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Fall Asleep to Proverbs _ Solomon_s 31 Chapters of Wisdom for the Weary Soul · truthunedited

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  Speaker 1: You have probably heard these words before. Trust in the
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  Speaker 1: Lord with all your heart. Do not lean on your
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  Speaker 1: own understanding. Maybe they are so familiar by now that
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  Speaker 1: they pass through your mind without landing, the way a
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  Speaker 1: song you have heard a thousand times plays in the background,
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  Speaker 1: without ever quite reaching you. To night we ask a
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  Speaker 1: quieter question, who wrote them? And why did he write them?
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  Speaker 1: As a warning? The man behind these words was not
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  Speaker 1: a saint removed from the difficulties of ordinary life. He
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  Speaker 1: was a king, the wealthiest human being who ever lived,
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  Speaker 1: A man who possessed everything the world could offer, and
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  Speaker 1: still found himself in the end sitting alone in the
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  Speaker 1: dark with an empty chest and a full treasury, a
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  Speaker 1: man history calls the wisest person on earth, who made
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  Speaker 1: some of the most costly and painful choices in the
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  Speaker 1: history of his nation. He wrote these words not from
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  Speaker 1: a place of a rival. He wrote them from from
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  Speaker 1: a place of reckoning. To night, we sit with what
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  Speaker 1: he left behind. Thirty one chapters. A lifetime of wisdom
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  Speaker 1: earned the hard way, written not to impress, but to
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  Speaker 1: reach across time and take you gently by the hand
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  Speaker 1: and say, listen, I know something about this road. Let
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  Speaker 1: me tell you what I learned. Settle in, let the
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  Speaker 1: day release its grip. You do not need to solve
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  Speaker 1: anything to night. Just listen and let wisdom speak softly
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  Speaker 1: in the dark. It was late in Jerusalem. The city
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  Speaker 1: had gone quiet beneath a wide sky thick with stars,
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  Speaker 1: and in the great courtyard of the palace, a single
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  Speaker 1: oil lamp burned against the darkness. Its flame moved gently
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  Speaker 1: in the night air, bending and recovering, casting long shadows
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  Speaker 1: across the stone floor and the ancient cedar beams overhead.
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  Speaker 1: An old man sat alone. He wore a rowbe of
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  Speaker 1: deep blue, worn soft by years, and his white hair
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  Speaker 1: fell loosely around a face carved by decades of glory
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  Speaker 1: and grief in equal measure. His hands rested quietly in
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  Speaker 1: his lap. In one of them a reed pen before him,
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  Speaker 1: an open scroll. This was Solomon, son of David, King
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  Speaker 1: of Israel, the man who built the Temple in Jerusalem,
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  Speaker 1: its walls of cedar, and its inner sanctuary overlaid with
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  Speaker 1: pure gold. The man whose reputation had spread to the
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  Speaker 1: farthest edges of the known world, so that the Queen
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  Speaker 1: of Sheba had traveled months through desert and mountain just
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  Speaker 1: to sit before him and test the limits of his mind.
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  Speaker 1: The ancient records tell us his annual income was six
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  Speaker 1: hundred and sixty six talents of gold, that he spoke
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  Speaker 1: three thousand proverbs and wrote one thousand and five songs.
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  Speaker 1: That he studied trees and animals and stars, and the
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  Speaker 1: hidden patterns of the human heart, and that people came
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  Speaker 1: from every nation to hear the wisdom God had placed
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  Speaker 1: within him. He had been given, as a young king
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  Speaker 1: kneeling before God at Gibeon, the greatest gift a human
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  Speaker 1: being has ever received, not wealth, not long life, not
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  Speaker 1: the defeat of his enemies, wisdom. And God had been
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  Speaker 1: so moved by that request that he gave Solomon all
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  Speaker 1: the rest as well. And yet the old man looked
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  Speaker 1: out across the silent courtyard and felt the familiar weight
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  Speaker 1: settle over him, the weight that gold could not lift
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  Speaker 1: and wisdom alone could not explain. He thought of the
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  Speaker 1: slow drift of his own heart, the foreign altars built
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  Speaker 1: on the hills of Jerusalem, the long season in which
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  Speaker 1: the very wisdom he had been given had become in
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  Speaker 1: his own mind, his own He had written about all
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  Speaker 1: of it in another book, the one he called Ecclesiastes,
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  Speaker 1: where he had said again and again vanity, all is vanity,
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  Speaker 1: Everything fades. He had chased after every pleasure the world
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  Speaker 1: could produce. He had written about the emptiness waiting at
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  Speaker 1: the bottom of all of it. But tonight he was
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  Speaker 1: not writing about what fades to night. He was writing
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  Speaker 1: for his son. He thought of the boy, young and
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  Speaker 1: bright and standing at the edge of a world full
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  Speaker 1: of voices calling from every direction. And Solomon knew, with
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  Speaker 1: the particular certainty of a man who has made every mistake,
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  Speaker 1: that his son would have to choose every single day.
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  Speaker 1: The boy would stand at a cross roads, and the
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  Speaker 1: voices would call, and the choices would accumulate, one after another,
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  Speaker 1: quietly and irreversibly, into the direction of an entire life.
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  Speaker 1: He dipped his pen. He did not write as a king,
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  Speaker 1: commanding his subjects. He did not write as a scholar
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  Speaker 1: performing for an audience. He wrote as a father, a
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  Speaker 1: father who had seen too much and learned too late,
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  Speaker 1: and loved his son enough to try anyway. The lamp
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  Speaker 1: flame bent in the night breeze, and Solomon began, my son, listen.
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  Speaker 1: Chapter one. The voice that called before you were lost.
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  Speaker 1: There is a voice that has been calling your name
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  Speaker 1: since before you knew what your name meant. It does
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  Speaker 1: not shout, It does not force its way through the
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  Speaker 1: noise of a crowded life. It calls the way a
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  Speaker 1: lighthouse sends its beam across dark water, not chasing the ships,
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  Speaker 1: not grabbing them, simply shining, trusting that those who are
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  Speaker 1: paying attention will see it before the rocks do. This
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  Speaker 1: is how Solomon opens his book, not with a command,
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  Speaker 1: with a call. He writes in the very first chapter,
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  Speaker 1: to know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight,
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  Speaker 1: to receive instruction in wise dealing, in righteousness, justice, and equity.
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  Speaker 1: He is writing for his But as you listen tonight,
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  Speaker 1: let the word sun fall away. Let it become simply you,
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  Speaker 1: because Solomon is writing for anyone who has ever stood
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  Speaker 1: at a cross roads and felt the weight of not
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  Speaker 1: knowing which way to go. In the ancient world of Israel,
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  Speaker 1: wisdom was not intelligence alone. The Hebrew word is chokma,
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  Speaker 1: and Hokma carried within it the idea of skill, not
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  Speaker 1: the skill of memorizing information or solving complex problems, the
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  Speaker 1: skill of living well, the artistry of navigating the complicated beautiful,
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  Speaker 1: painful reality of being a human being in a world
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  Speaker 1: that does not come with a manual. A craftsman of
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  Speaker 1: unusual ability was said to have chokma. A woman who
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  Speaker 1: could weave cloth of extraordinary beauty was said to have chokma.
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  Speaker 1: Wisdom in the Hebrew mind was not something stored in
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  Speaker 1: the head. It was something practiced with the hands and
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  Speaker 1: the heart and the choices, day after day, season after season,
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  Speaker 1: year after year. And at the very foundation of this wisdom,
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  Speaker 1: Solomon places one sentence, a sentence he will return to
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  Speaker 1: again and again across all thirty one chapters, the way
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  Speaker 1: a river returns to the sea. The fear of the
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  Speaker 1: Lord is the beginning of wisdom. When modern people hear
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  Speaker 1: the word fear, they tend to think of terror, of
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  Speaker 1: a small person cowering before an angry authority. That is
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  Speaker 1: not what Solomon means. The Hebrew word is yarra, and
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  Speaker 1: yra is richer and stranger and more beautiful than simple terror.
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  Speaker 1: Yeer is what happens in your chest when you stand
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  Speaker 1: at the rim of the Grand canyon and look down.
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  Speaker 1: It is the feeling that moves through you when you
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  Speaker 1: hold a new born child for the first time and
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  Speaker 1: understand in a way that exceeds words, that you are
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  Speaker 1: holding something so far beyond your ability to protect that
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  Speaker 1: your heart does not know whether to laugh or weep.
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  Speaker 1: Yra is what a human being feels when they come
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  Speaker 1: face to face with something so much larger than themselves
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  Speaker 1: that their own smallness becomes undeniable, not crushing, clarifying. When
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  Speaker 1: Solomon says the fear of the Lord is the beginning
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  Speaker 1: of wisdom, he is saying this the moment you stop
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  Speaker 1: believing you are the largest thing in the room, the
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  Speaker 1: moment you lay down the exhausting work of running the
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  Speaker 1: universe from your own small desk, the moment you look
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  Speaker 1: up from your plans and acknowledge that there is a
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  Speaker 1: mind behind all things, a love behind all things, so
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  Speaker 1: much greater than your own that the only honest response
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  Speaker 1: is to bow in wonder. That is where wisdom begins,
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  Speaker 1: not in a class room, not in a strategy session,
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  Speaker 1: not in the accumulation of the right information, or the
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  Speaker 1: right connections or the right achievements. In wonder, in the
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: quiet and liberating acknowledgment that you are not God, and
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  Speaker 1: that this is very good news, Because if you are
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  Speaker 1: not God, you do not have to hold everything together.
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  Speaker 1: You do not have to have all the answers. You
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  Speaker 1: do not have to be enough by yourself. You simply
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  Speaker 1: have to be willing to listen to the one who is.
