God is the same way with our righteousness.  You are in training for the day when you can actually join Him in perfect righteousness.  Until then, you have to learn and practice.  You are on Team Jesus and Jesus is the best coach we will ever have.

Now just suppose that one of our kids, who is still in high school, gets a chance to play for the Twins.  It is the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded and we are behind by 3 and our young high school man is up to bat against one of the best pitchers ever to play baseball.  The coach suddenly calls a time out and puts in a pinch hitter, the best home run hitter ever.  The pitcher pitches and this hitter hits the ball over the fence.  Then the coach tells the boy to go out and run the bases.  The coach tells him that all he has to do is touch all the bases.

Of course, Jesus is the batter hitting the home run.  Jesus has done all the work for us when He died on that cross so many years ago and then was raised back from the dead.  We are the high school kid that needs practice, needs maturity.  We are the base runner.  All Praise the Lord that we have a coach, someone to help us, a God who loves us and cares for us in our corner, in our dugout.  Today, He is asking us to do the things that are in our own best interest.  He is asking us to be wise in His name so we can be wise in this world.  Jesus Christ loves you and He wants to help you have wisdom.  Take this wonderful gift and live the life that was meant for you.  Thank you, Jesus, for first loving us.  Let’s pray.