Episode Transcript
Alright, if you take God's precious word and turn to the book of Proverbs chapter 13 Proverbs chapter 13 God willing will be expounding verse 19 tonight.
Proverbs 13, verse 19.
The title of the message tonight is sweet souls.
Sweet Souls.
First, we're going to begin by reading the entire verse together, please.
Proverbs 13, 19, the desire accomplished is sweet to the soul.
But it is abomination to fools to depart from evil.
So we'll begin here with the first two words: the desire.
The desire, and the Hebrew word translated desire here has the idea of longing for something.
The longing of a person's heart.
And the reason we have that is because God designed the human heart to long for things.
He designed you and I to desire things.
God put cravings in our hearts.
He wants us to long for things in life.
He wants us to crave and desire things.
In our soul.
I don't know if you ever thought about that before, but he does.
Could you imagine what life would be like if you didn't desire things?
Could you imagine?
A while back, I was desiring some homemade cinnamon rolls.
So my wonderful wife, she knows I love homemade cinnamon rolls.
Now don't go make me any.
Because they got to be made a certain way, or I won't eat them.
So don't any sweet people try to do something nice for Brother Richard.
And he wouldn't want to offend you, so he'd take them and I'd shake my head and I'd say thank you.
And then my wife would end up eating them, but I wouldn't.
I got to be healthy cinnamon rolls.
So my wonderful wife made me a big batch of whole wheat. healthy cinnamon rolls.
And every time every night when I got home from work for supper, you know what would happen after I ate my supper?
I knew I had those cinnamon rolls in the house, and so my heart would long for them.
And when I put those cinnamon rolls in my mouth, they gave me so much pleasure.
But when I get up in the morning, tomorrow morning, suppose my wife Were to surprise me with a couple of fresh homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast.
That would be a nice surprise.
And then I go to work, and around 11:30, After I've already had my snack at 10:30, because that's usually how I work it.
And at 11:30, I get hungry for lunch.
And so I go and I grab the lunch that my wife's packed for me.
And I discover that she packed three cinnamon rolls in there for lunch.
Well, how about that?
So I ate the three cinnamon rolls, and you know, the cinnamon rolls were nice, but by this time, noon, all I've had to eat all day long is five cinnamon rolls.
And then when I get home for supper, I sit down and my wife pulls out of the oven nice, warm cinnamon rolls for supper.
Y'all are laughing.
Y'all are laughing because by this time I'm sick of cinnamon rolls.
Right?
I'm sick of them.
At this point in time, I have no desire.
For cinnamon rolls.
The desire is gone.
So if I were to put one of those cinnamon rolls in my mouth, would it be pleasant to me?
It'd be unpleasant to me.
So the same food that once gave me much pleasure now gives me no pleasure at all.
In fact, it now gives me displeasure.
And it's the same man, it's the same food.
So, what makes the difference?
The difference is there's no desire in my heart.
That's the only difference.
There's no desire in my heart.
So here's something you need to understand: where there is no desire, there will be no pleasure.
Where there is no desire, there will be no pleasure, and God wants us to have pleasure in life.
Therefore, God gave us desires in our heart.
We learned that all the way back in the Garden of Eden, when God created all of these wonderful trees that were good for food and that were pleasant to the eyes.
And then, when Eve looked at the tree of knowledge of good and evil, it was a tree to be desired.
So there was desire in the human heart before there was ever the fall of the human heart, you see.
God created us to have desire.
So that we would have that need met, and when we have that need met, when God-given desires meet God-given grace, it's sweet.
To our soul, you see, but God's design every human heart Has longings.
The desire Solomon is speaking about tonight, though, we need to make sure we understand is the righteous desires of someone's heart, not the unrighteous desires.
The desires that are implanted in the human heart by the God who created it.
That's what Solomon's talking about tonight.
By God's design, every human heart desires something, but because of sin, Not every desire is going to turn out sweet, as our proverb says.
The wicked think that their desire is sweet.
But it's going to leave a bitter taste in the end.
When God blesses the righteous with the desire of their hearts, the Bible says in Psalms 1:12, verse 10.
Psalm 112, verse 10.
When God blesses the righteous with their desires, it says, The wicked shall see it and be grieved, grieved.
He that is the wicked shall gnash with his teeth and melt away.
Watch the last part of this verse.
The desire of the wicked shall what?
Perish.
The wicked have desires just like us.
They're just different desires.
And the desire of the righteous is going to be sweet.
The desire of the wicked is going to perish.
So Solomon is not talking about the desire of the wicked in this verse because the desire of the wicked shall perish, and a perished desire is not an accomplished desire.