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  Speaker 1: Solomon knew this. He had known it as a young king,
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  Speaker 1: kneeling at Gibeon, asking not for riches but for a
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  Speaker 1: listening heart. He had walked in that knowing beautifully. For
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  Speaker 1: a season, his judgments were breathtaking in their precision. The
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: glory of God filled the temple he built until the
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: priests could not stand to minister in it. But the
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  Speaker 1: years passed, and the wisdom became his in his mind,
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  Speaker 1: and the success became his, And slowly, without any single
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  Speaker 1: dramatic moment of turning, he began to drift. Not rebellion,
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  Speaker 1: just drift, the kind that happens when a life grows
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  Speaker 1: comfortable enough that the need for something greater than itself
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  Speaker 1: stops feeling urgent. He is writing to Night from the
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  Speaker 1: other side of that drift, not to condemn you for
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  Speaker 1: the ways you have drifted. He knows how natural it feels,
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  Speaker 1: how invisible the drift seems while it is happening. He
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  Speaker 1: is writing because he wants some one somewhere to find
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  Speaker 1: the way back to the beginning, before they have to
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  Speaker 1: travel as far as he did to get there. There
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  Speaker 1: is a voice that has been calling you toward wisdom,
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  Speaker 1: through the people who have loved you faithfully, through the
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  Speaker 1: quiet moments of conviction that come when the day's noise
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  Speaker 1: finally stops, through the beauty of a world that did
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  Speaker 1: not make itself, Through the ache inside you that no
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  Speaker 1: earthly thing has ever fully satisfied. That ache is not
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  Speaker 1: a malfunction. It is a compass, and it is pointing
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  Speaker 1: somewhere real. The fear of the Lord is the beginning,
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  Speaker 1: not the middle, not the advanced level. For serious believers,
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  Speaker 1: the beginning, the posture of a soul that has stopped
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  Speaker 1: pretending to be larger than it is, and discovered in
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  Speaker 1: that honesty a freedom it never expected. Solomon learned this
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  Speaker 1: the long way. He is hoping you will not have to.
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  Speaker 1: The voice is calling to night. It has been patient
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  Speaker 1: with you. It will go on being patient. In the
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  Speaker 1: quiet of this room. You are close enough to hear it.
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  Speaker 1: Let that carry you gently towards sleep. Chapter two, The
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  Speaker 1: Woman at the cross Roads. Imagine a city at night,
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  Speaker 1: not a modern city, with electric light blazing from a
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  Speaker 1: thousand windows. An ancient city, Jerusalem perhaps, or one of
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  Speaker 1: the great trading cities of the ancient Near East. Narrow streets,
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  Speaker 1: cool stone under foot, the smell of wood smoke and
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  Speaker 1: olive oil and bread baked hours ago and still faintly
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  Speaker 1: present in the evening air. Most of the city is asleep,
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  Speaker 1: but not everyone. Solomon describes a scene in chapter seven
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  Speaker 1: that is so vivid and so specific that it reads
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  Speaker 1: less like ancient poetry and more like something a man
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  Speaker 1: wrote because he had actually seen it, perhaps because he
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  Speaker 1: had lived something close to it himself. A young man
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  Speaker 1: is walking alone at night, simple, Solomon calls him, not stupid,
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  Speaker 1: not wicked, simply young, simply at the stage of life
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  Speaker 1: where experience has not yet taught what only experience can teach,
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  Speaker 1: and the gap between knowing something is dangerous and truly
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  Speaker 1: feeling it is dangerous has not yet been closed by
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  Speaker 1: anything real enough to close it. He is walking down
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  Speaker 1: the wrong street at the wrong hour without fully understanding
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  Speaker 1: what that choice will cost. And Solomon has been building
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  Speaker 1: toward this scene since the very first verse of the book,
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  Speaker 1: because running through the entire open section of Proverbs Beneath
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  Speaker 1: all the instruction and the poetry and the practical council,
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  Speaker 1: there are two figures, two women, two voices, two invitations
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  Speaker 1: that could not be more different in what they actually offer.
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  Speaker 1: The first is Lady Wisdom. She does not stand in
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  Speaker 1: shadows or speak in whispers. She goes to the most
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  Speaker 1: public places she can find, the city gates, where merchants argue,
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  Speaker 1: and elders meet, and travelers come and go, the cross
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  Speaker 1: roads where every road meets every other road, the highest
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  Speaker 1: point of the city, and she lifts her voice and
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  Speaker 1: calls to the simple, to the young, to anyone who
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  Speaker 1: lacks understanding. She is not making her invitation difficult to find.
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  Speaker 1: She is standing in the most visible place possible, being
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  Speaker 1: as clear as language allows. And what is she offering
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  Speaker 1: everything Solomon spent his life searching for prudence, knowledge, discretion,
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  Speaker 1: the ability to see clearly in a world designed to confuse.
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  Speaker 1: She says in chapter eight, I love those who love me,
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  Speaker 1: and those who seek me diligently find me, not hidden,
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  Speaker 1: not reserved for the especially worthy, simply requiring that you
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  Speaker 1: want her more than you want what the other voice
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  Speaker 1: is offering. And the other voice is Lady Folly. She
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  Speaker 1: is also calling from a public place. She is also
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  Speaker 1: making an invitation, but look carefully at where she stands
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  Speaker 1: and who she is actually addressing. Lady Wisdom goes to
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  Speaker 1: the cross roads and calls to everyone passing through. Lady
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  Speaker 1: Folly stands at the door of her house and calls
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  Speaker 1: specifically to those who are already going somewhere else. She
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  Speaker 1: is not seeking people who are searching for her. She
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  Speaker 1: is intercepting people who are simply walking down the street.
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  Speaker 1: And her offer sounds on the surface remarkably like Wisdom's offer, Come, eat, drink,
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  Speaker 1: but with one difference that changes everything. Stolen water is sweet,
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  Speaker 1: she says, bread eaten in secret is pleasant. Stolen secret,
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  Speaker 1: Lady Wisdom offers a real meal, nourishment that will actually
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  Speaker 1: sustain you. Lady Folly offers something taken rather than given,
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  Speaker 1: something that must be hidden rather than celebrated, something that
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  Speaker 1: carries within its momentary sweetness, the seed of everything it
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  Speaker 1: will eventually cost. Solomon knew this from the inside. He
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  Speaker 1: had tasted the stolen water. He knew with the authority
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  Speaker 1: of lived experience, that the sweetness does not last, but
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  Speaker 1: the consequences do. There is a layer to this portrait
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  Speaker 1: that goes deeper than a warning against poor choices. In
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  Speaker 1: chapter eight, Lady Wisdom says something that has made readers
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  Speaker 1: pause for centuries. She says, the Lord possessed me at
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  Speaker 1: the beginning of his work, the first of his acts
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  Speaker 1: of old. I was beside him like a master craftsman,
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  Speaker 1: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him, always
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  Speaker 1: rejoicing in the inhabited world, and delighting in the children
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  Speaker 1: of man. She existed before the world was made. She
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  Speaker 1: was present at creation, and her delight is the human race.
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  Speaker 1: Solomon was reaching towards something in this passage, straining toward
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  Speaker 1: a fullness he could sense but not yet name. The
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  Speaker 1: Church would later recognize in these words an echo of
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  Speaker 1: the one John describes as the Word through whom all
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  Speaker 1: things were made, who was in the beginning with God.
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  Speaker 1: That recognition belongs to the end of our journey to night.
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  Speaker 1: For now, it is enough to know that the wisdom
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  Speaker 1: calling from the cross roads is ancient and personal, and
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  Speaker 1: has been looking for you for a very long time.
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  Speaker 1: To night. The question is simple, which voice have you
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  Speaker 1: been following? Not in some dramatic once for a lifetime
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  Speaker 1: decision in the small daily choices that accumulate without any
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  Speaker 1: one fully noticing into the actual direction of a life.
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  Speaker 1: Lady Wisdom is still at the cross roads. She has
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  Speaker 1: not grown tired. She has not moved to a less
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  Speaker 1: public location or lowered her voice to a discouraged whisper.
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  Speaker 1: She is still there, in the most visible place she
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  Speaker 1: can find, being as clear as she knows how to be.
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  Speaker 1: In the quiet of this hour, Let the urgency of
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  Speaker 1: the other voice fade, and listen for the one that
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  Speaker 1: has been waiting patiently for you to go still enough
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  Speaker 1: to hear her. She has been calling your name for
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  Speaker 1: a long time. Chapter three. Trust with all your heart.
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  Speaker 1: There is a moment in every life when the ground
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  Speaker 1: shifts without warning. You have been walking forward, confident in
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  Speaker 1: your direction, and then something changes. A diagnosis, a phone call,
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  Speaker 1: a relationship that quietly comes undone, a plan you built
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: carefully over years that simply stops working one ordinary Tuesday morning,
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  Speaker 1: and suddenly the world you thought you knew looks entirely different.
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  Speaker 1: The landmarks you were navigating by have disappeared, and you
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  Speaker 1: are standing in the middle of your own life, asking
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  Speaker 1: which way now. In that moment, something inside you speaks
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  Speaker 1: very quickly and very confidently, figure it out, Analyze the situation,
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  Speaker 1: make a plan. You have handled hard things before you
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  Speaker 1: can handle this. That voice is not your enemy. It
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: has served you well in many situations. But Solomon, writing
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: from the other side of a long and complicated life,
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  Speaker 1: wants to gently interrupt it. He writes what may be
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  Speaker 1: the most beloved sentence in the entire book of Proverbs.
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  Speaker 1: Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do
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  Speaker 1: not lean on your own understanding in all your ways.
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  Speaker 1: Acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths. Six
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  Speaker 1: words in and Solomon has already said something. The modern
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  Speaker 1: world finds genuinely uncomfortable with all your heart, Not with
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  Speaker 1: part of it, not with the portion left over after
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  Speaker 1: you have exhausted every other option, not as a last
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  Speaker 1: resort when your own strategies have finally run out, with
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  Speaker 1: all of it. Solomon understood exactly why this is so difficult.
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  Speaker 1: Because he had been given a mind of extraordinary quality.
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  Speaker 1: He could see patterns others missed. He could look at
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  Speaker 1: the most complicated human situation and find precisely where wisdom
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  Speaker 1: needed to be applied, and apply it and it would work.
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  Speaker 1: And that genuine God given gift became over time the
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  Speaker 1: very thing that pulled him away from the giver, because
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  Speaker 1: when you are very good at something, you start trusting
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  Speaker 1: your own goodness more than the source of it. Think
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  Speaker 1: about the moment Solomon received his wisdom. He was newly crowned, young,
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  Speaker 1: overwhelmed by the weight of what had been placed on
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  Speaker 1: his shoulders. God appeared to him at Gibeon in a
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  Speaker 1: dream and said, simply, ask what I shall give you
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  Speaker 1: an open offer from the creator of the universe, Solomon
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  Speaker 1: could have asked for anything. Instead, he asked for an
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  Speaker 1: understanding heart, a heart that could listen, a heart that
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  Speaker 1: could tell the difference between what is true and what
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  Speaker 1: only appears to be true. And God was so moved
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  Speaker 1: by this answer that he gave Solomon not only the
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  Speaker 1: wisdom he asked for, but everything he did not ask
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  Speaker 1: for as well. For a season, Solomon walked in it faithfully.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: His judgments were extraordinary. His kingdom entered a golden age.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: He built the temple, and when it was finished, the
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: glory of God filled that place so completely that the
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: priests could not stand to minister in it. That was
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: a man trusting in the Lord with all his heart,
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  Speaker 1: but the years passed, and the wisdom became his in
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  Speaker 1: his mind, his achievements became his, his decisions became his.
