Fannin Terrace Baptist Church
July 12, 2026
  • Washed
  • Living Hope

      • Proverbs 5:1-4CSB

      • Proverbs 5:5-8CSB

      • Proverbs 5:9-12CSB

      • Proverbs 5:13-17CSB

      • Proverbs 5:18-21CSB

      • Proverbs 5:22-23CSB

  • We just watched eight people come home.
    (brief pause)
    Every one of them is now pointed in the same direction. Toward the same home. Toward the same Christ.
    Church family, hold onto that image. Because everything I am about to say this morning is about the direction you are pointed.
    (brief pause)
    We have been asking a question together all summer.

    What kind of person am I becoming?

    And we have said this: the voices you welcome shape the person you become.
    But underneath that question is a deeper one — and Proverbs 5 is going to press it into every one of us this morning.

    Where is your life actually pointed?

    Not where do you say it is pointed. Not where you meant for it to be pointed. Where is it actually going, right now, based on the direction you have been walking for months and years? Because you may not have thought about it lately, but you are pointed somewhere. Every heart is pointed somewhere. And the direction of the heart becomes the direction of the life.
    (brief pause)
    Solomon watched this happen in his own son's generation. He is watching it happen now. And this morning, he is going to describe for us what it looks like when a life is pointed the wrong way — not dramatically, not obviously, but so gradually that the person walking cannot see it.
    Solomon watched this happen in his own son's generation. He is watching it happen now. And this morning, he is going to describe for us what it looks like when a life is pointed the wrong way — not dramatically, not obviously, but so gradually that the person walking cannot see it.
    Home is not a place. Home is a person. And you can be there this morning.

    The Seduction and Its Cost

    Come back with me to how Proverbs 5 opens.
    The father is speaking again. And from his very first verse, his urgency is unmistakable.
    Proverbs 5:1 CSB
    My son, pay attention to my wisdom; listen closely to my understanding
    He is not offering a gentle suggestion. He is reaching across the table and saying: I need you to hear this. Because the direction you are pointed matters more than anything else in your life.
    And what he describes next is a seduction. Not a sudden ambush. A slow one.
    Proverbs 5:3–4 CSB
    Though the lips of the forbidden woman drip honey and her words are smoother than oil, in the end she’s as bitter as wormwood and as sharp as a double-edged sword.
    Honey and oil. Bitter and sharp.
    That contrast is the anatomy of every seduction.

    What presents itself as sweet is not what it actually is.

    What feels like nourishment is actually poison. The gap between the promise and the reality is total — but you cannot see that gap from the beginning of the path. You can only see it from the end.
    And by the time you are at the end, Solomon says in verse 5, her feet go down to death.
    Notice what he says. Her feet go down to death. She is pointed there. And anyone who walks with her is pointed there too.
    (brief pause)
    I want to be direct about what Solomon is describing here — because he is direct about it, and we should be too.
    He is describing sexual temptation and the destruction it produces when it leads outside the boundaries God designed for it. This is not a metaphor. Solomon is talking about a real woman and a real man and a real path that leads somewhere real.
    But the most important thing he says about this woman is not about her behavior. It is about her direction.
    Proverbs 5:6 CSB
    She doesn’t consider the path of life; she doesn’t know that her ways are unstable.
    She doesn't know it.
    The forbidden woman is not a cartoon villain who has deliberately chosen destruction. She is a person whose heart has drifted so far from wisdom that she can no longer see where her feet are pointed. Her ways are unstable and she is the last person in the room aware of it.
    That is not a portrait of a monster. That is a portrait of what happens to any of us when the drift goes unchecked long enough.
    (brief pause)
    Now let me show you how the drift happens. Because this is the thing Solomon most wants his son to understand — and the thing most of us most need to hear.
    There is a phenomenon that pilots call spatial disorientation. When you are flying through clouds with no visual reference points, your body can convince you that you are flying level when you are actually in a slow, gradual bank. The instruments say you are turning. Your body says you are flying straight. And if you trust your feelings over the instruments long enough, the turn becomes a spiral before you ever realized you were drifting.
    But here is what I want you to notice. The plane is still pointed somewhere. It has not stopped. It is still moving through the air at hundreds of miles an hour. It is just pointed in a direction the pilot cannot see.
    That is what Solomon is describing in Proverbs 5.
    The man on the wrong path — described in verses 7 through 14 — is not someone who woke up one morning and chose destruction. He is someone whose sense of direction got recalibrated. One rationalization. One small step toward the wrong neighborhood. One conversation that went slightly further than it should have. One night that started innocently enough.
    And each step recalibrated what felt normal until

