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Wisdom (Proverbs)
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I want to start by sharing a story from my college days. I was a sophomore, asked to sing some songs I had written at a house party. During the sound check, I was nailing it—or so I thought. My friend's sister had just gotten home from volleyball practice, and I was so eager to impress her that I spent the entire evening trying to get her attention. I was persistent, following her around, and eventually I got her number by offering to help her buy a Christmas gift for her brother.
We started texting, went on a few dates, fell in love, and got married almost 18 years ago. She's still just as unimpressed with my music today as she was back then! Here's the thing—I'd drop everything to pursue her. That pursuit shaped so much of my life: my time, my priorities, even my relationships.
This is the key insight I want to share with you today: what you pursue shapes who you become.
Think about this in your own life. It's true in how you pursue success at work. What have you been willing to lay down and abandon just to climb that next rung? It's true in how you pursue the approval of others. What have you compromised about yourself just to get those likes or those compliments?
Some of us pursue comfort. Others pursue control, thinking that if we can just manage and manipulate our little world, things will be fine. But no matter what we're chasing, the reality remains: what you pursue shapes who you become.
Here's the hard truth: you are not the same person you were a year ago. Life happens. Circumstances happen. Emotional change happens. And you will continue to change until you stop breathing. Every one of us is marked by our pursuits, our relationships, and the things around us.
Some of you know this too well. Your life feels like it's in shambles. You've stacked one bad decision on top of another, and you don't even recognize the person looking back at you in the mirror. For others, it's transition—maybe you just graduated, moved to a new place, started a new job, or entered a new relationship.
Here's what breaks my heart: it's possible to build a life that everyone sees as success and still fail to become the person God created you to become. Because God is far more concerned with your character than your resume.
So I have to ask you: What are you pursuing in your life? And how is it shaping who you're becoming?
What if I told you there's a pursuit that would actually help you become the best version of yourself? Proverbs 3 gives us a picture of what a life shaped by God actually looks like.
Let love and faithfulness never leave you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God and man. (Proverbs 3:3-4)
Love and faithfulness—these aren't just nice words Solomon threw in. They're foundational truths to the very core of who God is. The Hebrew word for love here is hesed—God's loyal covenant love. Faithfulness is emet—God's unwavering reliability. When you put these together, you get a picture of God's character.
Here's what Solomon is saying: never let the character of God get away from you. But how do you do that? You pursue it. We're charged to bind these qualities around our necks and write them on the tablets of our hearts—these are action words, words of pursuit.
Don't just wear God's love and faithfulness externally. Instead, let the character of God become your character. This isn't behavior modification. This is heart transformation.
Let's talk about the heart. In the ancient Eastern world, when people heard the word "heart," they weren't thinking about emotions. The heart is the core of a person—the command center of your entire life. What the modern world calls "self," the Bible calls your heart. Your heart is the driver of your life.
And here's the crucial thing: God cares more about your heart than your actions, because your heart determines your actions. You can modify behavior temporarily, but if the heart never changes, you'll always drift back to who you really are.
Jesus puts it this way:
The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart. And the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart, the mouth speaks. (Luke 6:45)
God said through Isaiah:
These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. (Isaiah 29:13)
God isn't after your performance. He's after your heart. That's the invitation of Proverbs 3 for us today. When you pursue the heart of God, he forms his heart in you.
Proverbs 3 gives us three ways to shift our pursuits from what we want out of life to who God is trying to shape us to become. Some of these are going to sting a little, but this is the greatest pursuit we could possibly set out on.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5-6)
Control feels safe, but it's actually exhausting. What does control look like for you? Maybe it's carrying anxiety you were never meant to carry. Maybe it's trying to force an outcome in a relationship by manipulating how people see things. Maybe it's refusing to ask God because you're afraid he'll say no.
Let me tell you about my son and the monkey bars. He was little and insisted, "I do it myself!" He wanted to do it without my help. So I stood back where he couldn't see me, positioning myself so he'd feel like he was doing it on his own.
He got through the first rung fine. The second rung got wobbly. Somewhere between rungs two and three, his arms started shaking. He looked around for me but couldn't find me because I was out of his line of sight. His whole body started swinging around, looking for me. Then his little arms just went limp and he screamed, "DAD! HELP!"