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  Speaker 1: And slowly, without drama, without any single conscious moment of departure,
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: he began to lean, not to fall, just to lean,
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: to put slightly more weight on his own understanding than
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: on God's. A degree here, a degree there, the way
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: a ship drifts off course, not in a sudden storm,
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: but in the gradual accumulation of small corrections made in
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: the wrong direction. Do not lean on your own understanding.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: The word lean in Hebrew is a physical word. It
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: carries the image of a person putting their weight on something,
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: depending on it to hold them up. And what Solomon
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: is warning against is not the use of your mind.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: He is not saying stop thinking, stop planning, stop applying
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: the intelligence God gave you. He is warning against the
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: posture of the soul that quietly decides I am the
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: final authority here. When my analysis and God's word point
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: in different directions, I will follow my analysis. That posture
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: leads somewhere dark, even when it dresses itself in the
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: language of sophisticated reasonable decision making. In all your ways,
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: acknowledge him The Hebrew word for acknowledge is yaddah, and
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: YadA does not mean to know a fact. It means
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: to know a person intimately in relationship, the way you
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: know some one whose history you share and whose presence
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: you carry with you even when they are not in
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: the room. When Solomon says acknowledge Him in all your ways,
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: he is not saying, mention God in your morning prayers
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: and then go run your day independently. He is saying,
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: bring God into every room of your life, life, every decision,
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: every fear, every ambition, every relationship, not just the Sunday rooms,
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: not just the crisis rooms, all of them. And the
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: promise attached to this is extraordinary in its simplicity. He
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: will make straight your paths, not necessarily easier, not necessarily
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: the paths you would have designed, but straight, clear, going
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: somewhere real and worth arriving at. We live in a
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: world that has built its entire architecture around self reliance.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: Know yourself, trust yourself, be true to yourself. The self
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: is the center, the reference point, the final authority. And
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: there is something true in this. God gave you a
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: mind and a heart and a will precisely because He
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: wanted you to use them, but he never designed them
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: to function without him. A compass works beautifully when it
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: is oriented to magnetic north. In the right orientation, it
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: is one of the most useful tools a traveler has.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: Remove that orientation, and the same instrument begins to lie,
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: and the more confidently you follow it, the more completely
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: lost you become. Solomon had the finest compass ever made,
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: and he let it drift off true north degree by
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: degree across the long prosperous years of his reign. He
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: is not writing to condemn you for your own drift.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: He has mapped the drift from the inside. He knows
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: every turn it takes. He is writing because he wants
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: you to find your way back to the orientation before
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: the drift takes you somewhere that takes years to leave. Tonight,
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: before sleep comes. Consider this, honestly, is there something you
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: are carrying entirely in your own hands right now? A
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: situation you have been analyzing and managing by the force
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: of your own understanding alone, and it is exhausting you
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: because no amount of intelligence was ever designed to carry
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: that particular weight. What would it feel like to loosen
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: the grip, to say I have done my thinking, and
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: now I am going to trust that there is a
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: wisdom greater than mine at work in this that is
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: not weakness, that is not giving up. That is the
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: bravest thing Solomon ever learned to do. He is holding
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: it out to you now, across three thousand years, with
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: the quiet urgency of a man who knows exactly what
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: it costs to let it go. Trust in the Lord
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: with all your heart, not some of it, all of it.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: He will not waste a single peace. Chapter four. Words
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: that build and words that burn. Think about the last
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: conversation that hurt you. Not a physical wound, the kind
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: that lives quietly in the chest and surfaces without warning
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: at two in the morning, the kind that sends you
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: back again and again, replaying a sentence someone said, word
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: by word, wondering why it still has the power to
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: reach you after all this time. Now, think about the
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: last conversation that healed you. A word spoken at exactly
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: the right moment, by exactly the right person, a sentence
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: so perfectly placed it felt less like something constructed and
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: more like something sent And you have carried it with
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: you ever since, taken it out in the dark moments,
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: and let it remind you of something true about yourself
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: that you had almost forgotten. Both of those experiences came
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: from the same source, the human mouth. Solomon was fascinated
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: by this. Read through chapters ten to fifteen of Proverbs,
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: and you will find that the subject he returns to
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: more consistently than almost any other is the power of
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: human speech. He approaches it from every angle, turns it
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: in the light, examine what it reveals from each direction,
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: and what he sees astonishes him. Death and life are
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: in the power of the tongue, he writes in chapter eighteen,
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: and those who love it will eat its fruits. Death
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: and life not in armies, not in economies, in the tongue,
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: the small, soft, entirely ordinary instrument of speech that every
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: human being carries with them every moment of every day.
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: Solomon begins with the ways words destroy. The lie is
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: the first and the one he returns to most consistently.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: A lying tongue hates those it hurts, he writes. Truthful
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: lips endure forever, but a lying tongue is but for
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: a moment. The lie feels powerful when you tell it.
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: It feels like protection or advantage, or the solving of
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: an immediate problem. But Solomon, watching human beings navigate their
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: lives across decades, says the life eye is always brief.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: The truth outlasts it every time without exception. But the
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: form of dishonesty he finds most dangerous is not the
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: dramatic falsehood. It is the flattering mouth, the word that
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: sounds like kindness but is actually a form of management.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: The compliment given not because it is true, but because
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: it will get you something. Whoever flatters his neighbor, he writes,
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: is spreading a net for his feet. The flatterer is
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: not your friend. The flatterer is using the language of
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: friendship to catch you. And then there is the word
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: spoken at the wrong time, the right thing said badly true,
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: but delivered before the other person was ready to receive it,
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: or in a tone that made the truth feel like
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: an attack, or in front of people who had no
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: business hearing it. Like cold snow in harvest time, Solomon writes,
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: is the faithful messenger who arrives in the wrong season.
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: Even accurate words poorly timed become a form of damage.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: But Solomon is not only cataloging destruction. He is pointing
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: at something extraordinary on the other side. A gentle answer
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: turns away wrath, he writes, But a harsh word stirs
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: up anger. Not a clever answer, not a victorious answer
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: that establishes your position beyond all doubt. A gentle one
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: the deliberate choice made in a fraction of a second
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: to lower your voice instead of raising it, to soften
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: rather than sharpen, to prioritize the person over the argument.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: This is a form of power that looks like weakness.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: It requires absorbing heat without returning heat, acting against every
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: instinct that says match force with force. But Solomon calls
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: it wisdom because he has watched it work. He has
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: seen a room on the verge of rupture diffused entirely
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: by a single person who chose to be gentle First.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: The tongue of the wise brings healing, he writes, Healing
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: from words. Solomon believed this as concretely as he believed anything,
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: that there are words which, when spoken at the right moment,
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: in the right tone, with genuine care behind them, do
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: something medicine cannot do and money cannot buy. They repair
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: something broken, they return something lost. They remind a person
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: of their worth at the exact moment that person had
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: forgotten it, and then, almost as a quieter side, he
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: writes something that carries its own devastating precision. Even a
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: fool who keeps silent is considered wise. When he closes
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: his lips, he is deemed intelligent. The relationship between speech
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: and silence runs through these chapters like a quiet current
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: beneath the surface. The wise person is not the person
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: who speaks most. They are the person who knows when
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: not to speak when words are many. Transg Agression is
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: not lacking volume without wisdom is a reliable path toward regret.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, Solomon writes, but
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: only in expressing his opinion. The fool is not the
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: person without information. The fool is the person so focused
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: on what they already think that no room remains for
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: actually understanding anything new. The conversation becomes performance rather than
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: genuine exchange. In our world, we have built entire systems
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: around this particular form of foolishness. Platforms that reward the
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: loudest voice, the sharpest, take the most provocation, architectures of
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: communication that make it easier than at any point in
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: human history to broadcast your opinions to thousands simultaneously, and
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: correspondingly harder to sit still long enough to think before
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: you speak. Solomon would have recognized the human tendency immediately,
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: even without recognize the technology, the deep and ancient pull
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: toward being heard over being wise, and he would say
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: across thirty centuries what he wrote for his son, be
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: quick to listen, be slow to speak. The power in
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: your mouth is real. Treat it with the reverence that
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: real power requires. Because somewhere in your life right now,
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: there is a person who needs a word of genuine
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: kindness spoken without any hidden agenda. There is a conflict
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: that a gentle answer could redirect before it causes damage
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: that takes years to repair. There is a wound that
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: has been waiting quietly and patiently for the word that heals.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: That word is available to you. It lives in your
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: mouth right now. Think of one thing you could say
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: to morrow that builds instead of burns. You do not
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: need eloquence, You do not need the precision of a king.
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: You only need to be willing to be gentle first.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: Carry that thought with you as sleep comes. Chapter five,
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: The Ant and the King of All the things a
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: man of Solomon's position could have said about work, this
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: may be the most surprising. He had commanded armies. He
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: had managed the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem, a
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: project that employed thirty thousand laborers in Lebanon alone, eighty
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: thousand stonecutters in the hills, and seventy thousand carriers. He
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: had administered one of the most sophisticated economies in the
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: ancient Near East. He understood supply chains and large human
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: systems at a level few people in history have matched.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: And when he sat down to write wisdom about work
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: and diligence, the example he chose was a creature you
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: could crush beneath your heel without noticing. Go to the Ant,
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: he writes in chapter six, consider her ways and be wise.
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: He means it because the Ant Solomon had observed with
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: the attention of a man who spent his life watching
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: how things actually work, rather than how they appear to work.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: The Ant demonstrates three qualities that all the sophistication in
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: the world cannot manufacture if the underlying character is missing.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: The first quality is self governance without having any chief
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: officer or ruler. He writes the ant does not need
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: to be managed. She does not require external motivation or
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: constant supervision or the threat of consequences for underperformance. She
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: works because the work needs to be done, because she understands,
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: at the level of her whole small being, that there
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: is a direct and unbreakable connection between to day's effort
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: and tomorrow's survival. This is rarer than it sounds for
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: most people. If we are honest, the primary engine of
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: most of what we do is external pressure. We work
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: because we have to, because someone is watching, because the
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: consequences of not working are real and immediate. Solomon is
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: not dismissing those pressures. They exist and they matter, but
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: he is pointing at something beneath them, a relationship with
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: work that does not depend on external pressure to sustain it.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: The ability to show up faithfully even when no one
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: is watching and the consequences are not immediate, because you
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: understand what you are building and you care about the outcome.
