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Thoughts of a saint and slave

    by Sam Isaacson

Proverbs 4:20-27
Date Posted: February 25, 2012

‘My son, be attentive to my words; incline your ear to my sayings. Let them not escape from your sight; keep them within your heart. For they are life to those who find them, and healing to all their flesh. Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. Put away from you crooked speech, and put devious talk far from you. Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you. Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil.’ (Proverbs 4:20-27)

These words are important

Do you get the feeling that Solomon really believes what he’s writing here? He’s making sure that we’re aware of the importance of listening to his words, because he knows that if we pay attention to them, they’ll positively affect the rest of our lives. And having walked together through the book of Proverbs we know that these words are providing wisdom, and wisdom means a relationship with God in Jesus Christ. That’s massively important, and if anything you could accuse Solomon of understating it here! These words are in the Bible (God’s Word), and elsewhere Jesus is called ‘the Word’. If we don’t listen to Solomon’s words, if we don’t read the Bible, if we are not in a relationship with Jesus, the ‘grace and truth’ that the Word is ‘full of’ (John 1) will not be ours. It’s all about Jesus.

Keep them within your heart

You may have read, or at least heard of, Corrie Ten Boom’s classic account of the Second World War, The Hiding Place. The title of that book is drawn out from this passage; she had always been taught to memorise Scripture, and when she was in the darkest times of her life that practice paid off more than anyone could have imagined. I want to ask you a straight question this week: how much Scripture have you memorised? I mean really memorised? I’m not talking about being able to paraphrase John 3:16, I mean being able to recite, word for word, something like the Sermon on the Mount. If the answer is ‘None’, allow me to talk straight to you and ask you to do it.

Now you may not think that you have a mind for memorisation, but I’d respond to that by encouraging you: the Bible is supernaturally memorable, and there are a plethora of tools our there to help (click on this link for some ideas). You probably remember your favourite joke, or song, or your phone number; why not add something to that list that really matters? If you’re still unconvinced, ask yourself genuinely why you wouldn’t want to memorise Scripture.

Keep your heart

Now this little phrase in verse 23 may be more familiar to some in the form ‘guard your heart’ (NIV) – while I was a university student I remember sitting in a talk in which we were told not to go ‘serial dating’ because the Bible tells us to ‘guard our hearts’. Girls would turn guys down who asked them to go out for a drink because ‘I’m guarding my heart’, and boys would remain single throughout university because he was guarding his heart. Reading this verse in context (i.e. as it was intended), it’s obvious that using it to define a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship is completely ridiculous!

'Keep your heart’ is an instruction to us to hold God’s Word close to us at all times, to allow it to guide us and to make all our decisions based upon its influence. You see, when it comes to the Bible we’re still sinners, and we tend to go one of two ways. We either don’t read it enough, or we read into it so much that we encounter the paralysis of analysis, and although we can quote God’s laws and name the order of all the books of the Bible, we just miss the point (just like the Pharisees did in John 5:39).

Question for this week: do we honour the Bible as much as we should? Do we allow it to influence us as much as we should?

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Biography Information:
Sam is married with two very young children. He manages somehow to balance family life with working full-time as a technology risk consultant for an international professional services firm, being actively involved in a church plant in London, UK, and keeping up-to-date with the NFL.
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