And Solomon is speaking to us tonight about the desire, Leubekin your text, accomplished.
When that desire of the human heart gets accomplished, which literally means to exist or to come into existence.
When we have a desire, a longing in our heart, and then finally that which we have craved and longed for and prayed for for so long and sought after.
Then finally, that need gets met, that desire, that longing gets accomplished.
Whatever we set out to do in the name of Jesus, it gets accomplished.
It's sweet.
And the fact that God joined by the Holy Spirit, he joined these two words, desire and accomplish together, is very precious.
He put the word desire and the word accomplished side by side in the Bible, and that demonstrates to us His grace and his love toward us.
Could you imagine how miserable we'd be if we only had God-given desires, but they never had any God-given accomplishments?
Could you imagine God giving us the desire for water?
Thirst is a big longing.
Could you imagine God giving every person the desire for water, but He never creates water?
And so you just go through life longing to quench your thirst, and there's nothing to quench it with.
He gives you a desire for a spouse.
He gives you a desire to have a baby.
He gives you a desire to accomplish something in the ministry.
He gives you these desires, and he never gives you the grace.
To see that desire accomplished, it'd be miserable.
I'd say it would be cruel.
The Bible says the desire accomplished, look back in your text, is sweet to the soul.
Sweet to the soul.
Not sweet to the tongue.
That's what the cinnamon rolls were.
We're talking about spiritual things.
We're talking about emotional things.
We're talking about the inward man here, not the flesh.
And that desire, that longing of the inward man is sweet to the soul, just like the cinnamon rolls are sweet to a person's tongue.
It gives you pleasure.
And God designed our souls to taste the sweetness of his grace toward us.
You see that?
God designed your soul to be able to taste the sweetness of His love and His grace toward you.
And how you are able to taste it is the same way we taste food.
I had a doctor's appointment after work today, and my wife came to Tyler and went with me.
And when we left, I was hungry.
And I wasn't just hungry for anything.
I was craving barbecue.
I said, Tammy, let's go get some barbecue.
Let's go get some barbecue.
I had that craving, and Tammy wanted to go to Rudy's barbecue.
Have you ever eaten at Rudy's?
It's good.
And so we went to Rudy's, and then she wanted the turkey there, because it's real good.
So we got some turkey.
And boy, to have that craving and then to finally taste that on your tongue was so good.
And that's how God does it for our soul.
He puts the longing, the craving in our heart, not in our belly.
And when he puts that craving in your belly, he causes you, like I did for that barbecue, to go seek after it, to go seek to have that craving met.
And then, by his grace, the same God that graciously put the craving in our heart, then graciously gives us that accomplishment.
And it's sweet to our souls.
I had someone Tell me the other day that because I've been working on this Treading on Mountains book, which I hope to get in the hands of many Bible teachers.
And I've been working on it for what, over three years, Tammy?
Around three years.
And it takes up pretty much all my spare time.
It took up pretty much all my spare time.
I still got an e-book to do on it probably in the future, and some other things.
But the night that I finally finished it, after all the revisions and corrections and re-revisions and all this stuff The night that I finally finished it, there was just this, I felt like I could finally rest.
And someone told me after I released it, he said, you wouldn't know what your books have meant to me.
And I'm looking forward to reading this one.
And there's something in a Bible teacher's heart.
It doesn't so much crave to teach the Bible, but craves to watch the people get fed.
My grandmother used to say she loved cooking for me.
And the reason was because I ate so vigorously.
I'd go, mmm, and I'd make noises and I'd just eat.
And when I was a young man, I had this incredible What do you mean when you when you burn your calories?
Metabolism.
This incredible metabolism.
I just eat, eat, eat, eat, eat.
And she just looked at me.
She goes, I love cooking for you, Richard.
I just love to watch you eat.
Well, that's the way it is for a pastor.
He loves to watch God's people eat.
He loves to watch them enjoy the scriptures.
It means Everything.
Everything.
Because that's the whole purpose is to feed God's sheep.
And so God puts that longing in a pastor's heart.
And then when the people get fed, it's sweet to the pastor's soul, sweet to the Bible teacher's soul, isn't it, Brother Shepherd?
Very sweet.
Very sweet.
And so that was a longing in my heart, and that's a longing that goes on for several years sometimes before you see the fruition of it.
So there's this long craving, this long seeking after.
But God puts that craving in the heart.
To cause us to seek that craving to be fulfilled, and then when the right time comes, God's grace.
Meets God's craving.
God's grace in heaven meets God's craving in you, and they come together and make that sweetness.
So God designed our souls to taste the sweetness of His love toward us, and the desire that is never accomplished is never sweet.
Listen to that again.