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: That quality cannot be installed from the outside. It has
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: to grow from the inside, from a genuine understanding of purpose,
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: from knowing, not just intellectually, but in the bones, why
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: the work matters. The second quality is preparation. She prepares
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: her bread in summer. Solomon writes, Summer is the season
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: of abundance, the season when gathering is easy and resources
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: are plentiful. And the ant, without a calendar or a
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: plan written down anywhere, knows that the ease of this
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: season does not guarantee the ease of the next one.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: So she works in summer precisely because she is thinking
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: about winter. The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance,
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: Solomon writes. Elsewhere, wisdom looks ahead with clear eyed attention
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: to the rhythms of the world. Neither obsessing over tomorrow
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: nor pretending to morrow does not exist. The third quality
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: is timing, and gathers her food in harvest. Harvest is
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: a specific window, a moment when the work of gathering
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: must happen now or the opportunity closes. The ant does
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: not work randomly. She works in alignment with the season
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: she is actually in, neither a head of it nor
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: behind it, precisely within it. Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, there
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: is a time for every matter under heaven. Wisdom is
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: not only knowing what to do, It is knowing when Now.
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: Solomon sets this portrait of the ant against one of
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: the most gently precise character studies in ancient literature, the
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: Portrait of the Sluggard. How long will you lie there?
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: He writes, A little sleep, a little slumber, a little
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: upon you like a robber, and want, like an armed man,
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: a little sleep, a little slumber. Not dramatic, defiant laziness,
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: the incremental postponement of effort, the small delay, the just
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: a few more minutes that becomes just a few more hours,
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: that becomes over, the long passage of seasons, just a
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: few more years, until one day you look up and
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: the harvest is over, and the winter is at the door.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: And then Solomon adds an observation so precise it is
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: almost tender in its accuracy. The sluggard says, there is
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: a lion outside. I shall be killed in the streets.
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: He is not refused to work. He has discovered a
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: reason why working is currently impossible. The reason is not
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: entirely unreasonable on its face. There could be a lion.
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: You cannot rule it out. And so he stays inside.
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: The season passes, The harvest waits for a man who
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: is waiting for a lion that almost certainly is not there.
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: How many of us have our own lions, the fear
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: that keeps us from starting the thing we know we
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: need to start. The imagined obstacle so thoroughly examined it
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: has grown from a manageable difficulty into an impassable one.
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: The what if that stands at the door of every
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: forward movement and says, but have you fully considered everything
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: that could go wrong? Solomon looks at the sluggard not
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: with contempt, but with the specific sadness of some one
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: who can see exactly what is happening and knows it
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: does not have to end this way. But here night
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: Psalms wants to say something directly to a different kind
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: of exhaustion, entirely because there is a weariness that has
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: nothing to do with avoidance. There is the tiredness of
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: the person who has been working without ceasing for years
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: and has quietly forgotten why, the person who measures their
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: worth entirely by their output, who cannot stop without feeling
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: like they are falling behind, who lies awake not because
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: they are avoiding the work, but because the work has
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: taken everything and left nothing behind. To that person, Solomon
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: writes something different. Entirely. It is in vain that you
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: rise up early and go late to rest, eating the
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: bread of anxious toil. For he gives sleep to his beloved.
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: He gives sleep to his beloved, not as a reward
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: for sufficient achievement, not as compensation earned by a day's
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: work well enough done, as a gift, as the expression
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: of a love that does not require you to to
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: earn your rest before you are permitted to receive it.
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: The ant works in summer, but even the ant rests
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: in winter. The rhythm of wisdom holds both the faithfulness
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: to work in the season that calls for work, and
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: the willingness to rest genuinely in the season that calls
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: for rest, without guilt, without the nagging sense that you
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: have not yet earned the right to stop. You know
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: which season you are in. To night, and to the
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: one whose hands are folded not in avoidance, but in
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: genuine weariness. Solomon does not say work harder. He says,
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: you are beloved. This rest is a gift. Receive it
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: without apology. The harvest will wait for you. The morning
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: will bring its own work, and you will meet it.
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: But that is the morning's concern. To night you are held.
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: That is enough. Chapter six, Silver and Dust. Let us
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: begin with a number six hundred and sixty six talents
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: of gold every single year. That was Solomon's annual income.
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: According to the ancient records. One talent of gold weighed
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: approximately seventy five pounds in the ancient world. The total
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: arrives at a figure so large it becomes almost abstract,
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: nearly fifty thousand pounds of gold flowing into Jerusalem every twelvemonths,
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: before you count the revenue from merchants and traders, and
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: the tribute of the kings of Arabia and the governors
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: of the surrounding lands. He also had a fleet of
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: ships sailing from the port of Ezion Geber on the
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: Red Sea, returning every three years laden with gold and
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: silver and ivory and rare animals from distant lands. His
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: throne was ivory overlaid with the finest gold. Silver. The
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: text tells us was considered of little value in Jerusalem
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: in Solomon's day because gold was so abundant. And this
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: man sat down and wrote more about the dangers of
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: wealth than almost any other subject in Proverbs. That is
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: worth sitting with for a moment, because Solomon did not
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: write about money from a comfortable theoretical distance. He wrote
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: about it from the inside, from the place of a
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: man who had held every form of wealth the ancient
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: world could produce, and had learned with the particular clarity
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: that only proximity gives exactly what money can do and
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: exactly what it cannot. And what it cannot do, he discovered,
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: is the thing we most desperately want it to do.
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: We want money to make us safe, to quiet the
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: persistent anxiety that lives beneath the surface of a human life,
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: the fear that things will fall apart, that we will
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: not have enough, that we are more vulnerable than we
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: want to admit. We want wealth to stand between us
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: and the fragility of being human in an uncertain world. Solomon,
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: from his golden throne says gently and clearly, it cannot
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: do that. Whoever trusts in his riches will fall, he
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: writes in chapter eleven. But the righteous will flourish like
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: a green leaf. Trusts in his riches. That is the
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: precise diagnosis. Not possesses riches, not enjoys riches, trusts in them,
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: builds his sense of security on the foundation of what
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: he owns looks to his wealth to answer the question
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: that every human heart keeps asking in its most honest moments,
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: Am I going to be all right? And wealth keeps answering, yes,
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: look at all of this. Of course you are going
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: to be all right. But that answer is borrowed. It
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: depends on the wealth remaining, and wealth, by its nature,
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: does not remain forever. Do not toil to acquire wealth,
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: Solomon writes, when your eyes light on it, it is gone.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: For suddenly it sprouts wings, flying like an eagle to heaven.
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: The image is almost gentle in its precision. You look
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: at your wealth, and it is there. You look away,
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: and it has grown wings and left. Markets shift, health fails,
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: circumstances change. The fortune that looked so permanent in the
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: season of abundance reveals itself in the season of loss
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: to have been built on something far less stable than
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: it appeared. This does not mean money is evil. Solomon
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: is careful here, and we should be careful too. He
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: acknowledges plainly that wealth has genuine protective power. It creates options,
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: it provides buffers. It makes certain difficulties manageable that would
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: otherwise be crushing. There is nothing spiritually superior about poverty,
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: and Solomon does not pretend otherwise. But there is a
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: crucial difference between acknowledging what money can do and trusting
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: it to do what only God can do. He traces
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: five patterns in the human relationship with wealth, and each
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: one deserves a moment of honest attention. The first pattern
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: is honesty in the getting of it. A false balance
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: is an abomination to the Lord, he writes, but a
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: just weight is his delight. Wealth gained hastily will dwindle,
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: but whoever gathers little by little will increase it. The
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: short cuts that seem to accelerate accumulation almost always contain
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: a hidden cost that arrives later than you expect and
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: costs more than you calculated. The ethical corner cut, the
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: relationship traded for a financial advantage, the reputation spent for
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: a short term gain. The math of dishonest wealth does
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: not add up the way it appears to in the
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: moment of the decision. The second pattern is generosity. One
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: gives freely, yet grows all the richer, Solomon writes, Another
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: withholds what he should give, and only suffers want. This
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: run against every instinct of accumulation, But Solomon has watched
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: it long enough to say it with confidence. The life
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: that remains open and giving stays richer in every way
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: that ultimately matters than the life that closes around what
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: it has and holds on. Whoever is generous to the poor,
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: lends to the Lord, he writes, simply, and he will
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: repay him for his deed. The poor are not an
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: abstraction in proverbs. They are a test of character. How
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: you treat the person who has nothing to offer you
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: in return reveals more about your actual values than any
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: stated belief. The third pattern is contentment. Better is a
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: and trouble with it. Better is a dinner of herbs,
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: where love is than a fattened ox, and hatred with
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: it better a little with the fear of the Lord.
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: Solomon is making a claim about hierarchy, about what actually matters.
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: When the accounting is for finally done, A small life
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: lived with integrity and genuine love and real peace is
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: richer in every way that counts at the end than
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: a large life built on wealth that cost you your
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: relationships and your rest, and the quiet alignment between who
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: you are and who you are trying to appear to be.
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: The fourth pattern is the reality of debt. The borrower
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: is the slave of the lender. He writes, not a
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: metaphor an observation. Debt trades future freedom for present resource.
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: Sometimes that trade is wise, Often it costs more than
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: the interest rate suggests, in ways that do not appear
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: on any statement. The fifth pattern is the deepest. It
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: is the pattern of perspective. Better is a little with
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: righteousness than great revenues withinjustice, not as a resigned consolation,
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: as a genuine first preference, as the actual position of
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: a person who has un understood what they are truly
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: choosing between when they face that choice. Because in the end,
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: in the very end, every treasure is dust. Solomon filled
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: his storehouses with more gold than any king before him.
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: He denied himself nothing his eyes desired. He built and planted,
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: and gathered and accumulated, and then he wrote about all
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: of it in Ecclesiastes. Then I considered all that my
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: hands had done, and the toil I had expended in
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: doing it, And behold, all was vanity and a striving
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: after wind. He is not saying the work was worthless.
