A sermon from Proverbs 10:11, 20–21, 31–32

Friendship isn’t optional- it’s how God forms and protects us. But even good friends fail. Jesus is the friend who never does. A message from Proverbs on friendship, failure, and the true friend we all need.

Your life is shaped by what you love. But we often love the wrong things or love the wrong way due to our sin. Proverbs helps us understand the danger of disordered desires while pointing us to the one thing that puts them in their place and leads to life. What is shaping your love?

We all experience fear, anxiety, grief, joy, hope, and sorrow—but what are we supposed to do with them? Should we suppress our emotions, or should we follow our hearts? In this sermon from Proverbs, we explore what Scripture teaches about the passions: why God created us as emotional creatures, how sin has disordered our emotional lives, how Christ entered into our humanity to redeem it, and how wisdom teaches us to navigate our emotions faithfully.

Sinful anger is appealing because it feels powerful and in control. But Proverbs shows us that true power belongs to the one who masters himself. Jesus embodied this perfectly, and it is ultimately his rule and reign over our hearts that displaces the anger that too often reigns there.

We all want to go up — approved, respected, thought well of. So we climb. But Proverbs warns that pride’s climb runs backward: the harder you push, the further down you go. Humility walks the other way — down on purpose — and it’s the only direction that leads anywhere good. At the heart of it all is Jesus’ humility for us — the one who descended all the way down and came out exalted, freeing you to stop climbing and start giving yourself away.

Why do you do the things you do? You're the one doing them, yet you don't fully understand why. The answer lies deeper than your behavior—in the source from which everything flows: your heart. What is the nature of our hearts? What did Jesus come to do about them? How should we guard something so vital?

Proverbs tells us its own purpose in a single line: all this wisdom, made known to you, that your trust may be in the Lord. But trust is never neutral — what you lean your whole weight on is what you worship, and we are all worshippers whether we admit it or not. We turn to Jeremiah's haunting image of two evils: forsaking the fountain of living waters and hewing out our own broken cisterns that can't hold a drop. We'll see why every self-made cistern runs dry, why the Lord alone can bear the weight of our trust and worship, and how the living water came to us in Christ when we could never make our own way back. To fear Him rightly is to trust Him fully. Come and drink.