The Daily Devo with Steve

Looking at today’s reading, and at tomorrow’s, we are going to get some more teaching on the topic of adultery for sure.  But we can take these teachings and use them beyond the topic of adultery, and that’s where my mind went as I was reading this morning, focusing on these 2 verses specifically:

27 Can a man carry fire next to his chest

and his clothes not be burned?

28 Or can one walk on hot coals

and his feet not be scorched?

You don’t have to be a Bible scholar to get something out of these 2 verses...and it goes back to something we were talking about recently called ‘guard rails’, and setting boundaries so as not to get close to the danger zone.  As we learned, there are sins where we can manage and eventually master the issue (more-or-less), and there are sins where we have no hope for mastery and which we must simply choose to flee in our lives.  Adultery is one of those sins according to the author.  I would say that I have learned that from my life as well...I lost my first wife to adultery.  I don’t believe it is because she is a bad person, and I recognize my responsibility as a husband and all of that...but the issue ultimately was that she put herself into a position where something that started small grew and grew and eventually all of the choices were bad choices.  Allowing yourself to have lunch with a person to whom you are attracted is a bad idea...it may sound innocent and you may be able to justify it to yourself as “lunch isn’t a bid deal”...but you know that there is a subtle urge for that lunch.  That urge isn’t a sin...that’s part of life.  The sin is having the urge and not having the wisdom to stop right then.  It is a lot easier to stop it then and to honor your spouse then.  It is a lot easier to FLEE that situation while there are still GOOD choices.  But when lunch leads to another lunch leads to a coffee to a quick drink after work...well, now all of the choices are getting to be bad choices.  Now there is something to break off with that person, and now you have a loss either way you turn.  That’s the way sin works...and that’s especially the way THIS sin, adultery, works.  And you are a fool if you think you are able to play with this fire and not get burned, in the words of our writer today.

Flee...that’s the wisdom here.  Just flee.  Wisdom isn’t being able to withstand temptation.  Wisdom is having both the understand of when to flee AND the courage to do it.  This is an place where integrity overlaps wisdom.  That’s the takeaway today...just flee this sin and don’t play with this fire at all.

Looking at this short section, there is a theme that jumps out to me.  As we read these verses the warnings against giving a pledge for someone, against slothfulness, and against wickedness in general, the theme that jumps out to me is the idea of not taking life seriously enough.  Some people live life like it is never going to end, like there is no urgency, and like there is always tomorrow.  And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s healthy to live life in a hurry or doing what I so often do (and which I want to improve upon) and always be living out in the future, failing to enjoy the moment.  So, we must live with a proper balance between being future-focused and present in the here-and-now.  But, the author is choosing to offer some encouragement for living with intentionality here; living with a mind on the future.  The connecting reason to warn against these issues of taking loans, against being slothful, or against wickedness is that each of these pulls our future potential into the present, just like spending our retirement savings on a car in our 50s.  It feels good, it may not be immediately costly to us, and we may forget that we ever did it...until the day that we need those dollars to live comfortably.  Borrowing money to spend today is just that...spending future income.  The more future income we’ve spent, the more we are working as a slave in the future; a slave to today’s spending.  Slothfulness sows seeds of low productivity in the future.  Low productivity leads to low income, or lack of marketable skills, or lack of production in another sense.  Low production means low means of enjoyment.  And with wickedness, we will reap what we sow in this sense as well...live wickedly today, damage our reputation, tarnish our name and our trustworthiness, and we won’t hav any leverage in the future.   Without trustworthiness and a good reputation, who is going to help me out in a time of need?  Who will give me the opportunity to do something that can beneficially change my life forever if I have crossed them or burned them in the past?

I think a great connection with today’s reading is this question I continue to ask myself daily while we are reading these Proverbs; “Today, have I taken a step forward or a step back in my life?”.  I continue asking that each night when I put the phone on the charger before going to bed, and I think this question builds on that.  I could amend it to say, “Today, have I taken a step forward or a step back in my life?  Have I lived with intentionality?”.  And, as I go to bed, I can go to bed thinking about this, “What do I need to do tomorrow to take a step forward, to move towards being the person I want to be and living the life I want to live?”.

