Wisdom in the Heart

Justin sits down with his 10-year old son and 8-year old daughter as they study Proverbs 3. Listen for the dynamic of these different personalities and how to navigate studying with multiple children.

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Hi there, my name is Justin Dobbs, and this is listen, my children, I'm a husband, I'm a dad, and I'm learning to do what a lot of you are doing, one of the most difficult but most important things I'll ever do, bring up my children to follow the father. Over the next four episodes, we're going to keep walking through the first five chapters of Proverbs, you, me and our kids. Listen, my children podcast is made possible by a donation from the Oliver family, we're thankful for their generous support of Appian medius content. If you or your organization is interested in helping to fund content like this, please contact us through our website at Appian Media dot org. Now, today, Elijah and Linden are going to be joining us. Elijah is 10, Linden is eight. And we'll get to play off each other as we go through this. And we're looking at Proverbs Chapter three verses one through 12 as we can. You talk about wisdom. And in this episode, we'll talk about how wisdom gets into the heart. We need it in deep. So if you have a Bible and you want to turn to Proverbs three, we'll get started. So we've been looking at the Book of Proverbs and we're in Proverbs three to get your Bibles up in Proverbs three. Now I've been talking with Amos and Jubilee and the both of you about Proverbs. What's a proverb? It's something essential. Yeah. Is when you take two things, you lay them side by side and you look at them to give a little help figuring out. What's what's really true, what's really going on now, where does wisdom begin? How do we get our start with wisdom with God and Proverbs one, verse seven, do you member what Proverbs one seven says? You're going to cheat and look at it the beginning of the year ending and I to indiscretions, right? Yeah. So in Proverbs three, we're going to get another thing that lays side by side. And it's a way for us to help see that God is great, he's awesome. And that's how we treat him. We fear him. So let's look at Proverbs three and Elijah, would you read verses one through two and then Lyndon, you can read three through four and then I'll read a little bit, too. OK, so I'll let you go. First, I want you to know some do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments for length of days and years of life and peace. They do not steadfast love and faithfulness for sake. You bind them around your neck and write them on the tablet of your heart so you will find favor and good success in the sight of God and that trust in the Lord with all your heart. And do not lean on your own understanding and all your ways. Acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes, be your the Lord and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones. And he goes on to talk about how we should honor the Lord. But let's stop right there and talk about something that happens three times in this section. Wisdom is something that we need. We need to be able to see the world the way it really is. It's called Insight and we can look in and see something the way it really is, because not everything in the world shows us itself. It tries to hide. This world can kind of be tricky, but that means we need wisdom really badly and we need it deep down inside. Wisdom isn't just something that, you know, it's not just something that you do. You have to bring it inside and make it part of who you are. And sort of look at verse one, how do we keep the commandments? Look at verse one. You keep it, my son, keep it on your heart. Yeah, we keep it in the heart. Yeah, yeah. Let your heart keep my commitments and what you say in verse three. There is still love and faithfulness. I think you. All right, nurses write them on the stretch and the universe five trust in the Lord with all your heart. So wisdom someone is really trying to get down deep inside the heart of us. God wants us to really know what to really wanted to be, who we are. And these these pieces here, verse one, we keep it with our heart. It's not just something that we do, but something that we want to do. I want to obey God. I want to treat him like he's great and awesome. And then verse three is probably one of my favorite pictures in the Book of Proverbs. So it's taking. Knowing wisdom and laying it right down side by side with writing on the tablet, nothing, earlier today, Lyndon and I were looking at a picture of this, but before they had paper, before they had computers, they used mud, right? Yeah, clay. And they would take a little box or even even with stone, it's hard to chip into stone. And if you make a mistake, you have to get a whole new slab of stone except for water and even did for a really long time. It will stay together. It'll stay together for a long time. But if you make a mistake, then it's over. So what they would do is they would make little tablets out of mud and take a little box and they put mud in it and make it all nice and smooth. And you could take a stick and you could scratch in your letters. It's called cuneiform, but that's really important. But here Solomon is treating your heart like it's a tablet and you would etch into it. Things that you'd want to remember and then you can lay it out and drag, because if you made a mistake in the mud, you just sort of smoosh it back in the right way and you dry it out or you'd bake oven and it would be there forever. We still have tablets like that. So we can see that what they wrote thousands of years ago. But here's Sollom is not saying write it on a tablet. He's saying write it on the tablet of your heart. So he's saying, get it in there, get it in there, etch the wisdom, write down deep inside. And then a verse five. You trust in the Lord with all your heart. Now, why would I trust in the Lord? Well, because in verse seven, I'm not going to be wise in my own eyes. I'm going to be wise by trusting that God is great. I'm not going to see myself like I'm great to treat God like he's great. In other words, I'm not going to trust myself. I want to trust him. Yes. It's just like when you're doing that study with everybody coming over at that one second if you lean on it. But if you have a good stick, right. That's the picture. You remember that the pieces of all these fit together just like a puzzle. Yeah, wisdom helps us to see and we put the pieces together. But what you're talking about, Linden, is we lean on different