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336 | Conversations - Proverbs 7: Guarding Your Heart · The Woman at the Well Ministries Podcast

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  Music.
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  Hello, friends, and welcome back to another podcast of Woman at the Well Ministries,
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  where we believe that all of us have to come to Jesus like the woman at the
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  well in John chapter four.
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  Our highest priority is making God real in your life.
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  Whether you are listening in our app, in your favorite podcasting app,
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  or on our website at watwm.org,
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  we invite you to sit down with us as we look to the scriptures to learn more
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  about God and to strengthen Your daily walk with Jesus Christ.
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  Living her life for Christ. She's a happy girl.
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  Music.
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  She's a happy girl.
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  In this episode of the Woman at the Well Ministries podcast,
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  join Kim Miller and Erica Close in a conversation as we walk with Jesus.
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  In today's conversation, we continue a series on the book of Proverbs,
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  and in today's podcast, we discuss the lessons learned in Proverbs 7.
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  Well, hello, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today.
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  I am Erica Close, and I'm here with Kimberly Miller.
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  Hello, and it is our pleasure to just spend some time with you as we walk through
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  the scriptures and see what it has to say to us.
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  And so today we're in Proverbs 7, and Erica is going to read the entire proverb to us.
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  So let's sit back and let's just listen to of the Word of God as Erica reads
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  it to us. All right, Proverbs chapter 7.
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  My son, keep my words and lay up my commandments with thee.
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  Keep my commandments and live, and my law as the apple of thine eye.
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  Bind them upon thy fingers, write them upon the table of thine heart.
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  Say unto wisdom, thou art my sister, and call understanding thy kinswoman,
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  that they may keep thee from the strange woman, from the stranger which flattereth with her words.
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  For at the window of my house I looked through my casement, and beheld among
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  the simple ones I discerned among the youths a young man void of understanding,
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  passing through the street near her corner, and he went the way to her house,
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  in the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark night.
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  And behold, there met him a woman with the attire of a harlot, and subtle of heart.
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  She is loud and stubborn, her feet abide not in her house.
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  Now is she without, now in the streets, and lieth and waited every corner.
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  So she caught him and kissed him, and with an impudent face said unto him,
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  I have peace offerings with me, this day have I paid my vows.
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  Thou for came I forth to meet thee, diligently to seek thy face, and I have found thee.
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  I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, and with carved works,
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  with fine linen of Egypt.
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  I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.
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  Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning. Let us solace ourselves with the loves.
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  For the good man is not at home. He has gone a long journey,
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  and hath taken a bag of money with him, and will come home at the day appointed.
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  With her much fair speech she caused him to yield, and the flattering of her lips she forced him.
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  He goeth after her straight away as an ox goeth to the slaughter,
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  or as a fool to the correction of the stocks.
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  Till a dart strike through his liver, as a bird hasteth to the snare,
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  and knoweth not that it is for his life.
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  Harken unto me now therefore, O ye children, and attend to the words of my mouth.
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  Let not thine heart decline to her ways, nor go astray in her paths.
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  For she hath cast down many wounded. Yea, many strong men have been slain by her.
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  Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.
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  Oh my, there is a lot in that verse, and I'd like to tackle the first six verses, if you don't mind.
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  That's fine. Let's start there. That's the part that's not quite so awkward to always read.
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  I love that the theme of Proverbs is a teaching.
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  Theme and it's teaching us to
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  keep the words and the commandments that
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  God has for us and we read from Genesis to Revelations who God is and we can
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  fully know God because we can fully know Jesus Christ and we know their attitude
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  we know their love for us we understand their ways and we understand what they do,
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  but we also know what their expectation is of every child of God if we will
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  just simply follow the Word of God.
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  And he says in verse 2, keep my commandments and live.
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  If you want to live life to its fullest, if you want to have the abundant life
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  that Jesus has promised us in John chapter 10, verse 10, then you need to live
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  the commandments that God has given us.
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  Now, many people take offense to the commandments and they say they're just
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  a list of do's and don'ts.
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  They are boundaries and they are do this and don't do that. but at the very
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  core and foundation of the commandments that God is asking us to live is what is best for us.
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  He's not just being punitive and saying, don't do this or do that.
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  What he's saying is when you follow after these, then you're going to live the
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  life that I have intended to you.