That’s a powerful idea.  Let’s live intentionally today...a great reminder from Proverbs 6 today.

This Proverbs is very obviously written for a son as a warning against adultry.   In reading this, two thoughts come to mind from what is written.  Before getting into that though, just a general comment - it seems like adultry is becoming so commonplace now.  It almost seems like affairs and divorces are losing their ‘shock factor’ in our society.  That is a terrible thing.  I am honestly not sure where affairs and adultry are actually more common now, or if this is just something where we are just hearing about it more...I don’t know.  Either way though, it is tragic to see the erosion of the marital union like that.  And, to be fair, there are far more marriages that are just agreements and relationships, where the relationship is obviously not really there, and the husband and wife are just too proud to actually go through the motions of divorce, or where they are just in it for the kids...and I guess that’s slightly better than divorce, but I don’t know; if it is better, it is by the narrowest of margins.  I think the biggest tragedy would be if marital relationships are materially worse than they have been historically, and I don’t know the stats behind that.  What families need, what kids need, and what we each need individually is a vibrant husband-wife relationship.  There are a myriad of benefits for all associated parties when that is in place.  The point isn’t to ‘stay married’, but to have a relationship that is flourishing.

At any rate, looking at this reading, one thing that is clear is that the author would suggest the son FLEE from this sin.  There are two types of sins in general terms - those we can manage and those we can master.  I would argue that we can just about train ourselves out of certain sinful behaviors by way of habit.  For instance, eating terrible food that is bad for my body is a behavior that I (personally) can pretty much master.  The way I am wired, when I am engaged in physical activity and exercise, when I am working ahead on meal planning and cooking, when I am involved in grocery shopping...I really don’t find it hard to eat well.  That is something I am just about master.  But this issue of adultery, especially for men, this is really more of an appetite issue, and it is really not something men can master.  We are made by God in a way that precludes us from mastery in this area.  This is an area of life we’d be better to simply flee, to run for the hills, to avoid being in a position where we even have to exercise our ability to resist temptation.

The second idea that comes to mind is, assuming there are areas of life where we want to apply this kind of fleeing strategy, we need to build appropriate hedges.  The Jewish traditions offer some great examples of this.  Jesus was mad at the Jews man times for honoring their own traditions and holding them up as ‘law’ when God clearly gave the REAL Law to Moses.  But what the Jews would do is see a Law that God gave and they would set a standard that got them in trouble before they were close enough to actually breaking God’s Law.  It was like a guard rail on the highway, an artificial boundary that stops a car from hitting the actual danger, the ditch off of the side of the road.  Similarly, in our lives, we can construct guard rails for our behavior that shield us from getting into a place where we even have to face the temptation that we are scared we’ll fall pray to...if you just have a rule that you don’t get alone in an office, a room, a car, or anywhere, any time, with a member of the opposite sex, then you basically preclude yourself from getting into an adulterous situation.

Today is the last few verses of Proverbs 4, where the attention turns to a completely separate idea (in my mind), and that I really wanted to spend a day on, and that is the heart.  Right there in verses 20-27 the author gets at an idea that is so powerful, and specifically in verse 23:

Here are a few different translations of this same verse:

ESV: Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.

NLT Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.

KJV Keep they heart with all diligence; For out of it are the issues of life.

HCSB Guard your heart above all else, for it is the source of life.

So, here is why I go into that...looking at various translations is one of the best ways we (as non-language-natives) can understand what is being communicated in these writings.  I hear people picking on various translations of the Bible and feeling like one is ‘better’ than another, and I find that to be a comical discussion...each one has an angle it is bringing to the scripture reading process.  I am thankful we have them all; it is in comparison that we can often unlock something we can use.  Here, I see a couple of words that seem to be used interchangeably; ‘keep’ and ‘guard’, ‘above all else’ and ‘with diligence’, and ‘determines the course of your life’ vs. ‘sources/springs of life’.

