How is Your House Built? (Prov. 24:3–4) from South Woods Baptist Church on Vimeo.

We’re rapidly approaching the most popular month for weddings in the USA, the month of June. Tennessee favors October, probably due to cooler weather and autumn foliage. But June weddings are still a close second in the state. Formal shops, floral designers, wedding planners, limos, reception venues, and caterers will put their best foot forward to dazzle the bride and groom while impressing the guests.

We’ll make our treks to these weddings, putting on our best attire, rushing around on the weekend to arrive in time, consuming mass quantities of reception food, standing until we’re ready to drop, and then getting home worn out. And we weren’t even members of the wedding party!

After all the vows exchanged, the “I do’s,” and lovely receptions, what then? The newly wed couple, living in a whirlwind leading up to the wedding, has scarcely a moment to think about the realities ahead. Now they face building their home. They will soon discover, a marriage license doth’ not a marriage make.

Realistically, some marriages never make. Others flounder for years without the kind of joy that should characterize their union as a reflection of Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:15–33). Some tolerate each other, focus on their kids and careers, but never quite get around to building a healthy, joy-saturated home. They have a nice house, good jobs, respectable kids, but their home never seems to find its stride.

So, what do we do? Many grab onto cookie-cutter outlines for ten ways to have a happy home. They attempt to force their unique personalities and God-designed lives into someone else’s idea of what a Christian’s home should look like. Usually, out of the legalistic morass of stuffing round pegs into square holes, they get frustrated and give up. But they started in the wrong place. It’s not that some of the steps to a happy home they’ve read and heard at seminars aren’t useful to some degree. It’s rather that they fail to enjoy the unique way that God has designed them to image His creativity and glory in the home.

That’s where this little text in Proverbs offers guidance. Whether married or single, we need homes that reflect God’s glory and give us joy. This passage speaks to all of us as contributors to our homes. Here we discover that the Lord gives the materials to build our homes for His glory and our joy. But what does that look like? Let’s delve into this proverbial guidance for the home.

If you’re building a house you must have the right kind of materials to get started. You wouldn’t find a couple of pallets of Play-Doh and boxes of tinker toys at the job site. It takes the materials conducive to constructing a home for it to be built to live in.

In the same way, Solomon points us to the materials that God provides for building our homes. They may appear quite odd, at first, but as we think about them more closely, then we start to see them as essential for building a home. Wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, the wisdom writer states, are the essential materials for building homes that taste and experience God’s glory and joy. Since those terms can be construed as abstract concepts, let’s give them three words that encompass their intention: revelation, application, and continuation. That’s how we’ll probe them.

This is not the first rodeo for these terms in Proverbs. The antithesis of the trio is found in Proverbs 1:8–19, with the one forsaking wisdom heeding the voice of recklessness that calls for a destructive approach to life. It takes the shortcut to success by running over and ruining others. It centers on forsaking the way of wisdom, pursuing a course of selfish, greedy living, and running to evil as the means to fullness of life.

A little later, in his aim to lead us toward the life of wisdom that lives in the revelation of God, the writer gives us the perfect model for building our homes. “The Lord by wisdom founded the earth, by[...]