Proverbs 1:20-33

You made your bed, now sleep in it. That seems to me to be about the crux of Proverbs 1:20-33. Wisdom is there, all around us, waiting for us to grab hold of her hand and let her lead the way. But, we so often ignore her and trudge through relying on our own merits or on the advise from those around us and then don't understand when it all explodes in our face.

Now, if we recall, wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord, or in more contemporary terms, with devotion, faith, and reverence for our Father. At the end of this verse we are told that if we listen to wisdom (to God) "we will live in safety and be at ease, without fear of harm". What an awesome place to be! I want to be there. Now it doesn't say that we will not meet harm, but that we will live without fear of it. God's way might be easy (Mathew 11:30), but that doesn't mean we won't get bumper around, scratched and bruised, or even killed (no one gets out of here alive :). So if we have fear for the lord (i.e., due respect for our creator) then we will be without fear of the unknown because we know that we are tapped into God's infinite wisdom and are thus armed with all we need to deal with all that comes our way.

Let's focus some more on this fear of the Lord idea. I know that I spent a good deal of time thinking about what it is and made some headway. But what does it look like. Do we show fear of the Lord by: bending down on our knees in prayer, in singing songs of worship to him, in devotedly reading the bible, in contemplating his word, in discussing who and what Jesus is, by loving our neighbors, by following the other commandments, by evangelizing about the saving grace of God through the death and resurrection of his son? I suppose that the answer could be yes to all of the above. But as with all things spiritual, there is not a fixed formula for honestly demonstrating your reverence to God. When the action becomes old and mechanical, it surely is without devotion and emotion.

I am reading this book called the "Divine Conspiracy" by Dallas Willard. Now I am only a hundred pages or so in (it's a dense read), but the premise is very clear: the Christian world has applied Christ as a kind of get out of jail free card and expelled him from our daily lives - we only need Jesus to get into the gates of heaven. As Willard argues eloquently, this gospel of sin management robs us and God of the intimate daily relationship we both (God and me) desire. And it is this daily devoted relationship that is at the center of our fear of God, which in turn produces the wisdom that will set us free of fear: We will walk in the safety of our shepherd (Psalm 23).

Peace
Dustin