Dear Younger Me...Wisdom vs. Knowledge [Sunday Message]

In this message from the book of Proverbs, Pastor Joe Liles unpacks what true spiritual wisdom really means. Diving deep into Solomon's teachings, he reveals how knowledge of God isn't just about reading scripture, but living it.

Key Highlights:

• Explore the biblical definition of wisdom from Proverbs
• Learn how to transform scriptural knowledge into daily faith
• Understand the powerful concept of "the fear of the Lord"

Quotes from the Message
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge." - Proverbs 1:7
"If you only come to learn and you don't apply it, you are not living a life of faith. You're learning about one."

We Hope This Message Inspires You To:

• Start daily conversations with God
• Look beyond yourself and see how your faith can help others
• Understand that wisdom is about application, not just information

Perfect for new Christians, seekers, or anyone wanting to deepen their understanding of faith. Join us as we explore what it means to truly live out your beliefs!
#ChristianWisdom #FaithJourney #DearYoungerMe

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to "Dear Younger Me" Series
• 5:30 Audience Participation: Sharing Life Wisdom
• 12:45 Scripture Reading: Proverbs 1:1-7
• 16:30 Understanding Knowledge vs. Wisdom
• 20:15 The Danger of a "Simple Faith"
• 23:40 The Fear of the Lord
• 26:30 Applying Faith Wisdom
• 28:30 Closing Prayer and Reflection

