Maybe you had a childhood toy that took your voice and sent it back distorted and amplified. Small choices work the same way in Proverbs 3:34-35 — God reciprocates what we put out into the world, amplifying our foolishness so we see it clearly, or honoring our wisdom in ways that matter eternally.

Study Questions

The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.

The preacher says God doesn’t reciprocate in a legalistic way, but rather allows us to experience the natural consequences of our choices. How is that different from legalism? Why does that distinction matter?
What does it mean that “wisdom is seeking after God” rather than accumulating knowledge or life experience? How does that reshape the way you think about making wise decisions?
The sermon uses the image of a microphone amplifying what we can’t normally hear. What are some “plosives”—small flaws or patterns—in your own life that might be getting amplified over time without you realizing it?
In what areas of life have you noticed your words or choices echoing back in amplified or unexpected ways? How does recognizing that as God’s mercy—rather than punishment—change the way you respond?
The preacher contrasts seeking momentary earthly honor with seeking God’s eternal honor, using Matthew 19:30 (“the first will be last”). Where are you tempted to chase the wrong kind of honor, and what would it look like to let go of that?

Transcript

This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.

I’d like for you to go back a few years, well, quite a few years, go back to the late 1980s for a moment. I was thinking about this week, a toy I had as a kid, and I tried to find a picture. I couldn’t find a picture of it, but it was a, well, it was a glorified gift wrap roll, essentially, but it had this glossy cover on it. And then it had on each end of the roll, it was a big, thick roll, it had what were essentially glorified solo cups put inside of it, held together with a spring. And then it had that label, that glossy label that said Zoob Tube.

This thing, this contraption, was just fascinating to me as a kid, because you could take it and hold it up to your mouth and speak into it, and it would distort your voice. It would make it echo, it would make it kind of sound just different, and then you could pull the cup a little bit and get all kinds of interesting effects. And of course, nowadays, we have cell phones and computers, and they all have audio apps. You can go into a video conferencing app and turn yourself into a parakeet and change your voice to match, but most of us, if we weren’t audio engineers in the 1980s, couldn’t. Certainly a kid couldn’t, and yeah, I had my Zoob Tube and I could do that, and it was interesting, it was fascinating.

Maybe you didn’t have a Zoob Tube, but you have been in a canyon or a cave, and you know that feeling when you echo. You speak not necessarily super loud, but that echo comes back, and it comes back seemingly stronger than your voice, and it’s, well, it’s fascinating. We put in a little something, and we see something bigger and louder come back to us, reciprocated.

Hi, welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad that you are here tonight as we wrap up our series for the summer, proverbially speaking. As always, it’s been a joy to be in the Proverbs with you, and if you’ve been here all summer, I’m glad that we can be together for the closing of it, but if you’re new here tonight, well, I’m glad you’re here too, because we’re at the cherry on top, and it’s a great time to join us. Speaking of which, would you hit the like and the share button, help someone else to join us tonight as we dig into God’s wisdom.

Here’s the thing that we’re going to be thinking about. When we talk about God’s wisdom and everything that we’ve seen through Proverbs chapter 3, what God’s saying is, what we do is reciprocated. Now, sometimes it’s reciprocated in a way that is pleasing and good, but when we choose the unwise path, we see that as well. That might, in a way, sound more like legalism than grace, but as we’re going to see tonight, it’s not about legalism versus grace, it’s about how God meets us with what we want.

Let’s pray tonight that we would want the things that he calls us to. Would you pray with me, please? Father, would you help us to be people of wisdom, people who want to do what you’ve called us to do, people who live according to the faithfulness that you tell us about in your word, because it’s something that echoes back in the best of ways. We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.

If you want to turn with me in your Bible, we’re going to look at verses 34 and 35 tonight. Take a look. It says, “…toward the scorners he is scornful, but to the humble he gives favor. The wise will inherit honor, but the fools get disgrace.”

God reciprocates what we do. Not in the sense that we can bring about a majestic, wonderful thing in ourselves. That would be legalism if we think we can do that. But there are paths before us. If you remember the bumper from last year, proverbially speaking, there’s a man looking at two different paths, and we see that over and over again in Proverbs. And here’s the challenge being laid out once again here as we wrap up chapter three. Are we going to choose the path of wisdom, moving towards God, or are we going to move towards the path of foolishness, of evil? And God allows us to choose.

