The Wisest Room in the House (Wisdom, Week 3)

Scriptures: Proverbs 3:1–7; 22:6 | Luke 15:11-32

Proverbs is itself a father’s address to his son passing down the faith from one generation to the next. This week we look at marriage, parenting, and the household of faith: what it means to build a home around the Word of God, to love imperfectly and be covered by grace, and to raise children not as our greatest achievement but as God’s gift entrusted to our care.

Transcript

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In Matthew 28, Jesus said, Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. He calls you to be that disciple. To hear his word, to receive his promises, to repent, to believe. That Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. And that by believing you have life in his name. Now here are the good news of Jesus for you. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Tom was cleaning out his father's house after he died when he found a shoebox in the back of a closet. Inside was a list in his father's handwriting. There was a column of dates. Alongside it were brief notations. Tom's name appeared at the top, and beneath it, stretching back 40 years, were entries like this. Tom's first goal, April 14th. Tom graduates June 13th. Tom gets the job October 22nd. Tom's daughter is born March 9th. And near the bottom, in shakier handwriting from more recent years, Tom's visit for Christmas, December 26th. Oh, that was a good day. His father had kept a record of everything. 40 years. He had noticed every single moment in his son's life. He'd written it down, he'd folded it up, and he'd kept it in a shoebox at the top of his closet. There's just one problem. Tom never knew that this list existed. His father had been paying attention the whole time. He just never told him. And Tom recalls just standing at the bottom for a long time and reflecting on the fact that he was paying attention. He was paying attention the whole time. He just never told me. We're three weeks into our summer journey through the book of Proverbs, a book about wisdom. This is how Proverbs 3 begins. My son, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments. Today is Father's Day, and so it's fitting for us to reflect on the very idea of Proverbs being a father speaking to his son about wisdom, about wisdom being passed down from one generation to the next. Further in this chapter, the Father says, Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you. He says, bind them, bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. Notice what he's passing on here. Notice the wisdom that he's sharing here with his son. It's not just information, it's not rules, it's not a list of accomplishments that he hopes his son will achieve. He wants his son to know steadfast love, covenantal love, and faithfulness. And he wants those things to be deep in his heart. And later he follows this up. He says, Trust in the Lord with all your heart and don't lean on your own understanding. That's the question that every parent wrestles with. When my child grows up and walks out the door, walks out of the house into the world, what will be the thing that guides them? What voices will they listen to? What understanding? Who will they trust? Perhaps that's why Proverbs 22, 6 has become a very familiar passage for parents as they reflect on what it means to be a parent. It says, train up a child in the way they should go, and then even when they're old, they won't depart from it. That's the dream, that's the desire, isn't it? But it's not a verse about raising successful children. It's about direction. It's about an orientation of life. And whether after everything else is stripped away, a person knows who they are. And they know whose they are. This is the wisest room in the house. Not a physical room, obviously, but it's the thousands of moments, of ordinary moments, where faith is taught, where love is demonstrated, where forgiveness is practiced, where God's promises are spoken about over and over again. Most of the passing down of faith doesn't happen in this room. As much as we might think it does and hope it does, but it doesn't. It happens around dinner tables and it happens in car rides, it happens at bedtime, it happens in everyday conversations. But Proverbs also knows something else. Sometimes, and by the way, parents know this well too. Sometimes children don't listen. Sometimes they forget. They forget the things that you teach them. Sometimes they walk away from the very wisdom that they are given. And so the question becomes: what do you do? What does a father do when his child leaves? This is exactly where Jesus takes us in Luke 15. He tells a story about his father, a father and his sons. And you know how it goes? The younger son demands his inheritance early, which was not common. And he leaves home. He wastes everything, and he ends up broke and hungry in a country that's far away. And he finally comes to himself and he decides that he's gonna go home. And he rehearses a little speech along the way. He'll confess his sin. He'll renounce the fact that he's even going to be a son, he'll renounce his sonship, he'll ask to be taken in, to be a hired servant, nothing more. Really, when you think about it, this is more about calculation than it is about repentance, because the son has a run out of options. But before the boy arrives, before the speech is delivered, something happens. While he was still a long way off, Luke records, his father saw him, he felt compassion, and he ran and he kissed him. His father saw him. That means the father had been looking, by the way, not once, not on an occasion, but every morning since his boy left. That father had been scanning the horizon, just looking, just waiting. And then one day he saw, that's my son. And so what did he do? He ran. In uh the first century, men did not run, by the way, because running meant that you had to hitch up your robe, you had to expose your legs, you had to make a spectacle of yourself. And so you walked, you you waited. You didn't run. But the father in this story that Jesus tells, the father did. He covered the distance himself. He got there first. And he fell on his son's neck before the boy could even begin, before he could finish this speech. And when the boy did start, he said, Father, I've sinned against heaven before you, and I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. The father doesn't let him finish. He's already calling to the servants best robe, ring, sandals, fatted calf. The party begins before the apology is complete. The