Fannin Terrace Baptist Church
June 14, 2026
  • This Is Amazing Grace
  • Holy Forever
  • Firm Foundation (He Won't)

      • Proverbs 1:20-22CSB

      • Proverbs 1:23-26CSB

      • Proverbs 1:27-30CSB

      • Proverbs 1:31-33CSB

  • Last week we opened this series by asking a question.

    What kind of person am I becoming?

    And we said this: the voices you welcome shape the person you become.
    We talked about the noise — the algorithm, the inbox, the feed — all of it competing for the one thing you cannot get back once it's spent. Your attention. Your affection. The orientation of your heart.
    And we laid a foundation. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Not intelligence. Not ambition. Not hustle. Reverence before a God who is holy and good and true — that is where wisdom begins.
    This morning I want to show you something that surprised me when I sat with this passage.
    We have been talking about the problem of all those competing voices — all the noise pressing in on us, pulling at us, forming us into people we didn't entirely choose to become. And the natural assumption is that wisdom is hard to find. That it is rare, hidden, tucked away in monasteries or seminaries or the quiet lives of people who have figured something out that the rest of us haven't.
    (brief pause)
    But that is not what Proverbs says.

    Wisdom is not hiding. She has been calling all along.

    And that changes the question entirely. The question is not whether wisdom is available. The question is whether you have been listening.
    (pause)
    This morning we are going to sit with one of the most urgent passages in the entire book of Proverbs. Wisdom herself steps forward and speaks. And what she says is not gentle. It is not a suggestion. It is a warning — and it is a warning delivered in love, by a voice that has been calling into the noise of your life longer than you know.
    I want to show you three things from this passage: where wisdom is calling from, who she is calling to, and what happens to those who refuse to listen.
    Because those three things, friends, are not abstract. They are personal. And they are urgent.

    Wisdom Is Already Where You Are

    Come back with me to verses
    Proverbs 1:20–21 CSB
    Wisdom calls out in the street; she makes her voice heard in the public squares. She cries out above the commotion; she speaks at the entrance of the city gates:
    I want you to notice something before we go any further.
    Where is wisdom calling from?
    Not a temple. Not a classroom. Not a retreat center somewhere outside the noise.
    The street. The public square. The city gate.
    In the ancient world, these were not spiritual spaces. These were the busiest, loudest, most ordinary places in daily life. The street was commerce and movement. The public square was where deals were made and arguments were settled. The city gate was where civic life happened — where judges sat, where merchants gathered, where the people who ran things conducted their business.
    Wisdom is not calling from a distance. She is calling from the middle of your ordinary life.
    (brief pause)
    Think about what that means for you this week.
    She is calling in the middle of your Monday morning. She is calling in the middle of the job site, the office, the oilfield. She is calling when you are sitting at the kitchen table at the end of a long day wondering if you are building the right life. She is calling when you open your phone at midnight and feel the pull toward something that will not satisfy you.
    She is already there. She has always been there.
    This is not a God who hides himself from ordinary people and reveals himself only to the spiritual elite. This is a God whose wisdom cries out — the word in the Hebrew is urgent, almost desperate — in the exact places you already are.
    And here is the thing about that which is both comforting and deeply convicting at the same time.
    If wisdom is already crying out where you are — if she is already present in the middle of your ordinary week — then the problem is never that she is too far away.

    The problem is that we are not listening.

    (brief pause)
    I want to give you a picture of this.
    You've probably had the experience of being in a loud room — a restaurant, a stadium, a crowded party — and someone is trying to get your attention from across the room. They can see you. They're calling your name. Maybe they're even waving. But you are so locked into your own conversation, your own phone, your own world, that the sound of your name just disappears into the noise.
    They weren't silent. You were distracted.
    That is exactly the situation Proverbs 1 is describing.
    Wisdom is not whispering. She is crying out. The problem is not the volume. The problem is what we have filled our ears with instead.
    And she is still calling.

    Who She Is Calling To

    Now come back to verses Proverbs 1:22–27. This is where wisdom's speech gets uncomfortably specific.
    She addresses three groups of people directly. And I want to spend some time with each one — because one of them is probably you.
    Proverbs 1:22 CSB
    How long, inexperienced ones, will you love ignorance? How long will you mockers enjoy mocking and you fools hate knowledge?
    Three categories. Three very different postures toward wisdom's voice. And wisdom names all three — not to shame them, but to diagnose them.
    The first group: the simple.
    We met the simple last week. The peti — the open, unformed, inexperienced person. Last week we talked about them in relatively neutral terms. Solomon is writing to the young and unformed. There is hope in that.
    But here wisdom turns toward them with a different question.
    How long will you love ignorance?
    That word — love — is important. Wisdom is not asking how long you will be confused or uninformed. She is asking how long you will choose this. How long you will prefer the comfortable fog of not-yet-deciding to the clarity that costs something.
    Because that is what simplicity becomes when it is not growing. It becomes a choice. The young person who stays simple is no longer naive — they are avoidant. They are choosing the path of least resistance. Drifting is comfortable. Forming is hard. And the simple person has learned to love the drift.
    In Midland, in 2026, this looks like the person who knows something needs to change — spiritually, relationally, directionally — but keeps putting off the reckoning. Not hostile to wisdom. Not contemptuous. Just perpetually not yet. There's always a reason to wait. Another season, another month, after this project, after this relationship figures itself out.
    (brief pause)
    Wisdom looks at that person and says:

    How long?