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: He is saying that when accumulation becomes the point, when
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: more is always the answer, and enough is a question
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: you never allow yourself to ask, you arrive at the
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: end with full hands and a hollow place at the
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: center where peace was supposed to live. And that hollow place,
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: regardless of what surrounds it, is a poverty that silver
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: cannot touch. Before sleep comes to night, sit honestly with
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: one question. Is there a fear beneath your financial anxiety
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: that goes deeper than the numbers, a fear that if
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: the resources disappeared, something essential about your safety would disappear
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: with them. Solomon carried that fear for decades and tried
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: to answer it with gold. He built his security higher
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: and wider and more magnificent than any king before him.
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: And then he sat alone in a courtyard at midnight
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: and picked up a pen, because the only thing that
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: had ever actually answered the fear was the thing he
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: had asked for as a young king kneeling at Gibeon.
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: Not wealth, a listening heart, the wisdom that comes from
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: the fear of the Lord, the trust that says, the
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: one who made me will keep me what I have
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: been given is enough to do the work I have
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: been given to do. That was the richest thing Solomon
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: ever owned, and it cost him nothing but the willingness
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: to receive it. The silver is dust. The gold will
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: grow its wings and fly. But you are not dust,
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: and you are not flying away. You are here and
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: here to night. You are held by hands that own
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: everything and lose nothing. That is a foundation worth resting on.
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: Chapter seven, A Father's Letter, A Mother's Tears. There is
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: a conversation that happens in the middle of the night
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: that no one else hears. It happens in the bedrooms
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: of parents who lie awake long after the house has
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: gone quiet, listening to the sound of children breathing down
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: the hall, carrying in their chests a weight that has
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: no precise name. It is not fear exactly, though fear
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: is threaded through it. It is not grief exactly, though
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: grief lives somewhere inside it. It is the particular ache
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: of loving someone so completely and so helplessly, someone whose
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: life you cannot live for them, whose choices you cannot
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: make for them, whose future you cannot control, no matter
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: how much you would give to be able to Solomon
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: knew this ache. He had children of his own, and
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: he had a father whose story was one of the
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: most complicated in all of human history. David, King of Israel,
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: shepherd boy turned warrior turned monarch, the man who killed
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: Goliath and wrote the twenty third Psalm and danced before
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: the ark of God with such unself conscious joy that
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: his wife was embarrassed by him, the man described in
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: scripture as a man after God's own heart. That title
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: does not mean David was without failure. It means that,
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: beneath all his failures, beneath the worst of what he
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: did and the damage it caused, the fundamental orientation of
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: his heart kept returning to God, not perfectly, not without
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: enormous cost, but returning again and again, across a lifetime
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: of stumbling, turning back toward the one he had turned
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: away from. And he also committed adultery with Bathsheba and
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: arranged the murder of her husband to cover it up.
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: His family was torn apart by violence and betrayal in
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: the generations that followed. His son Absalom led a rebellion
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: against him and was killed in it, and David mourned
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: him with one of the most heart breaking sentences in
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: the entire Bible. O, my son Absalom, My son, my son, Absalom,
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: would I had died instead of you? This is the
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: father Solomon grew up watching, magnificent and broken, capable of
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: extraordinary devotion and extraordinary damage, sometimes within the same season
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: of life. A father who left his son a kingdom
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: of remarkable promise and a family legacy of complicated pain.
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: What do you pass on to your children? What survives
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: the distance between who you intend to be and who
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: you actually are. Solomon does not avoid this question. He
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: writes throughout Proverbs in the voice of a father to
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: a son, and what he writes carries the full weight
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: of his own inheritance, the wisdom he received, the mistakes
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: he witnessed, the things he wished had been said to
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: him more clearly and more often when he was the
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: one standing at the beginning of the road. He writes
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: in chapter one, here, my son, your father's instruction and forsake,
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: not your mother's teaching. For they are a graceful garland
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: for your head and pendance for your neck. Two parents,
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: two voices, both honored, both necessary, and The first thing
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: Solomon says about parenting woven through the opening chapters with
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: the persistence of someone who has understood its importance. The
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: hard way is simply this talk to your children, not
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: the functional communication of daily logistics. Not finish your home work,
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: dinner is ready, be home by ten. The intentional directional
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: values laden conversation that says, here is what I believe
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: about the world. Here is what I have learned. Here
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: is what I want you to know about who you
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: are and what you are for. He writes in chapter four,
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: when I was a son, with my father tender, the
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: only one in the sight of my mother, he taught
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: me and said to me, let your heart hold fast
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: my words, keep my commandments, and live. He is quoting David.
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: His father's voice, preserved in his memory across all the years,
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: forms the foundation of the wisdom he is now passing
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: to his own son. The chain of transmission is explicit
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: David to Solomon, Solomon to his son, generation to generation,
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: the words moving through time, the way water finds its
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: way through the landscape, patient and persistent, and going somewhere
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: even when the path is not straight. But Solomon goes further.
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: He says something more specific about what parents are actually
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: transmitting when they speak, train up a child in the
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: way he should go, he writes in chapter twenty two,
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: even when he is old, he will not depart from it.
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: This verse has been quoted in parenting books and printed
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: on nursery walls for centuries, almost always understood as a
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: simple promise. Raise your child correctly, and the outcome is guaranteed.
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: But the Hebrew carries something more demanding than a guarantee.
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: The phrase translated as in the way he should go
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: is literally according to his way, according to his bent.
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: The word is derrick, and it carries the sense of
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: the particular path that belongs to a specific individual, not
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: a generic path that works equally well for every child.
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: The particular calling, the particular shape, the particular giftedness of
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: this specific soul standing before you. What Solomon is actually
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: saying to parents is this, pay attention to who your
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: child actually is, not who would be most convenient for
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: your plans, not who would best validate your choices by
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: making the same ones who they actually are, their natural inclinations,
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: the things that bring them genuinely alive, the particular bent
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: that was written into them before you ever held them.
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: Train them, not toward your version of their best life,
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: but toward the fullest expression of the life already forming
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: within them. This requires parents to loosen something that is
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: very difficult to loosen, the instinct to reproduce themselves in
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: their children, the quiet hope beneath the genuine love that
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: the child will become the confirmation of the choices the
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: parent made. Solomon is saying, look at your child, really,
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: look who is this person becoming? And ask not how
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: do I shape them into what I want? But how
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: do I help them grow most fully into what they
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: already are. He also writes about discipline, and hear his
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: words carry the weight of centuries of both faithful application
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: and painful misuse. Whoever spares the rod hates his son,
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: he writes, but he who loves him is diligent to
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: discipline him. The Hebrew word for rod is shabet, and
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: shabet throughout the Old Testament is the word for a
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: shepherd's staff, the same staff David described in the twenty
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: third Psalm when he wrote, your rod and your staff
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: they comfort me. The shepherd's staff was not primarily an
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: instrument of punishment. It was an instrument of guidance, used
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: to redirect a wandering sheep, to hold a lost animal
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: back from a dangerous edge, to provide a boundary that
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: kept the flock moving together in the right direction. When
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: Solomon writes about the rod of discipline, he is writing
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: about the parental commitment to provide boundaries. To say no
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: when no is the loving answer to redirect when redirection
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: is needed, to love a child enough to hold them accountable,
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: even when accountability is uncomfortable for every one in the room.
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: The parent who never says no is not being kind.
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: They are avoiding the discomfort of the present moment at
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: the expense of the formation of the future person. But
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: discipline without love is not wisdom, It is power, and
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: those two things in the hands of a parent produce
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: very different children over time. The deepest thing Solomon says
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: about parenting is also the hardest thing to hear. The
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: righteous who walks in his integrity blest are his children
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: after him. The blessing flows from integrity, from the parent
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: doing their own work, not asking their children to become
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: what they themselves are not willing to become. You cannot
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: give what you do not have. You cannot model a
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: genuine relationship with God while maintaining only a performance of one.
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: You cannot teach your children to trust what you, yourself
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: are afraid to trust. You cannot train them toward wisdom
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: while living in the private rooms of your own life,
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: in the house of folly. David failed here profoundly and
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: at great cost to the people who loved him. Solomon
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: is not excusing this. He is also not drowning in it.
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: He holds up the truth of what that failure cost
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: as a call to every parent listening tonight, take seriously
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: the sacred weight of the lives in your care, not
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: because perfection is possible, but because faithfulness is. And here
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: is the grace that Solomon's own story carries. David failed profoundly,
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: and yet something real was transmitted, something worth having made
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: it through the wreckage, a love of wisdom, a love
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: of God, a hunger for something deeper than mere power
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: and comfort. It arrived in Solomon impert perfectly. Solomon would
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: eventually lose much of it himself, but it arrived. The
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: transmission of wisdom from one generation to the next has
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: never depended on the perfection of the transmitter. It has
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: depended on the faithfulness, on the willingness to keep trying
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: to keep talking, to keep showing up, to keep being
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: honest about your own failures while still pointing towards something
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: better than those failures. To say to your children, not
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: I have arrived, but I am still on the road,
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: and I want you to walk it with me, he writes.
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: The father of the righteous will greatly rejoice. He who
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: fathers a wise son will be glad in him. There
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: is joy available at the end of this not the anxious,
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: conditional joy that depends on your children making every right choice,
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: The deep, quiet joy of a parent who gave their
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: best and trusted the rest, who said what needed to
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: be said, and lived what they were able to live,
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: and loved with open hands when open hands were the
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: hardest thing to offer. That joy is still available to you.
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: It begins in the decision made to night, in the
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: quiet of this house, to take seriously the weight of
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: what you are building in the lives of the people
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: sleeping down the hall, not with guilt, not with the
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: crushing pressure of perfectionism, with love, with wisdom, with the
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: fear of the Lord. That is the beginning of everything
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: worth passing on. Somewhere beyond the palace walls, Solomon sets
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: down his pen for a moment and listens, And in
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: a thousand houses, across a thousand cities, across a thousand years,
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: a mother is awake in the dark, the way mothers
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: have always been awake in the dark, holding the weight
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: of a child. She loves past the point where love
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: alone feels sufficient. Her tears are not wasted, they never
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: have been. They are are among the most honest prayers
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: ever offered. The children are in better hands than yours tonight,
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: and that is not a small thing to know before
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: you sleep. Chapter eight, The Mystery of Agur. There is
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: a man in the Book of Proverbs whose name appears
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: exactly once in all of scripture. No royal title, no
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: genealogy tracing his lineage through honorable generations, no list of
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: accomplishments or administrative achievements. Just a name, Agur, son of Jake,
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: And beside that name, a collection of words so strange
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: and so honest that scholars across centuries have been unable
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: to entirely agree on what to make of them. We
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: do not know who Agur was. Some scholars have suggested
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: his name carries the echoes of an Arabic or Ishmaelite origin,
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: a voice from outside the covenant people of Israel, that
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: somehow found its way into the sacred text. We do
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: not know when he lived. We do not know who
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: preserved his words, or why the editors of Proverbs placed
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: them here in chapter thirty, just before the magnificent final
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: movement of the book. What we know is what he wrote,
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: and what he wrote begins not with wisdom but with
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: its absence. Surely I am too stupid to be a man,
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: he says, I have not the understanding of a man.