Here is what all of that means to me...the condition of our heart in some way directs how our life turns out.  I can tell the author really believed that and that he really felt that our hearts should be monitored actively.

So, how is your heart?  How are you doing?  How are those around you doing?  Are you happy?  Really?  Why or why not?  What is keeping you from it?  What is the constant source of struggle for you?  We are taught that life and wisdom are paths down which we should journey...what is in the way of your path towards happiness that you just haven’t stopped to notice and to remove?

For me, I think a big thing is margin...I have sucked all of the margin out of my life by filling every minute of every day with intentionality and to do items.  I haven’t balanced the flow of work and play, the ups and downs of intensity and relaxation.  As such, I carry an intensity into every area of life that isn’t equally valuable in each area...I can’t love my family as well as possible with intensity...that’s not the environment for intensity.  Today I will pray for wisdom on this topic; as I plan for 2021 this week and next, it will be something important for me to bring to that planning, how to free myself from some of that intense focus and add margin to my life so I can be a better version of me for the people closest to me.  I love my wife and my kids so much, and they just aren’t getting the best of me I don’t think...and that’s because I haven’t paid close enough attention to my heart as the writer here in Proverbs guides...and it is time to remedy that for sure!

We are breaking this one into two pieces too...there are two very distinct ideas that I want to really focus on for a full day at a time.  The first is this idea of ‘the path’, the idea that both wisdom AND foolishness are paths that we go down.  Typically, wisdom is had by a single decision, and neither is foolishness.  We can make a wise choice in the moment, or a foolish one, granted, but living in wisdom is making wise choices systematically, repeatedly, and as a course of routine.  Foolishness is the same...it is repeatedly making unwise choices as we move through life.  It is the ability to weave God into our daily life, making choices in a manner where we routinely pause and as that question we’ve been discussing, “What’s the wise thing to do?”, it is not making every decision on impulse, but instead asking ourselves what we thing God might say to us in this situation.  In many ways, wisdom is a skill to cultivated in that it is gained with intentionality and practice.

Why is it so hard then?  I think one thing that makes wisdom and living in wisdom illusive is this idea of compounding.  As a parallel, think about the way money compounds when saved and invested.  Each day’s interest earnings are almost irrelevant and unnoticable, at least at first, but over time the momentum of that compounding builds and eventually big gains are made in short periods of time.  But it takes time and consistency to get there.  Think about the penny saved example...you heard of this one?  If you had a penny on day one, and that penny doubled on day two, and that then again doubled on day 3.  Do you know how much you’d have after a week, or 2 weeks, or at the end of a month?

After a week, you’d have $0.64.  After 2 weeks, you’d have only $81.92.  But, at 30 days, one month in, you’d have an astounding $5,300,000.  That’s mind-blowing.  Now, in life we don’t see quite that exaggerated of an outcome, but my experience has taught me that wisdom follows a similar kind of path.  Things compound.  It is the small, repeated, seemingly mundane decisions and actions, repeated over time, that build to create a momentum in life that we all want to have.

For me, today, my question is this, “Where am I NOT experiencing positive compounding in my life?”.  I will consider where I can apply the wisdom of this path principle, as pastor Andy Stanley calls it, and I will push myself to initiate a positive action and habit, just one, to which I can build on top of over time.

Today we read the second half of Proverbs 3, which is really like a hymn more than what’s in the first half, which reads more like the classic Proverb literature.  This section is littered with ideas that we could latch onto and talk about, as with the rest of Proverbs, but what really sticks out to me are 2 little ideas - this idea that living in wisdom gives us a clear conscious, and that we shouldn’t withhold blessing from others when we can give it.

On this first idea, here are the verses I am referring to:

21 My son, do not lose sight of these—

keep sound wisdom and discretion,

22 and they will be life for your soul

and adornment for your neck.

23 Then you will walk on your way securely,

and your foot will not stumble.

