Old things New Podcast

Prayer. Reading: Prov 2:1-4 Meditation. We will not get wisdom if we give it a half-hearted effort; it requires diligence. People don’t just walk around and find silver lying on the ground. They have to dig, and work, and sweat, and go, and go, and go. They have to extract it from the ground, then refine it. Silver and treasure do not easily come by, and neither does wisdom. Again, you will not ge...

Prayer. Reading: Prov 2:3. Meditation. We need to pray for insight desperately. And when I say need, I mean need. As in – we need air to breathe kind of need. Verse three of Proverbs 2 shows us something very important. You can study the Scriptures with the rigour of an academic. You can pour hours into their pages. You can become a biblical scholar whose entire life is spent researching the conte...

Prayer. Reading: Prov 2:2. Meditation. One of the things about mining is that it takes hard work. Sometimes you’ve got to bend your back into it and work. And it’s the same with wisdom. We must work hard in God’s Word to get wisdom. Pay attention to that statement: “incline your heart to understanding.” This word incline means to stretch out, to strain. It’s like a runner at the end of the race st...

Prayer. Reading: Prov 2:2. Meditation. How do you spend your week? Where are the places that you go? What are the things you do? Pause and think about that for a moment, perhaps write down your answers. Now ask yourself this question: Where are you focusing your attention? What are the things that occupy your mind? Where is it that your eyes are looking most of the time? As we consider and answer...

Prayer. Reading: Prov 2:1. Meditation. What do you do with treasure? As I write these words, I’m visiting a regional Australian city called Ballarat, staying in a mansion-come-resort previously owned by a gold-prospector who struck it rich. Around the back of the property is a solid blue-stone store house where he used to keep his gold (at least I think it’s bluestone). Anyway, it’s sold, thick st...

Prayer. Reading: Prov 2:1a. Meditation. When someone has been sick, one of the things they need to focus on as they recover is building up their strength again. You can’t build up your strength without food. Our bodies need food to survive. Without nutritious food, our bodies waste away and eventually we die. There’s a spiritual parallel of survival as well when it comes to wisdom, and we see it h...

Prayer. Reading: Prov 2:1-5. Meditation. The climax of the first chapter of Proverbs is a clear and open call from Lady Wisdom, an open invitation to everyone to come and get wisdom for themselves: “ Wisdom cries aloud in the street, in the markets she raises her voice; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks ” (Pr 1:20-21). Everything we saw in...

Prayer Reading : Prov 1:32-33. Meditation. Wisdom is ultimate. The warning of today’s passage takes no hostages. If you ignore her voice, you will be destroyed. If you listen, you will have security and – ultimately – salvation. Why is wisdom so important? The reason why is because, in this call of wisdom, the gospel itself is laid out before us. Those who will not fear God, which is the baseline...

Prayer Reading: Prov 1:24-31. Meditation. We ignore wisdom’s call at our own peril, and to do so invites certain destruction. It will do us good, then, to consider the way of the fool that we might avoid it for ourselves. The first mark of a fool is that they refuse to listen to wisdom. A fool, if they were to even read these words at all, would read and forget them before the day was out. A fool...

Wisdom’s Help Prayer Reading : Prov 1:23. Meditation. Have you ever needed help? Have you ever felt yourself to be helpless? I sometimes feel that the Christian life is nothing but a growing sense of my own helplessness. But, as we sometimes sing, our God is mighty to save. In Proverbs 1:23, God offers us four particular kinds of help through these words of Lady Wisdom. First, wisdom offers correc...

Prayer Reading : Prov 1:22. Meditation. One of the very important insights that we gain from the Book of Proverbs is that, by nature, we are not wise. When we are young, our default setting is what the proverbs call: “simple” (see Prov 1:4). What this means, very simply, is that: unless you have gained wisdom, then you don’t have it. Wisdom does not come automatically. Let me put it even more plai...

Prayer Reading : Prov 1:20-22. Meditation. For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. So spoke Solomon the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 3. In one sense, you could describe our lives as a series of opportunities. When we are young, we have the opportunity to learn. When we have grown we have the opportunity to choose a vocation, a marriage partner perhaps. We have the c...