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  Remember in Jeremiah 29, 11, he says he has a plan for you and it's a good plan
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  and it has an expected end to give you a hope and a future.
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  And if you follow his commandments, you're going to live the abundant life,
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  as I said, that he promised in John 10, 10.
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  So following his strategy, following his methodology, following his commands,
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  the plan that he has is going to get you the greatest return in your life.
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  It's going to allow you to have the purpose that God has intended for you.
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  And you're going to reap the blessings that he has created for you.
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  And he tells you that you need to understand his law and keep it as the most important thing.
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  Let it be the shiny thing that gets your attention.
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  Let it be the hungering, satisfying element of your life.
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  Keep it as your number one priority. He says, bond them upon your fingers.
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  Do you ever wonder why he probably said that?
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  When I read, it's my fingers that gets me into mischief. My mouth does too.
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  But it's my fingers that literally carry out the act usually.
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  And he's saying, put them on your fingers. It's also your fingers you use to do everything you do.
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  From brushing your teeth, to combing your hair, to feeding yourself, to dressing yourself.
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  It's tough to do if you don't have any hands.
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  And so put the word of God everywhere you can see it. everything you're going to do.
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  That's what he's asking us to do is let the law of the word of God be so surrounding
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  you that in every activity, in every part of your view, you see him.
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  Strategically in my home today, and as it was when I was a child,
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  in every room that I am in, If you look somewhere, you can see the word of God.
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  You either see the Bible or you see a plaque or a picture or a painting or the
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  words written on the wall.
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  You can't go through my house and not see the word of God. I need to be reminded.
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  He said to write it on our hearts, to write it on our foreheads,
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  to cover our fingers, to let our environment be fully encompassed with his law and his word.
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  And he says, be closely related and deeply love and absolutely committed to wisdom.
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  And get understanding and let it be so close to you that when people see you
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  and they see understanding, they see a connection.
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  That you're clothed with it.
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  Let wisdom and understanding and his law and his commandments keep you from
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  doing that which you shouldn't do.
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  Make sure you keep your eyes on the things of God in your own house, in your own home.
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  Keep your temple clean by following the commandments of the Lord and submitting to the Holy Spirit.
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  Yeah, I really appreciate, you said a lot of things in there that really struck
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  me, but I really appreciate that you said, let the law be the shiny thing that
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  gets your attention. Amen.
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  You made a really good point that where our attention is, that's where we go.
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  And this next section, like many of the Proverbs that we've just recently read
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  in the last couple weeks, it's a little awkward to read.
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  But, you know, we talk all the time about we may live in this world,
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  but we're not called to be of the world.
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  And this is a sinful world that we live in. And the Bible is written to people
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  that live in this sinful world, right?
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  It's written to imperfect people.
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  That are in the world struggling with the reality of the seduction of sin.
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  And everything that we've read in these last few Proverbs talk about how sin is seductive.
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  And here we read this account that is very much a seduction,
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  and that may not be the The sin that the devil is able to trap you in.
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  But all sin somehow seduces us into action. That's right.
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  Whatever it is. And so there are so many lessons that we can learn in that,
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  even if this particular sin isn't the one that we are ensnared by.
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  But if we look at this and we see in verse 6 that the young man looked out his window.
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  Right. He was looking for something.
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  Something was missing from what he had inside, so he was looking outside.
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  And the scripture describes that young man as being void of understanding.
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  He lacked understanding. He lacked an understanding.
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  To me, I read that as an understanding of the sufficiency of God,
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  the understanding of the sufficiency
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  of the presence of God in his life to satisfy the things that he has,
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  but he wasn't satisfied and he went looking and he went looking for satisfaction.
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  It talks about how he was looking for sin in hidden places, right?
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  He was looking in the dark. He was looking in places where nobody would necessarily
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  see his sin and he found it.
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  It's not hard, right? The devil places temptations in our path, whatever they might be.
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  And it's not going to be hard to find it. But this particular sin was literally
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  lying in wait for him at every corner.
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  It wasn't going to be hard for him to find it.
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  In this account that we read, the woman who the young man meets up with says
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  that she has her peace offerings as if she was on her way to the temple.
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  And I think that's something that is really important to notice because sometimes
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  the the things that are really sin for us, they look good.
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  They might even look at first glance like they're a good thing or a godly thing.
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  Maybe they have something to do with church, right? Maybe it's something to
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  do with other Christians.
