Worship, therefore, is the fuel and goal in missions. It's the goal of missions because in missions we simply aim to bring the nations into the white-hot enjoyment of God's glory. The goal of missions is the gladness of the peoples in the greatness of God. “The Lord reigns; let the earth rejoice; let the many coastlands be glad!” (Psalm 97:1). “Let the peoples praise thee, O God; let all the peoples praise thee! Let the nations be glad and sing for joy!” (Psalm 67:3-4).

But worship is also the fuel of missions. Passion for God in worship precedes the offer of God in preaching. You can't commend what you don't cherish. Missionaries will never call out, “Let the nations be glad!”, who cannot say from the heart, “I rejoice in the Lord…I will be glad and exult in thee, I will sing praise to thy name, O Most High” (Psalm 104:34; 9:2). Missions begins and ends in worship.

If the pursuit of God's glory is not ordered above the pursuit of man's good in the affections of the heart and the priorities of the church, man will not be well served and God will not be duly honored. I am not pleading for a diminishing of missions but for a magnifying of God. When the flame of worship burns with the heat of God's true worth, the light of missions will shine to the most remote peoples on earth…

Where passion for God is weak, zeal for missions will be weak. Churches that are not centered on the exaltation of the majesty and beauty of God will scarcely kindle a fervent desire to “declare his glory among the nations (Psalm 96:3). Even outsiders feel the disparity betwen the boldness of our claim upon the nations and the blandness of our engagement with God. – John Piper, Let the Nations be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions

What might seem a rather commonplace call to focus takes on more importance when we see that this is one of the sayings that are “life to those who find them/ healing to all their flesh.”

Go for focus. It energizes. Repairs what is ailing. It even sounds more comfortable than being “spread thin.”

Are you looking at what is in front of you? At who is in front of you? For example, the string of advice that our proverb sits in begins with a father sitting down with his sons: Hear, O sons, a father's reproof, and listen to discerning knowledge. He proceeds to unfold what makes a life safe and honorable and appealing and efficient and clear.

Now that kind of conversation doesn't just happen but is contrived: it takes time and an extra-ordinary atmosphere and composure. Well, focus. It is exactly these kinds of conversations with these persons – that is, sons & daughters – to which we are to devote our energies.

Remember Mrs. Jellyby, that well-meaning “telescopic philanthropist” in Dicken's Bleak House, who gazed on the ends of the earth, and forgot the people in front of her.

1. Scripture. 2. Prayer. 3. Family. 4. Church. 5. Christ's commission to make disciples where you are. 6. Livelihood. These are what God has placed in your path. Now let them hold your attention.

(Kindly notice the App store and Angelina Jolie didn't make the list.)

Today I'm not much interested in the final four lines. I've included them because they're part of the stanza and give some concreteness to what is today's focus, the exhortations in the initial couplet: Son, look at me. Son, give me your heart.

Give me your heart. This is what a father asks of his son. What does he mean by that request? Allow me to be chief Sherpa as you decide what route to take in life. Allow me especially to advise you in your influences, because your life will largely be decided by what/who is influencing you. For example:

Son, one day you'll be invited to a house where you've never been. Maybe it's the house of your thesis adviser, maybe it's your boss's boss. On that fateful evening, you'll enter an expensive neighborhood, you'll turn into a long, winding driveway with immaculate landscapng on either side, you'll be ushered into a high-ceilinged vestibule, you'll sit down at a well-appointed table.

Now listen up son! When you pull your chair up to the table, put the metaphorical knife to your throat. Don't allow any dream to take shape within your head. Don't imagine yourself living in these surroundings. This night, don't make any goals or form any expectations.

You could blacken many days in your time around that table, son. Instead of taking this evening as the serendipity of enjoying a fabulous meal with fascinating people, you could let it become the source of great dissatisfaction, of selfish ambition, of misusing your family. The night could turn out for you to be an uncertain star that, as time goes by and memory grows wobbly (was that an oak or mahogany table we sat around?), becomes more and more misleading.

Son, you're at risk of being seduced (and not by your host!) into a flawed idea of success. Take care, boy! Just enjoy the lobster, take a good leave, and think nothing else of it.

But there's also Let your eyes keep to my ways. The father is confident that his manner of life is consonant with his advice. Son, I've been through the temptations, weathered the pulls on ambition, and I know what it is to come up right. I can be thankful and leave it at that. I've learned the secret to being content. Look! – Those things about me are my wits. My years have been spent guarding my heart.

