In the sermon 'The Blessings of Discipline' by Peter Allison, the focus is on Proverbs 19 and the importance of discipline in gaining wisdom. The sermon emphasizes the two prerequisites to receiving the blessing of wisdom: listening to advice and accepting instruction. Listening is described as more than just hearing; it requires stopping the distractions, focusing, understanding, evaluating, and remembering the message. Humility and patience are necessary traits to truly listen and learn, as they allow one to accept that others may have valuable knowledge and to invest the time needed for comprehension and reflection. Accepting instruction involves being open to correction and learning from imperfect sources, as God uses these experiences for personal growth and sanctification. The sermon also highlights the blessings of wisdom as deliverance from hardship, the joy of giving, financial prosperity, wise children, and ultimately, the blessing of life—both in abundance and everlasting life. The sermon concludes with a prayer for the congregation to embrace these teachings and seek God's blessings through discipline and wisdom.

Please turn in your Bibles. To Proverbs 19, I would like to read beginning at verse 15. Lazyness casts one into a deep sleep and an idle person will suffer hunger. He who keeps the commandment keeps his soul, but he who is careless of his ways will die. He who has pity on the poor lends to the Lord, and he will pay back what he has given.

3. Do not set your heart on his destruction. A man of great wrath will suffer punishment, for if you rescue him you will have to do it again. Listen to counsel and receive instruction that you may be wise in your latter days. There are many plans in a man's heart.

The Lord's counsel, that will stand. What is desired in a man is kindness, and a poor man is better than a liar. The fear of the Lord leads to life, and he who has it will abide in satisfaction. He will not be visited with evil. A lazy man buries his hand in the bowl and will not so much as bring it to his mouth again.

Strike a scoffer and the simple will become wary. Rebuke one who has understanding and he will discern knowledge. He who mistreats his father and chases away his mother is a son who causes shame and brings reproach. Cease listening to instruction, my son, and you will stray from the words of knowledge. A disreputable witness scorns justice, and the mouth of the wicked devours iniquity.

Judgments are prepared for scoffers and beatings for the backs of fools. Thus far the reading of God's Word. May God be true, judge true, though every man is a liar. Heavenly Father, Your Word is truth, sanctify us by it. As we prepare to look into it, We ask that you would teach us For unless you teach us we we study in vain May ask also that you would sanctify these sinful lips that they might proclaim what is true.

They might proclaim the riches of your grace and your glory. In Jesus' name, amen. We've been looking at these two chiasms in Proverbs 19 and on the necessity and the importance of accepting discipline. But this morning I'd like to focus on the heart of these two chiasms. The heart verses 20 and 27.

Listen to advice and accept instruction that you may gain wisdom in the future and its counterpart in 27. Cease to hear instruction my son and you will stray from the words of knowledge." There is a blessing that is promised here. There's a blessing that's implied and inherent in these two passages, these two verses. God is a God who delights in blessing His people. And He promises over and over to Bless us.

And this here is one of these blessings, even though there is not the word blessing in this sentence, it is a promise to bless. Listen to advice and accept instruction that You may gain wisdom in the future. There's the promised blessing. But there's two prerequisites to this blessing. Listening to advice and Accepting instruction.

Those are the two prerequisites. Listen to advice and accept instruction in order that you may be blessed. Do you want to be blessed this morning by the Lord? Then here's what he says that we must do. We have to first listen.

Listen is one of the more frequently repeated commands in Scripture. Listen. Listen to the voice of God. Listen to the voice of his messengers. And listening is more than just hearing.

It is hearing, but it's more than that. But it is, first of all, it begins with hearing. That means we have to stop talking. I don't know anyone who can listen very well while they are talking. I know I can't, I know sometimes I try, but we can't.

We can't listen while we're talking. James teaches us to be swift to hear and slow to speak. Swift to hear and slow to speak. So we have to stop talking in order to be able to listen. We also have to remove distractions from us.

You see we hear with our brain. You hear with your brain. So if we stop talking but our mind is running to 101 other things other than the person that is speaking to us, we're not going to hear. Yes, the sound will hit our eardrum and move through each of those bones in a very amazing way and stimulate the nerve endings and send a signal to our brain. But if we're distracted, if our mind is elsewhere, we won't hear.