We've all done that, haven't we? We tell God, "I know you're here and you're willing to help, but I'll do it myself." Then we get into the decision, the relationship, the situation, and we start realizing it's not as good as it could be. We start looking around for God. Where is he? We can't find him anywhere. We start to freak out more. This is really getting bad. And eventually we just stop and yell, "GOD, HELP!"
We have this tendency to make decisions by leaning on our own understanding, then asking God to bless what we've already decided. But how different would the journey be if we asked God what he wanted and then stepped faithfully toward the direction he leads?
Submit your ways to him, and he will make your path straight. But we're so defiant about doing that. When we lay down control and choose to trust the Lord with all our heart, he becomes more of our pursuit because we're more dependent on him. The amazing thing is that God works through our relationships, our businesses, our situations, and our circumstances better than we ever could on our own.
What you try to control shapes who you become. But when you lay down control and trust God, he forms his heart in you.
Honor the Lord with your wealth, with the firstfruits of all your crops. Then your barns will be filled to overflowing. (Proverbs 3:9-10)
Loosen your grip on what's in your hands. For some of us, that's money. For others, it's our plans, our comfort, our future—the things we've quietly convinced ourselves we can't live without.
We have a tendency to take God's provision and make it our possession. One of the easiest lies to believe is that what we have belongs to us. "This is my house. This is my money. This is my time." But the longer we hold something, the easier it is to confuse stewardship with ownership.
The problem with believing we own it is that we start clenching it and depending on it. Whatever you believe is yours, you'll eventually trust more than God. What you grip the tightest is often where you trust the least.
Let me share what happened to me over 10 years ago when my family moved here from Missouri. We were trying to make good financial decisions, so we started the Dave Ramsey cash-only system. Every Saturday morning was "dad and donuts" time with my two little kids—one was about five, the other about two.
Getting a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old buckled into a car on time is like an Olympic sport. In the rush, instead of grabbing just a $20 out of the Dave Ramsey envelope that held all our cash for the entire month's worth of bills, I grabbed the whole thing. I put it on the roof of the car and started buckling the kids in.
You already know where this is going.
I drove to the doughnut shop. The kids are looking at all the sprinkled donuts, the eclairs, everything they could possibly want. I want a bear claw. We get too many donuts and head to the register. The cashier says, "This is going to be this amount of money." I say, "I think I left my money in the car. Let me go check."
It wasn't there. Poof. The entire month's worth of money—gone. Somewhere on Joe-Ex Road.
I took the kids back home, completely defeated. So much of what we'd been saving for, so many decisions we'd been working toward—all gone. I'd ruined it. I walked Joe-Ex Road for hours in the heat of the day, looking under rocks and in ditches, hoping somehow God let an angel carry it and lay it peacefully somewhere for me to find.
But what stands out to me most wasn't how much money I lost. What stands out was how tightly my heart held onto it. That money was like a security blanket for me. When something you trust disappears, you find out how much security you were actually drawing from it.
The next morning, I woke up and walked outside. There on my front doormat was an envelope with nearly the amount of money we'd lost. Quiet generosity. No Instagram post. No shout out. Someone honored God enough to let loose what he'd put in their hands, and they blessed me. I was the recipient of someone else trusting God enough to hold loosely to what they had.
Whoever you were, I think I might know, but I've never told you: thank you. My life was marked by your willingness to allow the character of God to shape your heart and hold loosely to the things he put in your hand.
What you grip so tightly shapes who you become. But when you loosen your grip on what's in your hands, God forms his heart in you—and he forms his heart in others too.
My son, do not despise the Lord's discipline, and do not resent his rebuke, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in. (Proverbs 3:11-12)
I've got to be honest—I tried to find ways to not include this in the sermon. It's deeply convicting. But I have to be true to what God's word says.
The third way to pursue God's heart is to let God shape you. What do you do when you're corrected? Do you get defensive? Do you try to justify? Do you blame or explain?
A couple years ago, my wife texted me out of the blue: "You got a ticket." My quick response was, "No, I didn't. There was never a moment where I needed a ticket." She said, "Your license plate is on here, and you were in Paradise Valley on this day at this time."
I said, "I don't even remember being in Paradise Valley. That wasn't me. I let some friends borrow my truck. I think they were in Paradise Valley."