24 If you lie down, you will not be afraid;

when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet.

25 Do not be afraid of sudden terror

or of the ruin of the wicked, when it comes,

26 for the Lord will be your confidence

and will keep your foot from being caught.

As I am thinking about this, I love this idea that living in wisdom will create a clear mind of us, a sense of peace.  I know from my own experience that when I live according to MY desires and what I can JUSTIFY for myself, I tend to veer of course and I do things I regret, or I buy things I don’t need and experience that buyers remorse...all sorts of stuff like that.  But when I live in wisdom, when I live my life asking that question from yesterday, “Right here, right now, what’s the WISE thing to do?”, I tend to live guilt-free.  I experience that sweet feeling from v24 when I lie down, I don’t feel that terror when it comes...and it WILL come, I love how the writer says that in v25.  This is just a great insight.

27 Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due,

when it is in your power to do it.

28 Do not say to your neighbor, “Go, and come again,

tomorrow I will give it”—when you have it with you.

Here in these 2 little verses are an idea that speaks a little to what really stuck with me yesterday, this idea of being generous with the first fruits of everything I have, including my time, money, energy, etc...all of it.  Today, the author stresses that it isn’t just to God that we should give, but that our giving should be to our neighbor; to others.  In the New Testament, we see Jesus teach this idea that giving to God IS giving to others, that others are our vessel for showing our appreciation for what God’s done in our lives.  This theme goes back 1500 years to Proverbs even.  We should act on that nudge that we feel to do for others.

Today, in that vein, I am going to do something I have done before, but I will do it again...I am going to swing through Starbucks for coffee right after lunch (right after I take my daily 15 minute nap after lunch...my recharge power nap), and I am going to ge the tab for the next person in line.  Then, as I am drinking my coffee, I am going to take a few minutes and pray for that person/family.  It is a small way to get my heart open to serving others.

This Proverb has 2 distinct sections, so I will do each of them separately.  The first 12 verses are a classic Proverb-style writing, with the second half of the chapter, verses 13-35 being more of a hymn.  For today, in reading the first 12 verses, these lines are just dripping with nuggets of wisdom.  I mean, it is rich.

One of the things I notice on a repeated basis in reading Proverbs, especially in these earlier chapters, is the repetition of the plea that we should really treasure wisdom, and that we should seek it like currency, almost like it is oxygen even.  It is something we shouldn’t take for granted in other words.  And yet, I know that I pass by it on a daily basis, not appreciating how accessible God has made it for me.  I love wisdom, but do I really treasure it like that?  Perhaps THAT is a key element of wisdom in-and-of-itself, just treasuring it and valuing it appropriately; a subtle point, but probably a highly valuable one.  We see this in verses 1-4 today.

Getting into verse 5, we see some of the more quoted verses from Proverbs, and a beautifully written piece of scripture.  We see words like “trust” and “lean”, and this idea of a path again...that trusting in the Lord, leaning on His wisdom will put us on a path towards a good life.  We will a different way of suggesting that we remain humble, that we shouldn’t be “wise in our own eyes”...a huge element to wisdom.  The author goes on to tell us that we shouldn’t dispise correction either; that discipline isn’t a negative, but a positive.  As a side note, I think this has a huge lesson buried in it, by way of example to us who are parents.  When I am going to discipline my children, it is imperative that I don’t do it in a way that insults them, that stirs them up, or that damages their opinion on themselves.  Discipline is a method of bettering someone...and it is important that we remember that.  Discipline is something that we give someone we love, as we are told that God does with us here in v11-12; if someone were looking over my shoulder and watching me discipline my children, they should be convinced that I love my children based on the way I discipline them.  That’s a big idea.

