Proverbs 23:17

Continue in the fear of the Lord

Good evening, it is certainly a joy and privilege and a blessing to be able to share with you all from the scriptures this evening, and I feel like it's been a while, so thank you for asking me. We are going to be looking at Proverbs 23, 17 tonight, and you can find that on page 545 of the Pew Bible, Proverbs 23, 17. And I believe this is the last scripture that we're looking at in the fear of the Lord. Is that right? Yeah. So we have gone through several weeks looking at this subject of fear of the Lord. And I hope that we've seen a lot of things with this subject that gets us thinking. And one of those things is really that misplaced fear can cause us to do very foolish things. Misplaced fear can cause us to do very silly things, and when I think of that, I think of a story from my childhood. I was about seven, and the kid downstairs in the apartments we lived in named Kevin told me that there were monsters in the woods, and he even described what they looked like. They Thinking back now, I don't think they sound very scary, but to a seven-year-old, they sounded scary. And it just so happened that the woods were right next to the dumpsters, and my job was to take the garbage out. And I feared these woods, and I feared these monsters in the woods, and so instead of taking the garbage to the dumpsters, I took the garbage to the ditch. and did that for several weeks to avoid my fear of the woods until the people who own the apartments found my garbage in the ditch and told my parents and rightfully placed my fear back where it needed to be, which was with my parents. But that example from my childhood reminds me that we oftentimes misplace our fear. And it's oftentimes in much more serious ways, and it causes us to do very foolish things, especially as unbelievers, but even sometimes as believers. And so, as we've come through this series on fear, we have found all the ways in which fear is better than foolishness, or fear of the Lord is better than foolishness. It's better than pride. It's better than earthly treasures. We've seen through the last several weeks that fear of the Lord gives us a strong confidence. Fear of the Lord gives us assurance. Fear of the Lord gives us a refuge. It gives our children a refuge. Fear of the Lord has been greatly contrasted with our base desires. We found that it's better to live in the fear of the Lord than to pursue evil means. And we've also heard that fear of the Lord can range from mere respect to absolute horror. But the reality is, as Ben already prayed, fear of the Lord, I think when we look at the whole of scripture, it causes us really to look at God with awe and with reverence. So it's not enough to just simply say that we respect him. And as believers who are redeemed by Christ, I don't think we're ever going to meet him in horror. But to the unbeliever, there will be a day that they sit at the judgment seat and they will meet him in horror. But for us as believers, we should fall down and worship this Lord. And I think that's what the whole of scripture is telling us when we fear the Lord, we give him all. We recognize that he's both good and powerful. We recognize that he is just and righteous. Because of that, we worship him. And so today we come to Proverbs 23, 17, and it's in the middle of what is described as 30 wise sayings. And so we're coming right in the middle of these 30 wise sayings. And these sayings are more than just the ramblings of some old man who has seen more in life than you or I. These wise words are more than just someone who has had more experience than us, but rather these wise words and this wise word from verse 17 and 18, it's the God-inspired instruction for our lives to help guide us. And there's 30 here, and this is one that the Lord wants you to know tonight. And so verse 17,

Let not your heart envy sinners, but continue in the fear of the Lord all the day.

