Evil people get rich for the moment, but the reward of the godly will last. Godly people find life; evil people find death. The Lord detests people with crooked hearts, but he delights in those with integrity. Proverbs 11:18-20
This is week Four of a Four-week Devotional Series entitled, “Wisdom from Proverbs.” Proverbs is a book about wisdom for life. It consists of many wise sayings. We find in them the themes of Scripture expressed as practical righteousness that help us examine how we live and manage daily life in the light of divine truth. The book of Proverbs strongly proclaims that wisdom begins with the fear of Lord. The "Fear of the Lord" involves a reverence for God where we truly embrace the fact that "God is God and we are not." So, Proverbs takes the multi-faceted thing we call life and zeros in on many of its facets in terms that put God right in the center of things.
In order to gain that which the book of Proverbs has to offer, we need to be ones who are willing to put our primary focus on God and that which he communicates to us about his intentions for our lives. We hope the “Wisdom from Proverbs” Series will wonderfully contribute to your life yielding a remarkable level of practical righteous as you allow Christ to change you in a multitude of wonderful ways. This series has four weeks of Devotional material, and each week has six Devotionals (Monday through Saturday).
Week One: Start Up Wisdom. Week two: Human Relationships. Week three: Anatomy of Work. Week four: The Truly Successful Life. We begin week four: The Truly Successful Life, with the following:
Here we are in the fourth and final week of looking to the book of Proverbs for the wisdom we need for life. This week the area of life to be addressed by the book of Proverbs is “success.” Our opening passage contrasts evil people and godly people. Let’s separate out what the verses say about each. This will give us a clear look at God’s take on what “success” in life is and what it is not.
“Evil people get rich for the moment - evil people find death - the Lord detests people with crooked hearts.”
When life is about the moment, what you can get from it is all important. When a person’s focus is entirely on how to get life to serve them and how they can use it, they find death. God detests this. The one who approaches life in this way will be a person with a crooked heart and will be one whom God finds detestable. This is what “failure” in life is all about.
“The reward of the godly will last - Godly people find life - he delights in those with integrity.”
For reward that lasts you have to look beyond our time here. This changes how we engage with what is here. When we are not trying to use life but serve it, we find life. The one who approaches life in this way will be a person of integrity and will be one in whom God is delighted. This is what “success” in life is all about.
The truly successful person is a steward of life and not a consumer of life. The whole dynamic of a truly successful person is that of “treatment” and not “consumption.” As we go forward in our week, we will look at all this in more detail as we explore more fully God’s take on “success” through the wisdom found in the Book of Proverbs.
Lord, as I live my life here in this world, I confess that I have allowed the conventional wisdom of the world to have far too great an impact on my life. I really do want to experience transformation in a full and complete way. So, here I am before you, asking that you fill my life with your presence, your purposes, and your power. Amen!