We also see this idea that we should honor the Lord with our production in v9-10 - that is, our money, our time, our energy...all of it.  My nature lends itself naturally to getting up early in the morning, writing this blog, doing my podcast, studying God’s word.  For some people, they look at that and think I am super-faithful...but that’s not fair.  Some people struggle to get up and put God first, to open God’s Word and to study, but at the same time they are very generous with their time, with their energy, with their money, etc.  It isn’t fair to judge me by my strengths only...and, I mustn’t give myself more credit than I am due.  The giving of my time, energy, and money is an area where I can grow.  It is an area where I used to be more solid if I am being honest.  What’s happened is the stress of work and family has caused me to be more inward-focused, almost in a self-preservation kind of mode, and I have lost that outward-minded lifestyle.  That is what I am getting from the reading today.  That’s the challenge I am feeling today.  That’s what I will be praying about and thinking about today.

As a side note, with the amazing wisdom in today’s reading, I find it funny that God really hit my upside the head with these two verses...I almost wish I could ‘unsee’ them...funny how that works.

One of the things I am always looking for with these Proverbs are the subtle ‘if-then’ prompts.  In the first few verses of today’s reading, we see the ‘if you do this’ phrasing, as follows in verses 1-5:

My son, if you receive my words

and treasure up my commandments with you,

making your ear attentive to wisdom

and inclining your heart to understanding;

yes, if you call out for insight

and raise your voice for understanding,

if you seek it like silver

and search for it as for hidden treasures,

then you will understand the fear of the Lord

and find the knowledge of God.

And there is more ‘then...’ to come.  That appears to be what most of the rest of the chapter is about...the ‘then’.

We are told that it is a path and a shield; that wisdom will come into our hearts, discretion will watch over us, and that our souls will be comforted in that.  It will come over us and be available, wisdom, and it will make our paths straight and that it will insulate us from wickedness, from evil.

For us men, it will guard us against the evil woman...a temptation to which men of this world constantly fall pray.

And then today’s chapter ends with a basic statement that living in wisdom is the way to flourish in this world, and that the evil will be cutoff from the world.  Again, this isn’t saying that bad things never happen to good people, and I am not going to replay that track over and over again, but as we get started, it is at least important to make sure this is front-and-center in our minds, that God is laying out a general pattern for how the world works for us.  And, integrity and living in wisdom are the path most likely to lead to success.  And, since we know that planning on winning the lottery isn’t a viable plan for retirement, neither is ignoring the way God made the world and expecting a great outcome.  We need to use the tools God gives us.

Apart from that, I know from my own personal experience that when I am living in wisdom, I feel better.  It is like I was made with this internal sense of ought and ought not...and I think most people have this as well, unless they’ve ignored it for so long that they can’t hear that voice anymore.  That ought and ought not is an imprint of God on me, and on you.

For today, I am going to start asking myself this question throughout the day as I facing decisions, big and small, “What’s the WISE thing to do?”.  Not, “What can I get away with right here?”, and not “What can I justify to myself and to others?”, but “What’s the WISE thing to do?”.  That is an incredibly powerful question and we’ll talk more about that in the coming weeks, but today is really just the setup for that.

As we discussed in the intro, Proverbs is really broken into 2 major sections, chapters 1-9 about fearing the Lord, and chapters 10-29 filled with wisdom sayings and ideas.  As we start reading this morning, there are 3 high-level ideas that really jump out at me.

First, we bump into this main idea of this first section of Proverbs  right up front here in verse 7:

7 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;

fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Fear of the Lord...what is that exactly?  According to my study Bible,  while “fear” can describe terror or dread in our vernacular, the Old Testament use of the word “fear” often indicates awe or reverence.  To fear God is to express loyalty to Him and faithfulness to His covenant.  Those who fear God exhibit trust in Him and obedience to His commandments.  According to the OT, those who fear God obtain God’s protection, wisdom, and blessing.  Another way to think about it might be under the term of authority - to fear is to give authority to...if you fear God, you give Him authority over your decisions, your actions; your life.

Another idea, the second one that is introduced here in chapter one, and to which we will refer is this idea of wisdom being like a path.  It isn’t just a decision, but a path down which we travel.  Living in wisdom is accumulating good decisions that lead in the direction of right living.  Two steps forward and one step back is still moving in the right direction - and frankly, that’s about as good as most of us can do!  That’s what this is about, building a body of work that ultimately moves us closer to aligning with a life of wisdom.