Transcript

Pastor Joe Liles: 0:02

So we are going to start a series today, and the series is called Dear younger me, and it is a series, oh, thank you so much. Andrea, I appreciate that. It is a series about wisdom. And I have been thinking about this series for a while, and it's a series that I think, as we get into a school, we get back into the fall, and we try to understand what we're learning in school and how important that is. And as some of us are raising kids, and other of us are getting into new jobs and new careers and different things like that, there is a whole avenue in our life of, what does it mean to have wisdom in our life, and what does it mean to learn from those around us? And so we titled this series, dear younger me, and it's really about, how do we learn to rely and trust on God, but also realize that what we share with others is meant to be something that we gain in wisdom from them, and they gain in wisdom from us. And that's also true about life, as much as it's true about our relationship with God, we should be where sharing wisdom in both sides. And so I wanted to start by saying I think there's a lot of different places and people we receive wisdom from, and I think that's true of every one of us in our life, is that we at one point have received wisdom from someone in a beautiful way, and just so we know what we're talking about. I one time received wisdom about the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and so sometimes we confuse those, and this was the best way that I have ever understood it. And it still hits me to this day when someone asks me about it and and here's the difference, knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit wisdom is knowing that you do not put tomatoes in fruit salad, right? See, we're saying knowledge is great wisdom, right? And we're going to get to that in a second. But I want to hear from you all in a fun way, what is some of the best wisdom that you guys have had in your life? And what we're gonna do is that we have our ushers over here and our greeters and our worship coordinators, and they're gonna come around and we have wisdom because we're using old chair cards. And so we're gonna have this there's wisdom. They're sitting in a drawer. We're gonna use our old chair cards. They're also volunteer cards. So if you turn it over and you're like, oh my gosh, kids city volunteer, I didn't know this was for me. Is God talking to me? This is a Holy Spirit thing, and you should just fill your name out on both sides and then do that. But with that, we are giving you cards right now, and we want you to take a second to write down life wisdom. Okay, we're gonna do two things. We're gonna do life wisdom, okay? AKA wisdom that you received about life, about daily life, right? This is different from faithful wisdom. This is daily life. So for my example, my dad, when I played football, right? And I was playing football, and I was trying to become the player that I was going to be, and I wasn't there yet. I kept on missing tackles. I was a linebacker, and I wasn't hitting hard enough, and he kept on saying, like, You got to be the hit toward, not the hit T, right? You know, like, and I was like, okay, he's like, he who hesitates is lost, right? These are things that stayed with me all my life. Those are little life wisdoms, right? Little Life wisdoms that I have never let go. And so I'm wondering, what are yours? So I want you to take a second, and I want you to write wisdom that you have received in your life. Next to that wisdom, I want you to write the relationship to the person. You don't have to write their name, just the relationship to the person in your life that gave you that wisdom. So take a second right now. I want you to think about that. What is wisdom you received in your life? If you have nothing to write right now, I have more questions. So I just there's a lot of, how many of you are struggling to write something right now about wisdom? I see you looking at me. I see you like, I cannot think of a thing right now. I was like, What happened to all my wisdom? Which means that you have a lot of knowledge in life, but not necessarily wisdom in life. So take a second. We're gonna work through this. While that's happening, I would love for you to shout out some wisdom in life. So let's just, let's we're gonna gain some wisdom today as a church. So who has some wisdom in life? Who's got some wisdom, right? Shout out a piece of wisdom. Cucumbers are also a fruit Thank you. That's very much. I appreciate that. That's gonna go into my knowledge bucket, and I don't know if I want those in fruit salad. Yeah, that's very true. I appreciate that. What's some other wisdom that we got out there? Seek, first to understand, then to be understood. All right, that's from church member. You can write that on your card if you don't have anything church member at the neighborhood church is what you're gonna get. That's really good. All right, what's some other wisdom? I love that one. Treat the janitor with the same amount of respect that you treat the CEO, right? Level the playing field. It's a beautiful space, beautiful narrative. Right? Church member. Thank you very much. Appreciate that, right? All right, what are one or two more, one or two more wisdoms that you received in life? You. It. I'm not gonna say that one out loud, because a lot of people will be mad at me. If you're not five minutes early, you're late. Yeah, I apologize to everyone in my life. Is what I'm so sorry. I just cannot. Man, I set up a meeting this week, and I was, I mean, I was prep. I was I'm be there 15 minutes early. I got there three minutes late, and I was like, man, it's like, every time I set it up so, but it was raining, which is not an excuse. So let's just say that out loud. I'm like, it's raining. I'm going slower. Ah, man, it's true, but it's not true. I could have been early. I could have been early. So if you're not five minutes early, you're