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We have a lot of things we think are signs of the “blessed life”? Proverbs has a clear answer that challenges our assumptions.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor contrasts valuing God’s wisdom with pursuing material wealth (silver, gold, jewels). How does this distinction play out in practical decision-making when you face a choice between financial security and following God’s direction?
In what specific ways might treating God like a “life insurance policy”—approaching Him only for what we can get out of Him—affect our trust and relationship with Him during times of hardship or unanswered prayer?
Using the Ferrari dealership example, the pastor explains that some things cannot be bought with money alone—they require a genuine relationship. How does this metaphor challenge the way we approach God? Are there ways we try to “buy” His favor or blessing rather than simply seeking Him?
The sermon emphasizes finding wisdom rather than earning it. What does it mean practically to “find” God’s wisdom, and how does this differ from the self-help or achievement-oriented approaches our culture typically promotes?
The pastor notes that following God’s way often leads to peace and blessing through both temporal and eternal outcomes, as seen in the tree of life metaphor. How do we maintain trust in God’s wisdom when doing the right thing doesn’t produce the material or circumstantial results we hoped for?
Near the end, the pastor suggests that if we prioritize God’s wisdom above all else, we become better stewards of other blessings when they do come. Can you think of examples where a lack of spiritual foundation undermines someone’s ability to use wealth, power, or health well?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be with you tonight.
Last week I saw a commercial that caught my attention, but for the wrong reasons. It was a commercial where a woman is walking around her house reflecting on the things she has and she says, “I know my kids won’t want my spoon collection or my Christmas decorations.” Her voice drifts off as she dusts off her spoon collection and looks at her Christmas decorations, and then she makes the pitch. She’s going to buy life insurance because what her kids want is a good life insurance policy that will pay for her expenses and leave them with some money. And my reaction was, this is really sad.
Now she might have been right about her kids, but I think most of us, if we really think for more than a moment on that, might say, well, yeah, if there’s a huge debt, that can be a real challenge for a family to absorb and there are practical reasons for life insurance. There’s nothing wrong with life insurance. But the idea that the things that meant something to her, and clearly the commercial is trying to say these things did—these are things that have memories for her that she would like to pass down—if we see that and the emphasis is get rid of that, just have a good life insurance policy, it leaves us feeling a little hollow.
If you were planning out a will and you were thinking about the people you might put on it, in fact, you would probably be more inclined to even provide money to the people who’d also say, “Yeah, I really want dear Aunt Sally’s spoon collection because I love her and I know how much it meant to her.” If someone thinks so much of us, they’d like to have something that we treasure. Then if we do have some other kind of wealth to pass along, we’d probably be more inclined to want to give that as well. The two go together. They’re not separate. And that commercial struck me for all the wrong reasons because of that. Because it’s suggesting that the real thing is just make sure that people get what they really want. It doesn’t matter if they care about you or what you cared about or anything else. I know that’s not what the insurance company was really trying to go after, but that’s the impression it left me with.
A lot of times when we go to the book of Proverbs, we’re kind of being like that spokeslady’s kids. We come to God and say, “I don’t want your spoon collection, God. I don’t want to really know you. What I want is to know how do I get the stuff, how to get the loot, so that when I’m faced with a challenge and it doesn’t feel like you’re very near, I don’t just have a nice verse in my head. I don’t just feel like God loves me. I have money to hand out to whatever I need to hand it out for.”
Proverbs challenges us to something different, different as God promises that he is going to provide for us. And we see that throughout. We’ve been talking the last few weeks. It’s not a blessing vending machine. God doesn’t always provide the exact financial means or health means that we would like. But God provides. He does provide all the blessings we have in this world. But he’s also challenging us to look for something deeper and more meaningful, what God truly treasures.
Let’s pray tonight that we would have a heart that wants that, that we’re not just waiting to see if we can cash in on a life insurance policy. Would you pray with me, please? Father, would you help us to be those who chase after what is valuable to you, our God? Lord, we know that you love us and we want to respond in love. And even as we do have needs, there might be that debt coming down the road and we don’t know how to deal with it.
Lord, help us never to just approach you as the one who we can cash out of, even as we do bring those needs to you when they come. And help us not to see that as the ultimate goal, but growing closer to you as the ultimate goal. We pray this in Jesus’ precious name, Amen.