things for support for strengths was like, if you're going on a walk, you've got a nice walking stick with you. Well, a good one won't break on you, but if you lean on a stick that's got a bad spot in it and it breaks, you're going to hurt. Might pierce your hand with it. You might fall down the cliff and die. And so we lean on something that's sturdy, something that will hold up. So you lean on the Lord, not on your own understanding. My own understanding is weak. I don't see everything. So get wisdom down deep in your heart, trust the Lord with all your heart and write it on the tablet of your heart. Obey God from your heart. Now, the last thing in verse nine on Little Lord with your wealth and with the first fruits of all your produce, then your barns will be filled with plenty and your vets will be bursting with wine. My son do not despise the Lord's discipline or be weary of his reproof for the Lord or proves him who he loves as a father, the son of whom he delights. The thing that I really want you to to understand is that wisdom leads a child. Not just to obey mom and dad, but wisdom leads a child to obey God, to treat God like father. Look at that again. In verse 12, the Lord approves him whom he loves as a father, the son in whom he delights wisdom teaches you to treat God like father. I only pray about that and we'll be done with this one. Father, thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for teaching us to fear you and treat you like you were great and awesome. Father, help us and to take your wisdom in deep help us to want to obey you and teach us to write your words on the tablets of our hearts that we can take it with us. That will always live now by trusting you and not ourselves. Thank you for it, Elijah. Thank you for Linden. Thank you for all your people who were trying to live this life with wisdom. Help us to honor you with the gifts you give us. It's the name of Jesus we pray and. Thanks for joining Elijah and lending to me in that conversation in Proverbs Chapter three, we got to talk about how God not just interested in what we do or what we say, but in what we think, what we want, the things that are down deep in our hearts. And so wisdom is something that we need to write on the tablets of our hearts. So maybe you can talk with your family about how God's wisdom, how the fear, the Lord changes who we are from the inside out. It changes what it is that we want. So, parents, let me talk with you for just a minute, but some things to consider from what we saw with Elijah and Linda and Elijah and Linden probably pair off more than my other children sometimes as Elijah and Amos, they share a room together. Sometimes it's Linden and Amos. They just goof around together. They all enjoy each other. But Elijah and Linden are more on a level together. And so getting to talk with them like this is a real treat. When you bring in the younger ones, you have to change dynamics a little bit. But the relationship that they have with each other is a real blessing. And I want you to think about the way that you're talking with your family at these regular times of family worship, using your children as one of your greatest assets to teach your children. Because what Elijah and Linden will do is they will sometimes help each other to obey or help each other to think through things. I know that they talk about their friendships with each other. They talk about their other relationships with other kids together. They cry together. There have been different hard things that we've faced as a family. And I've seen Elijah and Lyndon come together, even helped some of the younger ones use your children as some of the greatest assets in raising your children. Now, what a regular period of family worship does is it helps everyone to gel. And at the same time, because everybody's getting the same teaching, but not everybody is processing it the same way. If you notice, Elijah and Lyndon both had their Bibles. Both are reading out of their own texts. That was a special time for them when they had demonstrated the responsibility and the just the reading ability to get their own Bibles. And so they treasure those and they take them with them. They bring them with them to our Bible reading times. And they're able to look at the text themselves, but they're at a different level and they're looking at it from different perspectives. And that's a good thing because it means they process it differently. They're helping each other think through it. So when you make family worship a priority, you teach your family altogether. Everybody's on the same page, but they're looking at it in a different way. And that's really helpful. I benefit from the way they're seeing it. And sometimes they think of things that I didn't think of. If you noticed in this one, Linden reminded us of another time I had taught through Proverbs three, it was about a stick and maybe that didn't make much sense. But Proverbs three, verse five says Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. What had happened was we had a houseful of kids. We had invited over children from our congregation and from other corrugations. And I was teaching this principle and I had gone outside and gotten a rotten stick and leaned on it. And it burst apart in the middle of this room with all these kids and made a big noise to demonstrate the point that you can't lean on your own understanding. Now that connected with Linda. And she remembered that. And so when we read that verse together, that was there. But what I'm what I'm doing now by bringing up that that time where she mentioned that Lyndon being with other kids, whether it's Elijah or being with all those other kids being invited into homes, is really important. So maybe you're raising a child just you only have one or maybe you've got a bunch of them. Find opportunities to bring other children into your times of family worship, use children, use other godly people who are trying to follow the Lord as assets. As you raise your kids, what what that does, whether it's aunts and uncles or whether it's just cousins or children that you worship with as part of your church is going to give you some support. It's going to gel the kind of discipline that you bringing up in your home. What you can do is you can help them develop a love for each other as you help them develop a love. Next time, we'll be talking with Amos and Jubilee in one conversation, Amos Oz six, Jubilee is four. So that can be kind of tricky conversation to have two young ones all at the same time talking about the Bible. But we'll do that next time.