A desire that is never accomplished is never sweet.
It's just a longing.
It's just a craving.
And God wants us to have the sweetness.
God wants you to have a sweetness in your soul.
He wants you to have. the pleasure of seeing your God-given desires met with His God-given grace.
Because the grace originates with God, and if it's a God-given desire, the desire originates with God.
So, what do we learn from this tonight?
We learned that first God ordained us to have those God-given desires, a person without godly ambition.
Has nothing of true value to look forward to.
Nothing.
And that's why a lot of Christians A lot of people who have no spiritual ambition No drive to see anything accomplished.
No God-given cravings in their hearts.
And listen, you will have God-given cravings in your heart if you don't fill your heart with other cravings.
There's only so much room.
There's only so many things to long for.
And if we set our affection on things below, where Christ is not.
We'll never experience the affection of the things above where Christ is.
And the Bible says, set your affection on things above where Christ is.
And so we sometimes in life we have to sit back and say, what are my ambitions in life?
What are my goals in life?
And one of the things I absolutely hate Is hearing a Christian talk about their bucket list and God's not on it?
If I visit all 50 states and I visit all of Europe, And I don't accomplish anything for the kingdom.
I may have had a good time kicking the bucket, but I didn't have a sweet soul.
And all of that journeying and playing around, or whatever I'm doing, it's just going to perish one day.
There's no sweetness.
The sweetness of God's grace meeting God's given desires, that sweetness never goes away.
You carry that sweetness on into eternity.
And so take an inventory of your heart tonight and say, Do I have God-given longings in my heart?
Do I have any longings and cravings in my heart?
And if you have cravings for the world and you don't have cravings for God, then just Take inventory of your cravings, and you might want to call some of them, and rethink, repent, rethink, reconsider your bucket list.
Now, writing this book was on my, I've got another book on my bucket list.
I'm excited about it.
I'm not excited enough to start yet, though.
I'm ready for some rest.
But I'm excited about it.
But I wanted to write these books before I died.
It was important to me.
Because when I die, I want to leave something behind so people who struggle with the ministry that God's gifted me in can still have a resource when I'm gone.
That's a bucket list.
And every Christian needs to have kingdom bucket lists within your God-given graces, within your spiritual gifts, not mine.
Don't ever have a longing for somebody else's spiritual gift because you're going to get disappointed.
But within your spiritual gift.
So a person without godly ambitions, they have nothing of true value to look forward to.
They have nothing of enduring value to enjoy.
They have nothing outside this perishing earth to get excited about.
I'm excited about my kingdom bucket list.
We learn next that God wants us to experience the sweetness of His grace in our souls.
But the sweetness of God's grace will never be experienced without accomplishment of our desire.
That desire must be accomplished.
So it could be that there are Christians who have righteous desires in their hearts.
They have ambitions.
They have things they want to accomplish in life for God.
They have certain things that they're seeking after.
And if you have that desire in your heart, there must be some footwork to work toward getting that desire accomplished.
It can't be a pipe dream.
God doesn't have kingdom pipe dreams.
He doesn't.
You need to pray that God will accomplish that longing in your heart, and then you need to discipline yourself to do what's required of you to see that desire come to pass.
What good would it be for me to have a desire to have books and I never put my fingers on the keyboard?
It would never work.
It'd be a spiritual pipe dream, something I'm always talking about, something that is always a longing, but that is never a sweetness to the soul.
So if you have that, Then put your fingers to the keyboard.
Begin putting feet to those God-given longings.
The desire accomplished is sweet to the soul.
Look back in your text, but it is abomination.
And abomination, by the way, is the opposite of sweetness.
You'd think that Bitterness would be the opposite of sweetness, and in a taste test, I suppose it would be.
But sweetness is something that makes us happy, while abomination is something that makes us disgusted.
Disgusted.
God wants us to walk around with the sweetness of His grace, the joy of His pleasure and His grace in our heart, but it is abomination.
It is disgusting, look back to your text, to fools to depart from evil.
Fools have desires, but they don't have godly desires.
God has godly desires for them.
But they don't have godly desires for themselves.
As a result, a fool, as long as they're a fool, Will never ever taste the sweetness of God's grace in his heart.
And that's very sad to me.
I wish everybody could taste the joy of being a child of God.
I wish I could take.
The joy and the peace and the comfort and the security that I have knowing that I belong to God and that heaven is my home and that I've got something wonderful to look forward to.
I wish I could take that out of my heart and go stick it in every person's heart and say, now, see what that feels like.
See what that feels like.
But sweetness makes us happy.
Abomination makes us disgusted.
And it's disgusting to fools, it's an abomination to them, to do what?