But sort of like if you were trying to sneak through an echoey room. If the whole room were one of those giant tubes, and every time you step across the floor you hear this echo reverberating, and you think, “Oh no, I’m trying to sneak to surprise someone with a birthday present,” right? You’re going to do a surprise birthday party. You’re trying to be quiet. No, you don’t want that to reciprocate. You want it to be just stopped at the initial soft step of your feet. But it may not be. And when we talk about foolishness, it absolutely won’t be.

Take a look at James chapter 4. James writes, “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the scripture says, He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us, but he gives more grace. Therefore, it says, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

James is laying out here what happens when we choose the path of foolishness. The exact thing that we see in compact form in those last two verses of Proverbs 3. When we choose to be haughty, when we choose to be proud, God responds in kind. To the scorner he scorns. Why does he do that? Well, he gives them exactly what they want. If they want to live by scorning, God will allow them to live by scorning. He will mock the mockers, that might be what your translation says, whatever it might be.

Point being, God responds in kind. If we’re going to live that way, that’s what we say we want. God will allow it. The fool wants to be lifted up, wants to be important, wants to have everything. That’s what James is talking about, coveting everything. Asking for things, but not receiving because the desire is to receive things, to do more foolish things. Proverbs says that God will lift up the foolish person, but what? He lifts them up not to be elevated and important like they want, but rather to take that person and hold that person up to public contempt. The exact opposite of what they want, but in the exact format that they want.

Because the natural outlaying of desiring to elevate ourselves, of being proud, of being foolish, well, we want to be lifted up and have people admire us and have power and wealth and all these things. God says, “Well, you will be lifted up, but it’s ultimately going to come to contempt as people see who you really are,” rather than honor like you want. It is, as a commentator said of this passage, describing poetic justice. God brings justice, and he brings it in the very vehicle that we have sought.

If we seek to be lifted up, we’ll be lifted up, but if it’s for our own glory, it’ll be to our own shame. We want things, but we want them to do foolish things. God won’t give those things to us, and the things that we have, we will use to our destruction, not to our benefit. We’re speaking into that tube, and it’s amplifying out our voice, and what do you know? It is coming out distorted, because we only speak the part, the part that sounds good. We try to leave out the bad parts. We try to quiet our footsteps, but the echo resonates louder and louder. It comes back to the very thing we do.

God isn’t coming up with some novel, unrelated way to just torture us. That’s not the point. But rather to say, “If this is the path you’re going to take, let me allow you to see the logical outflow of it.” That’s the point of Proverbs. We put in the order for foolishness, God will allow us to experience being fools.

It’s interesting. I didn’t really fully appreciate until the pandemic when we started streaming Steadfast how much stuff a microphone picks up. Always picks up the stuff you don’t want it to pick up. You have to be careful with all sorts of things. Put filters on it, for example, so that the sounds that we make, such as P’s, they’re called plosives, don’t pop in the microphone. Things you probably haven’t thought about unless you’ve had to deal with microphones. Pick up all those flaws. But if we’re just talking person-to-person, you’re not hearing that pop because the microphone isn’t there amplifying it. It’s just us talking.

When we look at our own actions, when we look at the actions of those around us and we’re all engaging in foolishness, we don’t hear the plosives. But then what happens over time, it does build up. What God does is he takes, by showing us foolishness, the microphone right up to us and allows us to hear the parts that we’re missing.

If I’m editing a video for the church, and we’ll play different sorts of videos, as you know, we’ll play those videos and put them up, I need to make sure as I’m editing to turn the volume up so that I’m not missing the details that will be very clear when, for example, they’re played at full volume on a Sunday. You can see all those things.

And what the point here is, God’s going to allow us, if we are scornful towards other people, for example, to experience scorn, not to be mean, but rather out of mercy to say, “Look, this is what it is that you’re doing. We’re trying to lift ourselves up.” He’ll allow us to lift ourselves up and see just how foolish we are in doing it. So we actually understand what’s genuinely happening.

It’s God’s mercy to allow us to experience these things. The point isn’t to humiliate the fool, but to see the fool come to repentance. We’re going to be talking about this more over the next few weeks as we begin a brand new series next Monday, Babbling On. We’re going to be looking at the Tower of Babel and the implications of it, and it comes to this very thing, foolishness versus God’s wisdom, and how God gives us oftentimes exactly what we ask for, and in that it can feel, rightly so, an awful lot like judgment.

But even in his judgment, he’s merciful because he allows us to respond to his judgment. That’s why he sent the prophets over time. He sent them so that the people could see the error of their ways and repent.

The thing is, the things that we want, the things that we get disappointed when we realize that we were just trying to speak clearly, but we were speaking through the Zoob Tube and it was messing everything up, those things we need to know are actually distorted, even if we don’t have that roll of tissue paper fancily bedecked to distort intention. God says, let me hold this up, this amplification, so you can hear the distortion, so you can see it before it’s too late, before you realize when someone turns it up to full volume, wait, that was foolishness.