She said, "No, I know for a fact it was you."
Then she sent the picture. You know what I'm talking about—left hand on the steering wheel, right hand with a coffee, cruising through an intersection way too fast when the light was pink. I was caught red-handed. It was me. I couldn't deny it anymore.
I actually had to go to driving school. If you've been to Arizona driving school, you know it's horrible. It's brutal.
None of us like to be told we're wrong or that we've made a mistake. We want comfort more than conviction. We want approval more than honesty. We tend to view discipline as rejection. But Proverbs 3 says it's actually evidence of love. The Lord disciplines those he loves.
In other words, God loves you too much to leave you unchanged. Discipline is not a sign that God has abandoned you. It's a sign that he loves you.
There's a story in the Bible about a man of power who stopped pursuing God's heart and started pursuing his own sinful desires. He saw a woman he thought was beautiful and had to have her. He summoned her to his house and they slept together. She got pregnant.
To cover up his sin, he tried to manipulate the situation so he'd come out unscathed. The woman's husband would think the child was his, and everything would be fine. But the husband didn't play along nicely.
As his plan started to go awry, he sent the woman's husband to the front lines of the battlefield, essentially signing his death warrant. Once he got word that his adversary had died, he sighed with relief. "I manipulated my way through it. I explained my way through it. I don't have to deal with the consequences of my sin."
But God loved this man too much to leave him unchanged. He sent a trusted confidant to tell him, "I know what you've done, and the Lord knows what you've done. Repent or the consequences will be greater than anything you can imagine."
This man had a choice: let the discipline of the Lord shape him, or run? He chose the first option. He leaned into the Lord's discipline. He didn't let the sin that entangled him continue to shape his heart. Instead, he allowed the Lord to extract that sin and make his heart brand new.
The man was David. God called him "a man after God's own heart." After his repentance, after he allowed the Lord's discipline to shape him, he had a son with that woman. The first child died. David married Bathsheba, and they had another child. Do you know who that was? Solomon—the man writing this message to his son.
Solomon is saying, "If you want God's character in your life, let his discipline shape you." What hangs in the balance isn't just your heart—it's the change you might pass on to someone else. The future of your kids, the people in your life, could be changed by your willingness to let the Lord shape you today.
You could be the first in a line of men and women who has the guts to lean into the Lord's discipline and allow him to shape your heart. What God does in you today could shape generations after you're gone.
For some of you today, hidden sin has been quietly shaping your heart. Your story doesn't have to end there. Yes, the consequences of your sin are going to be painful—that decision's already been made. But the discipline of the Lord will begin to shape your heart. Your failure doesn't have to define you. The way you respond to your failure could actually be your greatest story. You're not done yet.
Remember: discipline is not a sign that God has abandoned you. It's a sign that he loves you. The way you respond to discipline shapes your heart and the hearts of those around you.
We are all on a journey of becoming. Out of all the pursuits we could give our lives to, the one that bears lasting fruit is the pursuit of the heart of God. Because at the end of your life, what will matter most won't be the accolades you accumulated. It won't be the money you made. It won't even be the decisions you got right.
What will matter most is who you became.
Proverbs says that when God's love and faithfulness are bound around your neck and written on the tablet of your heart, God will form his heart in you. Pursuit often looks like surrender: surrendering control, surrendering ownership, surrendering pride and sin.
Remember, the heart is the driver of your life. You can modify behavior temporarily, but unless the heart changes, you'll always drift back to who you really are.
I have three questions for you today, and I only want you to pick one of them:
Where do I need to lay down control? What am I trying to control that's getting in the way of pursuing God's heart?
Where do I need to loosen my grip on what's in my hands? What am I holding for myself rather than releasing for God?
Where do I need to repent? Where do I need to let God shape me?
When we pursue the heart of God, he will form his heart in us. There is no greater pursuit. There is no greater endeavor in this life than that. And you don't have to do this alone.
God sees you. He is with you. He wants to form his heart in you. And you have people around you right now who want to walk this journey with you.
At the end of every one of our services, we have people come down front who are willing and able to pray with anyone who needs prayer. Some of you need to have a conversation with a pastor. Come to any of our next step centers, and pastors will be ready to talk with you.
May we be people of godly character, shaped by the heart of God.