So I want us to focus in here on three things. One is the sinner. Two is the Lord. And lastly, the future. So we see in this verse a cautionary foil. And that is the sinner. And oftentimes when we read the Proverbs, especially, we have another foil, a dangerous foil, and that is the fool. And don't follow the ways of the fool. But this is another character in that same vein. It is the sinner. You don't want to identify with the fool, and you don't want to identify with the sinner here. And I know that there's a lot of ways that when we come to Christ, we identify as a sinner, right? And we all recognize the ways in which we have been redeemed. But the sinner, it is a special character that you don't want to find commonality with. It's someone who insists on their wicked ways. It's someone who swears by their ways and means by which they have gotten ahead in life. It's someone who swears by their ways for which they think that you could live a more successful, happy, wealthy life. And it's in their wickedness that they have found satisfaction. And so, when we have the propensity to envy someone, as the scripture says here, really we have the propensity to desire what they have. And truthfully, there's a lot of sinners out there that Oftentimes, I want what they have. And so, you know, this is one of those verses. I can read some verses and say, yes, on a spectrum, I deal with that or struggle with that a little bit, or I deal with that or struggle with that a lot. But this is one of those things that we can all see a mirror of identity here. We all can get caught up in envying the sinner. We want what they have. We want their charm. We want their looks. We want their success. We want their lifestyle. We want their roles, their positions. We want their wife. We want their husband. We want their precious little kids. We want their car. We want their house. We want their vacations. There's a lot of ways in which the center entices us and causes us to be envious. And, you know, lately I've been watching a ton of videos on Thailand because Shelby and I are getting ready to go to Thailand next month to get a little boy that we're adopting. And it's just so easy to be envious of so many people these days living lifestyles that, quite honestly, aren't honoring to the Lord. 4K cameras that capture the crispest images of the funnest things. I mean, who wouldn't be enticed by Ben and Phoebe, lifestyle bloggers, travel vloggers, right? I mean, it's enticing. They have things that we want and they have tangible things and they have intangible things that we dream about and that we desire. But do not envy the sinner. And really here envy is not the evil thing. I mean envy can be a very benign thing. There are certainly believers in this body that I envy for the walk of holiness that they have walked and they have challenged me and encouraged me. to be more faithful and I desire and hope that there comes a time where I can know the scriptures in the way that they know them, that I can apply wisdom from the scriptures into the way that they apply them. So envy here isn't necessarily the evil thing but rather the danger here is in the object of your envy, the sinner. We revere them, we worship them, We ogle over them. You might even say that we fear them. And you know many of them and as I said earlier a lot of us likely met a lot of success by skirting God's righteous decrees. A lot of us can identify with the successes of the center because we have employed their same tactics to achieve the same means that they have achieved. There is a lot of people who have spurned God's holiness for their own gain and for their own means. There's a lot of people who have done many nefarious things for power, for positional power. And there are many ways in which an unjust world rewards the sinner. Satan comes along and he wants to entice you to revere the sinner. He wants to remind you of all the ways in which God has had his grace upon the sinner. He will use that and remind you of that. And he'll convince you that you should skirt God's holiness to achieve your own means. That's what he wants to do to you. I think about this in a lot of ways. If you've ever run a business like I have, you know there are a lot of ways in which you can emulate the center and run your business in such a way that you gain undue success. I call this getting fat. You can skirt the rules. You can disobey the law. You can walk all over your people. You can take advantage of people. You can undercut the competition. And you can continue in that way in perpetuity, and no one will ever call you out, no one will ever catch you, and you will have no accountability, and you can walk on the backs of the people who suffer beneath you. It's easy to do in business. And there are other ways in which we can envy the sinner and emulate the way that they do things as parents. We can envy the sinner and we can envy the way in which they rule their family with an iron fist and strike fear into the hearts of their children rather than ruling that family with a loving, gracious, and patient hand. It's easier. It's easier to domineer your children. And there are plenty of sinners, the sinner, who will show you that, that it's easier to do it that way. And I asked Shelby, hey, what are some other examples? And she said, marriage. It's easy, especially as a young single person, to see the sinner, that person, and see how they're going about living the lifestyle that you've always wanted to live, being with whoever they wanted to be with, perhaps partially committing to someone without fully committing in marriage, right? Just to see if it's gonna work out rather than taking that commitment seriously. lot of ways in which we envy the sinner and we follow their ways. The examples are myriad here and you can all think of the examples in your own life and apply it to your own life. Galatians 5 tells us this,

now the works of the flesh are evident, sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

And the sinner, the one that we are so tempted to envy, He employs those things for his unholy means. And we have to admit there's ways in which the Lord has blessed the sinner. I mean, the world is temporal, its goods are fleeting. And when we look at the blessings that the Lord has given to the sinner, I'm reminded of a saying from Matthew Henry. He says,