Warning: This is a little complicated, perhaps because I myself am still trying to figure out the principle here. But I sense that it is an important one. (Certainly it's no throw-away line!) And it's a truth that other sages have spoken. That old German Goethe had a saying that comes up to this proverb: Cease endlessly striving for what you would like to do and learn to love what must be done.

You've gotten 8/10ths through the long task, but then the 2/10ths has sat unfinished for several months now. You're on to other things, you've gotten used to the inconvenience of working around the unfinished parts, nobody's prodding you to completion.

Except wisdom. The sluggard buries his hand in the dish; he will not even bring it back to his mouth. According to wisdom, regularly not finishing the job places you in a category you don't wish to be. Wisdom says, Be diligent. Finish what you started.

Ok, simple enough. But now for a strange question: how will you hear wisdom say to be diligent? I have come to believe that your notion of wisdom, your idea of what is her relation to you, indeed the sound of her voice in your head, makes all the difference in whether you will continue in the way of wisdom.

Think of wisdom as your sister. Not having a sister, I'm at a disadvantage in understanding this proverb. But I look on at my daughter, who is also a sister, and learn some sistering things from her. My findings: the best of sisters are interested**, even opinionated, realistic/ practical, cheerful, and affectionate. And now to my point: it is these sisterly qualities that we are to ascribe to wisdom.

So when wisdom says to be diligent, don't hear the phrase as from master to serf: impersonal, threatening, solely after efficiency.

Neither hear the call to diligence in lofty, poetic, or sociological terms. For instance: Every society that is not marked by diligence has faltered and then slid into oblivion. or Diligence is civilization shaking its fist at chaos.

No, no. You have to hear wisdom's call of diligence as from your sister – the one who watched you grow up, who knows your gifts and besetting sins, who becomes happy by your success.

So the 2/10ths needs not hang over you as a drudgery. When you hear the call to diligence as from your sister, you are, in a way, set free to love and enjoy (and then start!) the 2/10ths that needs be done.

Do you understand? You have to like and trust wisdom before you'll start listening to her. Wait – that's not exactly true. Let me rephrase: You have to like and trust wisdom if you're to keep listening to her.

**Even though she's the fourth born, Tess among her older siblings is the only one who replies to my morning 'how did you sleep' with the 'how did you sleep.'

For about a month, our family had been gathering around the table with our food lit by candlelight. All the primitive flickering was not a nod toward our New England Puritan antecedents, but rather the consequence of our dining room light dimmer going belly-up.

At first we found the lower light charming, but it wasn't too long before we had a hankering for the good old days of modern illumination. Ben had to give up his reading at the breakfast table. We got tired of burning the cup of our hand as we dropped lit candles back into their candleholders. And we inconvenienced our guests: at dinner time the Sunday night study group shuffled around the gloomy room, blindly rummaging in one mystery dish to another.

Ah, the guests. They had entered our home by a strange ritual. Like any solid citizen they walked up to our front door, knocked, and waited. They heard the sound of approaching footsteps. But then, the door didn't swing open. Instead, “Can you open the door? We can't from this side.” For at least a month we hadn't been able to open our front door because of a broken latch.

A family of seven, no matter how Dickinsonian eccentric it is, occasionally has to leave the house to have dealings with the real world. Doors are ideally suited for these kinds of exits. And front doors have all the advantages of directness.

But when it was time for all of us to leave, we'd send Kai out the back door, into the backyard, along the side, through the fence, up the steps of the porch, and we'd startle the neighbors by filing out as Kai held open the door.

It's been a complicated month, thanks to these two mamed fixtures. What stopped me from fixing them? Well that's complicated too. It has a lot to do with my having to go down to the back of the basement, open up the gray box, read the faint, messy print, and piece through which switch it was that turned off the current to the dining room light. A huge obstacle by any one's measure.

On Monday, though, I took the two hours and fixed the dimmer and door handle. Lit food and easy exits have gone far to smooth out our lives.

The thought is often there, though hardly ever articulated with such Isaianic eloquence: My way is hidden from the LORD/ my cause is disregarded by my God. Others have received, others have had prayers answered (and after just a couple goes at it), others are moving ahead, strength upon strength.

You? Nothing. And that bright nothingness has beat down on you and burned away your hope. You're well beyond being encouraged by Abraham, James & his positive take on trials, Romans 8:28. Once you would get excited by small, hopeful developments in your situation. Then, through numerous disappointments, you learned to temper that excitement. Soon fresh news only occasioned cynicism. And now, no leads, now news, no developments. You're dead in the water.

