Happy Father’s Day! Among other choice morsels in today’s reading we find this insight: “moral rot leads to national decay, and such governments are easily toppled.” If that’s not contemporary, I don’t know what is.
I say this every morning, partially out of frustration “there’s too much to comment on”. On the other hand, I’m not supposed to be writing just to guide others…this is supposed to be my personal thoughts on the passage. In some strange way, that seems to make it easier.
So today, what catches my eye? The several passages about obeying the law. I wonder if that includes traffic laws? I’m guessing that God’s law is what’s implied. If it’s man’s law…I’m in trouble. Having said that, I really should make a better good faith effort to stay within the law whenever possible. That rebellious streak in me comes out once in a while.
28:22 reminds me of games of chance, the lottery in particular. I used to wonder what the Church had against gambling..”it’s harmless fun” I thought. Then someone pointed out that it’s really an excitement of greed, we are trying to get something without earning it, or deserving it. There are people lined up at the lottery machines thinking they are going to get rich…and the whole time they are really headed for poverty. This proverb is exactly right.
A few verses down it says “greed causes fighting” and below that it says “generous people will not lack anything” (my paraphrase). Every once in a while I have a tendency to become possessive. Not so much with my money, but with my time or my attention. If I am doing something, I don’t want to stop and tend to whatever another person wants me to do. This doesn’t have anything to do with greed,m (I don’t think) but it could have something to do with being generous. If I were to be more generous with my time, maybe I would find that God would find other ways to help me get my jobs done. I discovered yesterday that two people working together for 15 minutes saved me about 1 hour of work. Somewhere in proverbs it says “two have a good return on their labor”.
“Fools vent their anger” in Chapter 29 verse 11 and in verse 20 “don’t speak without thinking”. This can be a real problem for a person who is an auditory learner, like myself. I tend to learn something better if I can hear it spoken, instead of just reading it. So, if you were to hide somewhere around me, you would hear me explaining to myself what I should do next. I almost laugh out loud when someone catches me doing it. The look on their face is priceless.
If I want to know if a particular line in a sermon is correct, I often say it aloud. That’s the auditory learner. But that leads to the tendency to be a little too expressive. Some thoughts and emotions need to be suppressed, because they don’t deserve to be heard or even thought, much less to be spoken aloud.
I guess whatever I am angry about reveals something about me. If I’m angry about being bothered, then I may be feeling that my time is more valuable than others time. Or, something similar.
There seems to be a lot in the Proverbs about humility as well. Proverbs 9 says “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” and I suppose that we don’t possess this reverent fear until we are first humble.
Faithfully,
PR