God does reciprocate our foolishness and our evil, but he also responds in kind with honor. Take a look again at verse 35. The wise inherit honor, but he holds fools up to public contempt.

What’s the view here? Is it a sort of legalism? We talk about God’s grace, but we’re saying, “If you live wisely, if you do good, God will bless you.” Is that the point? What does it mean when we talk about God responding to wisdom? Well, it really comes back to the question we ask every year when we come to the book of Proverbs, talked about again at the beginning of the summer: wisdom is seeking after God.

That’s what we see, for example, in Proverbs 2, verse 5, that knowledge of God is what comes out of wisdom. So, if we’re talking about having wisdom, we’re not talking about educating ourselves with lots and lots of books and remembering all the facts in them, now we’re wise. We’re not even talking about living for a very long time and accumulating lots of experiential knowledge. Those are both good things, right? Book learning is good, lived life learning is good. Those are both very useful things, but that’s not what we’re talking about. You can be, practically speaking, very young or very old and be wise or foolish.

The question is, are you seeking after God? There is the wisdom. There’s the thing that we ultimately need, and it’s also the thing that takes us from pride to humility, because if we realize that it’s not about our wisdom, but about Him and His wisdom, it moves the honor from us to Him. That’s the point.

It’s so sad when we see Christians trying to talk about how they understand this or that about the Bible and build themselves up, because what are they doing? They’re taking what sounds like the wisdom of God and turning it back into the foolishness of man, because it’s all about making themselves feel important. You shouldn’t do that.

It’s one of the reasons why I don’t do it perfectly, but one of the reasons I try to avoid using a lot of technical theological language when we’re studying God’s Word together, because it can be a real temptation to toss that stuff out when we sometimes all will do it. If you’re in Bible studies and studying theology and so on as a Christian over time, you’re going to pick up some of those things that sound pretty impressive, and occasionally they’re actually useful because it’s very specific in helping to define something.

But a lot of times you know why I want to use it? So that you know I know it. So much better just not to use it. Only if it adds more clarity. You need to be really careful as Christians that we’re conveying the truth of God’s Word clearly and accurately, and yes at times if we need a term, use that term, but don’t toss out terms just to look important. Don’t point out people who aren’t just so that we’re more important than them.

And even when it’s minor things, don’t spend all the time nitpicking other people’s theology. Yes theology matters. Yes there are things that we should absolutely point out, but when we get just cranky and start pointing out everything we disagree with other genuine Christians, what are we doing? We’re trying to actually have that wisdom of the world. We’re putting the honor back on ourselves.

What do we want to do instead? We want to put the honor on God. He’s the only one that deserves that honor. The scoffer wants earthly honor, wants to be important right now. The wise person says, “I know that God bestows honor on his people. I know he loves his people. What could be better than that? I don’t need the earthly honor. I need God’s heavenly honor.”

So as Jesus said, the first will be last and the last shall be first. Matthew 19:30 is essential to this. We need to be thinking in the long term. That’s what we’re also encouraged to do in the book of Daniel. For example, Daniel writes in chapter 12, verse 2, “Many of those who sleep in the dusty ground will awake some to everlasting life, and others to shame and everlasting abhorrence. But the wise will shine like the brightness of the heavenly expanse, and those bringing many to righteousness will be like the stars forever and ever.”

Are we seeking the momentary or the lasting? That’s a question we’ve come back to over and over again through this series, through chapter 3. Different particular contexts, but that’s really the question that boils down over and over again. Are we seeking Him or not?

We think about those things that amplify as taking something that’s often small and making it louder. The book of Proverbs is saying, the choices we make, the wise choices and the foolish choices, they seem small in the moment, but they get louder.

It’s really like what happens every time we eat, right? Especially if we haven’t grown our own vegetables. Maybe you have at this time of year, but for the most part, most of us, we’re going to eat various vegetables, probably not lettuce just now, but various vegetables, various fruits, whatever we assemble into our meals or order as our meals, we’re going to take those things and we’re not going to be thinking of all the itty bitty microscopic things in it.

Yet our bodies depend on it, right? We need certain amounts of protein. We need certain vitamins and minerals. We need all those things. They’re all in there. We can’t see them. Little bitty things, but they end up having a big effect. We live or we die.