That video captures so much of what’s wrong with each of us. And maybe the hope in the video is to appeal to the more selfish side of those who are going to do the inheriting and they kind of more tactfully nudge a loved one to buy a life insurance policy. I don’t know.
A lot of preachers, when they preach through a book like the Book of Proverbs, they latch on to those few verses that speak of the material blessing and turn it all into that because why? Because people want to hear that. Because we see in the overall context of the chapter, and that’s why it’s so important that we read the Bible verse after verse after verse, and that we don’t just take out a verse somewhere that we’d like to focus on, is because those verses by themselves can appeal to something that’s wrong in us, but they’re not actually then being corrected and strengthened and redirected in the fuller picture that God intends for us.
We do confuse what matters, and that’s what we see here in verse 13: “Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gets understanding. For the gain from her is better than gain from silver, and her profit better than gold. She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her.”
God says, what you really need to value, what’s really important in this life, well, it’s not all those other things that you can list out there, right? How much gold can I have? How much silver? How many jewels? What’s really valuable? It’s God’s wisdom.
Now God’s wisdom leads to oftentimes the best earthly outcome, and that’s what we see over and over again in Proverbs. The proverbially true thing is it’s going to lead to prosperity more often than not, right? If we lead our lives with integrity, if we run our businesses or do our job with integrity, that often works out well. Sometimes it doesn’t. We’ve been talking about that over the last few weeks.
But the sometimes it doesn’t is hard for us if the thing that we want is the earthly outcome that is viewed as superior: more wealth, more power, more health, those sorts of things. And it makes sense in a way that we want those, right? You have a bill you need to pay. You want money. If you’re not feeling well, especially if it’s a chronic illness, you’d like that cured.
But if that’s our goal, then when God’s way of integrity and God’s way of living wisely at the moment doesn’t seem to be cashing out the way we want, what are we going to do? We’re going to give up. The woman that’s looking at the life insurance policy, if the company says, “You know, we don’t think you qualify anymore, she can’t make the life insurance payment anymore.” If her family really only values her because she’s going to hand down a life insurance policy and they don’t care about the memories and things encapsulated in the spoons, they have no material wealth value but have the value of being a shared experience with the loved one.
Well, when that life insurance policy goes away, what are they going to do? They’re going to walk away. And when we are investing in a God life insurance policy, when it doesn’t seem like it’s going to cash out at the moment, when it feels like, did God forget to pay it? We’re going to walk away. And God didn’t forget to pay it. God is ultimately going to bless us. But that’s the problem we run into. We think, I don’t know, maybe I could do better.
What are we really valuing? We looked a few weeks ago at this parable, the parable of the merchant and the pearl. Matthew 13:45, Jesus says…
The implication here for us that sometimes it’s hard for us to absorb is so important, is that we need to view God and his kingdom, knowing him, that’s what wisdom is, as so valuable that we’d give up everything else for it. We’d give up our wealth. We’d give up our health. We’d give up our power and comfort for him.
If you know someone cares about you so much that you know if something happened to you, the only thing they’d want is something that you and that other person had shared time with. Maybe it was the spoon collection. And they just wanted that. You would want to bless them any way you could, right? Because you know that you really meant something to them.
But that person would say, “Well, give me all the life insurance policies and the spoon collections. I just want my loved one back.” We all know those people that we feel that way about. It doesn’t matter how much we could inherit, we miss the person.
What God’s saying here is, yes, sometimes my wisdom is going to lead you to prosperity, but don’t value silver more, don’t value gold more, don’t value rubies more, don’t value the things the world says are of value more than me. Would we trade all those things for wisdom?
Now notably here, what are we told in verse 13? That we find wisdom. We don’t earn it. We don’t study up and become wise. We find it. Why? Because wisdom isn’t something that we do. It’s what God gives.
So what the call is here is really to say, knowing God and being filled by his spirit and transformed by him as he works in my life, that’s the thing that’s most valuable to me. All those other things, even the things that sometimes can come from me—and they can sometimes come from me—I’m not going to say you will never prosper by doing God’s way. I’m not going to promise that you always will. And if that’s a nice bonus when it happens, wonderful. But boy is it going to be hard if it’s actually what we’re trying for instead. That’s what we want.
Because wisdom is ultimately of value. Gold can buy a lot, but there are things that gold can’t ever buy. Eternal life, it can never buy. Genuine happiness and purpose, it can never buy.