Prayer Reading : Prov 1:10-19. Meditation. The world is on the road to destruction, they are plunging after sin headlong: “ their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed blood. ” The attraction of sin spurs them on and, as we’ve seen in our proverbs episodes, it is attractive. There is even a temporary sinful pleasure that comes with it, but the bottom is simply this: sin brings death. For t...

Prayer Reading : Prov 1:10-14. Meditation. One thing we need to recognise from this passage is that the enticements of the world are dangerous because, on some level, we find them to be truly attractive. They have a magnetic power to the sin that remains in our hearts. There is something in us, even as Christians, that answers to and desires to respond to these temptations. One of the reasons that...

Pray. Reading: Prov 1:10-14. Meditation. In our last few meditations, we have learned a few insights into how our sinful nature generally works. It is self-centred, it is greedy, and in verses 13 and 14 we now also see that sin is evangelistic. God has made us to be social creatures. We are designed to live in community, and we naturally reach out to other people to connect, to love, and to live....

Pray Read: Ecc 5:8. Meditation I rarely buy the newspaper, but just this last Wednesday (at the time of writing) I picked up two different papers, and let me share just a little of what I read. I warn you that these stories are troubling, but there is a point in sharing them. A four year old Melbourne girl was admitted to hospital this week. Weighing only 9.3kg, she had suffered severe neglect at...

Pray Read: Ecc 5:1-7 Meditation We’re going to talk a little about vows. Now it must be said, this topic is not really something that comes up at all for modern evangelical or even reformed Christians. It is pretty much off our radar. That is not because we do not make vows, but more because we do not think about them. In Solomon’s day, vows were a specific aspect of temple worship. There are mult...

Pray Read: Ecc 5:1-7. Meditation When we come to worship God, we come to listen, therefore our words must be few. That’s what we learned in our last meditation. But part of worship is about bringing our own offering as well. We must come and speak. Or, to be more accurate, Solomon instructs us to come and speak a little. He makes this very clear: the words of our mouths, even if they aren’t many,...

Pray Read: Ecc 5:1-7. Meditation As Solomon opens up his words of wisdom on worship, he starts with this basic instruction: come to listen. Verse one says: “Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil.” In the first place, we know that Solomon is talking about worship because...

Pray Read: Ecc 5:1-7. Meditation In the words of John Piper: “ Mission exists because worship doesn’t. ” In John 4, Jesus tells us that God is seeking worshippers. The highest end for which we were created was to glorify God, to declare his excellence, to revel in his beauty, and to enjoy him forever. And yet, as we reflect on our own worship, how often are we truly so enraptured by God’s beauty t...

Pray Read: Ecc 4:4-16. Meditation Now we have a peculiar little story in verses 13 through 16, it’s almost a parable. Solomon tells the story of a foolish old king who did not know how to take advice. We will open this up a bit more later, but for now notice the old king. What was the defining mark of this king? That he did not know how to take advice. He did not listen to people. He had cut himse...

Pray Read: Ecc 4:4-12. Meditation We’ve seen that envy and laziness as forces of individualism, but Solomon has two more insights to give. Reading from verse 9: “ Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. 10 For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! 11 Again, if two lie together, they...

Pray Read: Ecc 4:4-5. Meditation Solomon has another observation on individualism for us in verse five: “The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh.” Now, like last time, you might be asking again: What has this got to do with individualism? Let me try and show you. Notice the description of this man. The first thing we see is that he is lazy. He sits, he folds his hands, and he does nothing....

Pray Read: Ecc 4:4-8. Meditation There is a prevailing sickness in our culture today. You will find this sickness quarantined behind closed suburban doors and high fences. You will see its symptoms in next door neighbours avoiding eye contact and a friendly wave. There are train carriages full of this disease all across our major cities each day. You notice it when you look up from your phone and...

Pray Read: Ecc 3:16-4:3 Meditation Verse 21 is one of those awkward Ecclesiastes sayings. It’s one of those verses that makes Christians want to avoid the book altogether – and plenty, it would seem, do just that. I want to take a moment to explain it. Let’s just start by reading it together: “Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?” St...