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Bibleline Bibleline, here God’s Word on Bibleline, everywhere, every time. Here God’s truth on Bibleline. Welcome to Bibleline with Dr. Ralph Yankee Arnold, pastor of Calvary Community Church in Tampa, Florida. Clearly declaring the gospel of Jesus Christ through the radio and the internet. Your regular prayers and monthly support make it possible for Bibleline to continue on the air. You can reach us toll-free at 1-800-576-3771. Online donations may be made by clicking on the donations link on the Bible-linemenistries.org homepage. We pray that you will enjoy our commitment to the clear gospel of Jesus Christ, and that today’s first part of this two-part message will be a blessing to you and your family.

I want you to take your Bible. Turn to the book of Proverbs chapter 1. Proverbs is a book of wisdom. I love little short sayings, things of wisdom that makes you think. They always said that brevity is the soul of a joke. You know, you say something and it’s short pointed and it’s good. And everybody loves a little humor. But God’s Word tells us that there is something better than silver and gold. Look in verse one of chapter 2.

Proverbs chapter 2 verse one says, My son, if thou wilt receive my words and hide my commandments with thee, So that thou incline thine ear unto wisdom and apply thine heart to understanding. Ye if thou cryest after knowledge and liteth up thy voice for understanding, if thou seek it her as silver and search it for her as for hid treasures, then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. Now, as you read the book of Proverbs, you will read some of the greatest quotes you could ever read.

It deals with your thinking about God and yourself and other people. We often talk and we did this morning about serving the Lord and the power of the Holy Spirit in an individual’s life. power the Holy Spirit in your life depends upon the power of your yielding. You yield little, you’ll get little power. You yield a lot, you get a lot more power. So the Lord wants to use you more and more and growing in the Lord is you yielding more and more of your life in different areas of your life.

So when you first start off you don’t yield everything in every area of your life. You just just kind of like give him on one little thing here, and a little thing there, and a little thing there, and they say, no, it begins to grow. But nobody walks with the Lord perfectly when they’re just a trust that Christ is Savior. It’s a process, you’ve got to learn how to do that. But what I want you to see, and the word understanding, now there’s parts of this that I will have mentioned before, and I go back over, and I say a few more things it because you’re always trying to refresh a person’s mind.

But I want you to see this word there in verse 2 of chapter 1, to know wisdom and instruction to perceive the words of understanding. These are the proverbs of Solomon, who was the son of David, the king of Israel. Understanding, down in verse 5, you have a wise man will hear and will increase learning and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise councils. So you see, as you learn and the more things you understand, you understand that the more you need to learn.

And so the The more you learn, the more you understand. And the more you understand, the more you understand you need to learn. Well that kind of gets going, don’t it? So at what point can you stop learning? Or do you stop learning? You learn all the time. Did you know that there’s people that God will send across your path to teach you to learn something? It might be patients. Tribulation works with patients and a lot of people are tribulation.

Not only do they have a problem, they are a problem. People are problems. And so we are problem solvers. So we come together and we study the Word of God so that we can understand people why they do what they do. And the more difference that they have among themselves in their various problems that they’ve done. diversity of it means you gain more wisdom because you’re learning from more people. And that’s why God will send certain people at a certain time for you to learn something.

And that’s also part of the reason why there are certain things that God would allow to happen to you because not only do we learn from God and from people, but from situations, problems that you have, circumstances. The lack of money will teach you something, bad health will teach you something. You know when you get bad health, do you ever try to figure out now what caused this? Why am I sick? Now what did I do? What did I eat?

I must have ate something. Sometimes it’s not what you know you’re eating this what’s eating you and you can have things that are bothering you and there’s consequences to it. So he makes a statement here in verse five, a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsel. Verse six, to understand a proverb and the interpretation, the words of the wise and their dark sayings, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools, despised wisdom, and instruction. Fools don’t want to be taught.

Fools don’t want to learn. This is why when you don’t want to learn, people irritate you to the point you don’t want to be around those people because you don’t want to learn anything. You don’t want to help people with problems. You want to be left alone. Well, did you know that God may send people into your life that just really plays havoc upon your mind. Welcome to the club. God wants to use you. Remember I mentioned this more than the Holy Spirit wants to minister to you and through you.

So He doesn’t need to work through you if there isn’t anything for you to do. So that means He has to send some people your way that need help. Remember, Christ says He did not come to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give his life a ransom for all. He came to minister, well then somebody must need some minister to. Some people might need your help, your wise counseling, your advice. Don’t you admire the wisdom of the people who come to you for advice?

