I Can’t Believe I am Going to Preach Wisdom

So this coming Sunday I will begin a sermon series on the book of Proverbs. It is all about wisdom, and I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject. But maybe this will help me.

Proverbs is what is known as wisdom literature in the Bible. This is a type of literature that aims at helping us to live “wisely.” I learned long ago that wisdom is a skill. It’s not something that just comes to you, it’s something you gain over years of practice.

I would suggest that we deeply need to practice wisdom. We all need to get better at it. The gospel helps us to do that. The book of Proverbs actually says “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.”

Now I know that that may strike some us as funny. Especially if you are other than Christian, and somehow that implies that wisdom is only available to the those who fear the Lord. And that translates to YHWH, the personal name of the God of the Jewish and Christian Tradition. So to make it worse, that sort of excludes other traditions.

It’s also complicated by that word “fear.” Christians often struggle with this because we talk about Jesus being a “Friend of sinners.” I have created a paraphrase of the first nine chapters of Proverbs. In it I propose that the way to understand this is that wisdom starts with recognizing ourselves as creatures living in the creator’s world. This is not fear in the classical sense of trembling, shaking, and nervous, but what I would call a healthy understanding of our position.

I can also say I don’t think it is entirely unfair to say that we can’t really begin to practice wisdom until we rightly understand our place in the world.

I would argue that if we live in unwise times, it is partly because we don’t want to recognize our place in the world and that we don’t actually want wisdom.

I will save some of these thoughts for the sermon series, which I do hope you will listen to and learn from. I also hope I will learn from it.

For now, I want to offer you a resource. My first nine chapters paraphrase. Naturally I would recommend the real thing, but I also know that the heightened language might make it a little harder to read.

These first nine chapters serve an important purpose in the book. They are written to make us want to practice wisdom. I took the English version of these chapters and wrote what I think is somewhat faithful paraphrase that aims to do what the heart of the original author was. To make us want to practice wisdom.

Will you read it? Will you see if it makes you want to practice wisdom?

If it does, I would encourage you to turn to the real thing, it’s better than what I wrote. I also want to encourage you to join us Sunday at 9AM at BCC or subscribe to our podcast so you can begin to practice wisdom with me.