father's not interested in the speech, he's interested in the son. And that would be a great story, by the way, if it ended right there. But it isn't. The story isn't over because there's a second son, a second son who stayed. He followed the rules, he did everything right. And when he hears the music in the background, the music from the party that's taking place, he refuses to go in. Look, I've served you and I never disobeyed your command, and yet you never even gave me a young goat that I could celebrate with my friends. He's been in the house the whole time. And here's the irony: he doesn't know the father at all. Whole time. He doesn't know the father at all. He thinks of this relationship between father and son like a transaction, like an employer and an employee, rather than a parent and a child. And the father goes out to him too. And just like he ran to the younger son, he goes out to the older one who's now standing in his bitterness and resentment and anger. And he says, Son, you're always with me. And everything I have is yours. If you sit with this story enough times, you begin to resonate at different points in your life with both the older and the younger son. Again, some of us have been the younger son taking what we're giving, and it sounds really good, sounds great, and then we walk away from it. We leaned on our own understanding, as Proverbs says. We were convinced that we know better, that we can figure it out on our own. And some of us have been the older son. We stayed, we did the right things, we showed up. But then there's this ledger that we've kept. Running account of all the things that we've done, and therefore all the things that we deserve because of it. And along with that, there's a resentment, a resentment toward the people who seem to get grace, even though they haven't earned it. We become convinced that God owes us something. And then there are the fathers. They're the fathers in this room, like Tom, who kept the list for 40 years and never said a word about it. He was paying attention the whole time. He just never told his son. How many of us are keeping that kind of a list in a shoebox? Proud of our children, moved by them, carrying them in our hearts, but never saying anything out loud? How many of us have left have let that distance grow between us? Because crossing it, because crossing that distance would be too vulnerable. It'd be too much like hiking up our robes and exposing our legs and subjecting ourselves to ridicule from the people around us. How many of us have been meaning to make the call and have the conversation and say what needs to be said, but we're just waiting. Waiting for the right moment. The father didn't wait for the right moment. While the son was a long way off, he ran. Jesus doesn't tell this parable primarily to give us a model of good fatherhood. He tells us so that we see what God is like. The watching, the running, the robe, the ring, the party. This is what the father does. He watches the road, he watches the horizon, and then he runs. That's what the cross is. The cross is the father running. God does what Proverbs has been describing all along here. He demonstrates steadfast love and faithfulness. He doesn't merely run towards sinners. He sends his own son for sinners. God covers the entire distance, the entire distance between where we are and where we need to be. Jesus comes to the far country, the wasted inheritance, the ledger keeping, our years of silence and absence and distance. And he buries it. And three days later, there's a party. The best robe. The ring. It's for you. Not because you earned it. Not because you finished the speech that you were prepared to give the father. But because that's what the father is like. And that is worth passing on from generation to generation. Not a moral code, not a set of rules, but a story. This is a story of a father who ran. And we pass it on not just with our words, but with our actions, with our presence, with our attention. And no father does this perfectly. But the one who did it perfectly, he now sends his spirit, which produces in us something that looks like running. After Tom found the shoebox, he stood in his parents' bedroom for a long time and he just kind of held on to the list. And then he did something. He sat down at his father's desk. He took out a piece of paper and he wrote a list of his own. His daughter's name was at the top. And he started to write down everything he remembered the first day of kindergarten, the spelling bee, the broken arm, the recital, the graduation, the first apartment, the phone call that came at midnight when things had fallen apart. But Tom didn't fold it up and put it in the shoebox. He called his daughter that afternoon. He told her about the list that he had found, and then the list that he had written. And he then began to read some of it over the phone. He told her what he should have been telling her for years, but wasn't modeled for him. And she was quiet for a moment on the other end, and then she said, Dad, I didn't know. I didn't know you were paying that much attention. In many ways, that's the discovery. That's the discovery of both sons in Luke 15. They thought they understood the Father, but they didn't. One thought that because he had made all these wrong decisions, he would be rejected. And the other thought that he had worked hard enough and that he had to earn his place. And they were both wrong. Proverbs says, as the father is telling his child, trust in the Lord with all your heart. Don't lean on your own understanding. The father in Jesus' story is far better than either son imagined. And our Heavenly Father is far better than we imagine. He doesn't keep his love hidden in a shoebox. He doesn't want you to do that either, by the way. He puts it on display. He puts it on display for the whole world to see. The Father who loves you, has already run to you, already spoken words over you. He's already declared you beloved and his own child. So that means you don't have to hold love in a shoebox anymore either. You don't have to wait for the right time to say what's true. Whether you're a father or a mother or a son or a daughter, a parent, a grandparent, a friend. You don't have to keep it in a shoebox. The wisest room, the wisest room in the house is the one where this kind of love is regularly spoken out loud by name, and it's on display for everyone to see that the Father has given this love, and now we give this love. As we show this love, as we forgive one another, and as we tell these stories, we remind one another of God's promises.