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: I have not learned wisdom, nor have I knowledge of
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: the Holy One. Stop there. This is chapter thirty of
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: a book called Proverbs, a book that has spent twenty
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: nine chapters teaching and instructing and illuminating the path of
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: wisdom with extraordinary care. And now a man steps forward
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: and opens with the declaration that he is too stupid
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: to be a man. This is not the performance of
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: false humility. It is not the social convention of self
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: deprecation from someone who actually thinks quite well of himself.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: Read the verses that follow, and you feel the weight
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: of genuine reckoning. A man who has looked honestly at
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: the distance between what he knows and what there is
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: to know, and has been undone by it, not crushed,
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: undoon opened. Who has ascended to heaven and come down?
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: He asks, who has gathered the wind in his fists,
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: who has wrapped up the waters in a garment? Who
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: has established all the ends of the earth. What is
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: his name? And what is his son's name? Surely you know,
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: question after question, each pointing at the incomprehensible vastness of
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: what lies beyond human reach, the movements of weather, the
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: boundaries of ocean, the architecture of the cosmos, the name
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: of the one who made it all. Surely you know.
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: The tone is not bitter, It is not despairing. It
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: is almost wry, as if Argur is gently puncturing the
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: quiet pride of any one who is been moving through
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: twenty nine chapters of Proverbs, feeling quite pleased with how
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: much wisdom they have accumulated. He is saying, sit down
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: for a moment, let me show you the view from
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: where I am standing. There is an ancient tradition among
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: some scholars and rabbis suggesting that Solomon himself wrote or
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: compiled the words of Argur, that this strange chapter is
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: Solomon's voice from the far side of his journey, saying
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: under a different name what he could not quite say
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: under his own. Whether or not that tradition reflects historical reality,
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: it carries a spiritual resonance worth holding. Because the Solomon
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: of the palace courtyard, the old King writing in the
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: lamp lit dark, had arrived somewhere close to Argur's position.
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: He had held more wisdom than almost any human being
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: in history. He had also watched its slip through his
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: fingers in ways he still did not fully understand. And
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: what remained after every after the wealth and the glory
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: and the long wandering through Ecclesiastes, was something very close
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: to what Argur describes, a creature genuinely humbled before a
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: creator who is genuinely incomprehensible, a soul that has stopped
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: pretending to more answers than it actually possesses. And from
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: that place of honest smallness, Argur makes the most unusual
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: prayer in the Book of Proverbs. Two things I ask
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: of you, Deny them not to me before I die.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: Remove far from me falsehood and lying. Give me neither
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: needful for me. Lest I be full and deny you,
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: and say who is the Lord? Or lest I be
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: poor and steal and profane the name of my God.
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: Two requests, and neither of them is what you would
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: expect from a man writing in a book about wisdom
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: and the good life. The first request is for honesty,
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: not success, not life long life, or influence or a
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: legacy that outlasts him. Honesty the freedom from the exhausting
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: work of maintaining a version of yourself that is not
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: entirely true. The ability to live without deception toward others
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: and toward himself. This request is a confession. Agoua knows
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: his own capacity for self deception. He has seen in
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: himself the places where the truth is uncomfortable enough that
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: the lie becomes quietly attractive, and he wants to be
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: far from that. He wants the inside of his life
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: and the outside of his life to be the same thing.
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: The second request is for enough, not abundance, not security,
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: not the financial cushion that allows you to stop worrying
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: about money, just enough, the daily portion, the food that
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: meets to day's need without solving tomorrow's anxiety. And he
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: gives his reasons with a candor that is rare even
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: in honest writing. If I have too much, I might
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: forget God. If I have too little, I might steal
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: and dishonor God. So give me the middle, the portion
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: that keeps my soul honest, the amount that keeps me
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: dependent enough to remember who I am and whose I am.
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: This prayer understands something about human nature that our spiritual
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: language tends to avoid. It understands that prosperity is a
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: genuine spiritual danger, not only a blessing. That the full
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: stomach very easily forgets the hand that filled it, that
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: the comfortable life very naturally stops looking upward because everything
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: it seems to need appears available at ground level. And
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: it equally understands that desperation carries its own dangers, that
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: a person pressed hard enough against genuine need will make
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: choices they would never make in a season of sufficiency.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: So Agur asks for the middle. And in asking for
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: the middle, he demonstrates something that all twenty nine previous
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: chapters have been building toward, without quite naming it. This
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: clearly he demonstrates genuine self knowledge, not the self knowledge
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: of a personality profile, the self knowledge of a person
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: who has looked honestly at their own particular ways of
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: going wrong, and has brought that portrait before God and said,
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: here is where I am likely to stumble. Please account
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: for that in what you give me. This is wisdom,
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: not the wisdom of knowing many things, the wisdom of
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: knowing yourself well enough to know what you need, and
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: equally important, what you cannot safely be trusted with. Argur
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: continues with observations in the literary form called numerical sayings.
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: Three things that are never satisfied, four things that say
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: it is not enough, Three things too wonderful to understand.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: Among the things he finds too wonderful, he lists the
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: way of an eagle in the sky, the way of
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: a serpent on a rock, the way of a ship
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: in the heart of the sea, the way of a
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: man with a woman, four movements that pass through their
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: environments without leaving a trace. The eagle rises and the
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: sky closes behind it. The serpent crosses the stone and
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: leaves no mark. The ship passes, and the water fills
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: the place where the hull had been. The mystery of
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: what moves between two people in love, something real and
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: transforming and entirely beyond the reach of precise explanation. Agur
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: is not frustrated by these mysteries. He is not reaching
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: for an explanation that will finally resolve them into manageable categories.
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: He is pointing at the places where the world exceeds
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: our ability to account for it, and he is saying
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: that is not a problem, that is a gift, because
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: the alternative to a world that exceeds our understanding is
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: a world small enough to be fully contained by it.
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: And a world that small would be a world without wonder,
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: a world without the particular freedom that comes from standing
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: before something so much larger than yourself that your own
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: smallness becomes not a source of shame but a source
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: of relief. You were never supposed to understand everything. The
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: fact that you do not is not a failure of
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: your intelligence. It is a feature of your humanity. We
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: live in a moment that has very little patience for
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: not knowing. The architecture of the information age is built
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: on the assumption that uncertainty is a temporary condition, pending
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: the next search, the next study, the next expert opinion.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: The correct response to mystery our era insists is further research.
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: We have gained an enormous amount from this orientation, real goods,
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: real gifts. But we have also lost the capacity to
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: sit quietly before what we do not understand and let
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: it enlarge us rather than frustrate us. We have lost
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: the willingness to say I do not know as a
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: complete and sufficient answer. We have lost Agur's gift, the
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: ability to look at the eagle and the serpent and
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: the ship and the mystery of human love and say
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: not let me find the explanation. But this is too
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: wonderful for me, too wonderful, not too confusing, too wonderful.
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: There is something in your life right now that you
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: have been trying to understand, past the point where understanding
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: is available, A situation turned over and over in the mind,
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: examined from every angle, analyzed to exhaustion, looking for the
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: explanation that will finally make it settle into sense. What if,
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: just for to night, you let it be too wonderful
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: for you, not giving up on it, not pretending it
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: does not matter, simply releasing it for these hours of darkness,
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: into the hands of the one whose name Agur asked about,
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: and whose understanding exceeds everything we could bring to bear
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: on any question we will ever face. The eagle flies,
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: the ship sails, the stars hold their courses without your assistance,
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: and you are held by the same hands that hold
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: all of it. Let that be enough for to night.
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: It is more than enough. It always has been. Chapter nine,
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: a mother's words to a king. There is a voice
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: in the Book of Proverbs that we almost missed. We
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: have heard Solomon's voice writing for his son in the
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: Lamplet courtyard. We have heard Lady Wisdom calling from the
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: city gates. We have heard Agur's quiet and honest confession
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: of not knowing. And now, at the very threshold of
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: the final chapter, a different voice speaks, a woman's voice,
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: the words of King Lemuel. The text says simply an
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: oracle that his mother taught him. No ceremony, no elaborate framing.
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: A king and the woman who taught him. We do
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: not know who Lemuel was. The name appears only here
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: in all of scripture. Whether Lemuel is a proper name
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: or a symbolic title meaning devoted to God, is a
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: question scholars have discussed for centuries without resolution. Some ancient
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: traditions identified him with Solomon himself, suggesting these are the
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: words of Bathsheba to her son. Others see him as
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: a different king entirely, perhaps from a neighboring nation, whose
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: mother's wisdom was preserved and included because its truth was
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: too valuable to leave outside the text. What we know
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: with certainty is this, in a book written predominantly by men,
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: in a world where women's voices were rarely preserved in
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: official records, this mother's teaching was considered important enough to include,
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: important enough to place at the threshold of the final chapter,
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: important enough that the last word on wisdom before the
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: book gives way to its closing poem, is spoken through
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: her son by a woman who loved him enough to
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: tell him the truth before the crown was placed on
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: his head. That matters. It mattered then, in ways that
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: were probably not fully recognized. It matters now. She begins
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: with an intimacy that cuts through all the formality of
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: the ancient world. What are you doing, my son? What
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: are you doing, son of my womb? What are you doing,
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: son of my vows, Son of my womb, Son of
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: my vows. She is not addressing a title. She is
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: not speaking to a crown or a throne. Or a
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: political office. She is speaking to the person she carried
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: in her own body, the person she made promises to
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: God about before he was born, the person she held
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: when he was entirely dependent on her arms to keep
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: him from falling. And she is asking, with the directness
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: that only a mother can summon without flinching. What are
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: you doing? Not the surface question about logistics or health
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: or whereabouts, the deeper question about direction, about who you
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: are becoming in the private decisions no one else sees
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: about whether the person walking toward the throne is the
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: person she raised him to be. What are you doing,
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: my son? She delivers three pieces of counsel. They are
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: not gentle suggestions. They are warnings, the kind that come
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: from a woman who has watched the world long enough
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: to know exactly how kings fall, and who loves her
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: son too much to stay silent. The first warning is
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: about women. Do not give your strength to women, She says,
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: your ways to those who destroy kings. Before we hear
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: this wrong, let us hear it right. She is not
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: speaking against women. She is not making a broad, dismissive
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: statement about half of humanity. She is warning her son
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: about a specific and ancient pattern, the relationship built not
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: on genuine love and mutual honor, but on access to power.