late. Thank you for humbling me during the message. I appreciate that. One more piece of wisdom. Yes, always be nice to the people that make your food. That is practical wisdom. Very practical wisdom. That is because when they go in the back to get it, you have no idea what goes on. Just a note, this is very true. I went to Texas Roadhouse last night. Just got in off a plane. We went to Texas Roadhouse. We love the roles at Texas Roadhouse, so we go there. They also have steak, but it's more about the roles. So with that, we went to Texas Roadhouse, and I showed up in the drive through, and they said it was gonna be ready at 945 and I showed up at 930 Oh, apparently I'm early for food, huh? That's interesting. Okay, I had to process that one with my therapist this week. Okay, it's gonna go great. So with that, what happens is, we showed up early for food, and she said, she said, Yeah, your food's not ready yet. We'll text you. I said, Yeah, I got the text. Just wanted to roll through and say hi and so you can meet me. Just like, what? And I was like, Yeah, I'm super excited. I was like, you guys, I guess, putting the rolls into and she goes, yeah, we'll do rolls. I'm like, like, you guys putting the rolls in, you know, saying she's like, do you want extra rolls? I was like, the rolls, you know, she's like, she's like, look, look, look, we got you. And I was like, That's so awesome. That's great. And so, and with that, she gave us like, 14 rolls, which was awesome, so, which was only about 3000 calories. So I mean, we ate those on the way home, and our family is now better for it, so it's a really wonderful deal. So there is wisdom out there. So here's what I want you to do. You now have that wisdom in your life that is daily life wisdom. Now, wisdom that we're gonna talk about today is a little bit different. So I want you to think about those cards now. Here's what we wanna do with those cards, actually, is we wanna share wisdom out to the world. So if you wanna leave those today, this is our hope is that we can take a snapshot of it right, and we can actually put it on our socials and say, Here's wisdom from our church for the life of the world. Now, here's what we also want you to do on that card. Wisdom today is about faith. Wisdom and the message today and throughout this series is going to be about your life with God, not just daily life. I think sometimes we get a laws of wisdom in daily life, but we lack the wisdom, or we make it kind of commercialized wisdom, right from faith, right? We make it this thing that we should be talking about a relationship with God and wisdom when we come forward, we should be talking about how to love your neighbor and what's commanded in the Bible, and bringing that into a wisdom of how we understand others and moving that into daily life. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to draw a little line. I want you to write wisdom from faith below that, and then I want you to think about who has given you wisdom and faith, who has given you knowledge and a way to apply it in your life and relationship with God. That is wisdom and faith. It is the application of your knowledge of God in daily life that's wisdom. So I want you to write that line, and I want you to think about that who has given you wisdom and faith, and I want to you to write what that wisdom is. We should be sharing our knowledge of God. We should be sharing it in a way to increase other people's experience and their relationship with God so that our knowledge doesn't just stay as knowledge, it becomes part of our relationship and becomes wisdom. We apply what we know about God in our daily life and make it wisdom. If you come to church every Sunday, and you open your Bible every week, and the only thing that you do is learn and have knowledge of God. You are not living your life of faith. You know a life of faith, but you are not living it. And that might be hard for some of us to hear, because Sunday and Bible reading might be our application. We might open that up, and we might learn more about God. We might have knowledge of God, understanding of God, a theology about God. But unless we apply that to our daily life, we are not living a life of faith. We are learning about a life of faith. We have to take it outside of these walls and as a church, we can. Only do so much to do that for you. We can teach the kids and give them questions to take home. We can say, here's what you ask your children. We can set up youth programs and youth dates. We can set up mission projects on Thursday nights at for the love. And we can set up these different things that go around and help us go out and raise money with beer and hymns our strategic partner. And we can set up these opportunities. We can do Bible studies and life groups and men's groups we can do all of that. But if you only come to learn and you don't apply it, you are not living a life of faith. You're learning about one. And there has to be a moment when we take what we are learning and apply it to a life of faith that is wisdom, and then we have to share it. This is our one mission, to take learning and apply it to a life and then move forward. The beautiful part about this, which we're going to get to the Scripture. The beautiful part about this is that when you take learning and apply it to your life in wisdom, and you apply it to your life. And faith is that your learning increases, because when you get that wisdom and you apply it, you are in a new life. You are transformed into a new creation. You are in a new relationship, and therefore you have to learn new things. When a relationship shifts in your life, you have to learn new things. When you go from being a friend with someone to then dating someone, you have to learn new things. When you go from dating someone to then marrying someone, you have to learn new things when you change these relationships in your life, you have to learn something new. The same is true in your relationship