Video Transcript: Are You Listening?

I have a few examples from the book of Proverbs where some people listen and others don't with disastrous results. Proverbs says don't join a gang, my son if sinners entice you, do not give in to them. Don't go along with people who say we're going to attack others and get their stuff. We're going to enjoy a whole gang fellowship here. Beware of gangs. And that has stood in God's word for a very long time. Many parents have warned their children not to join the gang and yet, kids do join gangs, some of them with disastrous effects on others and often on themselves. He who walks with the wise grows wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm. Pick the right companions, because the wrong ones can really mess you up. A man of many companions may come under ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. When  you find the right companions and above all, the greatest companion our Lord Jesus Christ, the ultimate friend, then companionship can change your life for the better. But are you listening? Who do you hang out with? Some people have gotten in trouble in the past, find themselves in jail and when they get out, they go right back to their old companions who got them into that mess in the first place. You need to listen and find new companions to hang out with if that's been your problem. And so, the power of companionship is something Proverbs speaks very much about. But are you listening? 

Proverbs speaks about sexual desire, and about wrong sexual desire. And the Bible says keep your way far from her, this woman who's just trying to seduce you. Lest at the end of your life you've grown, when your flesh and body are consumed, and you say how I hated discipline my heart despise reproof. I did not listen to the voice of my teachers or incline my ear to my instructors. I am at the brink of utter ruin. Many a church leader has not been wise in the way he relates to members of the opposite sex and has wrecked a ministry as a result. Many people have gotten themselves or other people into great trouble because of sexual folly. And we know that some have gotten into pornography and rather than find ways to get out of it, rather than being accountable to others, rather than seeking help and trying to break with it, they get deeper and deeper and deeper into it, and it ruins marriages. It ruins one's own soul. It ruins your boldness for the Lord. Your joy in the Lord. And so sexual desire Proverbs teaches us is something that you got to focus on the spouse God gives you. And if you have that headed in any other direction, you've got to keep far from it. Or you may end up groaning and saying I didn't listen and wow, did it cost me? Pastors who think they can just hang out with women who weren't their wife and do lots of stuff with them and maybe have a little any window do other with them and think it's a big joke. I've seen time and again, that ministry ends up in flames. 

And then there's alcohol. Wine is a mocker and beer a brawler. Whoever is led astray by them is not wise. The Bible clearly teaches that getting drunk and drinking to excess is sinful and damaging. But are you listening? Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Well, those who linger over wine, and Proverbs goes on to describe and kind of humorous but also very sad detail how they're like somebody at the top of a ship's mask swaying back and forth and all over the place and unsteady and they've got their wine and in the end, it bites like a snake and poisons like a viper. They hit me you'll say, buy I'm not hurt. They beat me, but I don't feel it. When will I wake up so I can find another drink. That's the terrible thing about alcohol. You just can't listen. You can't learn from life. You're at this party and you're drinking, you get beaten. But hey, you were drunk at the time and didn’t feel it and where's my next bottle? Or another disaster comes your way. Your spouse says man, I wish you quit drinking. It's wrecking our marriage. And you won’t listen. You just keep on drinking. You see your kids being alienated from you. You see their lives getting messed up. I've known alcoholics and their kids are getting suicidal, they're desperate. And the alcoholic even knows it. And he'll listen to the problem and then say, well, we're going to get another bottle. It's just tragic. But this inability to listen. 

I've talked with people who are members of a family of an alcoholic and I say you know, you really need to go to Al Anon. That's a support group which will help you to understand the illness and the addiction of your alcoholic family member. But some of them won’t go and they just remain part of the system and they remain enabling that alcoholic. I'll say to an alcoholic, you got to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. You've got to break with your drinking. You've got to admit that you're powerless and that God can help you that you have other people to help hold you accountable and support you in that. You got to go to AA, and some do. And I know once we've been free of alcoholism for decades, because of it. But I know others that received the same advice, but they would not listen. And again, alcohol is a marriage and family wrecker. It's a ministry wrecker. Some people who are ministry leaders get into drinking. Many people, many, many people who've gone to prison or find themselves in jail had problems with alcohol and drugs. It's something that absolutely has to be reined in. And so, I just urge you, as you think about these things, listen. If alcohol has a major part in your life, it's got to go. Wine is a mocker, beer a brawler, whoever is led astray by them is not wise Proverbs says it but are you listening? 