Even in your disillusionment, you're too smart to go down the well-worn path of disbelieving God's existence. But what has settled on you is the assumption that God has not regarded you.

In all His lofty ways, He's skipped over the detail of that upcoming deadline that spells your failure. He's forgotten to adjust His provision scale in light of the economic realities of 21st century Boston. He said He loves to see sinners repent, but just not those people you care about. His own aseity makes it impossible for Him to really grasp the utter neediness of our own contingent existence.

Whatever. You're actually not sure of the details. Just that God doesn't see the whole picture.

He doesn't know how badly I want this. He doesn't understand that I can't focus on anything else until this is resolved. He doesn't see the detrimental effect that His inaction is having on my kids. He obviously doesn't see how divided I am, or else He would remove this temptation. He doesn't realize that He needs, NOW, to stop my faith from eroding. He doesn't feel the weight of waking up worried. He doesn't note my expanded waistline from restlessly and unhappily tossing down food. He doesn't mark that I'm giving up, no longer looking, no longer praying, no longer ironing my shirts. He doesn't realize that in this economy, people my age and with my narrow skill set…

But He does.

Throughout Proverbs, especially in the first nine chapters, we have these earnest entreaties as from a father to a son. Weirdly, they're not teaching anything other than the way to learn, and then to retain what has been learned. We're itching to move on to a lesson like “Nine Steps to Success”; these paragraphs slow us down and question how long we can hold on to any new wisdom.

So the father: You'll have to remember what I've said to you – how will you remember? How will you remember to remember?

You'll have to guard my teaching against the noise and superficial advice of the society. On some afternoons, Deepak Chopra will sound a lot more attractive than moderation and telling the truth. Who wants unyielding commands when you can have “find the place inside you where nothing is impossible”? How will you protect my teaching against the vulnerable moments, the pretty words?

If you don't make my lessons immediately accessible, they'll slide away. Truth grows stale if it is shut away and not constantly taken out and handled.

Not just handled, though. My teaching must be forcibly pressed into your preoccupations, brought to bear upon your important choices, allowed to inform your deep thoughts of happiness and trouble. Even when it doesn't at first please, write my teaching on the tablet of your heart.

But then: Say to wisdom, “You are my sister.” What does that mean? What is the father saying about learning with his Call Discernment a friend?

If I say to my boy, Nobody is talking to the new kid – go and befriend him, he has a choice. He can spend time with the new kid all the while thinking how unfair this is, how much he wants to be with his own friends, how much trouble it is to get to know someone new, how the new kid annoys him.

Or my boy can think, Here I am with Johnny, the new kid. Might as well not pine over the fact that I'm not with my other friends. Might as well discover some interesting things about Johnny. Might as well see if he wants to help me finish building my fort. Might as well like him. Might as well enjoy him.

And so wisdom, or the way of wisdom, can easily be a pleasant companion for you. Then don't balk at her demands. Don't stew over what you are missing because of her. Don't reckon her company as suffering or even training. Enjoy what she's offering you.

You will not get off the drink until you decide to love sobriety. Maybe you're not leaving behind bad habits because you're not walking toward anything you like.

Watch your attitude toward wisdom. If you're going to stay with her, or rather if she's going to stay with you, you'll need to like her.

The two passages above are strange. God about to kill Moses – whaa! I didn't see that one coming. And then Joshua – out for a morning walk and then met by the Commander of the army of the LORD, who stands unsmilingly, with sword drawn.

Both of these men were where they were because they were on their way to carry out what God had specifically commissioned them to do. They weren't rebels or Jonahs or even doubting Thomases. God called and they moved. And now God threatens them.

And so before God would command events through them He would first assert Himself as their own Commander. Moses and Joshua were shown that the great war in the earth is not first against Egypt or any of the 'native-ites' of the Land of Promise. Rather the onslaught is mainly against sin, and the One who leads that surge is holy.

Moses and Joshua were sinners themselves. And before sinners will take part in that great campain against sin they must first deal with their own sin. Every single bit of it.

