Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Wisdom in Your Own Eyes | The Writings | Proverbs 26

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

Are you wise in your own eyes? Do you struggle with self-righteousness? Do you have eyes to see your lack of wisdom? In today's episode, Jensen shares how Proverbs 26 encourages us to be wise in God's eyes, not our own. Read the Bible with us in 2024! This year, we’re tackling a group of Old Testament books traditionally known as “The Writings”— Psalms, Chronicles, Proverbs, Daniel, Ruth and more! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Proverbs 26

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jensen Holt McNair. If you read through the entire book of Proverbs, you'll come out the other side of it, knowing one thing for sure. It's not good to be a fool. The foolish person doesn't get any breaks in this book. They're likened to a dog returning to their vomit, destined for ruin, no chance for honor. Proverbs is full of comparisons between the wise and the foolish, the righteous, and the wicked. The chapter we're looking at today in particular lays out seven different types of wicked people. The first one is actually found right at the end of chapter 25.

But chapter 26 as a whole is giving us a detailed picture of many different ways that humans can find themselves living wicked lives, straying from the path of wisdom. There's the unrestrained, the fool, the sluggard, the meddler, the deceiver, the slanderer, and the hypocrite. We're given a very detailed look at the actions, motivations, and characteristics of these kinds of wicked people. And in these seven different types of people, we see the most real estate given to the fool. It's not good to be a fool. And yet, in the final thoughts on the foolish person, we read this. verse. Do you see a person wise in their own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for them. Let's unpack that. The fool, the prototype of a person that has been roasted throughout

Proverbs, actually has more hope than a person who is wise in their own eyes. This whole chapter is dedicated to detailing the lives of the wicked, to warn us away from falling in step with them, to push us towards wisdom. And yet, within this verse, I think we also see another reason for Proverbs chapter 26. It's also supposed to act as a mirror. Now what do I mean by that? Hang with me for a second. If you've ever read the Gospels, you'll know that as Jesus spends his time spreading the good news of his kingdom, he has quite a few run-ins with the Pharisees. And if you've been in any Christian circles for long, you'll know that we also love to roast a Pharisee. They are so clearly the bad guys of the gospel.

I mean, they killed Jesus. But to the original audience, to the people living in the days of Jesus, the Pharisees weren't the bad guys. They were the spiritual leaders, the teachers of the law. They were the good guys. The people thought it, and the Pharisees certainly thought so as well. But Jesus held his ground again and again, and called out the self-righteous arrogance of the Pharisees.

We see it so clearly in the people. parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector found in Luke 18. To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable. Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed, God, I thank you that I am not like other people. Robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like this tax collector, I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get. But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. You see, the Pharisee was confident in his righteousness. He was wise in his own eyes. He thanked God that he was not. like the other sinners, like the tax collector. On the other hand, we have the tax collector, someone who certainly had chosen a foolish and wicked way to live, and he knew it. He stood before God humbled, begging for mercy. He knew his own folly and he laid it bare before God. And Jesus,

to a crowd who would have seen the tax collector as evil and despicable and the Pharisee is honorable and faithful, declared that it was the tax collector who went home justified. It was the tax collector who would be exalted by God. Truly, this was shocking in its time. There was hope for the tax collector because he was able to see himself clearly in light of God's holiness. Now, here's the problem we run into with our modern lens as we read the gospel. We aren't shocked by the Pharisee being the bad guy. We expect it.

We can safely stand beside Jesus and agree with him. The Pharisees are the worst. But when we do that, we offer ourselves protection. We lose the self-reflection peace that Jesus' original audience would have experienced. They didn't relate to the tax collector. They hated him. They related to the Pharisee. And when Jesus condemned the Pharisees for their self-righteousness, he was offering his audience a mirror.

He was giving them a moment to reflect, to see their own brokenness, to see if in their hatred of the tax collector, the sinner, they'd become blind to their own sins as well. Which brings us back to Proverbs 26. a proverb where it would be particularly easy to read through these descriptions of wicked people and think about other people in your life that fit that mold, to see it as a warning to make sure you don't become like them, but stay comfortable in your own belief that you are wise, you're not like them. But verse 12 should give us pause. There is more hope for the fool, for the tax collector, the obvious sinner,

than there is for the one who believes they are wise. in their own eyes. The one who believes they have the answers. They have it figured out. They are not the problem. They do not need correction. Those people, like the Pharisees, hear Jesus' rebuke and want to silence him rather than self-reflect. Their hopelessness stems from the fact that they can never see themselves as the fool. And so correction will always fall on deaf ears. Growth will never happen and they will continue in their ways, never recognizing their need for help. See, when we begin to believe ourselves to be wise in our own eyes, when we become comfortable in our own righteousness, we become more hopeless than the fool.

Now, this isn't to say that we aren't allowed to acknowledge growth or recognize the ways that God has shaped us into people of wisdom. The problem with the Pharisee wasn't that they were really good religious people and they knew it, it was that their belief in their own self-righteousness blinded them from the reality that they, like every other human being, were no less guilty of sin than the tax collector next to them. They were wise in their own eyes, but not in gods. In God's kingdom, the wise man is not the one who believes himself to be wise in his own right, but it's also not the one who's a fool and continues on in his foolish ways. No, the wise man is the one who recognizes that on his own he has lived a life of foolishness, that as he reads Proverbs 26,

he sees the ways that he has acted the part of the fool, the sluggard, the slanderer. He is the one that knows that apart from God's wisdom, God's grace, God's provision, he is destined to live a foolish and wicked life. And in, in, That knowledge, he casts himself down before God and begs for mercy. He mourns the folly he sees in his life rather than standing to the side, wagging his finger at the wickedness of those sinners. Don't fall into the self-righteous trap. The unrepentant, prideful man has no hope in the kingdom of God. A fool is better off, for at least he has hope of repentance. The next time you're tempted to think, at least I'm not like them. Yeah, I gossip with friends sometimes, but it's really just to

share information, and at least I'm not crazy like those girls on reality TV. Or yeah, sometimes I'm a little lazy, but it could certainly be a lot worse. I tell a little white lie here, there, but no one really gets hurt. It's not like I'm lying on the stand or something. Self-righteousness is sneaky. Allow Proverbs 26 to be a mirror for you, to cause you to self-reflect, to examine your heart, to beg God to have mercy, to show you the areas of life where you are foolish, where you do fail. Fall before him with humility. Repent of the self-righteousness that blinds you. Before you let yourself slip into the comforting trap of self-righteousness, remember that ignoring your brokenness, pushing away the discomfort of acknowledging sin will only lead to destruction. You can believe

yourself wise all you like, but it was the tax collector who stood justified before his God that day. The kingdom of God will be full of humbled, repentant, grateful fools, feasting alongside their merciful king. Don't let yourself righteousness keep you from that table. Humbly, fall before your king, depending on his righteousness alone to carry you into his kingdom.