Money. Money problems can damage our individual lives. They can also be damaging in the realm of ministry where some pastors misuse the money of the congregation, or they misuse their own finances and they're not in a in a good situation to provide for themselves. Lazy hands make a man poor. Diligent hands bring wealth. There's a lot of Proverbs about money. I will mentioned a few here. We'll find out a lot more when we talk about financial fitness. Better a little with the fear of the Lord than great wealth of turmoil. So, it's good to work hard and make some money. But sometimes even if you can't make a lot of money if you're following God, that's a lot better than being some rich Fat Cat. Don't be a man who puts up security for debts. Don't let other people's debts drag you down. They'll be unwise about that. Be generous with your money. He who is kind to the poor lends to the Lord; He'll reward it. If you want to be a true follower of Jesus, don't let money be your master. You can't have two masters. You serve God or not. But you can't serve God and money at the same time. You’ve got to serve God and then manage your money wisely. And again. Proverbs says these things. Are you listening? Have you become wise and a hard worker in your management with money? 

Or do you love death? You just love your alcohol too much. You love the wrong companions too much. You waste money too much. You love death? Whoever despises the word brings destruction on himself. A man who remains stiff-necked after many rebukes will suddenly be destroyed without remedy. The Bible gives many examples of that. One of the most grievous ones was Pharaoh. Moses went to Pharaoh, and he said, thus says the Lord, let my people go. Pharaoh said, “I do not know the Lord and I will not let your people go. Who is the Lord that I should obey Him? Well, he got a very tough introduction to the Lord and the God's power and the plagues of God and the destruction and still he would not relent and then even after the 10 plagues, he wouldn’t let them go. Pharaoh decided later on that he was going to go after him anyway, and he lost his whole army and perished in the Red Sea. A man who was stiff-necked after so many opportunities, suddenly there's destruction. And so, wisdom comes to us to bring us life, to help us flourish, to help us taste of the tree of life, to gain fitness in so many different areas of life and wisdom comes to us promising the way to that abundant life in Jesus Christ. And if you don't want to listen to that wisdom, there’s just one explanation. You must love death. So, are you listening? That's the big question we want to keep asking as we go along. 

When we have hearing problems, when we're not listening, it often means in fact, almost always means there's a heart problem. And Jesus talked about the heart very much. And some of His stories show what happens when we have hearing problems. Jesus would often say he has ears to hear let him hear. But anyway, a preoccupied heart is a heart that's just too busy. A heart is too busy with this that the other thing is unresponsive to God's voice. Jesus told the story of people who are invited to a great banquet. But they all made excuses. They all had something else to do. And so, they missed out on the banquet. Because they were preoccupied with their own stuff, and they didn't want to bother with the king and his banquet. 

It's also the fruitless heart which doesn't produce crops, even though the seed of God's word is there. And Jesus tells a parable of different kinds of soil and some soil is so hard packed and so much activity and the seeds lands there, the birds take it away and that's like the devil just coming into a heart that's hard and just sweeping away the Word of God before it ever sinks in. And others, they're kind of shallow and they're all excited about the word for just a little bit, but then they're like seed on shallow soil or rock and it springs up right away. But then when the sun comes out, it withers right away. And that's what happens when shallow people receive the word for a little bit, but then when anything tough comes along, they give up on it. And there's the weed filled heart. There's thorns and weeds that spring up along with the seed and they choke out the seed and Jesus says That's like having all these cares and pleasures of life that are all filling your heart. There's just no room for the seed to grow and bear fruit. But there's also a heart that is good soil and it produces a lot of fruit. The fruitless heart though, all those different kinds of soil have something in common that hard-packed path, that rocky soil and that weedy soil, they're uncultivated. They need to be plowed out as one of the prophets says, plow your heart if you plow your heart through repentance, and then that seed can then fall into the repentant, cultivated heart where the soil is deep, where the thorns have been dug up where the rocks have been removed, where it's not a hard path, but it's been plowed. So, if you've got hearing problems, it means that your heart may need to be cultivated in order to become good soil. 

