Sermon Series

Wisdom for Life: Proverbs

You may have come across these modern updates of familiar sayings:
Close but no Wi-Fi,
Never judge an app by its icon,
and the tweet is mightier than the sword

Clever sayings however are nothing new and the ancient world had their share like: Liars when they speak the truth are not believed, from Aristotle and
He who will not economize will have to agonize, from Confucius.

The Bible also has its share of sayings and some of them are curious like Ecclesiastes 9
Better a living dog than a dead lion
and others outright surprising like Proverbs 31
Let beer be for those who are perishing, wine for those who are in anguish!

But the ancient world went one better than our modern one. Whereas we have self-help books that offer something more than a sentence or two of advice they had Wisdom literature. Unlike our modern works, manufactured by the publishing industry to do more help to the author’s and publisher’s bottom line, these wisdom works generally had no official author and were collections gathered over the course of centuries that offered true lasting insight into the human condition.

The Bible has several books within the Wisdom literature tradition of the ancient world, Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and for the month of November we are going to explore the insights of Proverbs’ wisdom for life. Specifically, its call to cultivate
a cheerful heart,
a listening ear,
and a committed will.

I invite you to read through the whole book so that, together, all of us can “make our ways straight through the way of wisdom.” Peace, Tom Evans