Been reading a lot over the last few weeks and listening to commentary on the new Ferrari coming out. How’s that for something that gold can buy? Yes, Ferraris, you need a lot of gold. You need a lot of money to buy them. And I will never own a Ferrari, unless one of you just loves Ferraris and has too many and decides to give me one. I’m never going to own a Ferrari because they’re incredibly expensive. I’d be nervous driving one if I actually, if someone gave me a Ferrari, I’d be nervous even getting behind the wheel of it. They’re so expensive.
And this particular one that’s coming out is notable for two reasons. One is it’s going to sell for $650,000. I mean, you can, how do you drive a $650,000 thing? That strikes me off the top of my head. But the second part is it was designed by John E. Ive, the designer of the original iMac and iPod and iPhone and so many other Apple devices. And I’ve always been an admirer of his design work. And so I was interested in seeing what he would do. And it is interesting, but normally I don’t pay attention to Ferraris because even if they’re not $650,000, they’re certainly not something I’m in the market for.
So this whole Ferrari thing, it was a whole new world hearing about it. And one thing that was really fascinating to me that I had no idea about, apparently it’s common knowledge if you are actually in the market for a Ferrari, is that you can’t necessarily go and buy any Ferrari you want whenever you want. You see, sure, the base models, the normal, for Ferraris, mass-produced models, if you have $100,000, $200,000, $300,000, you can go buy one. But if you want the really special ones, then perhaps this Luce will be one of those special ones.
You have to actually have the right relationship with Ferrari in order to obtain it. Oftentimes they only want to sell the limited edition Ferraris and the special Ferraris to people who already own Ferraris, one or more. So they’ve proven that they’re actually those who love Ferrari, they have a relationship with Ferrari. And you certainly can’t be someone who likes to buy limited edition things and then turn it around for a profit. Ferrari won’t actually sell you many of its cars with the right to resell it. You agree not to sell it for a year, at least for a profit. And if you try to, Ferrari has the right to buy it back from you, because they want someone who actually wants a relationship with Ferrari.
You can have all the gold, trade wisdom for gold. You say, I just want gold because I want a Ferrari. And you walk in and you say, “Here’s a sack of cash, give me a Ferrari. I want this one.” They may very well turn you away, say, “That’s not what we’re looking for. We don’t want someone who says, an influencer on YouTube who’s made a bunch of money, but it’s going to humiliate our brand. We want someone who loves the car, loves the brand.”
Some things you just can’t buy, and when you realize you want them, and you realize that you’ve been focused on what you can buy, how much power you can have, and you realize you don’t have that, then you realize what really matters. That’s God’s wisdom.
You see, we can’t go and just earn enough money and buy wisdom. Be wise. We can’t go and earn enough money and buy eternal life. Ferrari doesn’t want people who just care about how much money they can pay. They want someone who’s bought into the brand.
And yes, they do want your money too. God wants something from us as well. He wants us to turn to him and to trust him. That’s what he’s calling us to do. Over and over again, trust in God’s wisdom. That’s the theme of this chapter.
And yes, we may like the trimmings that come out of that, but God doesn’t want us focused on those. He doesn’t want us to walk up to him and say, “God, just hand me over that Ferrari. Just hand me over that house payment. Just hand me over the good job. Just hand me over the cure for my health.”
God wants us to say, “You know what I really want? I want you. Care about you. I want that relationship with you.”
That can be true of a car company where they want that, how much more so the God of the universe. But notably, God isn’t going to ask you to pay for it. He already did. He’s not going to say, “Well, I want you to care about me and bring $650,000.” Or even $100,000. Or even $50,000. Or $1,000. What’s God going to say? “Just want you to come and trust in me. I want you.”
And then he says, I’ll give you what money can’t buy, what’s priceless.
If we look at this passage and we think about what’s going on over and over again, what do we see? Trust, trust, trust, trust, trust. Why are we called to that trust? Because that’s what God says really matters. Of course, he’s right.
If we want the good things of life, and we really want to know what’s good in life, and we want that, well, we need the right foundation. And that’s that trust in God. It can’t be earned.
Back to verse 13. We find it. And then on to 15: “She is more precious than the rubies, and none of the things you desire can compare with her. Long life is in her right hand, and in her left hand are riches and honor. Her ways are very pleasant, and all her paths are peaceful. She is like a tree of life to those who obtain her, and everyone who grasps hold of her will be blessed.”
