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WISDOM AS INNOCENCE- PROVERBS 4:11-27

I want to talk to you today about wisdom as innocence. And so we get this idea of course from Proverbs where it says, do not go down the path of the wicked. So innocence doesn't have to do with our standing before God. It doesn't have to do with how pure we are. It has to do with the intention that we have, the standard that we use to make our decisions in how we relate to God and how we relate to other people. So Scripture makes it very clear that if we follow God, He has a standard, a set of principles, and some morals for us to line up with. So let's dig into this a little bit out of Proverbs 4. So this has to do with the idea of ethics. These are the values that we hold as we follow Jesus. This has to do with the principles that we use for our daily decision making.

Now most of this is rooted in of course Exodus 20 where God gives the Ten Commandments, really the bedrock for morals and ethics which we operate with today. In fact, I've done an entire teaching on this, about 30 minutes. I'll put a link in the video at the bottom if you'd like to dig into this at a deeper level. But it's pretty clear as we follow God every day that He has a certain standard that we're to apply in our life, our relationships, and our decisions. The Bible refers to this as our ethics, the way we filter our life, our decision making. It has to do with right verse wrong. And right verse wrong of course has to do with, well, who are we talking about and who sets the standards? Well, God does.

And the scriptures do. And when we get to heaven, we can talk to God, if we make it, we can talk to God about how He developed His algorithm and His systems and His rules for us. The Bible's pretty clear. There's right and there's wrong. And you can find that in the scriptures. This is what it's referring to when the writer of Proverbs says, do not go down the path of the wicked. Now every day we're going to make decisions, now the wise person, remember we're talking about wisdom, the daily application of divine knowledge as given to us by the Holy Spirit. You know, if you follow Jesus, you have the

Holy Spirit every day through the Holy Spirit, God will show you how to navigate every minute, hour of the day as you try to align your will with His will. It's this beautiful adventure of following Jesus every day. So we're going to find our ethics in scripture.

We're going to get our sense of right and wrong. I'll say this, this isn't downloaded to you all at once. It's something that you develop as you walk with God every day and as you align more of your life with the scripture and as you learn more of the scripture.

Okay, so the second thing is where we get our morals from, our sense of our conscience, our direction, our compass, our sort of our true north in life. We want to line up with the Holy Spirit. We want to line up with scripture.

Okay, and then thirdly, principles for living. Well, that's why I'm going through Proverbs. You can find all sorts of nuggets and wisdom in the book of Proverbs for our lives. I need as much wisdom as I can get the daily application of divine knowledge from the Holy Spirit in my life for each and every situation that I faced throughout the day.

Walking with God is the most powerful real time adventure you can ever go on because as you walk with God more, you can actually feel God showing you how to avoid certain situations, how to avoid certain people. Bible calls this discernment. God will actually give that to you the closer that you get to him. So that's an incentive we have every day to get as close to God as possible. He'll help us avoid bad situations. He'll help us to avoid bad people as those decisions impact us.

Now, are we able to navigate our entire life free of suffering and pain? Of course not. If you follow the life of Jesus, which is the model for the believers of Jesus, of course we have parts of our life, seasons of our life where we experience crucifixion and suffering. But when we're talking about innocence, we're trying to line up our ethics, our sense of right verse wrong, and our morals and our principles with God, the Holy Spirit, and his word.

Well, thank you for joining me. Until next time, I hope you have a beautiful day.