You know, they gotta really be smart to understand just who you are and how much you know. You see, nobody ever asked me anything. Hmm, I’m not going to answer that. But notice what he says in another verse that talks about this understanding business. You see there in verse six of chapter two, he says in verse six, for the Lord giveth wisdom out of his mouth, cometh knowledge and understanding. Then down there in verse 11, discretion. shall preserve the understanding shall keep thee.

It’s one thing to learn something. It’s another thing to understand what you learned. It’s like some people they have a working knowledge of the Bible so they’re able to use the knowledge of the Word to work for them. There’s other people who have a knowledge of the Bible, but not a working knowledge. They have knowledge, but they don’t have understanding. So they can’t use it to help people. They only know it’s there. Maybe if you can quote verses. But you know you can even know salvation verses, but not know how to use them when it comes to talking to somebody about the Lord.

So you want to have a working knowledge, a knowledge that that works for you and it works for you when you understand how to use that knowledge that’s what wisdom does. Wisdom is not just the accumulation of facts, that’s knowledge. Wisdom is knowing how to apply that knowledge to the various circumstances of life. Now, he makes a statement down there in verse 11, and understanding shall keep thee. It means it guard you because you understand why God says what he does.

For example, if you look there in verse 10 of chapter 1, my son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not. So you know that verse, maybe quote that verse, but do you understand what’s behind that verse? If sinners entice the consent, they’ll not. Don’t give consent. You don’t have to do what everybody else does. You don’t have to make provision for the flesh because you understand that if I make opportunities for me to get in trouble, I probably will.

So you want to be wiser than the average bear. So you don’t want to do that because you understand that when you mock God is because you mock sin. And you mock sin when you think it won’t harm you. It won’t get you. You can handle it. Well, probably not, but people do it anyway. Now look there in chapter three, where it makes this statement in verse four, So shall thou find favor and good understanding in the sight of God and man.

It’s good when you as a child of God begin to understand why your Father in heaven does what he does. When you understand his rules, would it be good if daddies and mommies was so consistent in their discipline that a child knows that if I do this, this is what’s going to happen. If I do this, this is what’s going to happen. But because some parents are not disciplined, they can’t discipline children. You can only discipline as well as you are disciplined.

For example, you’re sitting there watching the boob tube and little Johnny is just, well, he’s running all over the place. And you tell him, Johnny, sit down. If I tell you one more time, I’m going to beat the the tar out of you. All right, he does it 10 more times, and you still haven’t beat the tar out of him. You’re the one who needs discipline. You are the problem. That kid is not the problem. You are the problem.

And most parents never learn how to discipline because they are not disciplined themselves. And they have to tell them 10 times. I tell you one more time. One more time. One more. One more. One more. You’re making me mad. you have to discipline because you’re angry, you’re not doing it for the kids’ sake, you’re doing it for your own sake. Because you’ve had enough. You’ve had it up to here. You’re angry. You’re mad. You’re bitter. You’re upset. He’s interrupting what I want to do.

What I’m watching. I love Lucy and you’re interrupting. I can’t watch. So it has nothing to do with the kid learning, he’s interrupting my life. And so you’re not training a child, except you’re training the child, that it doesn’t matter how many times you say it, he has to wait until you explode, then he runs to his room, then he’d be quiet, because he knows he’s trained you. Most children are training their parents today, and most parents are afraid to discipline their children because, well, my kids are not disobedient.

Well, that’s because you don’t tell them to do anything. You let them run wild. And it’s because you don’t understand your heavenly Father. But if you understand that God is very disciplined and that God your heavenly Father, who loves you, means what he says. And that your heavenly Father, when he says he’s going to chase He will. He will. And some cases he even takes him home before their time, but you cannot make fun of your heavenly Father and get away with it.

There’s a price to pay. So he makes the statement here in verse 8 of chapter 3, trust in the Lord with all thine heart. Lean not unto thine own understanding. Don’t trust your judgment. You have to trust God’s judgment. You learn what God says. That’s when you begin to have wisdom. Wisdom is from the Lord. Jesus Christ is the wisdom of God. He is the power of God. So he says in verse 6, in all thy ways, Acknowledge him or seek the Lord in his way in everything that you do and he shall direct by paths.

