FROM THE DAWGHOUSE…
FORGE 31 Days in the Dawghouse Challenge:
Do your DAWG for a month to make it a holy habit for life
Proverbs 1:1-7
1 The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel:
2 To know wisdom and instruction,
To discern the sayings of understanding,
3 To receive instruction in wise behavior,
Righteousness, justice, and integrity;
4 To give prudence to the naive,
To the youth knowledge and discretion,
5 A wise person will hear and increase in learning,
And a person of understanding will acquire wise counsel,
6 To understand a proverb and a saying,
The words of the wise and their riddles.
7 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
Fools despise wisdom and instruction.
After just a few minutes chewing these verses over in my mind, it hit:
Proverbs are for every man at every stage of life and in every day and age.
Proverbs is for me and you, today. And it will be for us tomorrow too. And the next day, and the next….
Until Jesus returns and cleans up Planet Earth and restores true wisdom and justice and order, Proverbs is a major resource to us so that we may live life well. With skill. A life He can and will honor. A life that will be a positive legacy for others.
About the Proverbs a man can never say:
“Ya, I read that book; a good one. It’s in my library.”
Proverbs is never just about past tense, “Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.”
It was never intended by our Father to be a one-time-only read but rather a daily go-to well of wisdom in a rapidly changing world.
It’s relevant, practical, and powerful every day for the naïve man, the young man, and the wise man. Every man. For salesmen, teachers, pastors, entrepreneurs, contractors, medical researchers, business owners, landscapers, for the man who loves reading and the man who hates to read…Every man.
For the man who knows little about how God has designed life to really work and for the man who has learned tons about life. Every man, at every stage of life, and all the time.
Proverbs is inexhaustible in its wisdom and practical application because God is Infinite and way out ahead of us in terms of what is coming at us and what we will need to face it. God made life, so He knows what we need for life.
It just makes sense therefore that I should make reading and thinking through Proverbs a daily part of my routine before I go out into a world that will be different today than it was yesterday. Constantly changing and constantly promoting fear:
Fear of COVID and the next strain of it…
Fear of loss of freedom…of aging…not knowing what career path to take…
In a time of the exponential proliferation of confusing and contradictory messages from our thought leaders that makes us fearful of trusting anyone…in a time when fear is shaping passive men by the thousands,
Proverbs says: Fear, honor, reverence for God:
Fools despise wisdom and instruction.
This is the big idea of the entire book and it’s repeated throughout it: fear, honor, reverence for God. That’s the first step of wisdom. Ignore reverence of God and acknowledging God, and you take the first big slippery step downward into the fool’s dark hole.Here’s the fork in the road Proverbs brings us to: Reverence for God and find knowledge for success. Reverence for yourself and you sabotage success.
Father, today I accept the gift of Proverbs for what it is: Your gift of wisdom so that I as Your beloved son might live wisely today and every day and thus live the most successful life possible. Help me to start seeing You today, seeing You as the Supreme King that You are. Because I can’t see You with my physical eyes, I tend to forget that You exist, and not see You with my spiritual eyes. Thank you that what’s good for me in Proverbs is good for everyone of my friends and family too. I’ll pass on what I’ve learned today. So as I launch into this new day, I start out by honoring You, and seeing You, and revering You. I will fear You in that sense of reverence, but by Your grace, I will not live in fear of anyone or anything! Soli Deo Gloria!
Amen
