Self Control

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. We're nearly finished with this series on wisdom, and I think we've realized along the way that the way of wisdom is the untaken path, the path less traveled by, as Robert Frost said. It's the one that's probably not even considered by many in our culture today, and yet, as Robert Frost said in that poem, it makes all the difference, makes all the difference. And this is especially true when we're going to come to what is called today, of all things I know, this is going to be kind of a heady thing, epistemology. Can you say epistemology? I knew you could. So epistemology, I think the first slide there, is from two Greek words, episteme, which means knowledge or even an encounter where you actually get to be acquainted with someone because you've encountered them, and the word logos, which is the word for logic or for account or for reasoning. Now Miriam Webster defines epistemology this way, it's the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge, especially with reference to its limits and validity. You're going like, what does that mean? Okay, well, it's what do you know? How do you know, and when do you know it? Does that make sense? Because there are people who think they know everything. Have you met a few? Yeah, yeah. But epistemology, that study in philosophy, has only been around a couple hundred years, and yet it goes all the way back to the earliest philosophers we've ever had, such as Plato, and in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it has this paragraph that I know. I wanted to share it though, and I'll explain why. It says Plato's epistemology was an attempt to understand what it was to know, and how knowledge, unlike true opinion, is good for the knower. And Locke's epistemology was an attempt to understand the operations of human understanding. Kant's epistemology was an attempt to understand the conditions of the possibility of human understanding, and Russell's epistemology was an attempt to understand how modern science could be justified to appeal to sensory experience. And you're going like, who are these people, and why do I care? Yeah, they are different philosophers over time, but here's the deal. I don't know if you realize this, but philosophers often think of things and come up with things in academia and other circles that trickle down into society hundreds of years later. And then they affect us all, and we don't even know it. We don't even realize that we're basing. And I can tell you right now why this is important, is because when you now meet someone today and you share what you believe is a fact that can be verifiable based on what's really out there, whatever it is, and they look at you and go, well, that's your opinion. Have you ever had that happen to you? That's because now what they have bought into is an epistemology that you can't know anything for sure, and it's just your opinion against mine. And that's all that really matters. And so, all of a sudden, you can now, through that philosophy of what that epistemology is, justify just doing whatever you want to do, because it's just my opinion against yours. And then on top of that, it means I don't have to change ever. I can do whatever I want, and I can assert whatever I want, and I can believe whatever I want, I can do. And that's our society today, and it's all based in epistemology. So that's why this is all important. Now what you also noticed about from Plato on, all these philosophers, they believe that knowledge is a thing that you figure out yourself, that you have the faculty and the capability of having a direct relationship with things that you can verify and understand. You think, therefore you are. You experiment, you adjust your thinking based on the facts that you find out, and you get a little closer to the truth. But we're going to find out from the book of Proverbs, counter-cultural to everything that we have experienced in our life. The Bible says knowledge is not an abstract thing or concept. Knowledge is all about relationships. It's relational. It's not so much what you know, it's who you know, and who knows you. That's probably even more important. That's what makes all the difference. Who you know, and who knows you. And from that, then you can know other things. But if you don't have that first relationship, nothing else really matters. So we're going to be reading through the book of Proverbs, and I've got them all listed in the YouVersion of the Bible app. They're going to go pretty fast here, starting in chapter 1 and all the way through to chapter 28. We're kind of selecting various verses. So let's read them before we get into the actual message today. Proverbs 1, verse 7, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. Proverbs 3, trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on you...