with God. You have to learn something new when you transform in your life and apply it to your life. And that's a beautiful place to be, because then it means we're in a constant state of learning about God and applying it to our life. Learn about God, apply it to our life. Learn more about God, apply it to our life, and in every different scenario, we can learn how to walk with God through all parts of our life if we share the wisdom. Because what I'm going through for first time, you might have been through four times. You might have wisdom that I don't even know about yet, and I don't even know if I want it yet. I have teenagers for kids, you know what? They don't want my wisdom. They don't care about it. They don't want it. They look at it and they're like, maybe, and I'm like, but I've been through it. And Jess and I get to each other, we're like, we've been through it like we've gone through this moment in life. We remember this like we can tell you what it is, and like, Ah, let me try it my way. Let me just take a walk this way. And it's the same thing we do in our relationship with God. The same thing we do is that. So I want you to write down your faith wisdom. What are you learning from faith? And then I want you to hear about wisdom in the scriptures. So think about that as we're talking through the message today. So if we're going to be in Scripture, we love Bibles in the Church. We love Bibles in the church. And so if you got a Bible, raise it up. We love to see Bibles. That's great. Yes, yes, bring a Bible to church. That's great. So if you don't have a Bible and you're on the Bible app, raise up your smartphone. We have the Bible app. Also. You can just jump onto the Bible app. You'll see our service loaded up there, dear younger me, you can follow notes and scriptures, different things like that. We're going to be in the book of Proverbs. Now, the book of Proverbs is about wisdom sayings. So these are small, little sayings given to move our relationship forward with God, to help us understand God, our relationship with God, understand our life and apply it to a life of faith. These are the wisdom sayings now in a little background of where proverbs comes from. Proverbs was written by King Solomon. And King Solomon is the son of King David in Bathsheba, right, if you go back into that story. So we're kind of following a narrative now, and David had many sons, but one of the sons was wanting to be king, but David had promised that Solomon was going to be king, and so he anointed Solomon as king in his time. And so on. Became king, and mostly Solomon is known as a very peaceful king. He built the first temple in Jerusalem. So he was helping out the Israelites. He he kind of came into a time of building wealth and prosperity in the kingdom of Israel, which is really beautiful. And so he had this wonderful kind of peace and prosperity narrative to him. But he also fell away from God at times. And he fell away from God, and he walked away from God, and he used relationships in an effort to get him farther in the kingdom and to advance different different relationships with other kingdoms around him. And so we have Solomon, who's this wonderful character, but he's also known for writing wisdom. He's known for writing these Proverbs, right? And it's not the only Wisdom literature that we have. In Scripture, we also got Psalms, we have Proverbs, we have Ecclesiastes, we have the book of Job is also considered wisdom. And so we have these different books of wisdom in scripture where we get these sayings about how to daily live your life with God, how to apply your knowledge of God into your daily life. These are what the wisdom books are. So we're going to start off right away. We're going to start off right away with King Solomon, right. About wisdom in the book of Proverbs. So if you find Psalms, Proverbs, you'll find it Psalms is large. You can turn to that in the Old Testament, we're going to read verses one through seven to start in Proverbs. And excitingly, we have our Bibles on order coming for August. So we have new Bibles are going to go into our Bible boxes. We have three different Bibles. If you don't have one, they're going to be here next week. We're going to have a Lutheran Study Bible. We're gonna have a student Bible, student study Bible in there also, and then a kid's Bible, which is gonna be awesome. And if you don't have one, there's gonna be a card inside that you can fill out, and we'll get you a Bible at our welcome desk. And so you can come up and we'll give you a Bible. That same Bible will hand to you. And so that way you can use it every single Sunday. So this is Proverbs, chapter one, verses one through seven. And here's what it says, for learning about wisdom and instruction, for understanding words of insight, for gaining instruction in wise dealing, righteousness, justice and equity, to teach shrewdness to the temp, to the simple, knowledge and prudence to the young, let the wise also hear and gain in learning. And the discerning acquires skill to understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and the riddles. Verse seven, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. Fear is the beginning of knowledge. Let's talk about wisdom. So this whole first part is an introduction to wisdom. It's an introduction that goes on, understanding the words and insight, gaining instruction in and wise dealing. See, wisdom integrates knowledge, right? It also integrates understanding, moral insight. It integrates a reverence for God. Is what wisdom does. And so what we're doing, as you can see, is we're taking the knowledge of God. We can say that we've learned these things over our life. And effort to ask you about your knowledge of God, you'd probably start with what you've read in Scripture. If you think about your knowledge of God, and if you think about how far that knowledge goes, where did you learn that knowledge from? So let's just kind of break this down