Wisdom? Who is Wise? by John.

Wisdom? Who is Wise?
Proverbs 11:30

I. Proverbs 11:30 says, "The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life; and he who wins souls is wise."
1. I see three things in this verse:
(1) The righteous life bears fruit to eternal life.
(2) Since this is poetic in form, the second half of the verse says the same thing, or it adds something else to the first.
a. Considered the second way, it is wise to win souls.
b. Taken the first way, a wise person wins souls.
2. We may persuade others to trust the Lord for salvation, but it the Lord, and only the Lord, Who does all the saving.
3. Before Solomon's day, God told us how to recognize a wise person and how we can become wise.
4. The process is simple to state, but not so simple to accomplish.

I. Do you want to be Wise?

1. Persuade men to put their trust in the only real God there is, the One Who reveals Himself both in the Bible and to the human soul.
2. How can you do that?
(1) First, live like Jesus did when He walked the earth. I John 2: 5b and 6: "This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did."
a. The world can tell the real from the phony in the blink of an eye!
b. It's true that people let Satan confuse them sometimes, but if they go directly to God in prayer, their understanding will be opened to the truth.
(2) Second, fill your life with good and avoid the bad the rest of the world does. People know and notice the difference!
(3) Third, love people the way God does.
a. I'm talking about the kind of love that the Father displayed when He sent His only born Son to die for us.
b. Again, lost people know, and they can spot a phony, and Satan aids them in that! In fact, Christians out of fellowship with the Father are one of the strongest tools Satan uses to keep lost people lost!
(4) Fourth, deliberately seek to lead others to the truth of the Gospel.
a. Most people hear preaching when they go to church, if they go to church, or on the radio, or TV, but they don't really apply it to themselves.
b. Your visiting with them will cause them to say, "Hey! You mean the preacher was talking about me?" Or, they will at least get the idea God cares!
(5) Fifth, we must pray for, and if possible, with the people we want to meet Jesus.
ill. When I was very young, I was in church every Sunday morning and night. I never applied the message to myself. I just wondered how long the preacher was going to preach, or when the Sunday School bell would ring ending the class. I had a very strong, uncontrolled temper. When I got angry, my mother took me into the bedroom, knelt by my dad's bed, pulled me down beside her, and she prayed for me, and when I asked her why, she said, "I don't want you to end up in the penitentiary. That would break my heart!" Those prayers did not make me a Christian, but they did make me scared of doing wrong! She really got my attention, not through scolding, but through prayer!
When you pray with lost people, they get the point that you, and probably God, care about what happens to them in their future!

II. A Wise Christian is a Soul Winner.

1. I don't think most Christians understand what a soul-winner is because we think that when we do the things we've already mentioned, people will automatically become Christians.
(1) If that doesn't happen, we think we are at fault! And we may be, but that's not necessarily true.
(2) Maybe there's unconfessed sin in our lives.
(3) That may be true, but we don't save people!
(4) God does the saving, and He uses the Gospel to do it.
(5) If we give the Gospel to people, we've given them the one thing they need to live forever!
ill. If you saw a person drowning in a swimming pool, what would you do? Jump in and save him? Call the lifeguard? Dial 911? What would you do?
When I took lifesaving, they taught us how to go about every possible circumstance to save the person drowning, and to be safe ourselves. The very first rule was, don't go into the water if it is not absolutely necessary! Use that long pole with a hook on it. Throw the person a life preserver. Those things you can do even if you can't swim!
When you are dealing with lost people, be aware of your limitations and theirs, but don't let them keep you from doing God's will. Use your limitations to do it right!
(6) What we need to do is get out of the way and let the Gospel and God's Holy Spirit work!
2. God made each one of us free.
(1) We may be slaves or freemen in this world, but by the time we know what's going on, we've already sinned against God.
(2) That means we are lost, under the insidious control of Satan and we are strangers to God.
(3) We are helpless to regain the righteousness God gave us, but we are still free to choose God!
(4) He sent Jesus to die for us, pay for our sins, open the doors of heaven to us, and to give us the ability to become children of God!
(5) We, individually, must decide that God's way is the way of real life, and we must accept Jesus as our own personal Lord and Savior. (If He is not your Lord, He is not your Savior)!
3. Now, where does that put the "soul-winner"?
(1) It makes us wonderfully blessed to have a part in helping another person have life everlasting, to be God's own child! As I Corinthians 3:9 says, "We are God's fellow workers."
(2) But we must be sure the glory of all we do
goes to our heavenly Father, to His Son Jesus, and to God's Holy Spirit Who seals every person to the very day of redemption. Ephesians 4:30 says: "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption." "Sealed" is past tense and means every believer who places his life in the Lord's hands is sealed all the way to heaven!

III. Please God!

1. We've talked about being wise, and about winning souls.
2. We have not paid much attention to the first part of that verse, "The fruit of the righteous."
3. It seems reasonable to say that the fruit of a Christian is another Christian, but since we don't do the saving, is that true?
4. Perhaps we need to consider the word, "righteous." (It is tsaw-DEEK in Hebrew, 6662 Strong's ).
(1) The righteous man or woman is moral, upright, someone who is dependable.
(2) Someone recognized by his neighbors as without sin.
(3) Such a person in Solomon's time would be highly respected.
(4) The person from the New Testament on is a Christian rather than a godly Jew.
5. Perhaps you feel you are too much a sinner to fit that description.
(1) Let me remind you that Isaiah said in Isaiah 64:6:"...All our righteous acts are like filthy rags..." Without Jesus we could not be clean!
(2) Titus 3:5 says, "He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life."
(3) Whatever righteousness we have comes directly from God. We haven't, and we can't, be righteous apart from Jesus!
6. The point is: it is wise to trust Jesus as our Lord and our Savior. Everything good comes from that one Source!

Conclusion:

1. Without Jesus, we are like every other person in the world.
2. With Jesus, we become fellow-workers with God.
3. By our words, by our actions, by our thoughts, by our actions, all of which make up our godly character, we witness to the truth of the Bible, to the reality of our Lord Jesus and of others need of forgiveness and salvation.
4. We are wise when we trust Jesus and commit our lives to Him.
5. We are wise when we guard our lives from sin and live uprightly.
6. We are wise when we show the world how wonderful it is to belong to Jesus.
7. When we do these things, people will notice that we are different, and they will want to know Jesus, too.
8. Perhaps you haven't given your life to Jesus...Look around you. All of these have.
9. Give yourself to Jesus right now. The altar is open for you. We will pray with you, counsel with you, help you to know our Lord Jesus!