    The wrong direction felt like home

    And he ends up in verses 12 through 14 saying the most heartbreaking thing in the passage:
    Proverbs 5:12–14 CSB
    How I hated discipline, and how my heart despised correction. I didn’t obey my teachers or listen closely to my instructors. I am on the verge of complete ruin before the entire community.
    On the verge of complete ruin.
    And looking back, he can see every moment where the instruments were telling him he was pointed the wrong way. Every moment where wisdom was calling. Every moment where correction was available.
    He just trusted his feelings over the instruments.
    That is not a story about a pilot. That is the biography of the man in Proverbs 5. A person who had access to every instrument he needed — a father's voice, wisdom's warning, correction at every step — and who trusted what he felt over what he knew. And by the time he looked up, he was pointed further from home than he had ever been in his life.
    (brief pause)
    Loved ones, I want to speak to something specific in this room before I move on.
    Midland is a city of extended absences. Of long hours, long distances, long stretches away from home and family and the relationships that keep us accountable. The loneliness that lives in those stretches — the particular ache of being far from the people who know you and love you — creates a vulnerability that most of us don't talk about out loud.
    But Solomon would talk about it. Because he knows that loneliness and the hunger for connection are not weaknesses to be ashamed of. They are the exact pressure points where the seduction of folly finds its opening.
    Guarding the direction of your heart in seasons of loneliness and distance is not passive. It is active, intentional, and urgent.
    Know your instruments. Trust them over your feelings.
    And here is what I want you to know about the instrument you are being called to trust.
    It is not a rulebook. It is not a moral framework. It is a person.
    Jesus Christ walked the straight path perfectly — through every pressure, every loneliness, every moment where the drift would have been easier than the discipline — and he walked it all the way through death and out the other side. His resurrection is the proof that the path of wisdom leads somewhere real. His Spirit, given to everyone who is in him, is the power that keeps you pointed toward home when everything in you wants to trust your feelings instead.
    You are not being called to try harder. You are being called to turn — and to trust the one who is himself the direction of life.

    The Covenant and Its Joy

    Now come back to verses 15 through 20. And I want you to notice that the tone changes completely.
    Because this is the part of Proverbs 5 that almost never gets preached.
    Proverbs 5:15–19 CSB
    Drink water from your own cistern, water flowing from your own well. Should your springs flow in the streets, streams in the public squares? They should be for you alone and not for you to share with strangers. Let your fountain be blessed, and take pleasure in the wife of your youth. A loving deer, a graceful doe—let her breasts always satisfy you; be lost in her love forever.
    (brief pause)
    Solomon is not embarrassed by this. And neither should we be.
    What Solomon is describing here is the joy, the pleasure, the delight of sexual love within the covenant of marriage — and he is describing it in the most positive, celebratory, unashamed terms available to him.
    This is not reluctant permission. This is exuberant affirmation.
    If you think about it, sex is not a problem to be managed. It is a gift to be received — and like every good gift, it has a home where it thrives and places where it doesn't. The home God designed for it is covenant marriage between one man and one woman. Not as a cage. Not as a restriction imposed by a God who doesn't trust you with good things. As the one place where two people can be fully known, fully seen, and fully safe with each other — without performance, without fear, without the morning-after question of what this actually meant.
    That is what Solomon is celebrating. Not just the physical pleasure — though he doesn't shy away from that. The wholeness of it. The safety of it. The joy of a love that has nowhere else to go because it has promised itself completely.
    That is not the language of reluctant compliance with a rule. That is the language of home.
    (brief pause)
    Notice that word Solomon uses — home. A well of your own. A fountain to yourself. A love that stays. The whole picture in verses 15 through 20 is a picture of a heart that has arrived somewhere and gets to stay. Not restless. Not wandering. Not pointed anywhere else.
    Home.
    And that is not the final word — it is a picture of something even larger that I want to show you before we are done this morning.
    (brief pause)
    Now let me be clear about something — because I think this needs to be said.
    Sex is God's idea. It is not the world's invention that the church reluctantly tolerates. It is a good gift placed in creation by a God who declared it very good, designed to be an expression of the total self-giving of one person to another within the safe and permanent home of covenant marriage.
    Outside of that home, it is not that the gift becomes evil. It is that the gift becomes disconnected from the direction that gives it its deepest meaning. It becomes, as Solomon has shown us in the first fourteen verses, a path pointed the wrong way — a path that promises honey and delivers wormwood. Not because God is withholding something good, but because the gift separated from its proper home loses the very thing that made it good.

