Prayer

Heavenly Father, I thank you for your tender and kind mercies today, for the strengthening reminders of your help and grace. Lord, thank you that you have not abandoned my soul to Sheol. Lord, you have instructed us to let our requests be made known to you, and as Solomon prayed so long ago – I find myself lacking in the wisdom needed to fulfill my duties and calling. Lord, meet me in my weakness I pray, hear my prayer. Lord, give me wisdom – for the sake of the glory of your name. Please give me wisdom, that I may live wisely in righteousness and in accordance with justice in my home, my vocation, and in society. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.

Reading

Proverbs 1:3

“To receive instruction in... righteousness.”

Meditation

We’ve seen that a proverb is a short saying, but secondly, a proverb is also a true and righteous saying. As a general observation, I believe that some Christians have embraced a false understanding of what wisdom actually is. Let me explain. Consider the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not kill”, for instance. Many Christians would acknowledge that this commandment is an imperative – that the command has a binding moral force. We can not and must not kill another person. Wisdom, on the other hand, tends to be viewed as a kind of good but optional course of action. Let’s call this the take-it-or-leave-it approach to wisdom. As though we can all acknowledge that wisdom is the better path, from the take-it-or-leave-it perspective, but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t follow the path of wisdom. Anyway, wisdom only really applies when you’re trying to make a choice between a good option and a better option, right? As we will repeatedly see in our studies of proverbs, this kind of thinking is both erroneous and deadly.

Perhaps I can put it this way: the law reveals moral principles of righteousness, wisdom is the ability to apply those principles in real life situations. Wisdom and righteousness are two sides of the same coin. Righteousness is the standard, as it reflects God’s good and perfect character, and wisdom is the capacity to skillfully live out that standard in your daily life. As you read the book of Proverbs, it’s very obvious – wisdom is not some optional extra for the Christian life. Wisdom is a tree of life (Prov 3:18), and this is contrasted with foolishness, which stems from one very basic root: “the fool says in his heart: there is no God” (Prov 14:1).

The fundamental definition of foolishness, which stands as wisdom’s opposite, is to be at enmity with God. Conversely, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The wise person is one who fears God and cares about what he thinks. Biblically speaking, therefore, we may say with conviction that wisdom and foolishness fundamentally align with righteousness and wickedness. Being foolish is not just some casual “stuff up” that you can just get over and move on with. Foolishness is the pathway of death. Pursuing and living in wisdom is an imperative, not some optional ideal. For this reason, we must set ourselves now at the start of our studies in wisdom to take wisdom seriously, to read carefully what we are learning, and to get wisdom. We must not treat it as optional. As you continue on in your studies of Proverbs, treat this as though it were life and death, because that’s exactly what it is. This is the road to Godly maturity, and there are no shortcuts.

Be ye doers of the word…

What have your thoughts toward wisdom been up until this point? Perhaps you have not even read the Book of Proverbs before, and your thoughts have been few and with little real consideration. Perhaps you have thought of wisdom in terms of something that is an “ideal”, but only a few super-spiritual people reach it in their later years. For the rest of us, wisdom is not a particularly important subject. Perhaps something else comes to mind. In this book, however, Solomon makes it perfectly clear: all of us are called to get wisdom, and it is of utmost importance that we do so. Wisdom is not optional. If your view was changed to reflect this reality, what might change in your life today? Certainly, diligent prayerful attention to this book must be a starting point. This is a lesson we will find repeated on many different occasions, but take this as a refresher: do not let the pursuit of wisdom be a passing fad in your life. Let it be a diligent and persisting pursuit. Let it be a matter of ongoing prayer. SDG.

Prayer of Confession & Consecration

O Lord, I pray that you would work into my heart the sustained desire to pursue wisdom. Please give me a sense of spiritual hunger and urgency about the getting of wisdom, too many years of my life have been wasted without it. O Lord, please hear this prayer, please give me wisdom, please give me a profound and abiding hunger for wisdom. And Lord, in this desire and it’s outworking, please lead me to Christ and into conformity to his good and perfect character. I pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.

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