Which brings me to this excerpt from Charles Spurgeon's “Faith's Checkbook”:

Israel must conquer idolatrous cities and destroy all the spoil, regarding all that had been polluted by idolatry as an accursed thing to be burned with fire. Now, sin of all sorts must be treated by Christians in the same manner. We must not allow a single evil habit to remain. It is now war to the knife with sins of all sorts and sizes, whether of the body, the mind, or the spirit. We do not look upon this giving up of evil as deserving mercy, but we regard it as a fruit of the grace of God, which we would on no account miss.

When God causes us to have no mercy on our sins, then He has great mercy on us. When we are angry with evil, God is no more angry with us. When we multiply our efforts against iniquity, the Lord multiplies our blessings. The way of peace, of growth, of safety, of joy in Christ Jesus will be found by following out these words: “There shall nought of the cursed thing cleave to thine hand.” Lord, purify me this day. Compassion, prosperity, increase, and joy will surely be given to those who put away sin with solemn resolution.

Are you listening, son? But every parent knows the vacant look that sometimes attends the affirmative answer to that question; even with his mind 10 miles away, Billy can pay close enough attention to at least nod his head at the right times. There's more to attentiveness than obliging nods, though. That's the point of this stanza, where the son is urged to discreet actions that together make up attentiveness.

Bind them on your fingers – In my basement on the bottom of a storage shelf and in a plastic Container Store box are some old letters I've retained. Once my kids get old enough they can read letters from my mom, pledges of life-long adoration from former something-like-girlfriends, letters from Tonia when we were engaged, a couple of advice letters from pastors. Actually I forget all what's in that box because I've looked at it maybe twice in all our 15 years of marriage.

Well, what doesn't happen with those letters and me is the exact opposite of what it is to “bind them on your fingers.” Don't file away wisdom, but make wisdom accessible to you, as close and familiar as the palm of your hand. Have good books by your bedside table. Read the Scripture daily, afterwards on a 3×5 write down two or three key verses to chew on throughout the day, and stick the card in your pocket. Have sermons in the car for your commute. Make it easy to behold wisdom.

Write them on the tablet of your heart – One fairly recent (as far as I can tell) development among God's people is the readiness to admit that much of the Bible is boring to them. Now I'm going to call this a hopeful tendency, as hopeful as is any confession of the truth. But then again, this admission can only stay positive as long as we recognize that the problem of the “boring Bible” is with us, and not with the Bible.

C.S. Lewis one time admitted that he didn't enjoy the company of children, but he quickly admitted that this betrayed a deficiency in his personality. Certain things we should enjoy, we don't. If these things are intrinsically valuable, our disinterest in them isn't an example of “to each his own”; rather of our own dullness.

Just as if someone is annoyed by Bach's fugues, that's certainly not Bach's problem! We don't fault the Grand Canyon when the juvenile tourist takes it in and isn't impressed, right? I wish I could state this more clearly. Just because it's good doesn't mean we'll feel it as good. We'll have to work toward the right reponse.

It happens all the time: we come into contact with greatness, and we yawn. The question is, what will we do after we yawn? Write them on the tablet of your heart. When it comes to wisdom, then: we find it, we confess it as wisdom, we resist our resistance to it, and we start the work of taking it into our deepest selves.

Only after all that will wisdom cease to be boring. Or rather we will cease to be bored.

There's any irony to be had here. To the stanza promoting attentiveness and attention to detail, we're likely to content ourselves with a quick scan. Ok, another encouragement to be a good learner – on to the substance…

No, no. Around the corner from me the past couple of weeks a professional clean-out company has been, well, cleaning out a house. All of the materials are going into regular size pick-up trucks, and I've been struck by how thoughtfully the workers are loading every piece. Evidently they've discovered that the time it takes to stack everything neatly is worth the space they're saving by not just tossing everything in.

Well, that's my observation of what's happening with the trash around the corner. Now compare the value of that trash to the value of wisdom, and let the “so much the more” sink in. Attend to wisdom thoughtfully, carefully. Don't rush through your daily Scripture reading and forget what you have heard. Measure it and then painstakingly fit it into your memory.

Thoughtfully. Carefully.

And protectively, as you love and nourish your eyeball (the apple of the eye). You have gifts: life itself, talents, supplies, time, intelligence. And hopefully wisdom. Don't expose these gifts to the waster, to the tawdry, to the sloppy, to the frivolous, to the unfocused Zeitgeist. Live thoughtfully, carefully, protectively.

Sure, these words are, in the popular understanding, often next to connotations of “stuffiness,” “stiltedness,” “wooden,” “unimaginative,” “dull,” “rehearsed,” “BORING.” So what?