And so we have to prepare ourselves. Peter says it this way, gird up the loins of your mind. There's a preparation there. He's making an image of somebody who picks up their long robes in preparation to engage in some strenuous activity or doing something, he's saying we have to do that same sort of thing, that same sort of preparation with our mind. We have to prepare our mind to be able to hear.

It means We have to remove the distractions that would crowd out the message. How many times as parents have we listened to our children while they were talking, while we were doing something else, and then realized we really weren't listening to them. Our children probably realized that before we did. We have to focus, or remove the distractions of our mind. And we have to then focus on the person who is speaking.

We have to give our attention to them. And that's an effort, that of girding up the loins of our mind. Paying attention, giving heed, these are things that we tell our children all the time and they are what the Lord tells us as His children. Pay attention, give heed. But we also then in order to listen to advice after is more than just hearing.

You know, we have to stop talking, remove the distractions, focus and so on, but hearing, listening, I should say, is more than that. We have to understand the message. You can hear the words, but we have to engage our mind to understand what has been said, and sometimes that takes effort, and we're by nature lazy, as this passage talks about lazy people and sometimes we if we're lazy we don't exercise the mental diligence to understand the message You can hear something without understanding it. In fact, that was what Isaiah said of Israel. He said that they would hear and not understand because their hearts were dull Jesus spoke in parables so that the people there would hear but not understand We need to understand we need to have diligence exercise that mental diligence to understand and comprehend the message that's being brought.

But then we also have to go further and evaluate that message. We have to evaluate the message. It takes work to understand but we can't stop there having just merely understood what was being communicated. The Bereans were good listeners and what did they do? Paul praised, Paul commended them because they were good listeners.

He commended them because they searched the scriptures daily to see if what the message that Paul had given them, to see if it was true. So they evaluated the message against the Word of God. That is the standard by which we have to evaluate the message. It's the only standard that we may use in evaluating the message, is the Word of God. But that's not all.

There's more to listening. We have to understand the message, we have to evaluate it according in the light of the Word of God. But then we have to remember the message. And this might be one of the harder aspects of hearing, is to remember the message. One of the charges that Jeremiah brought a number of times against Israel was that they had forgotten what Jehovah had told them.

Again and again he says to them, you've forgotten what I have told you. You've forgotten the message. You understood it, but you forgot it. James says, don't be like the foolish person who hears a message and then goes away and forgets what he heard. And that's like a person looking at himself in a mirror and walking away and forgetting what he looked like.

Remembering the message takes work, it takes meditation, It takes reflection on what was heard. Our mind is sometimes like an overflowing trash can. You ever try to put trash in an overflowing trash can? You put it there and it just kind of falls off. If you want that trash to stay in that overflowing trash can, you have to put it in there and you have to really press it down, all the way down, so that when it comes back up it doesn't fall out.

Well, maybe our mind is similar to that overflowing trash can. There's a lot of stuff in it. And if we don't work at remembering, at impressing into our mind this message, then we'll forget it. We'll Forget it. And it won't do us any good.

It's what we remember. It's what we, and that comes by reflection, by meditation. And that is simply keeping it in our mind, actively keeping our mind thinking and reflecting upon that word. Pushing it, pushing it down into our mind. Maybe even memorizing, you see, memorizing.

Remembering. Memorizing, you see, memorizing, remembering. When we do that, when we reflect on something, when we meditate on it, when we study it, if you will, that may bring up questions. Questions about what was said. That's an important part of listening.

They help, questions can help us to, when they're asked with the right motive, When they're asked to help us to understand something, they're a very important part of listening. The disciples often had questions for Jesus when he was done speaking to the crowds. They asked him what his parables meant, they asked him questions and they had discussions because they were listening. They were actively listening to what Jesus was teaching them. And then lastly, if we're going to listen to advice, we have to follow the advice.

There has to be a turning from what we were going to do to follow what God's commandment is to us. In numbers, when the Israelites were going to go over into Canaan, the half tribe of Manasseh was going to settle over on the other side of the Jordan. And Moses heard their plan and he was somewhat angry with them in Numbers chapter 32. The children of Israel, the children of Reuben and Agad in the half tribe of Manasseh, they saw the land of Gilead and it was a place that was good for their livestock and they came and spoke to Moses and to Eliezer and to the leaders of the congregation and they said, you know, this country is good And if we have found favor in your sight, let this land be given to us as a possession, and don't take us over the Jordan." But Moses said to the children of Gad and to the children of Reuben, "'Shall your brethren go to war while you sit here? Why will you discourage the hearts of the children of Israel from going over the land?