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  And sometimes the devil disguises things that are not for us in a cloak of things that just look good.
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  So in this case, it looked like she was on her way to the temple,
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  that she was doing the right thing, but she wasn't because it says that she
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  came looking for him and she had prepared for him, right?
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  She had made things very attractive for him so that every out that he had,
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  she had covered because she really wanted to ensure that she trapped him in that sin.
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  She talked about how the good men of the house, right? The one that her husband was away.
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  She said, it's okay. Nobody's going to know, right? The good men of the house
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  is away. Nobody's going to know about this sin.
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  Anything done in deceit you can guarantee is not right. Exactly.
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  And so it was all about deceit and deception and hiding.
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  And verse 22 talks about how the young man goes after her, right?
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  Goes after her as an ox goes to a slaughter or as a fool to the correction of the stalks.
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  The ox is going to his death, right? The fool is going towards punishment.
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  When we go after sin and we don't heed the voice of the Holy Spirit in our lives
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  stopping us, we're going to end up with some kind of destruction.
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  This verse talks about like a dart striking his liver, a physical hurt.
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  But regardless of what the consequence is, there will be consequences.
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  When we get to verse 24, I think we get back to the instruction place.
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  A lot of that example is over.
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  But we read, Harken unto me now, therefore, O ye children, and attend to the words of my mouth.
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  I love that, that it's declining, right? It's a downhill slope towards the sin.
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  Sometimes life as a Christian may not seem easy.
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  It might not be like you're coasting downhill on the bike, but instead you're
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  riding uphill to get to the place that God wants you, where he wants you to be.
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  But if it's simple and if it's easy, it's honestly likely that it may not be
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  something that he wants us to do.
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  And it could be something that
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  declines us to a place where we won't need to be and don't want to be.
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  And we need to be incredibly careful because this chapter ends.
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  She's cast down many wounded.
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  Sin wounds us.
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  Wounded people are often people that have been stuck in sin for some reason.
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  Many strong men have been slain by her. We lose pieces of ourselves to sin.
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  And then it says her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.
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  We can talk here about physical death and we can talk here about spiritual death,
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  but the devil wants nothing more than to us to fall victim to sin because it's
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  the easiest way to get our eyes off of Jesus.
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  It's not something we can do. It's not something that's for us.
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  So we need to make sure that our heart is in tune,
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  that we are tuned up, and that we have the Holy Spirit in us to lead us and
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  guide us and direct us, to keep us on that path,
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  to keep us not looking out the windows for some other kind of satisfaction that
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  we don't have in our home. home, right?
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  We need to keep our home, like Kim said, so full of things related to who God is.
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  Keep our friendships so full of godly friends that we see God in them, right?
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  Keep our families on track and in God's Word so that what we see is God living
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  and breathing and working things out in our lives. But we have to do all that.
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  So that we're not tempted by the wiles of the devil.
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  Because he is out there seeking whom he may devour.
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  You know, there's something I would like to add, if you just go back to verse
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  23, he says, till a dart strike through his liver.
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  And as you were eloquently explaining the scripture to us out of Proverbs 7,
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  when you got to that part, I found it so fitting.
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  That the repercussion of this was that his filter was destroyed.
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  The liver. Because the liver acts as a filter to the body.
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  It is the main filter for all of the waste and all of the toxins.
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  And when it's doing the right... It cleans our blood, right?
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  When it's doing the right thing, it's cleaning and it's cleansing.
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  And this person living
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  this life has abandoned the cleansing
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  of the liver that's fascinating and so
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  he kills it and it's to me
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  a picture of how when we
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  abandon God we've killed
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  the cleansing of our life and we don't need it so it's removed and there are
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  times when we reject God so many times that we become impervious to his whispers, to his word.
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  And the scripture even says we get turned to a reprobate mind. We don't know.
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  When that happens, because the Lord wishes that none should perish and that
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  all should come to repentance, and his mercy endures forever and his grace is unending.
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  It is a dangerous thing, as we see again in Proverbs 7, to ignore the Lord and
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  his loving, gracious, merciful, cleansing blood.
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  Amen. Thank you all so much for listening to today.
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  This was an interesting proverb, but it's a proverb that has such truth for every one of our lives.
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  We thank you for listening. We look forward to visiting with you again in our
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  next podcast, and we want you to just remember that you are loved. Jesus loves you.
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