    The second group: the mockers.
    The mocker is a different animal entirely.
    The mocker has moved past indifference into something more active. Contempt. The mocker doesn't just ignore wisdom — they ridicule it. They have developed a posture of sophisticated dismissiveness toward anything that asks them to be accountable, to be formed, to submit their life to something larger than their own judgment.
    The mocker probably doesn't look like someone sneering at the Bible. They look like the person who has been burned enough times — by the church, by religion, by hypocrites who preached one thing and lived another — that cynicism has become their armor. Every time wisdom calls, the mocker deflects. A raised eyebrow. A sarcastic comment. A well-constructed reason why none of this applies to them.
    And the tragic thing about the mocker is that the armor feels like strength. It feels like intelligence. It feels like I have simply seen too much to be naive enough to believe.
    But it is not strength. It is a closed ear. And a closed ear, held long enough, becomes something much more serious.
    (brief pause)
    The third group: the fools.
    The fool is not stupid. That is the most important thing I can tell you about the fool in Proverbs.
    The fool has made a settled, considered choice. They have looked at what wisdom offers — the fear of the Lord, received instruction, the slow careful work of formation — and they have decided they want something else more. Knowledge, wisdom says, is something the fool hates. Not misunderstands. Hates.
    This is someone whose will is set. They are not drifting like the simple. They are not deflecting like the mocker. They have chosen a direction and they are moving in it deliberately.
    In ordinary life, the fool is the person who knows exactly what they are doing and has decided the cost is worth it. The relationship they know is wrong. The habit they know is destructive. The direction they know is leading somewhere they don't want to end up — and they are walking there anyway, eyes open, because the short-term return feels worth the long-term cost.
    (brief pause)
    Three categories. Three different distances from wisdom's voice.
    And wisdom addresses all three with the same urgent question: How long?
    Now look at what she says next — verses
    Proverbs 1:24–27 CSB
    Since I called out and you refused, extended my hand and no one paid attention, since you neglected all my counsel and did not accept my correction, I, in turn, will laugh at your calamity. I will mock when terror strikes you, when terror strikes you like a storm and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when trouble and stress overcome you.
    This is the most jarring moment in the passage. Wisdom laughing at calamity. Wisdom mocking when terror strikes.
    I want to be careful here, because this language is easy to misread.
    Wisdom is not sadistic. This is not God taking pleasure in human suffering.
    What Solomon is describing is the built-in consequence of a closed ear. When calamity comes — and it comes for all of us, one way or another — the person who has spent years refusing wisdom's voice will find that the very counsel they dismissed is the thing they desperately need and no longer have access to. The patterns they chose. The voice they silenced. The formation they delayed.
    It is the laughter of terrible irony, not cruelty. The irony of a person who spent years refusing the very thing that could have prepared them for exactly this moment.
    And it arrives, wisdom says, like a storm. Like a whirlwind.
    Not gradually. Suddenly.
    (brief pause)
    I have sat in hospital waiting rooms with people who spent years as the simple — always almost ready to get serious about God. And then the diagnosis came. And they looked at me with eyes that said: I thought I had more time.
    Some of you know I served on a mission trip to New York City the week before last. My daughter and I got into a conversation with two men who described themselves as cynical about matters of faith. They’re the mockers of this text. And the tragedy for them is that when I pressed them about the certainty of Jesus’ resurrection, they closed their ears. For them, they had spent so many years closing the ear that they didn't know how to open it.
    And I have watched fools — good people, people I love — arrive at the consequences of their settled choices. And there was nothing to say except: I wish you had listened sooner.
    The storm comes.
    The question is what you have built before it arrives.

    What Happens When the Voice Goes Silent

    Now come back to Proverbs 1:28–31. This is the most sobering section of the passage, and I am not going to soften it.
    Proverbs 1:28–31 CSB
    Then they will call me, but I won’t answer; they will search for me, but won’t find me. Because they hated knowledge, didn’t choose to fear the Lord, were not interested in my counsel, and rejected all my correction, they will eat the fruit of their way and be glutted with their own schemes.
    Then they will call. And I won't answer.
    Then they will search. And they won't find me.
    I want you to feel the weight of that for a moment.
    This is not God permanently withdrawing his grace from a seeking soul. The gospel does not allow that reading — the New Testament is full of prodigals who return and are received. God is patient. His mercy endures.
    But this passage is describing something real and serious: there are seasons of opportunity that do not last forever. There are moments when wisdom is calling and the window is open — and there are consequences to treating those moments as if they will always be available.
    (brief pause)
    Let me put it this way.
    Not long ago, my wife's car gave us a warning. One morning it started slower than usual — not dead, just labored. That hesitation was the car telling us something. Yvette noticed it. She told me. I noted it mentally, filed it somewhere in the back of my mind, and went on with my day.
    (brief smile)
    The next morning, it didn't start at all.
    And I stood in the garage thinking: it told me. The warning was right there. One slow start — one clear signal that something was wrong — and I had all the information I needed to act. I just didn't act on it.
    That is a minor inconvenience when we are talking about a car battery. It is something else entirely when we are talking about a soul.
    Maybe it was something relational. A conversation someone tried to have with you that you deflected, minimized, or postponed — until the relationship was somewhere you never intended it to go and the conversation you avoided became the conversation you desperately needed to have had months earlier.
    The warning was there. The voice was calling.
    And the cost of the closed ear was not theoretical. It was real. It arrived like a storm. And you sat in the middle of it thinking: I knew. I knew and I didn't listen.
    (brief pause)
    Solomon is not writing about car batteries and strained relationships.
    He is writing about a soul.
    He is writing about the person who spends their entire life in the proximity of wisdom's voice — in a church, in a family that prays, in a community where the gospel is proclaimed — and who reaches the end of their road having never truly responded.
    And the haunting phrase is this:

    They will eat the fruit of their way.

    Not someone else's choices. Their own.
    The life shaped by a closed ear produces its own harvest. And you cannot, at the end, blame the noise. You cannot blame the distractions. You cannot blame the algorithm or the inbox or the feed.
    Wisdom was calling.
    She was calling in the oilfield and the office and the quiet of a Sunday morning when something in you leaned forward and almost said yes.
    She was calling.
    And the question — the question this passage presses into the chest of every person in this room — is not whether you have heard her.
    The question is what you have done with what you heard.

    Invitation

    I need to tell you something before I close this sermon.
    Everything in Proverbs 1 is true. The warning is real. The consequences are real. The urgency is real.
    But if I leave you here — with a warning and a closed door — I have not preached the gospel. I have only preached the law.
    So here is the rest of the story.
    There is one person who heard wisdom's voice perfectly — who never closed his ear, never deflected, never chose the fool's path. One person who walked in the complete fear of the Lord, who received all wisdom, who refused every wrong invitation. One person in whom wisdom's full voice was not just heard but embodied.
    Jesus Christ.
    And here is the staggering thing. That person — the only one who ever lived in perfect wisdom — did not spend his life calling down judgment on the simple, the mocker, and the fool.
    He came to them.
    He ate with the fools. He had patience for the mockers. He reached for the simple. And when the storm came — not their storm, but ours — he did not step aside.
    He walked into it.
    On a cross, Jesus Christ absorbed the calamity that our closed ears deserved. He took the whirlwind. He bore the fruit of our way so that we would not have to eat it alone.
    And he rose. Which means the door that Proverbs 1:28 seems to close — they will call and I won't answer — has been reopened. Not because the warning was wrong. But because the one who is himself the wisdom of God has made a way back for every simple, mocking, foolish soul willing to turn around.
    (brief pause)
    But I need to say something carefully and directly.
    The door is open. But it will not always be open in the way it is open right now.
    We do not know the day or the hour of Christ's return. We do not know how many Sundays remain before the final reckoning. We do not know which breath is our last.
    Tomorrow is not guaranteed.
    And the patience of God — which is real, which is vast, which has been extended to every person in this room — is not the same as indifference. God is patient because he does not want anyone to perish. But his patience has a horizon. And we do not know where that horizon is.
    Wisdom is still calling this morning.
    She is calling in this room, right now, to every simple person who has been perpetually not yet. To every mocker whose armor is heavier than they want to admit. To every fool who knows the direction they're heading and has not yet decided the cost is too high.
    She is calling.
    And this is what she is calling you toward: not a program, not a religious system, not a set of improved behaviors.
    A person.
    Trust him. Repent. Repent of the closed ear, the deflection, the settled choice against the life he offers. Turn toward him. And make it known.
    (brief pause)
    In a moment we are going to respond to God's word together. And I want to tell you about something we call First Steps — a table in the back of this room where real people are waiting to talk with you, pray with you, and help you take whatever next step you need to take today.
    Maybe that step is trusting Jesus Christ for the very first time — transferring your trust from yourself and everything you have been building to the one who is himself the wisdom of God. If you have never done that, today is the day. Not next week. Not after things settle down. I beg you for the sake of your soul. Today.
    Maybe that step is repentance — naming the closed ear, the direction you've been heading, the invitation you accepted that you knew was wrong — and turning back toward the voice that has been calling you all along.
    Maybe you just need someone to pray with you. Maybe you need to say out loud, for the first time, that you have been the simple person. The mocker. The fool. And you are done.
    Whatever it is — First Steps is for you. The people there are not there to judge you. They are there because wisdom calls in ordinary places through ordinary people.
    (pause)
    So here is the bottom line I want you to carry out of this room today:

    You cannot afford to keep treating wisdom's call as something you'll respond to later.

    Later is not promised.
    But right now — this moment —

    She is still calling.

    And the one who is himself the wisdom of God is still receiving everyone who comes.

      • Proverbs 1:20–21CSB

      • Proverbs 1:22CSB

      • Proverbs 1:24–27CSB

      • Proverbs 1:28–31CSB

Fannin Terrace Baptist Church
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