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: The intimacy that flatters without truly caring, that uses the
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: language of devotion to reach what lies behind, the person,
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: that takes without giving and leaves the king emptied of
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: the very things that made him worth knowing. She is
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: warning him about the pattern that had brought Solomon, the
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: greatest king in Israel's history, to building altars to foreign
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: gods on the hills of Jerusalem, not through one dramatic
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: moment of rebellion, but through the slow accumulated weight of
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: relationships that were never truly about him. Your strength is real,
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: she is saying to her son, and there are people
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: in this world who want that strength without wanting. You
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: learn to tell the difference before the difference costs you
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: everything you were given to protect. The second warning is
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: about drink. It is not for kings to drink wine,
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: she says, lest they drink and forget what has been
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: decreed and pervert the justice of all the afflicted. A
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: king who drinks forgets, not just in the moment of intoxication.
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: He forgets the commitments he made in clearer hours. He
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: forgets the standards he said he would uphold. He forgets
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: the people depending on him to see their situation clearly
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: and render a verdict that actually reflects what is true
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: and who suffers most. When a king forgets the afflicted,
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: the widow with her case, the laborer who has been cheated,
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: the orphan who has been dispossessed, the people at the
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: bottom of every social order, whose only protection against the
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: powerful is a leader clear eyed enough to see them.
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: She is making a connection that every person who carries
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: any form of authority needs to hear. What you do
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: in the private shapes who you are in the public ones.
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: The clarity of your judgment, your capacity to see the
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: person in front of you as a person rather than
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: a problem, depends on what you are building or eroding
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: in the hours when no one is keeping score. The
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: private life and the public life are not separate compartments.
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: They are expressions of the same soul. What erodes quietly
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: in private eventually shows itself publicly, usually at the worst
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: possible moment, usually at the greatest possible cost to the
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: people who needed it to hold. The third council is
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: the one that carries the whole passage into something larger
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: than a set of warnings. Open your mouth for the mute,
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: she says, for the rights of all who are destitute,
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: Open your mouth, judge righteously defend the poor and needy.
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: Speak for the ones who cannot speak for themselves. After
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: two warnings about what a king must not do, she
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: arrives at what he must do, not as one option
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: among several, as the point, the actual purpose of the crown,
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: the whole reason the power exists, not the glory, not
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: the privilege, the protection and the voice for the people
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: who have no one else. He has access. Some people
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: will never get near justice without someone like him opening
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: the door. He has the ability to render a verdict
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: that changes everything for a person whose entire future rests
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: on whether someone with authority decides to pay attention. Open
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: your mouth for them. And here the council exceeds its
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: original context entirely because it is not only for kings.
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: It is for any one who has been given more
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: than the minimum, more voice, more access, more education, more safety,
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: more options than the person standing beside them. In line,
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: the mother is not asking for grand gestures. She is
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: asking for the daily, ordinary, entirely practicable, willingness to use
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: whatever voice and platform and influence you carry on behalf
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: of the person in your immediate world who needs someone
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: to speak when they cannot. That is where all the
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: internal formation of Proverbs flows, All the fear of the Lord,
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: and the wise speech, and the generous hand, and the
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: faithful work and the disciplined character not pooled up inside
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: a single, well ordered life, flowing outward into the world,
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: into the lives of the people who need what a
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: wise life carries. Lemuel's mother says what she came to say.
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: She does not linger, she speaks, and then she is quiet.
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: But her words are still here, preserved across centuries, placed
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: at the threshold of the poem that will close the book,
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: given to us to night in the quiet of this
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: dark room. Tomorrow there will be someone in your world
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: who needs a voice. You will recognize them when you
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: see them. You already know what to do. Chapter ten,
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: The Woman of Valor. There is a poem at the
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: end of the Book of Proverbs that most people have encountered,
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: but very few have truly seen. They have met it
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: in sermons and at weddings, and on prints hanging in hallways.
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: They have heard it read aloud and nodded along and
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: felt if they are honest. A complicated mixture of admiration
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: and exhaustion, because most people who have encountered this passage
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: have encountered it as a list, a standard, a portrait
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: of impossible domestic perfection, assembled specifically to make ordinary people
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: feel inadequate. By comparison, that is not what it is
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: in its original Hebrew. It is a love song. The
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: final twenty two verses of Proverbs are constructed as an
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: acrostic poem. Each verse begins with a successive letter of
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: the Hebrew alphabet, from aleeih to tav first to last,
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: every letter the language possesses. In Hebrew literary tradition, the
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: acrostic was the most complete and honorable form a poem
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: could take a way of saying, I am going to
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: praise this person with the entire alphabet, because the full
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: range of human expression is barely sufficient for what I
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: want to say. This is not a job description. This
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: is a portrait of someone the poet loves and admires
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: and wants the world to see. Clearly, the Hebrew title
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: for this woman is eshet sha'il, woman of Valor, and
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: the word chail is used throughout the Hebrew Bible for
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: warriors and mighty men, men of great strength and formidable
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: capability in battle. When it is applied here to a woman,
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: it is not softened or redirected, or made into something gentler.
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: It is the same word, the same valor, the same
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: remarkable strength, celebrated in a way warrior is being celebrated
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: here in a woman who builds a household, manages a business,
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: cares for the poor, and raises her children in the
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: fear of the Lord. This woman is a warrior, just
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: not the kind who carries a sword. An excellent wife
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: who can find she is far more precious than jewels.
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: will have no lack of gain. She does him good
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: and not harm all the days of her life. The
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: foundation of everything that follows is trust, Not admiration from
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: a comfortable distance, not even love alone, though love is
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: present throughout. Trust, the deep, daily, unhurried confidence of a
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: man who knows that the person beside him is genuinely
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: for him, not managing him from behind. A careful performance, genuinely,
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: consistently trustworthy across all the days of their life together
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: and she is trustworthy not because she is without opinions
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: or needs of her own. She is trustworthy because her
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: character is oriented toward good all the days of her life.
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: That is not a description of convenience. That is a
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: description of character so deeply formed it does not require
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: a favorable situation in order to hold. Then the poem
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: opens into the specific and wonderfully earthy details of her
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: actual daily life. She seeks wool and flax and works
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: with willing hands. She is like the ships of the
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: merchant bringing her food from afar. She rises while it
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: is yet night and provides food for her household. She
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: is not a spiritual abstraction. She gets up before dawn
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: and makes things happen. She thinks about logistics and supply
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: and the practical requirements of the people in her care.
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: She is present before the day begins asking anything of her.
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: She considers a field and buys it with the fruit
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: of her hands. She plants vineyard. In the ancient world,
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: where women's economic agency was constrained by law and custom
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: in ways that are difficult to fully imagine from our distance,
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: this portrait of a woman who evaluates land and executes
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: a purchase was quietly revolutionary. She sees an opportunity, she
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: considers it. She acts without waiting for permission, without deferring
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: the decision to some one she believes is more qualified
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: to make it. She dresses herself with strength and makes
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: her arms strong. The poem does not describe a decorative woman.
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: It describes someone who works with her whole body, and
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: whose body shows the evidence of that work, whose arms
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: are strong because she has used them in the daily
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: labor of building something real. She opens her hand to
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: the poor and reaches out her hands to the needy.
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: The same hands that manage the household and plant the
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: vineyard reach outward to the person who has nothing. There
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: is no wall in her life between the work of
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: building what is hers and the work of caring for
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: those outside it. Both flow from the same source. Both
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: are expressions of the same character that does not calculate generosity,
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: but simply practices it. She is not afraid of snow
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: for her household, for all her household are clothed in scarlet.
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 1: She has prepared, She has thought a head. She has
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: done the work in the season of sufficiency to ensure
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 1: that those in her care will not be caught helpless
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: when the harder season arrives. This is the ant's wisdom
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: grown into the full stature of a human life. Strength
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: time to come. She laughs at the time to come,
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: not because the future holds no uncertainty. She knows it
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: does not because she has eliminated every risk or solved
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: every problem. She has not, and she knows she has not.
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: But she has built her life on something that does
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: not shift when circumstances change. And that foundation, rooted not
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: in favorable conditions, but in character, gives her the freedom
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: to face whatever comes without being destroyed by it. She
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: laughs freely from a place of genuine security that no
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: one can take away, because no one gave it to her.
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: She built it herself, one faithful day at a time.
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: kindness is on her tongue. After all the descriptions of
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: what she does with her hands and her mind and
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: her remarkable capability, the poem arrives at what she does
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: with her words. She teaches with wisdom and with kindness,
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: together the truth and the tenderness, the substance and the
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: care for the person who needs to receive it, not
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: one without the other both. She looks well to the
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: ways of her household and does not the bread of idleness.
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: She pays attention to the specifics, to the texture of
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: the lives lived within the walls. She tends. She is
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: not managing from a distance. She is present, actually present.
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: Her children rise up and call her blessed. Her husband also,
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: and he praises her. Many women have done excellently, but
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: you surpass them all the fruit of a life, not
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: a performance, the honest response of the people who know
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: her best, not the people who have seen her at
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: her most carefully curated. Her children call her blessed, not
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 1: because they have been coached to, but because they have
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: grown up inside the actual reality of her love and
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: her faithfulness, and they recognize what they have been given.
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: Many women have done excellently. He is not diminishing every
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: other woman to elevate her. He is saying, I have
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: seen excellence in many forms, and she surpasses all of it.
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: Not because of her extraordinary productivity, because of her character,
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: Because all of her remarkable capability flows from something deeper
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: than ambition, from love, from the fear of the Lord
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: from wisdom that has been lived day after day, rather
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: than merely admired from a distance. Charm is deceitful, and
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: beauty is vain. But a woman who fears the Lord
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: is to be praised. There it is the sentence that
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: closes the whole book and circles back to the very beginning.
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: and here at the end, the woman who fears the
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: Lord is to be praised. Charm is real. Solomon has
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: watched it work in every court and market place he
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: has ever entered, but it does not reliably indicate anything
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: true about the person who possesses it. Beauty is real.