A self-centered heart is an unloving heart. Jesus story, for instance of a rich man who ignored the beggars around them and wouldn't do anything for them. And then when he died, he pretended as though he couldn’t have known that he wanted a messenger sent from the dead to warn his brothers and he was told well, if you won't listen to the Word of God, to Moses and the prophets, you wouldn't listen even if somebody came back from the dead. In fact, somebody did come back from the dead and he was even named Lazarus. Jesus raised a man named Lazarus from the dead and his enemies still wouldn't listen to Him. Jesus Himself rose from the dead, and His enemies still wouldn’t believe it. But the self-centered heart, the unloving heart won't hear God's word. That's what was going on with that rich man. He acted like he never had ample warning, but he had known what God's word said. He just wouldn't listen because he was too self-centered, and that made him unloving.

And then there's just the doomed unbiblical heart. Jesus says that anybody who hears these words of mine and doesn't put them into practice, who won’t listen to and out them into practice is like a foolish man who builds his house on sand. When the rains come down, and the streams rise and the wind blows, it collapses with a great crash. A heart that just isn't interested in the Bible is a doomed heart headed for a big crash, when the storms come. 

So, if you have hearing problems, you’ve got to realize that there's heart problems. As we said in an earlier talk, if you want to be spiritually fit, especially you need a healthy heart. Jesus said the seed on good soil stands for those of the noble and good heart. Proverbs says, Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Above all else, guard your heart for it’s the wellspring of life. The prayer of the psalms was give me an undivided heart. You need a healthy heart and for that to happen, God gives you a heart transplant. And transforms your heart and causes you to be born again. Are you listening? Have you received that new heart in Christ? If not, you must. Because otherwise just to take a class what good is that? You need a new heart, you need a healthy heart. 

And then you need to develop spiritual fitness. We've seen that we're spiritually fit when we're close to God, and we're resistant to evil and the practices that lead to fitness are meant to draw us into fellowship with God. To develop his grace in us. When we’ve blown it, we thank God that He gives us more grace, and then submit yourselves to God, resist the devil, he’ll flee from you. Come nearer to God, He'll come nearer to you. We've talked about what it takes, what's involved in coming nearer to God and resisting the devil. But are you listening? Are you doing anything different than you did before? Are you following any of the practices that develop nearness to God? 

Did you ask yourself and take to heart the questions of spiritual fitness testing? Are you desiring God more and more in your life? Are you resisting the devil, the world and the flesh? Are you loving and caring toward others? Are you willing and able to forgive? Are you heavenly minded? Are you faithful in Bible intake and prayer and other spiritual disciplines? Those aren’t just questions that appear in the lecture now you're going to get quizzed on them. Those things are tests of how your spiritual health is, are you listening? Are you taking them to heart? Are you getting a realistic idea of your spiritual health? That's the whole point of asking these questions. 

And then we thought about feeding on God's word to read it daily, yourself and your family, to memorize portions of it, to meditate and think it over and how the word applies to you and relates to your life and think about things in your life and then the Holy Spirit brings the words to bear on it. So, listen to the preaching of the Word in church and from others in Bible study groups, to apply what you learn and act upon it. To journal it, write it down. Are you doing any of that? You listen to a presentation about it. Maybe you want to take a quiz about it. But are you doing it? Are you listening? 

Now, let me just say that when you learn a number of new practices, it may not be very reasonable to put all of them into practice at once. It may be wise for you to take one or two things that you haven't been doing and make them part of your life. And then go back and think about later on, once those are ingrained in your life and add a little something more in how you feed on God's word. So, I'm not saying everything all at once, or else it's a total failure. But have you made any change whatsoever? Are you growing in your ability to feed on God's word? Really, as you move along, and you take a class like this and things you learn in it, you should take stock once in a while. A few weeks from now a few months from now and ask yourself, how much of this am I practicing in developing my spiritual fitness? And the same holds true for other things that we'll look at later on in total fitness. Are you putting these things into practice? 