God’s wisdom leads to both temporal and eternal peace. Yes, there are good earthly outcomes from God’s way. If you choose to follow God’s way, and for example, you don’t go and rob banks, you’re going to live a more peaceful life insofar as you’re not worried about someone catching up with you and arresting you for robbing banks. Sin always leaves us in that unpeaceful state.
You might say, “Well, I do what’s right, and I don’t feel peaceful because I think someone’s going to find out that I’m doing what God’s way calls me to do, and they’re not going to agree with me, and they’re just going to be mad, and I’m not going to live peacefully.”
And I can tell you that, Tim, it doesn’t always lead to the peaceful route. And that’s why the starting point is so important. The point is, I want God’s wisdom so I can live a peaceful earthly life. It’s that following God’s way often leads to a peaceful life, but it also leads to something so much better.
Wisdom has both a left hand and right hand here, if you look at this metaphor. Left hand things are nice. Straight paths, peaceful life, those are nice things. But what’s so much better? Long life, in verse 16, and the life in view in particular—we go on to this metaphor of tree of life.
Well, what does the tree of life do? The tree of life doesn’t just give a long earthly life, it gives eternal life. The point here being, when we follow God’s way, we live a life that ultimately leads to flourishing, frequently that’s experienced in this lifetime to a degree. And Scripture says that. I don’t want to deny it.
But it does say that the way to a good and healthy long life is to follow the Lord. Why? Because he knows what’s good for us. And when we go other ways, it’s often going to be deteriorating to us, not just in our souls, but also to our bodies.
So yes, there’s a degree to that. But if we get all focused on that, then we’ve gone back to, I just want gold and I’ll see if I can hand it into the dealership when I want to actually get the thing that is of value.
But God says, look to the tree of life. Wisdom is about more than just a long earthly life and a peaceful earthly life. It’s about ultimate peace, being at peace with God, being at peace in eternity that goes well, well, well beyond this earthly life.
We all know we’d rather have something for a long time than a short time if it’s something of value. And yet, how often do we look at the short time of our lifetime and say, “I’ll trade the eternal life, that long time value, for the short time gain?”
Greater than wealth is genuine vitality of being alive in the Spirit. God reviving us from being dead in sin, what we’re talking about in Romans 6, to being alive in Him.
We’re going to talk more about this again next week because we need to unlock more about who this wisdom is and we’re going to see actually that this passage is a foreshadowing of John chapter 1, and if you know John chapter 1, we know who John chapter 1 is talking about. It’s talking about Jesus. I’ll go ahead and spoil that. And we’ll get more into that. But the key thing is, as we will get into next week, wisdom built the world and so wisdom also builds our lives. We’re part of the world. And so if we want to understand how the world is built, we want to actually function in accordance with the way things ought to be, well, we need to follow the one who actually formed it.
Do you care about having provision in your life? What things really matter to you? Recent surveys surveyed Americans on what matters most to them. Family was way on top, way above everything else, followed by values such as freedom and integrity and health. Then once you got past those, faith showed up, lower, 20% or so of people said that was a value to them, an important value.
But we have these other things, right? Family, freedom, integrity, health, and we say those are the things that are of—those are the things I really want, the things that I would trade anything for. I want those things, right? And those are good things. Silver and gold and rubies. Those are good things. But what undergirds them and allows them to actually flourish? It allows us to, for example, live in freedom in a way that isn’t anarchy, but actually a good life that does well, that has joy. Well, that’s freedom that has a foundation of God’s wisdom.
You see, if you could move that lower down entry of faith and move it to the top, the others flow out of it. That is a mechanical promise. We’re not looking at the vending machine. But rather if we’re going to have any of those other things, if we’re going to try to live with integrity, do you realize, we all realize, I don’t really need to tell you this, right? It’s hard to live with integrity. But how much harder is it to live with integrity if it doesn’t ultimately matter? When you can do something that isn’t full of integrity, but no one will ever know, are you willing to give up everything else for it?
But God says, I know, and I love you, and I want you to do that. Integrity means more when we’re walking alongside God, and we know that he’s the one who made us and intended us for it, and he’s the one who’s going to strengthen us even when it’s difficult, and he’s the one who’s going to say, “Well done, good, and faithful servant,” when we do it.
