You’ve heard them. Those voices. They aren’t just in your head. They’re everywhere. They come from coaches, teammates, parents, fans, yourself. They push you toward higher achievement or greater mediocrity.
Those voices won’t ever stop, and you’ll always have to make a choice between them.
Proverbs 9 gives us a picture of two even more important voices. One is wisdom. The other is foolishness. Both, the proverb says, make their voices heard. Neither is hiding. Both have the same message: listen to me and you’ll find what you’re looking for. One leads to life, but you have to trust that it will. The other leads to destruction, and will never tell you the truth. One seems mundane and unexciting. The other is flashy, loud, and has immediate payoff.
Two voices. And you can only choose one.
God’s wisdom, by his own admission, will seem like foolishness at first. It seems foolish that you should consider yourself a sinner in need of forgiveness from a perfect and holy God you can’t even see. It seems foolish that this God, knowing you aren’t worthy of his forgiveness, would leave heaven and come to earth. It seems foolish that Jesus, the very embodiment of God, would do for us what we could not possibly do for ourselves…live perfectly and then die in our place to pay what we owe God for our sins. It seems foolish that the Bible says he died but didn’t stay dead and that he will one day come back from heaven to judge the world.
It seems much easier to believe that this life is all there is, that you may as well live it up because of that.
Those are the two voices. You must make a choice between them. One leads to life, the other to destruction.
Lord Jesus, I believe what at first seems to be foolishness, that you are the Son of God, that you lived a perfect life, that you died to pay for my sins, that you rose again to give me new life, that you are coming back one day, and that faith in you is my only way to God. I believe. Amen.