Be not wise in thine own eyes. That rhyme in case you didn’t know that. But that’s a good little portion of the verse. Be not wise in thine own eyes. And then because you understand things, why your heavenly Father does what He does because He is a holy God, a righteous God. But you also know that your heavenly Father is merciful, full of grace and kindness and so forth. And you know that if you’ve done something wrong, you can confess it to your heavenly Father and he will forgive you and wipe the tears from your eyes and he will love you and all the rest of it and open up doors for you or he can close doors.

He can bless you or he can beat the Torah out of you. But look at verse 13. Happy? Happy is the man that finds its wisdom and the man that get it understanding. The word of God is where you gain the wisdom. That’s why I want people to come to listen, to learn, study the word. You study the word, you’ll become wiser in your life because you’ll know what God says to do. You see, just because you studied the Bible when you was in Sunday school, it’s not going to be sufficient to carry you all the days of your life because we have a fault.

The fault is, is we don’t have perfect recall. We can’t remember everything we’ve been told. That’s why we have to stir up our remembrance, stir up our minds, help us to remember one of the reasons that a whole Psalm is written because he says they forgot, they forgot. And God says they forgot. And a lot of times that’s excuse we use when we do, I forgot, I forgot. What God wants to help us remember. And sometimes those bitter experiences that we have is to teach us something so that we don’t forget it so quickly.

God allows us to have sometimes deep, deep hurts to help us remember what caused the hurt. Sometimes we make decisions and we say things and we do things and we hurt other people deeply and when we hurt people that we know and love then we also are hurt because of what we say and what we do. And the deep of the hurt, the longer you remember.

So that’s why sometimes God wants you to learn valuable lessons. So He’s always working in your life and He’s given to us personalized attention. But look what He says about this wisdom thing. In verse 14, the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver and the gain they’re all, then find gold. In other words, if you have wisdom, did you realize you can buy things for yourself that you can’t buy with gold and silver? Did you know that he that win if souls is wise and it don’t take money to win souls?

But because you have wisdom and you know that that’s a wise thing to do, that you can win people to Christ and you’ll be rewarded for eternity. Now, that reward for eternity is that better than the gold that’s temporary here. So you see, wisdom is better than silver and gold. And yet how many people give up everything to learn how to make money, how to make money, and never learn how to live. They don’t know how to live. You can give some people a million dollars in making blood in a month.

I like to try one time, just one time, just to try. They say that money cannot buy happiness, but it can’t everything else. Look at verse 15, she is more precious than rubies in all the things thou can’t desire are not to be compared unto her. Wisdom, wisdom can give you length of days, as he says there in verse 16, The length of days is in her right hand. And in her left hand, riches in honor, her ways are ways of pleasantness.

And all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her and happy that everyone that retainted her. You often hear teenagers say, boy, I just wanna be happy. I just wanna be happy. And they think they can be happy doing the things that everybody else does in the world. But that’s on. Not a happiness at last, and there’s a lot of sorrow with it. And so, as you go down through here, look in chapter 4 and verse 7, wisdom is the principal thing.

And you have to have principal to work from. You mean that is your core value. The one thing that you have to have to make decisions, because you’re always making decisions, And all of life is making choices. Wisdom is the principle thing. Therefore get wisdom, and with all by getting, understand, understand, understand God, understand man, understand yourself, understand life. And then say you’re not so shaken by the things that don’t happen to you the way that you think you are, because you understand.

You understand. You understand that when people get married, they don’t live in eternal bliss from here or not. You understand that. Because you understand they got a no sin for nature, both of them, and they don’t live happily ever after. They might live forever, but I mean they don’t live happily ever after. And people have problems. Kids have problems. You have children. You’re going to have problems with kids. You ought to understand that. You go to work. you shouldn’t expect everybody to treat you with love.

That ain’t going to happen. You should understand what people send for nature. They’re going to do you wrong. But you can live with it because you see you have something that’s greater on the inside of you than he that is in this world. Something means more to you. You understand. So you can come to church because you understand the reasons why you should. You can support missions or the various ministries or get involved. Why? Because you understand, not everybody has the same understanding.

They don’t have it. The Bible talks about the horse and the mule that have no understanding. I thought they were pretty smart to me except maybe a mule doesn’t. You know, stubborn, rebellious, stubborn as a mule. Is it possible that God’s children could act like a mule that has no understanding? Know anybody like that? Don’t look at nobody. Don’t do that. But wisdom is the principal thing. So then he says in verse 8, Exalt her, and she shall promote the…

You know why I want to start a Bible college? I want to teach young people wisdom, the wisdom of God. They’re not going to learn this in the average church. They’re not going to learn it most at home. They’re not going to learn it from all the secular universities at college there are. You’ve got to try to challenge people. If there’s anything that you want to do with your life of any value whatsoever or eternity, you’ve got to know the book.