Thus your fathers did when God had sent them originally and they became afraid. And God's anger was aroused against Israel when all the hearts of the people became faint. And Moses is saying, you're going to do the same thing. You have risen in your Father's place, a brood of sinful men, to increase still more the fierce anger of the Lord against Israel. For if you turn away from following Him, He will once again leave them in the wilderness and you will destroy all of these people." That was Moses' advice to these people.

And then they came near to him and said, they had a new plan. They listened to his advice, his counsel. And they said, well we will build our houses and sheepfolds here in this land which is good for our livestock, but we will go over armed with our brothers and engage, partake in this conquest of Canaan. And then when that conquest is done, then we'll come back to our families on the other side of the Jordan. And then Moses said, now if you do this thing, if you arm yourself before the Lord and all your armed men cross over Jordan and the land is subdued before Jehovah, and then afterward you return, then you will be blameless before the Lord, and this land will be your possession before the Lord.

But if you do not do so, take note you have sinned against the Lord, and be sure your sin will find you out. Build cities for your little ones, fold for your sheep, and do what is proceeded out of your mouth. See, now there is an example of people who were turned from what they were going to do. They heard that message, they evaluated it, they remembered it and they came back to Moses and said, okay, this is what we are going to do instead. And Moses blessed them.

He blessed them for that. He said, if this is what you are going to do, do it and the Lord will bless you in that. Now, that's the first prerequisite to this blessing is to listen, to listen to advice and to accept instruction or this word, which is really discipline, which is a very broad term. It's maybe not a good exact translation in English for it, but it has the idea of being instructed, of chastening, of discipline, of correction, of growing, of growing. And so those who would receive the Lord's blessing are to listen to advice and accept instruction.

Now, accepting this kind of instruction, accepting correction is hard. It's very hard. God uses it as a tool for our growth, for our transformation, for our personal development, for our sanctification. God uses this, but it's what we need to receive. We need to accept it.

Rebuke a wise man and he will love you. That's accepting correction. Give instruction to a wise man and he will be wiser still. The ear that hears the rebukes of life will abide among the wise, Proverbs says. The ear that hears the rebukes of life will abide among the wise Proverbs says the ear that hears the rebukes of life.

That's the concept of accepting Instruction accepting correction Accepting instruction means that we have to be willing to admit that we might be wrong. We have to be willing to admit that we might be wrong. Accepting instruction also means accepting imperfection. Because instruction comes through imperfect people. And the bringing of instruction or correction to us is going to come imperfectly.

But that's what God's ordained. God is ordained to bring correction to us through sinners, and so it won't be exactly correct. Sometimes it can be highly flawed. But even in the worst correction, there is usually something to be learned. Something to be learned if we receive it as from the Lord.

If we receive it as what God in His providence, God in His goodness, God in His grace to us is teaching us, We can learn from it even when it's not perfect, even when it is highly flawed. You see, we by nature are prone to love ourselves, and that means we love our ideas, and we're prone to being deceived, self-deceived. And so accepting corrections means we have to let go of both of those. We have to let go of our self-love and our self-deception. And so there's obviously, you can see there's some very clear character prerequisites to this.

Listening to advice and receiving instruction or discipline require a character that bears the fruit of the Spirit. It requires humility. You see, humility is a prerequisite for listening itself. To be willing to listen to someone is to acknowledge that the person that is speaking may know something that we don't know. And so those who are wise in their own eyes are not willing to listen to somebody else because they don't accept that that person might know something that they don't know.

To listen to someone else is also to put ourselves under them in a sense, to allow someone else to lead and to be willing to follow them where they are going. It takes humility to listen from another person's perspective, to give up our perspective for the moment and to work to see things from this speaker's perspective It takes humility to change our course, what we were going to do, what we wanted to do, and to go a different direction and follow advice like the children of Reuben did. It took humility for them to accept that correction from Moses and come back with a different course of action than what they had originally intended. It takes humility to receive instruction from imperfect people. It also takes patience.

Humility and patience. Because you see it takes time to communicate and if we're going to listen, we have to stay around long enough for the message to be communicated. We have to be willing to listen for long enough and that takes patience to sit and to listen. It takes Patience to do all the things that need to be done to listen. The focusing of our mind, the evaluating of the message, the exercise of understanding the message.