To depart from evil.
Now, the only way you're going to have the sweetness of God's grace in your soul is to have a God-given desire met with God-given grace, accomplished by God-given grace.
And God never gives sweetness to the soul through wickedness.
He doesn't give wicked desires.
He doesn't supply grace to see those desires met.
And so, as a result, a fool will never taste the sweetness of God's grace.
For a fool does not pursue the will of God, they pursue the wickedness of man.
If you were to try to talk a fool into departing from evil and pursue the will of God and his life, and you were to explain. how wonderful it would be if they would depart from evil and pursue God in their life in all the wonderful things that come with walking in the will of God.
You would not whet that full spiritual appetite.
That you would make that fool disgusted with what you were describing to them.
There used to be this.
Delicacy in one particular part of the world, I can't remember where it is, maybe you all remember, they would take duck eggs and let them rot.
And then it eat the rotten duck embryos.
Does anyone remember that?
No?
And one of the missionaries was telling us one night about how they were trying to get him to eat that rotten duck embryo because it was good to them.
And he said, you know, they were always told to not turn things down, but he turned it down.
He said, just couldn't do it.
Just couldn't do it.
So it would be like trying to describe to you how wonderful this rotten duck embryo would be.
If you were to try it, the more I would describe it to you, the more disgusting it would sound.
That's the way it is trying to describe kingdom things to a fool.
Trying to talk them into it.
It's abomination to them to a fool to depart from evil.
The idea of departing from evil is disgusting to them.
And what a timely verse this is.
In our nation today, because it explains the phenomenon that we're seeing in our liberal cities today.
It's bizarre.
It's weird if it wasn't for us having the scriptures.
Because oddly enough, city leaders and some citizens in Washington, D.
C. , they're disgusted.
That their city is turning away from lawlessness to law and order.
It really disgusts them, as bewildering as it is.
It is an abomination to fools to cut their crime rate down.
They'll protest it.
It is an abomination to them to depart from evil.
That's why.
And when you see people protesting, their city getting cleaned up, when you see people upset because Criminals are being arrested, and people are no longer being murdered, and citizens can actually safely walk the streets again, then you now can understand why they're upset.
Because it is an abomination to fools to depart from evil.
It's amazing.
I don't know if y'all have seen some of the.
The citizens, some of the whether they're locals or whether they're visitors, I don't know.
Have you all seen them having their pictures taken with the National Guard and all them out there?
They're excited.
They want to have their pictures taken with them.
So, some people are celebrating their presence.
Other people are protesting their presence.
And it's the same people doing the same thing.
And it's all humanity.
The difference is the heart.
To one group of people, it's celebratory.
To the other, it's an abomination.
So if it wasn't for verses like this, we'd never understand how a fool thinks.
But now we do.
And you'd think that these foolish people, after seeing how many lives have been saved, would eventually say, Man, we were wrong.
We like the law and order in our town now.
But a fool won't say that because they're pleased with the The crime, they're pleased with the trash, the filth, the homelessness.
They're not pleased with the order, they're disgusted with it.
You can try your best to convince a fool that what you're doing is good for them.
But the good you show them won't convince them because it's an abomination unto them.
So I'll leave you with a kingdom truth tonight.
You can't please a fool by removing them from evil.
A fool will not be happy unless you allow them to destroy themselves.
You cannot please a fool by removing them from evil.
A fool won't be happy Unless you allow them to destroy themselves.
And with that, we'll go ahead and close tonight.
Father, we thank you for your precious word.
Thank you first of all, Father, that the desire accomplished is sweetness to our souls.
That you gave us the ability to taste the sweetness of your grace in our soul.
And when we have our God-given cravings met with your God-given grace, we are literally in our hearts tasting a bit of heaven.
Tasting the grace of our God.
And we thank you for that.
And we thank you, Father, for giving us the understanding.
Of the mind of a fool, and why they cannot celebrate with us righteousness, but they detest it.
Thank you for that understanding.
In Jesus' wonderful name, amen.
And let me share something real quick that the Lord put on my mind when I was a little boy.
My grandmother, my mother's mother, she would take a pear or an apple when I was staying with her.
She'd wash it off in that well water, and she'd take her little paring knife and She'd trim the peeling off of it and she'd cut it up into pieces, and she would take that fruit and she'd put it in my mouth.
And I can still taste her thumb when it touched my tongue.
I didn't think much of it at the time, but when I grew up, I cherished that.
And when you have your God-given longing met by God's God-given grace, you're tasting God's thumb.
The sweetness that you taste.
Is a taste of God.
He's allowing you to detect and rejoice in who He is.
It's amazing to me.
Amen.