You got to know the book. So you want to promote wisdom, you have to promote the word. And when you promote the word is because you care about the people, you want the best for them. You want people to make wise decisions because everybody’s going to make decisions. And there is a way that seems right unto a man, but it leads to destruction. So the only thing to offset the wisdom of man is the wisdom of God. So that’s what you look for.

Take your Bible and turn all the way over there to the 15th chapter, the 15th chapter. I just want to point out a few thoughts to you here. In the 15th chapter of Proverbs, look what he says in verse 1, A soft answer turneth away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger. Isn’t that a wise verse? Have you ever applied that verse? Have you ever thought in advance? If somebody says this to me, I am prepared to speak very kindly.

And you can determine that ahead of time. Most people, they find out what irritates another person and then do it. Cause they know how to make them that. So you make me mad. No, you allowed them to make you mad. They just know that if they say this, you’re going to react this way. way. Fool them next time. Don’t react that way. So you can make me mad. You can… Fool them next time. Don’t react that way. So you can’t make me mad.

You can’t make me mad. You’re not going to upset me. And in smile, this is big and pretty. That’ll really get their goat. You see, you can turn. You don’t have to be a puppet in everybody’s hand. Don’t let people use you. But he also says here in verse three, looking verse three, he says, the eyes of the Lord are in every place. Be holding the evil and the good. Do you think God sees everything that happens to you?

People that do you wrong? Say wrong things to you or about you? Listen. Do you think these verses I’m sharing with you? you haven’t become real in my life after 50 something years. You’d be surprised at things that I’ve had people say about me, lies that have been said about me. It doesn’t matter. I know God knows. And then I can just smile because that is a great thing to know. That brings great comfort. It keeps me from getting bitter because I know God knows.

I understand I know that sometimes it’s not just what the people want to do. Sometimes the devil gets the best of people. And sometimes people say things they wish to have in the said. We’ll cut them some slack and let it go. Don’t make everybody fall down and bow to you and beg for forgiveness. Thank you dirty scoundrel, you’re… And then give them a whole list of penances they got to do to make up for it. Look in verse 10, correction is grievous unto him that forsakeeth the way.

And he that hated reproof shall die. Correction is grievous unto him that forsakeeth the way. Nobody likes to be corrected when they know they’re doing wrong. They don’t want you to say anything about it. That’s why sometimes people when they want to do wrong, they don’t want to come to church. You know how people don’t go to church? Because they don’t want to. You know how people don’t come to church on Sunday night or Wednesday? They don’t want to come.

People generally do what they really want to do. True? Unless you know they got work or their sake or something like that, but most people that you do what you really, down deep, you really want to do. But wise men understand that. You understand, you can’t make everybody understand. You can’t makelahoma body love God. You can’t make everybody walk with the Lord. You can’t make everybody do all the things you want everybody to do. That’s going to happen. So you’re thankful for the ones that will.

And you just keep feeding and keep trying to do right by those that will respond and love what God’s Word says. You’ve been listening to Bibleline, a teaching ministry of Calvary Community Church in Tappa, Florida with Dr. Ralph Arnold. We pray that you were blessed by today’s message. Part 2 of this teaching will conclude with tomorrow’s broadcast. If you have enjoyed our commitment to the clear gospel of Jesus Christ, you can reach Bibleline and pledge your support to keep us on the air in your area by dialing tool free, 1-800-576-3771.

1-800-576-3771. To listen to today’s message again or to obtain a free download of any of our Bible line programs, just go to our homepage at BibleLineMinistries.org and click on the radio broadcast link. If you are in the area, we welcome you to visit us. The address for Calvary Community Church is 4811 George Road, Tampa, Florida, 33634. Our Sunday morning services begin at 10.30 and at 6 o’clock on Sunday evening. Live broadcast of our services may be seen by clicking on the Calvary Community Church link at BibleLineMinistries.org.

Thanks for joining us on Bibleline, and now a closing thought from Pastor Arnold. Friend, one day it will happen. The trumpet will sound, and we will be changed. Caught up to meet the Lord in the air. live today and every day. Believing that the Lord is coming soon, and just keep looking up.