a little bit. So how many of you believe you know God? Raise your hand if you know God. Everyone should raise their hand right now. You're learning about God. It's okay. This isn't a trick. Like, people like, Ah, I don't know. You might bring me up, and then I'm gonna have to talk about this. It's gonna be a no. And so how many of you know God? How many of you know God? Be strong about that. Okay, that's great. So we know God. Okay, now I want you to think about this. Where did you gain that knowledge from? Okay, where did you gain that knowledge from? How many of you, by show of hands, gained that knowledge from church? Okay, which means you gained it from a pastor? Can I say that out loud, not from a church, but from a pastor who gained it, probably from a seminary, right? Who gained it from other early authors, right? You see, our knowledge is unfolding here, right? But then at that time, each one of those people has life experience that they apply to the knowledge of Scripture to make it wisdom for you all, I bring in my life experience into the scripture when I'm teaching you from the front about what wisdom is. So I want you to think about if you gain that wisdom from church, that's wonderful. That's one place. How many of you gained wisdom from maybe a mentor, or someone in your life that was like a faith mentor? That's great. Okay, so you have knowledge of God from a mentor. That's great. How many of you gained knowledge of God because you went through a tough time and you couldn't go through it without knowing more about God, right? How many of you have done that? Do you see how we start to make our relationship to God based on things that are happening in our life? What begins to happen is church handles a relationship. Someone in your life handles a relationship, an experience in your life handles a relationship to God, and we start to make God an action based on something else that we do, or someone else that we know. Church is the first action, the situation that happened, is the first action. The person in our life is the first action. We receive our knowledge from God, from other spaces outside of God, first. So part of what I want to say is that if we're looking at this, that wisdom integrates knowledge. It's an understanding, it's a moral insight. The first thing I want to tell you is that if you want to gain knowledge about knowledge about God, this is a daily identity in your faith with God. If you want to take that knowledge and apply it, you have to begin to walk with God in that knowledge before something happens that you need God in that knowledge. So you need to start in the Scriptures daily. You need to start with prayer daily. You need to integrate this knowledge into your relationship with God right now. So when something does happen, you can access that knowledge, not wait for it afterwards. We don't want to respond to things in life. We want to prepare with God for things in life. And so you need this knowledge to begin with, which means it leads me back in to say, how do you gain in knowledge every. Single day with God, and do you need the church to do that? Do you need someone else to do that for you? Do you need a situation to do that? Or can you step into that daily knowledge yourself? Can you begin in that way? See what we have here is an incredible way where we're looking at, what does it mean to have a fear of the Lord as the beginning of knowledge. But if we go back a little bit, it did talk about in the verse. In here, it said it was talking about what it means to be simple. And I want to take you forward just a tad, right? So if you turn over to verse 22 say in Proverbs, we're just going to turn forward a little bit into verse 22 and I want you to hear this because it's speaking about, what is Wisdom speaking to us? So they personify wisdom in this character of a woman, and they're talking about, she's crying out in the street and she's crying out to you. We need to listen to wisdom. And then verse 22 comes, and it says this, How long, oh, simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge. How long? Oh, simple ones. Will you love being simple? I think we land there a little bit she said of being simple in our faith, and here's why. Simple in our faith is always concerned about ourself. A simple faith is always concerned with yourself. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Knowledge is the beginning of wisdom. If we start by learning about God, then what we are called to do is not just apply that to ourselves. That's simple. What we're called to do is apply our knowledge and our interactions with God to others. You have to know God so well in your life that it's no longer for you, that it's for the sake of others. That's the extent that we need knowledge of God where it extends beyond ourself. Otherwise, we are in a simple faith where I hear about God and I just apply it to myself. I hear about God and I just apply it to myself. I'm too busy learning about God. I can't deal with you right now. I just apply it to myself. That's a simple faith. Well, we're talking about beginning in knowledge of the Lord and where wisdom begins. It's knowledge that God has called us to take this and to move it into other people's lives, that you have a calling to reach in other people's lives, not just with the simple faith anymore, but with the true wisdom of our nature, with God. There's a whole narrative here where we need to take this knowledge and move it now is what I want you to do. I want you to turn over a little bit more into verse nine, or sorry, chapter nine, verse 10, and I want you to hear a little bit more about this fear, because it was something that stopped me in the text This fear is the beginning of our knowledge of God. Fear is the beginning of our knowledge with God. Am I? Ooh, I don't know if I like that. I don't necessarily want to fear my relationship with God. I want to look to my relationship with God with joy and with hope and with a