SALT WATER

BULA BULA the day I surfed perfect Cloudbreak Tuesday August 14th 2012 which made Surfline’s best sessions of 2012. God hooked it up! You can see the waves here https://www.surfline.com/templates/article.cfm?id=64653&sef=true

CLEAN WATER

LIVING WATER

Day I published my book about my 10,000 mile bicycle ride from Canada to Colombia and I got to read chapter 1 at OBbeans with my family and friends. Was epic evening. This year we plan on starting worship nights at OBbeans so everything coming full circle!

Talk to you today about wisdom as a warning.

So of course, wisdom can only be understood as it relates to unwise ideas. Smart concepts can only be understood in relationship to stupid concepts. Good to evil, God to the devil. So what we want to do, we want to develop our wisdom, our smart ideas about life. The great news is, is God is happy to help us do that. So Proverbs chapter 1 verse 20 through 33 gives us a few things that we can consider as we think about wisdom as a warning.

Now a lot of people misunderstand wisdom. They think that there's only an upside, no downside. So God is very strong words today for us as we think about wisdom as a warning. So God is warning us to really listen as I followed in last episode. That's why I spent the whole episode talking about actually what is listening. So now that we understand that, let's now get into wisdom as a warning.

First of all, a lot of people think that wisdom is hidden from us. It isn't. Wisdom is actually available in plain sight and there's plenty of it in the world as long as you start with humility. That's why two episodes ago I talked a lot about humility. So humility and then listening and then wisdom starts to come to us. So verse 20 talks about wisdom actually calling out to us. You know, God's not hidden from us. He's in plain sight.

In fact, even right now as you're watching this, you can say or listening to it, you can say, God, show yourself to me right now and he's happy to do it. God helped me right now and he's happy to help. So wisdom isn't concealed. Wisdom is out of the open. It's out in the public domain for those who want to access it.

The second thing we learn is that we should repent and get it. Repent means to turn away. It means that you're literally going north. If you were to use the compass as an analogy and you literally make a 180 degree turn and you travel south, it is an about face. It is going in the opposite direction that you were headed. So the Bible says that we're actually supposed to go the other way. We're supposed to go against the culture.

We're actually supposed to make it our goal in life to repent and get wisdom. The Bible says to trust the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding. Our quote, own understanding is really what gets us in the most trouble. So we can turn away from our understanding and we can trust God and his wisdom.

Okay, and now thirdly, what are some of the consequences of not listening to wisdom? A lot of times people think like the Bible is just sort of this book of positive suggestions or that Jesus was this really noble teacher. Let me be clear. Jesus is God. The Bible is the word of God. That's much different than saying Jesus was a teacher, Jesus was a good person, and the

Bible is a set of positive affirmations about who we are. And so we, again, when we have humility and we have understanding, we can then have the correct posture towards what the Bible and the scriptures is. Now God is so straightforward about this that he says, now if you don't listen to my wisdom, then I'm actually going to laugh at you. Now what does this mean get laughed at? It isn't God up in heaven giggling at your misfortune and your miscalculation. That's not what this is suggesting. What it is suggesting is that life will sort of laugh at you. Life can be so much more than what it is for us when we cling to God's wisdom instead of clinging to our own wisdom.

And so again, with humility, we want to say, okay, Lord, I'm going to trust that your ideas

about life and why I'm here are much stronger than our ideas. Now to be very clear and to help me illustrate this, a lot of people go through life with double birdies towards the Bible. That's right, double birdies towards the Bible. Now a lot of people wouldn't come out and say it with their words, hey, I'm giving double birdies to the Bible, but they certainly do it with their life. So to be clear, when we have a total disregard for scripture and a total disregard for God's wisdom, that is like giving double birdies to the Bible.

So we don't want to do that. Verse 26 says, you know, again, if you mock God, the Bible says that God will not be mocked. In fact, whatever a man sows, that's what he reaps. So the Bible actually says that we will get laughed at by life. Life will mock us. So I don't know about you, but I don't want my life to be laughing at me and mocking me because I chose to follow my own ideas. So again, wisdom is a warning. And then the last thing is that God does not fight people, but he always wins.

What does this mean?

So God will allow us to think what we want to think and to behave how we want to behave. And then he will watch the results. So when we honor God and we trust God, we get peace and contentment in our life. Peace and contentment are the crowns of the kingdom of God. It's not that you avoid hardship, avoid trials, or avoid sufferings, but when you trust God, you get peace and contentment in your life in each age and each stage.

That is what the Bible talks about, trusting God in all circumstances. So God loves us so much. He doesn't fight with us, but he always wins. And so it's an important reminder that when we go through hardship and difficulty, that we're really to trust God for the outcomes that he wants, not the predetermined outcomes that we're sort of telling him that we want and that he's supposed to do on our behalf.

No, we're supposed to ask for God's wisdom to apply to our life and then leave results and outcomes up to God. I hope this was useful today. Until next time, I hope you have a beautiful day.

50 DAYS OF WISDOM - DAY 4 "Wisdom as a warning" Proverbs 1:20-33