The last overarching idea that I get from this chapter is this idea that wisdom is calling out to us...it is seeking us, as we should be seeking her.  Wisdom isn’t hard to find; it’s cost is simply humility.  We must have the humility to feel the NEED for wisdom...that’s the only cost.  If we don’t feel as though we need wisdom, we can’t see it.  As such, we have to force ourselves to remain humble.  We have to remind ourselves that we ARE in need, that we don’t have all of the answers...this really pairs very well with this idea of fearing the Lord; if God has authority over my life, then I can’t help but to be humble, because I am not in charge.  This is a skill that we develop and hone over the course of our lives; humility is an integral part of wisdom.

There is so much in chapter one...it is so good, and it is really the framing of what’s to come.  For me, in terms of application - when I go to bed tonight, before I put my head down, during this entire study, I am going to ask myself, “On ‘net’, have I taken a step forward in living in wisdom today?”  I am going to have a little reminder each night, before I put my phone on the charger, to think about that as we read through Proverbs together.

Proverbs is a fascinating a fun book of the Bible, and I have not done a read-through on it in quite some time.  It is definitely one fo my favorites though, so I thought this would be a fun exercise.  I may stop at some point to do something fun right around Christmas, something specific to Christmas, but we will see.  I am thinking through that now.  In the meantime, we can ready through Proverbs and see how God guides us and meets us in that.

Thinking at a high level about Proverbs, it is really a collection of writing with 31 different chapters that is broken into 3 parts - the intro and setup (chapters 1-9), the main wisdom collection (chapters 10-29), and the conclusion (chapters 30-31).  This is book is written so that the reader would have the Hebrew word Knokhmah (hook-ma), which means wisdom, but it really carries with it an action element; so, like wisdom applied.  It is about what happens when life is lived with wisdom.  To be fair, Proverbs is really BEST understood when taken alongside of Ecclesiastes and Job - where Proverbs provides insights about how to rightly live life, Ecclesiastes provides some perspective in being clear that life doesn’t always work out where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, and Job is like hearing from your grandfather who’s seen it all in his long life.  These 3 collections together really provide depth to the topic of wisdom.  But Proverbs is the guidance portion...it is a cause-effect portion, where we learn how to world generally works.

While we are on the topic, let’s just be clear on this - good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to good people too.  But, if we are all honest, based on everything we’ve read in scripture and that we know about God and Jesus, we are bad people if not for God’s rescue.  In other words, there really isn’t anything that can happen in this world that we don’t really deserve in a general sense.  So, I think we can mostly dispose of this notion that we get a lot that we don’t deserve - that is completely right, and it cuts both ways.  We should be paying the penalty for our sins, and none of us does that in this life.  We already have it good.  We are already blessed.  It is this very fact that we are celebrating in 19 days...the birth of the guy that made that possible!

So, in our reading, we will focus on a set of practice skills that we can apply to live life well, as well as developing a healthy fear of the Lord, which we’ll define.

We should think about Proverbs as Probabilities...we know that doing X in this world doesn’t always guarantee that Y will happen; but we just as easily understand that generally speaking, doing X most likely leads to Y.  That’s what Proverbs is about...it is Ecclesiastes and Job where we hear wisdom about the exceptions to the general rule.

In terms of background, there really isn’t a lot known about Proverbs.  It is assumed that Solomon was the writer of some of these, but not of all of them.  In reality, the author really isn’t super important, because once you’ve lived life longer than about 18 years, you will recognize the reality of these truths and teachings...none of this is off limits to the average person, we all kind of know this stuff intuitively.  That’s what so amazing about this - it is almost a book of reminders and nudges.   So, our reading of this book will be a lot about application; a lot of daily challenges, applying what we are reading.  We can’t apply wisdom without action, so this will be a fun journey of application for us...great for a type A personality like myself!

So, tomorrow, Proverbs chapter 1...here we go!