Jan 27 - Today from Proverbs 27 we look at verse 24
"Finish your outdoor work and get your fields ready; after that build your house."
A thought on priorities in life - they are not always what our first instincts would make them to be. In the case before us, it would seem that the first priority would be to build your house in order to provide a place of protection and shelter for the family. Once again, we need to place ourselves in the culture. If you are admonished to get your fields ready, you can easily assume you are in a rural agrarian setting. There are no grocery stores or supermarkets even in the cities of that day, so you can imagine what was available in rural areas! The families were completely dependent upon crops gathered from their gardens and fields, and upon milk and fleece gathered from their livestock. So, you can see that in this cultural setting, your fields and flocks must take priority. It's a small thing to dwell in a tent for a few weeks while the family makes sure the seasonal crops are planted and the flocks have proper grazing and protection. It wouldn't matter how nice of a house you built; the family would perish without a proper means of sustenance.
"Well," one might say, "given the cultural situation, the proverb almost seems too obvious to write down as a bit of wisdom. Under those circumstances you'd have to be a fool to build the house first."
That's one of the reasons the Proverbs were written, "for giving prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the young -" (Proverbs 1:4). Give an average young person $10,000 to do with as he or she pleases, and what do you think they would do? Invest it in a financial portfolio? Use it to defray college expenses? Invest it in a career opportunity? Or. . . do you think they might go buy a new car? A new entertainment center with a plasma TV and Dolby surround sound with the latest Play Station 3-D action pack? Or. . . would they just carry large amounts of money around and treat their friends and live it up doing whatever fits their fancy at the time? Get the picture?
I think we all have problems with priorities. We need to pray for wisdom, carefully choose our priorities in life, and then work at keeping them in order. As believers, one of our greatest priorities is our relationship with the One who loves us with an everlasting love. Do our actions follow suit? Or do we allow lesser things to eat up our time and affections. God certainly doesn't intend for us not to have times of leisure and rest from the often-hectic pace of life. But He promises that if we first seek His kingdom and His righteousness, He will add to it all that we need for material, mental and spiritual sustenance. It's a discipline - a wise discipline.
Since Nov 08
About Me
- Ken
- While mentor-ing a couple of young men late in the year 2001 , I told them that if they agreed to read a chapter of Proverbs each week-day as a part of their devotions, I would choose one verse from the chapter and share a meditation by email. They agreed. I continued to write the meditations at my desk in my home for the next two and a half years. They began to forward them to their friends and I received requests from those friends to be placed on the email list. My personal email bundle was to about eighty people. Many of those people forwarded them to friends all over the country – and some over the world. Only the Lord knows how extensive the writings traveled. I am not a professional writer, and each meditation was spun off in a relatively short period of time during my own personal devotions in the morning. In April of 2004 I assembled 366 of the meditations into a calendar year. As I now bring up the Proverb of the Day to send on to my friends, I am surprised at how fresh each of them is to my own heart – and often how they speak to me in a completely different way than when I first wrote them. . . . . Ken Sweers
2 comments:
I see some people that really struggle with this. There is so many materialistic views and focuses out there, that it drives people away from reality sometimes. I think raising children today is even more difficult than in the past because of all these worldly things they think they "need". Someone once shared a quote with me: It's not wanting what you don't have , it's wanting what you do have. With that in mind I think that so any people out there get blinded with these materials, blinded from whats truly worth something and cannot be replaced, example, the people around us. So to everyone out there, please show your love for people, the way God has shown His love to you, before it's too late.
"It's not wanting what you don't have , it's wanting what you do have."
This is a rather profound thought. Can you give us a little more context? I mean, we kind of understand that "wanting what you don't have" can turn into a stumbling block called covetousness or perhaps greed.
Do you think "wanting what you do have" is a warning against 'idol worship' or an admonition for 'gratitude and contentment'?
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