    The boundary is not a cage. It is a container for something precious.

    (brief pause)
    And here is what I want the unmarried person in this room to hear — because Proverbs 5 is not only for married people.
    If you are in your twenties in Midland right now, you already know what it feels like to want connection. Real connection. Not just physical — though that's part of it — but the kind where someone actually knows you and stays anyway. That hunger is not a design flaw. God put it there.
    But the world has handed you a thousand counterfeit versions of it. Relationships that offer the feeling of intimacy without the safety of commitment. Connection that feels real until it doesn't. And every time you settle for the counterfeit, something in you gets a little more convinced that the real thing isn't actually available.
    It is available. But it lives inside covenant. And the discipline of waiting — of guarding the direction of your heart and your body in this season — is not the suppression of something good. It is the protection of something you actually want. Don't trade what Solomon describes in verses 15 through 20 for something that will leave you pointed somewhere you never meant to go.
    (brief pause)
    And I want the married person in this room to hear this too.
    The joy Solomon describes in verses 15 through 20 is not automatic. It is cultivated. It is the fruit of two people who have chosen each other — not just once at an altar, but again and again, in the ordinary moments of an ordinary life. The Tuesday evening when you put the phone down and actually ask how they are. The Saturday morning when you choose to be present instead of preoccupied. The thousand small decisions to keep pointing toward home rather than letting the well quietly go dry.
    Covenant love does not maintain itself. It requires the same thing wisdom always requires — intentional, sustained attention to the right direction.
    Guard your cistern. Tend your well.
    Be lost in her love forever.

    The Verdict and Its Warning

    Come back to how the chapter closes.
    Proverbs 5:21–23 CSB
    For a man’s ways are before the Lord’s eyes, and he considers all his paths. A wicked man’s iniquities will trap him; he will become tangled in the ropes of his own sin. He will die because there is no discipline, and be lost because of his great stupidity.
    Three verses. And they carry more weight than their brevity suggests.
    The father closes with two observations that I want to develop carefully.
    The first: God sees every direction.
    Proverbs 5:21 CSB
    For a man’s ways are before the Lord’s eyes, and he considers all his paths.
    You have learned to show people exactly what you want them to see. The version of yourself that appears on your phone, at work, and even in this room on a Sunday morning can be managed with remarkable precision. Most of us are carrying a private life and a public life and working very hard to keep them from touching each other.
    But God sees the actual direction. He sees the screen at midnight. He sees the conversation that nobody else knows about. He sees the drift that has been recalibrating your normal for months. He sees where you are actually pointed even when you have convinced yourself that you are still flying level.
    This is not meant to produce paranoia. It is meant to produce honesty.
    Because the person who lives as though God sees — who makes decisions in private the same way they make decisions in public — is the person whose direction never has to be hidden. They are pointed the same way in the dark that they are in the light. And that consistency is not a burden. It is a profound freedom. It is what home feels like from the inside.
    (brief pause)
    The second: the ropes are your own.
    Proverbs 5:22 CSB
    A wicked man’s iniquities will trap him; he will become tangled in the ropes of his own sin.
    Solomon does not describe God reaching down and tying the fool up. He describes the fool being entangled in ropes he himself has woven. The consequences of the wrong direction are not primarily imposed from outside. They are produced from within. The drift produces the destruction. The wrong heading produces the wrong destination. The ropes are woven one compromise at a time — and every rope keeps you pointed away from home.
    And this connects directly to the heart theme we named at the beginning.
    This is not finally about behavior management. It is about the direction of the heart. The person who is drifting is not someone who made one bad decision. They are someone whose heart is pointed away from God and toward something else — and the path they are walking is the outward expression of that inward direction.
    Which is why no external correction alone will fix it. You can change the behavior without changing the direction of the heart — and the ropes will simply be rewoven to keep you pointed the wrong way.
    The heart has to turn.
    And only one person can turn it.