We talked about healthy prayer patterns, praying alone and praying together with others, praying spontaneously on the spot, as well as having a pattern and schedule for prayer. Praying from your heart, but also having some guides for prayer. And we talked about some of those possible guides. Using the Lord's Prayer as an outline and a structure for prayer that then you express more and more based on each of those statements in the Lord's Prayer. We talked about adoration, confession thanksgiving supplication, A.C.T.S as a pattern for prayer. Praying the words of the Bible, the Psalms, the prayers of Paul the prayers of Revelation. Praying like children saying things like Daddy, please, thank you, it's not fair and so forth. Those are some of the guides that we gave for prayer. But only question is this. Are you listening? Are you seeking the Lord more? Are you finding ways to develop your prayer life? If your prayer life was already doing great, well, wonderful, but if not, are you taking any steps to develop stronger patterns for prayer? 

We talked also about taking a break? About disciplines of abstinence about rest, taking a break from busyness. Solitude, take a break from people and be by yourself sometimes. Silence take a break from noise and be still before God. Secrecy not doing things in front of others all the time. But doing things secretly just because God is watching you. Fasting, taking a break from food to focus on God. Submission. Be silent for a while. I'm just going to let others have their way unless it would be sin but otherwise, I'm not going to be pushing for my way for this period of time. I'm just going to take a break from control and submit. Or sacrifice take a break from plenty and give generously. Maybe give a little more than you can afford once in a while and do that as a discipline that when you take a break from calculating every penny and where you take a break from having always everything more and more for yourself and to bless others. These are disciplines where you take a break that get you out of ruts and then come back to enrich your busy times, enriched by your rest. Your times with people are enriched by the time you spent alone. Your ability to be silent has made you better when you do talk. Your secrecy has made you a better person whose light can shine when you're actually in front people because you're genuine not just trying to impress them. You're fasting helps you to handle food more wisely and helps you to not have your stomach as your god. Submitting to others helps you then to interact with others and be bold when you need to be. Sacrifice means that you're not dominated by your needs all the time. Taking a break. Are you listening? 

Did you actually put any of this into practice. Did you ever go off by yourself and you say, “Man, I've been working 24/7 I've been way too busy. I need to really take a Sabbath. I need that day of rest to worship with God's people just take the day off.” Are you doing any of this once again, you don't have to do all of it at once but as the Spirit lay something on your heart say boy, that's a practice I really sense that I need it. I need it. Now I'm going to put it to work in my life. Are you listening. When we get into total fitness training, we've talked about the big picture. We've talked about spiritual fitness and spiritual fitness training and Bible intake and prayer life and taking a break in various ways. Have you been listening? Has it made any difference whatsoever for you?

Once again, without being too rude, the whole point of the class is to help you to flourish to make decisions and to follow practices that are going to bless you. And that means you got to listen. It's just a waste of time to look at some talks. Fill up some quizzes and move on unchanged. What a waste of your time to do that. When you hear about physical fitness. There's going to be some things related to what you eat and how you exercise. You can learn from that and put it into practice. Or you can just ignore it. And it will be no good. You can handle your finances the way you always have and if you're already wise at it, it will be good for you. But if you're not, be listening. When you're learning, intellectual fitness, or how to manage your emotions or what to do in relationships or things that are practically important for your job, take them to heart and keep thinking about them. 

There's a sense in which I haven't said anything new in this talk. I've just been reminding. But that's what a lot of life is about. Once you discover and learn something, you need to keep reminding, keep going back to it and keep putting more and more of it into practice in your life. You listen and first you say, what are two or three of the things that strike me most that I need to work on first, and you go after that? And then once you've added something then you integrate other healthy patterns into your life. But are you're listening.

Please don't go any further in this class without putting something into practice of what we've already covered. And then as you move forward, be someone who hears and puts into practice the things that you've discovered that God lays on your mind. Now then listen to me. Blessed are those who keep my ways says wisdom. Listen to my instruction and be wise. Don't ignore it. Blessed is the man who listens to me, for whoever finds me, finds life and receives favor from the Lord. That's my heart's desire for you. That you have life abundant life that you'll be eating from the tree of life, that you'll be flourishing and receiving God's favor and experiencing it in so many different areas of your life. But whoever fails to find me harms himself. All who hate me, hates wisdom, love death. Are you listening?