That takes patience to do that long enough to hear it all, To reflect on what is heard, to wrestle with that message. That takes an amount of patience. Without patience we would just move on, forget about it, discard it. It takes patience to continually practice listening to this advice and receiving instruction over a long time because you notice that's what it says, listen to advice and accept instruction that you may gain wisdom in the future. In the future.

There has to be a patient can ongoing continuing listening to advice and accepting of instruction it's not something that is done once and then we have all the wisdom that we ever need. It's an ongoing habit. Takes patience. The promise is that we will be wise in our latter end. And that kind of, that wisdom doesn't come overnight.

But it does come. This wisdom is the blessing that is promised. Wisdom is turning away from our way, from the way that seems right to the way of the Lord. It is turning from the evil way to the way of righteousness. It is turning from darkness to light.

It is turning from lies to the truth that can set us free. It's the fearing the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom that sets us free from the fear of man. Fearing the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom sets us free from fearing man. So a lot of men fearing this week. A lot of people who are afraid of what men were going to think of them in their legislature.

It's the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord that can set us free from the fear of men Wisdom is a devotion to the Lord to Jehovah It's a love of Him. It's a love of His Word. It's a love of all that is His and a devotion to it. It's a forsaking of the love of this world and the things that are in it, The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life.

These things that are passing away and it's a loving of the Father. We can't have both. Wisdom is this blessing, but there are many blessings that flow out of this, from these two chiasms. Wisdom brings the blessing of deliverance from blows. A fool's back is made for a rod, for beating, a beating for the back of fools.

So wisdom delivers us from those hard knocks, those blows. Wisdom brings the blessing of giving. That's a blessing. It's a blessing to give. In fact, it's more blessed to give than to receive.

And one of the blessings that flows from the Lord to those who receive correction is the blessing of giving. The blessing of giving to the poor, of helping, of being somebody who is a provider, that's a great blessing and it flows from this wisdom here. But it's also the blessing of the Lord repaying us. Financial prosperity and other blessings that the Lord repays that which we have given. This is the Lord's doing, the Lord repaying us.

The freedom from worry about money, the freedom from worry about where to live, about housing, about food. When the Lord repays, He repays richly. He's not stingy. When He gives, He pours into our lap, good measure pressed down, shaken together, running over. This is the blessing that is held forth here.

The Lord is rich. He is rich. There is no one richer. And He gives, He repays according to His riches and His glory. The blessing of wise children who are an honor to their parents is given here.

All of plants, as the scripture describes them, in strength and beauty in the home. Children who rise up and call their mother blessed. Children who earn honor. This is a blessing that flows from those who listen to advice and receive correction. But also, there is here the blessing of life.

The blessing of life. The fear of the Lord leads to life. And whoever has it, rests satisfied. He will not be visited by harm. The fear of the Lord leads to life.

What a blessing, a greatest blessing. Everlasting life. In the presence and in the fellowship of Jesus Christ our Savior, the presence and the fellowship of God the Father, the presence and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. This is life. And Jesus came to that we might have life and that we might have it abundantly.

This is His protection, though, upon our life now. And giving to us now a life of abundance, a life of protection from demonic attack, from financial disaster, from vandalism, from theft, from waste, from destruction, from famine, from hunger. These are the blessings of life that God pours out on His people. This is what He delights in, blessing. You can read Deuteronomy 28.

There are a number of blessings there that are poured out that God promises to his people. God is a God who delights the blessing. The greatest blessing is the blessing of life. The blessing of the Holy Spirit dwelling with us, living with us, so that this life which we now live in this flesh, not just in heaven, but the life we live now in the flesh, is a life of blessing a life lived in fellowship with the Holy Spirit a Life that Christ lives in us May the Lord so richly bless each of you with the abundant life that is promised in His Word through Jesus Christ. Our Heavenly Father, we thank you that you do bless us.

We thank you for your blessings, for you daily load us with benefits. You daily feed us. You daily clothe us. You dwell with us and we know and can live in the power of your resurrection, in the power of your ascension. You have made possible for us to live in victory, in victory over sin, in victory over Satan.

Oh Father, we ask that by your grace, through faith we might appropriate these blessings, that we might receive them, that we might seek them, that we may ask for them, for you surely delight to give them to us. And O Lord, we ask of you that you would ever keep us from ceasing to hear instruction, that we might never stray from the words of knowledge. We ask this through your grace of Jesus Christ. Amen.