    Invitation

    I want to close with the most important thing I am going to say this morning.
    Proverbs 5 is a warning. And the warning is real and the consequences are real and everything Solomon describes is true.
    But if I end there — with the warning and the ropes and the verdict — I have not preached the gospel. I have only described the problem.
    So here is the rest of the story.
    In Ephesians 5, the apostle Paul takes the covenant love that Solomon celebrates in Proverbs 5 and shows us what it is ultimately a picture of. He says that the relationship between a husband and a wife is a reflection — an image — of the relationship between Christ and his church.
    And then he says something that should stop us completely.
    Ephesians 5:25–27 CSB
    Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word. He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless.
    Notice what he is doing in the water. He is turning her toward himself. Cleansing her. Making her his home.
    Do you hear what Christ is doing in that passage?
    He is being the faithful covenant partner that the forbidden woman of Proverbs 5 abandoned. He is being the direction the whole human heart was pointed toward from the beginning. He is being the home.
    And here is the staggering grace of it: he is offering this covenant love to people who have not been faithful. To people who have drifted. To people who have trusted their feelings over the instruments and found themselves pointed somewhere they never meant to go. To people who are sitting in this room right now entangled in ropes they wove themselves.
    Jesus is not offering his covenant love to people who have earned it. He is offering it to people who need it.
    And here is what it cost him to offer it.
    He went to a cross. He died in our place. And then he rose.
    Which means the covenant love he offers is not wishful thinking. It is secured by a resurrection. The one who absorbed our unfaithfulness is alive — and he is still receiving everyone who turns and comes home.
    (brief pause)
    The one who never drifted — who was faithful in every private moment, who walked the path of righteousness all the way to a cross — absorbed the consequences of our wrong direction so that we could receive his faithfulness in exchange.
    That is not a transaction. That is a covenant.
    And it is offered to you this morning. Not when you have cleaned up the drift. Not when you have untangled the ropes. Now. From here. Wherever here is.
    (brief pause)
    And this is exactly what you just watched happen in this water.
    Church family, look at what those eight baptisms actually showed us this morning. Every one of those people was pointed somewhere else once. Every one of them was on a path. And at some point, Christ turned their direction — and they said yes. The water this morning was not the moment of turning. The water was the sign of the turning. The public declaration that their heart is pointed toward home now, and they belong to the one who is home.

    Baptism is not the beginning of the journey. It is the announcement that the direction has changed.

    And this morning, that same turn is available to you.
    (brief pause)
    So here is where I want to land this morning, loved ones.
    Some of you are in the drift right now. Not looking back on it — living in it. The instruments have been telling you something and you have been trusting your feelings instead. And you are pointed further from home than you have admitted to anyone.
    Today is the day to turn around. Not tomorrow. Not after things settle down. Today.
    And you do not have to figure out how to do that alone. In a moment I am going to invite you to First Steps — the table at the back of this room where real people are ready to sit with you, pray with you, and help you find the way home. And if that feels like too public a step for where you are right now, you can come to me. Directly. Personally. That is what a pastor is for.
    Some of you are married and you have been letting the well go dry. The direction of your covenant has been quietly drifting for months and you are not sure how to name it. First Steps is for you too. Or find me after the service. Because home is not just for the individual heart — it is for the marriage that has been walking two directions at once.
    Wherever you are this morning, Christ is further still. And he is not finished.
    And some of you have never trusted Christ at all. You watched eight people walk into that water and something in you recognized what you were seeing. You were watching the direction your own heart has been reaching for the whole time.
    The covenant love of Christ is for you. Today is the day to receive it.
    Here is what receiving it looks like. You repent — you turn from the life you have been building on your own, by your own judgment, trusting your own read on things, flying by your own feelings. And you trust — you place your confidence not in your ability to clean up the drift but in his ability to receive you as you are and make you into someone new.
    That is what faith is. A turn. The same turn those eight people made — visible in the water — is available to you invisibly, right now. And when you turn, the Spirit himself takes up residence in you — pointing you toward home from the inside.
    Walk to First Steps and tell someone: I want to trust Christ today. That is all you have to say. They will know what to do. And one day soon, you will walk into that same water — and everyone in this room will see, publicly, that the direction of your heart has changed.
    (brief pause)
    Home is not a place. Home is a person. It is the one whose covenant love never drifts, never breaks, never leaves you entangled in ropes he wove. You get there the same way everyone who has ever come home has gotten there — the same way the eight came home this morning. Through repentance and faith. Turn around. Trust Christ. And walk toward the one who has been calling you home the whole time.
    (brief pause)
    Here is the bottom line I want you to carry out of this room today:

    You don't fall into folly. You drift there.

    Trust the instruments.
    Come home.

      • Proverbs 5:1CSB

      • Proverbs 5:3–4CSB

      • Proverbs 5:6CSB

      • Proverbs 5:12–14CSB

      • Proverbs 5:15–19CSB

      • Proverbs 5:21–23CSB

      • Proverbs 5:21CSB

      • Proverbs 5:22CSB

      • Ephesians 5:25–27CSB

Fannin Terrace Baptist Church
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