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: He has been surrounded by beautiful women his entire life,
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: and he knows more thoroughly than he ever wanted to know,
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: that beauty is temporary, a gift, but a temporary one.
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: But a woman whose life is oriented around something larger
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: than herself, whose source of security is not her appearance,
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: or her capability, or even her wisdom, but her relationship
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: with the God who made her, whose fear of the
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: Lord is not terror, but the deep, daily clarifying wonder
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: of a soul that knows whose it is that woman
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: is to be praised. Give her of the fruit of
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates.
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 1: Let her own life speak for itself. The field she bought,
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: the vineyard she planted, the poor she fed, the children
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: she raised, the wisdom she spoke, and the kindness she taught.
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: Let all of that be the eulogy. Not what was
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: said about her, but what she actually built. Now Knight
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: Psalms wants to say something directly to the women listening
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: to Night who have encountered this passage before and felt
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: exhausted by it, who have read it as a list
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: of demands and felt themselves failing before the second verse,
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: who have wondered quietly whether this portrait is meant to
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: honor women or simply burden them with an impossible standard.
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: Hear this. This poem is not a job description. It
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: is not a checklist. It is not a mirror held
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: up to show you everything you are not. It is praise,
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: long overdue, spoken publicly, given with the full alphabet of
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: human expression, because ordinary words were not sufficient for what
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: this life deserved to be called. The work you do matters,
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: the ordinary, unremarkable. Nobody is watching and nobody is thanking
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: you daily work of building something real and good. The
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: hands that rise before dawn, the mind that thinks ahead,
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: the mouth that opens with wisdom when silence would be easier,
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: and with kindness when harshness would feel more satisfying. In
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: the moment that work is seen, it has always been
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: seen by the one who counts every faithful act that
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: passes without a witness, And to the men listening to night.
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: This poem is also speaking directly to you. It is
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: asking whether you actually see the woman in your life.
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: Not the surface version who performs adequately and meets expectations.
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: Here the full and complicated and exhausted and magnificent reality
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: of who she actually is and what she actually carries.
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: Does she know that you see her? When did she
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 1: last hear you say it? Many women have done excellently,
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 1: but she surpasses them all. If that is true of
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: the woman in your life, she deserves to hear it said.
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: Not on the occasion when saying it would be expected tomorrow,
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: in the middle of an ordinary morning, when nothing special
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: is happening and the work of building some thing together
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: is simply continuing as it always does. Tell her not
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: because She needs your validation to know her worth, because
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: she deserves to hear the truth spoken aloud by the
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: person who knows it best. That is the wisdom of
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: this final poem, not a standard to be met, a
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 1: love to be expressed, a worth to be named out
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 1: loud while there is still time to name it. Sleep well, beloved.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 1: The lamp of the Woman of Valor is still burning,
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: and tomorrow yours will burn again too. Chapter eleven, Wisdom's
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: final invitation. We have come a long way together. We
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: began in a palace courtyard with an old king, an
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: oil lamp, and the weight of everything he had gained
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: and lost and still hoped to give. We stood at
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: the cross roads where two voices were calling, and learned
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: to tell them apart. We felt the weight of what
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: it actually means to trust with all your heart. We
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: learned what the tongue carries and what the ant knows,
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: and what gold cannot do, no matter how much of
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: it you accumulate. We sat with a father writing for
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: his son, knowing he could not live the son's life
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: for him. We met the man who knew he did
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: not know, and found in his not knowing a wisdom
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: deeper than certainty. We heard a mother speak before the
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: crown was placed on her son's head, and we stood
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 1: before a woman whose life was a poem written in
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 1: the full alphabet of faithfulness thirty one chapters. The ancient
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: rabbis taught that Proverbs was arranged so that one chapter
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: could be read each day. The whole book completed in
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: a single month, cycling through again with the turning of
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: the next month and the month after that, always finding
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: you in a different place than where you were the
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 1: last time through. That is the nature of wisdom literature.
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: It does not give you the answer once and become obsolete.
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: It gives you a lens, and through that lens you
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: see differently at thirty than you did at twenty, differently
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: at fifty than you did at thirty, differently in grief
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: than in joy, differently in winter than in summer. You
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: are not the same person who settled in at the
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: beginning of this journey to night. Something has been working
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: in you as you listened, even in the hours when
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: you were more asleep than awake, because that is how
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: wisdom enters, not always in the flash of sudden insight,
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: more often in the slow and patient accumulation of truth,
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 1: heard again and again, until it begins to feel not
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: like information arriving from outside, but like something you already
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: carried and were simply waiting to recognize. You already knew
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: that wonder was the beginning of wisdom. You already knew
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: that your tongue carries both life and death. You already
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: knew that money promises more than it can deliver. You
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: already knew that your children need your faithfulness more than
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: your perfection. You already knew the noise had simply been
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: too loud for too long to hear it clearly. Now
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: Here is what Proverbs has been moving toward from its
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: very first sentence, Through lady wisdom at the cross roads,
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: through the trust that does not lean, through the mother's courage,
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: through the woman of Valor's burning lamp, through AGU's honest
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: prayer for enough. Wisdom at its deepest route, is not
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: a set of principles, not a collection of practical insights,
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 1: not even a quality of character as real and valuable
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: as that is. Wisdom is a person. Paul writes to
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: the Corinthians that Christ is the power of God and
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 1: the wisdom of God. And when John opens his Gospel
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: with the description of the Word, who was in the
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: beginning with God, through whom all things were made, who
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: came into the world and made his dwelling among us.
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: The ancient readers who knew Proverbs chapter eight heard something
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: they recognized. Lady Wisdom, who existed before the world was made.
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: Lady Wisdom, who was beside the Creator like a master craftsman,
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: delighting in the inhabited world, delighting in the children of man.
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: Lady Wisdom who stood at the crossroads and called and
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: called and never stopped calling. That wisdom arrived in the
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: world with a face. And when Jesus says, come to me,
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: give you rest, Take my yoke upon you, and learn
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: from me, he is speaking in the exact register of
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: Lady Wisdom's invitation in Proverbs, come, eat, drink, learn rest.
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: The invitation is the same because the one extending it
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: is the same. This means the journey through Proverbs has been,
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: at its deepest level, a journey to a person. Every
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: word about the fear of the Lord was pointing toward
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: the one in whom that fear finds its truest expression.
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: Every chapter about wisdom was moving toward the one Paul
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: calls the wisdom of God, in whom, as he writes
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: to the Colossians, all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 1: are hidden. And the extraordinary news, the news that does
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: not depend on your having gotten everything right along the way,
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: is that this wisdom is available to you. Not because
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: you successfully navigated all thirty one chapters, not because your
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: trust has been unwavering, or your tongue has never caused damage,
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: or your hands have always been as open as they
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: should be. Because he is generous, because his delight is you,
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: the same delight that Lady Wisdom expressed in the inhabited world,
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 1: rejoicing in the children of man. That delight has a
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: face now, and it is turned toward you tonight. In
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: whatever room you are resting in, in whatever season of
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: life has brought you to this particular evening, the table
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: is still set, The invitation has never been withdrawn. The
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: voice is still calling from every cross roads you will
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: ever stand at. Come. You do not have to have
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: it all together first. You do not have to finish
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: becoming wise before wisdom will receive you. You come as
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: you are tired, perhaps still carrying things you were not
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 1: designed to carry alone, still leaning in places you have
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 1: not yet released on your own understanding. Come anyway, the
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 1: invitation has always been for people exactly like you. Solomon
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: set down his pen in the quiet of the palace courtyard.
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: The lamp had burned low at the far edges of
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: the night sky, the first barely visible suggestion of morning
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 1: was beginning to form. He had written what he needed
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: to write, said what he could say, poured into these
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: pages everything he had learned and lost and still believed,
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 1: with the particular urgency of a man who does not
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 1: have unlimited time to say the important things. He did
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: not know how far these words would travel. He did
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 1: not know the centuries they would cross, or the languages
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 1: they would be carried into, or the rooms they would
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 1: find on the other side of three thousand years. He
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 1: did not know about you, specifically, in your particular room,
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: in your particular season, listening to night. He simply wrote
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: and then released what he had written into the hands
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 1: of a wisdom greater than his own, because that is
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 1: finally what wisdom learns to do, not to hold everything,
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: to give what you have been given, and trust the
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: rest to night. The journey through Proverbs is complete, but
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: the journey of wisdom continues. To morrow you will wake
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: to new choices and familiar cross roads, and the same
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: invitation that has been extended every morning of your life,
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of everything,
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: the trust that does not lean, the tongue that builds,
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: the hand that opens, the lamp that keeps burning through
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: the dark. You will not walk into that to morrow alone.
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 2: Let us pray, Father of Wisdom, God of the morning
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 2: stars and the patient ant and the Eagle, whose path
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 2: through the sky cannot be traced. God of Solomon, in
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 2: his glory and in his reckoning. God of Agur, who
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 2: knew he did not know. God of the Mother who
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 2: spoke truth before the crown was given, God of the
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 2: Woman of Valor, whose lamp never went out. Thank you
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 2: for these thirty one chapters, for preserving them across three
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 2: thousand years, to find us here tonight, wherever here is
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 2: for each person listening. Thank you that the invitation from
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 2: the cross roads has never been withdrawn, that your table
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 2: is always set, that your delight in the human race
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 2: has not diminished by one degree across all the centuries
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 2: since Solomon first wrote about it. Give us wisdom for tomorrow,
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 2: not only the wisdom of knowing what to do, but
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 2: the wisdom of knowing when and how and for whom.
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 2: The fear of you that is not terror, but wonder,
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 2: the trust that releases what it was never designed to
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 2: hold alone, the words that heal instead of wound, the
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 2: hands that give from a heart that knows it will
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 2: not run out. And when we fail, as we will,
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 2: give us the grace to return the way David returned,
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 2: the way Solomon, in his own way, returned to the
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 2: pen and the page and the honest reckoning at the end.
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 2: Not because returning erases the distance traveled in the wrong direction,
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 2: but because you are the God who meets people on
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 2: the road back, and that is not a small thing
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 2: to know. To you be all wisdom and honor, now
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 2: and always and forever. Amen. Sleep now. The lamp is
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 2: still burning, the table is still set, the voice at
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 2: the cross roads is still calling your name with the
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 2: patience of someone who has always known you would find
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 2: your way back. You are held to night by the
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 2: only wisdom that was never foolish and the only love
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 2: that was never unkind. Good Night, beloved, rest well the
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 2: morning is coming, and when it does, you will walk
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 2: into it held