COLUMN: If you accept my words
Published 1:00 pm Tuesday, February 4, 2025
- Charles Qualls
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I’ve noticed one of the obvious results of our last few years of undeniable national division. That result was exaggerated to some extent by the pandemic isolation a few years ago. It is that, so many seem to be quite well in touch with what they would consider to be their own individual freedoms.
People came at each other and had no shortage of opinions and vitriol as we tried individually to cope with the terrible COVID-19 event a few years ago. With forced physical distancing came a more brave and intense presence of keyboard warriors. Many usually did so at some point with declarations buffeted by mention of freedoms or rights.
When at its best and healthiest, our nation is indeed built on a series of inalienable rights. Freedoms that are protected and yet always held in tension with another nagging little conviction.
That is, so many have historically been driven by Christian values, we hear often. That’s what so many like to talk about.
So freedoms and rights are always held in tension, if it’s true Christianity we are talking about, with the ethical responsibilities of sharing space and living peaceably together. In Jesus, beliefs and ethics cannot be separated.
Why so? Because Christianity is never just a matter that is between you and God with your rights cozied up in a nice little nest with only you. Christianity is built on a chassis of Jesus having come to live among us so he could show us how to live together now. Here in this life, and before any of us enter into eternity.
Our journey through the Bible continues this week. Today, we take on another somewhat familiar inclusion in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. We are in Proverbs. Specifically, you might read Proverbs 1: 7, 2: 1-15.
What does all of this discussion of Christianity and ethical responsibility have to do with Proverbs? True, the original readers of the biblical Proverbs collection would not have known about Jesus. He arrived hundreds of years later.
But like American democracy, Proverbs has a core freedom built right in. That freedom swings on the hinge of a two-letter word: if. “If you accept my words…,” chapter two begins. That follows right after chapter one has proclaimed that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and that fools despise wisdom and instruction.
Exactly none of us aspire to be foolish. Not one of us. So, what follows a strong statement like that should be of interest. That is where we hear that “if” we accept God’s words and wisdom, then we will understand wisdom and find an understanding of the fear of the Lord.
Sadly, we live in a world that has forgotten that the fear Proverbs talks about is not best understood as conventional fright. Instead, a “fear” of the Lord in the biblical sense conveyed that we acknowledged, appreciated, accepted and yielded to God’s lordship over our lives.
We weren’t so much to be afraid of God as we were to yield to God. We were to acknowledge that God is God, and that we are not. That’s a proper biblical fear of the Lord.
If any of us say that we truly are imperfect, if we use the churchy word and call ourselves “sinners,” then we are admitting something important. That when we don’t accept God’s words and God’s ways, then living on our own doesn’t always work out very well.
So Proverbs spends the better part of thirty-one chapters giving specific counsel, or wise instruction, on everything from wisdom to wealth and from self-discipline and success. That is, success measured on God’s terms and not those so limited that we could think them up.
You see, modern Christianity has fixated on sinners as the only ones who can be lost. But what of all the others who say they follow the Lord? Those who say that they love Jesus Christ, but whose lives demonstrate that they haven’t been transformed by anything that remotely resembles our Lord?
Like the book of James in the New Testament, Proverbs would have a big problem with performative Christianity. Because Proverbs is a collection of wisdom ascribed to God. Wisdom that is intended to guide how we actually live, more so than what we say.
You want hope? Hope starts with you and with me. It starts with us allowing God to guide and inform our living. To transform us into images of Christ for each other.
DR. CHARLES QUALLS is senior pastor at Franklin Baptist Church. Contact him at 757-562-5135.