We certainly think about it a little bit more on a week like this one, where the headlines have been all about that horrible bacteria that’s been present in lettuce. Turns out it appears to be lettuce at Taco Bell. I was thinking, you go to Taco Bell and you’re hungry. You look at the menu and you decide to order, let’s say, a taco salad. You think, “Well, at least for Taco Bell, I’m being pretty healthy, right? I’m going to get my protein. I have my tomatoes and my lettuce,” so on. All this good stuff in here. And I’ll also be full. It’ll be nice.

And under the surface part of that is that if everything goes well, there’s good nutritious things that you’re eating. Those things are going to empower your body. You’re going to be able to keep going. So it’s going to take those itty bitty things and they’re going to be amplified into something meaningful for our lives. We get this if we think about it. We don’t often think about it while we’re eating. We just decide whether we enjoy it or not. Where we do think about it more is something like the current situation, where you eat something not realizing it’s contaminated, and then you live with the absolutely miserable results thereof. People that went to Taco Bell and got that contaminated lettuce, they’re thinking a lot more about tiny things that you normally can’t see than we normally do.

Notice those tiny things magnifying to giant effects. That’s the point that Proverbs wants us to remember. Whether it’s for the good, like those minerals and vitamins and proteins and such that we’re benefiting from as we eat, or it’s the bacteria and stuff that chip away, there’s all kinds of little things. And each of our choices is a choice towards the good or the bad, the nutritious or the harmful. And oftentimes it looks about the same to our view. That’s why we need God’s wisdom, His Word.

But there’s something else about thinking about how we consume food that’s really key if we’re going to understand what God is calling us to here, and this idea that wisdom is seeking after God. And that’s this: If you go to Taco Bell, you didn’t raise the livestock that produced the protein that you ate. You didn’t go and raise the vegetables. You may wish that you had after eating that lettuce, but you didn’t do it. You didn’t raise it. You simply turned towards it. You placed the order. You didn’t even assemble it, right? Someone else assembled.

That’s how it is oftentimes with foolishness and always with God’s wisdom. The best we can do is place the order, right? God nudges us towards Himself and we say, “God, I’d really like the taco salad of wisdom,” but the taco salad is contaminated. God brings it to us. He’s the one that raised all the wisdom in it. He’s the one that assembled all the wisdom in it. He provides it to us.

The part that’s being amplified that we’ve been talking about, that reciprocation, is all about that seeking aspect. We’re called to seek after Him. And what does He do as we seek after Him? He provides the nutrition that we need for our soul, because oftentimes we can ignore that and just be focused on the body. But how much more so do we need that nutrition for the soul?

That’s the wonderful news we find in Proverbs. Yes, there’s lots of practical things that we can remember in it, but at the heart of it, over and over and over again, and that’s what we’ve seen over and over again this summer and every summer as we come to Proverbs, it’s really about seeking Him, because all the rest of wisdom is contained in that relationship with Him.

God doesn’t reciprocate when we’re wise. He reciprocates when we hunger for His wisdom. What does He provide in return? The perfect wisdom, the perfect honor, the perfect wealth of the Spirit that’s far beyond anything we could think that we need. And that, that’s the gospel right there in the book of Proverbs that we often think about as legalistic. But it’s not. It’s about God who loves us and wants His wisdom to dwell in us.

Would you pray with me, please? Father, would you help us to be people of your wisdom? Turn us more and more toward you. Give us the hunger for the good, nutritious things that you offer instead of the things that are contaminated that are in this world. A lot of times we can’t tell the difference. It feels like when we speak with a small voice, not realizing the echo that is to come. But Lord, would you help us to see the amplified effect, to be ready for it, to turn away from that evil and to turn towards the good that comes only from you? We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.

I do hope this has been an encouragement for you today, and as I mentioned at the beginning, if you would give this a like and a share. That share, it seems like a little thing just whispering into the digital world, but it is amplified. Because when everyone here goes ahead and shares it, it tells Facebook and YouTube and X and wherever you might go with it, “Hey, this is something worth hearing.”

I think people need to know that God’s wisdom isn’t about demanding that they be perfect, but rather that they turn to the one who is perfect. How much do we all need to know that? Maybe you’re wrestling with something and how to apply that in your life right now. And you can use our number, 833-356-4032, or the comments below. Either way, whether you’d like to go more privately with that text messaging, or you’d like to leave a comment that we can all pray over and encourage each other with together.

But either way, please do reach out. And please come back next week. We will be in that new series, Babbling Along. I can’t wait to share that with you. I think it’s going to be a really helpful time studying a story that we know well, but we don’t spend a lot of time. So hope to see you for that next week.

In the meantime, have a wonderful and blessed week, and I’ll see you again very soon.