Now, let’s say you really want that new Johnny Ive designed Ferrari. And so you go and you sell everything you have, and you buy a different Ferrari so you’ll be in line for that Ferrari. Well simply owning a Ferrari doesn’t mean you’re always going to get the Ferrari you want because there might be only a hundred of them or a thousand of them. There are going to be more people that want it, and they’re not going to allow them to go on the open market so you can pay whatever, as we discovered.
Maybe you knew that. I didn’t realize it was such a thing, right? But now I know. And so not every Ferrari owner is going to get whatever Ferrari they want. But they’re not even going to get in the door, and they’re not going to be part of that relationship unless they start with valuing something more than just having cash.
Being in God’s family doesn’t mean necessarily you’re going to get everything you want, every limited edition thing, right? In this life, not everyone is going to be the president or leader of a big business or have a lake house and an ocean home and a yacht and all the worldly pleasures and riches. Not everyone will. In fact, for many of us, it would actually be detrimental to us if we even did.
So if we’re chasing after that, it’s not going to work. But if we think we can get to those things and really prosper in life in a genuine way, not just in an accounting kind of way, and we think we can do it without God’s wisdom, we can’t even do that.
Not everyone who owns a Ferrari will get that Ferrari. But if you don’t have a Ferrari, you’re not going to get it at all. What God’s saying here is, I’m letting you in, you don’t have to pay anything, you’re not going to earn your way to me, I just want you to know me.
And you may not get every earthly blessing, but I am going to be with you. And make no mistake, there is blessing to following God, eternal life of course, but too often we discount even the simple joy of knowing him day in and day out, that he is with us, and that the God who is going to save us ultimately is the God who loves you right now, today.
And if we understand that’s the best reward, and everything else is a bonus, well then, all those other bonuses, the ones that we really do want, the ones we’re really hoping for, we’ll either see aren’t really the thing that we need in our life and aren’t ultimately the blessing, or when God does bless us with them, we’ll actually have the ability to utilize those blessings well, to make good use of them, to enjoy them, and to steward them, and to bless others with them, because we’ll have him working in us. That’s the ultimate blessing.
If you want to know what the blessed life is, people give all these different things: all this money, and wealth, and power, being well-liked. But Scripture has a different answer for the blessed life. The blessed life is living in God’s wisdom, full stop.
Let’s pray today that that is what we value. Will you pray with me, please?
Father, thank you for this evening and for these friends that we get to study the ultimate thing of value, your wisdom, in your Word each week. And Lord, there are a lot of things that tempt us, and some of them are even good things that you’ve put in our hearts to desire, that you want us to pursue in life, but you don’t want us to make them idols. You don’t want them to be the thing that we want most, but rather the things that come from what we want most, which is you and your wisdom.
Lord, would you help us to have our hearts redirected to desire what is most important, most fully? Would you help us not to think that somehow we’re going to earn it, that we’re going to come in with a pile of cash and buy it, but what it is is ultimately a relationship with you. We can’t store up our own wisdom and somehow become wise. We find wisdom by coming before you and you giving it to us.
Would you help us to know that, and to feel that, and to live that blessed life that is knowing you because of that? We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
I hope this has been an encouragement to you today, and if it has, please do share it. Share the wisdom, right? It’s not good to hold on to something that is of value and not pass it on. It’s not good to hold on to God’s Word and not pass it on, and a simple way to do that is simply to say, “I watched this video, and I think you would enjoy it, too.”
Because a lot of people, they’ve heard all that preaching about how you’re going to earn things by loving God. What they need to hear is what they’re really ultimately yearning for, even if they don’t realize it, is God’s wisdom itself. He is what we are looking at and what we need.
So I do appreciate when you do hit that share button. In the meantime, if there’s any way I can be praying for you, any way I can encourage you, you can always use our texting line, that’s 833-356-4032, or the comments below. And jump in either way. If you’d just like to text in and keep it a little bit more private, our prayer team would love to pray with you. Or in the comments, we can all pray for each other.
It’s a great way, either way, to encourage each other. It’s going to be those times that we’re chasing after the wrong thing, and we kind of even know it, but we’re struggling. Great thing to bring together and pray for in each other, that we can value God and his wisdom all the more.
And I hope that his wisdom goes with you through this whole week, that you sense his presence with you all this week, that you have a blessed week, and I’ll see you again very soon.
Amen. Amen. Amen.
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