Be Careful What You Wish For

Have you ever wanted something so badly but didn’t feel like God cared enough to provide? Jesus reminded us to ask God “give us this day our daily bread,” but what I want and what I need are not always the same thing. When I am discontented with the “daily bread” that God supplies it becomes easier for me to believe that God doesn’t want what’s best for me.

In this story, the Israelites again complained about their lack of meat.

Your Legacy

Someone once reminded me that the most important part of a gravestone is the dash that comes between the year someone was born and the year they died. That dash represents everything that happened over the course of that person’s life. Unfortunately, most people don’t stop to think about their legacy until long after their legacy has already been determined in the minds of the people around them.

Choosing An Inconvenient Justice

On the surface of it, these four proverbs don’t seem to have a common thread. All of them land squarely in the category of the blindingly obvious: of course it’s unfair to punish the innocent! Probably they weren’t really intended to be read as a unit, as this section of Proverbs is really a list of Solomon’s wisdom aphorisms. So why does he remind us of things we already know?

Justice is, most often, inconvenient.

Striving for More

Consumed with clutching my own personal ticket to paradise, I wonder how often I let the saving words of God slip through my fingers. I am all too often like the man who presents his legal battle with a family member, requesting a verdict in his favour. Here Jesus exhorts his followers to abandon a life of worry.

The parable Jesus gives in response addresses the underlying reason for many of our complaints in life.

Dainties and Delight

We live in a prestige obsessed culture. Popularity and power dominate from high school hallways to reality TV. The daily news and our political processes are saturated contests of prestige. Sports figures, movie stars, politicians, TV commentators are the daily focus. Even in the grocery store checkout line the magazine racks push food and fame.

Insincerity on the Menu

Ever get something caught in your throat? Wow, I hate when it happens! We cough, gag, and hack to get it out. The metaphor in today’s proverb says something like that happens with dishonest people. And wisdom, we come to understand, is about being skillful and successful in one’s relationships. It is prudent to avoid the offer of a selfish person.

Who are you to judge?

These words were written a long time ago at a time when the author’s environment was markedly different from ours. In spite of all these differences and all the changes that have occurred over the past centuries, what Agur describes here clearly shows that the heart of man has not really changed at all.