promise. When you say fear, I have some questions. If I'm going to fear my relationship with God, I mean, I fear a lot of things that go on in life, so I don't need that in my relationship with God. So I wanted to understand more about what it means that fear is the beginning of knowledge. And here's what it says in chapter nine, verse 10, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight. What it means is that fear is truly to be in awe of God. Fear is to be in awe of God. But when you are in awe of God and the relationship that you have with God, it also means that fear means that we know our place in the kingdom, our call in the kingdom, if we are in a simple faith with our knowledge of God, we raise up our place in the kingdom to be just about us, that God only came for me, that God is only here to watch over me, and God only calls me to work with myself and my relationship with God, we should fear God in that moment. But if we have an understanding of the nature of God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, who sent His only Son to die for us on a cross, what ends up coming about is that we know our place in the kingdom, which means that we have a fear that says because of who God is and. Who God made me. I know my place in the kingdom, and my place in the kingdom is trusting God to send me to those who need to understand my experience of God and what I've been through. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the beginning of taking your knowledge and applying it to your life so that you may understand your place in the kingdom. So I want you to take a look back at your cards real quick. There's a reason that I had you write down wisdom if you have space in your cards, if you've written so much wisdom that you can't have any more space in your cards, raise your hand, because that's awesome. If you wrote one and you're like, I can't think of anything else, that's okay. It was a surprise test today, but you started with daily life wisdom. You started with wisdom from faith that other people have given you. Here's the third wisdom. With your knowledge of God, what wisdom would you give to others in faith, with your knowledge of how God has been in your life, how would you guide others in faith? What would you tell them? What is the wisdom? That you would give them about who God is? I want you to write that down. Take a second. This is a moment where we're doing this right now. What would you tell them about your relationship with God? If you're finding this hard, it's because we don't do it often enough. If you met with people every day, if you talked with people every day when they hit your heart and you called them and you shared with them what God's doing in your life, our pens should be flowing right now. I had this conversation last week. I had this conversation the other week. I was talking about this one the other in fact, other, in fact, I had a conversation yesterday with God gave me a revelation. It was a wisdom. In the middle of a conversation, I was at the men's breakfast, and I was talking with one of the presenters, Marty, and he was over there, and he was talking about his relationship to sheep dog and how he came. He was talking about his life of faith and his testimony, and he was talking about spiritual maturity. And he said, Yeah, you know, we need to get to a space of spiritual maturity. I said, Great. I said, How should we define spiritual maturity, though? I said, That's so hard to define when you're spiritually mature, right? And he goes, Yeah. He goes, it's really stepping in and really, really thinking about the things in your life and thinking about them with God first in your life. And I said, Yeah. I said, it's almost like we need to discern before every decision, discern before decision, discern before decision. And it just hit this moment. I was like, That's spiritual maturity. And I got that because I was talking about someone and their experience and testimony and their relationship with God. That's where wisdom comes from. In conversations about God. So take that. Ask yourself, What wisdom do you share? Because I know, and I believe that God has been in your life all along, and you have wisdom from God to share, and that is something we should never keep for ourselves, because that would be simple. And all God's people said, Amen, let us pray, heavenly and gracious Father, we come before you today knowing that we have times have walked into a simple relationship of faith. Simple word is only concerned with self, not simple in its nature, or simple because we don't understand. Enough about you or have enough knowledge of you, simple because it only concerns ourself. It does not think of our community. It does not think of our community of faith. It does not think of our our people around us who hurt and who struggle. Does not think of those who are ostracized and marginalized. It it just thinks of inside of my comfort, and that's very simple, Lord. So in that, Lord, we ask for forgiveness. We ask for forgiveness that we have not shared wisdom that has come from you. But today, Lord, what my hope is that from these small moments of hearing wisdom, these small moments of hearing where you have been in our life, that it would not stay with inside the walls of these church that truly we would find ourselves in conversations about our testimony, about our life with you, that that would be the first thing that we talk about, And that, Lord, you would put people into our lives who need to hear this wisdom, who are about to come into something in their life. Would could benefit from knowing how we've experienced that with you in our own so watch over us. Lord. Help us gain knowledge in you. Help us apply it to life with you. Help. Us to lead a life that is worthy of the calling that you have given us. We pray these things in your holy and precious name And all God's people said, Amen. You guys enjoying our wisdom. Series start, so if you want take.