Nuggets
- Remembering helps strengthen our relationships with God.
- We have to make sure our relationship with God is right before we can work to help others improve theirs.
- We have to follow God’s laws and commandments to His standards.
The proverbs can help us keep God’s laws and commandments. This devotion looks at how that promotes faithfulness and the rewards that faithfulness brings.
Remembering Promotes Godliness
“My son, don’t forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commands; for they will bring you many days, a full life, and well-being” (Prov. 3: 1-2 CSB)
Solomon was advising his son to remember the proverbs he was telling Him. Yes, that is good advice for us, too.
Lawson also gave us good advice. He cautioned that we needed to keep the proverbs in our minds and in our hearts.
We need to keep them in our minds so that we can pull them up as needed. That has to do with remembering.
Ooo, we haven’t talked about remembering in a while. It seemed like for a stretch we were walking about it almost daily.
Remembering helps strengthen our relationships with God. He wants us to look back at all the times He has helped us through situations that were impossible for us but possible for Him (Mt. 19: 26).
But God wants us to have more than head knowledge. We learn so much through experiences, but it isn’t until the reflection piece where we apply what we have experienced and learned. We make plans based on the adjustments those experiences caused. That changes our hearts.
It’s called circumcision of the heart. Circumcision of the heart is where God changes our hearts.
Following the proverbs will help us to keep God’s laws and commandments. That brings the greatest change in us. As the commandments show us a God’s character, keeping them helps us imitate God.
Imitating God brings us godliness. Godliness, equated with the Old Testament term fear of the Lord, is an attitude of reverence that is promoted by walking in His Spirit.
Thorne saw the tie between godliness and the law. He also instructed us that we have to make it personal.
Resource
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What are the rewards of being godly? Horton wrote that we should “… look for the fruit of righteousness in long life and prosperity …” Fruits of righteousness are the rewards being holy and righteous.
- Eternal life is the reward of the righteous lives we live now.
- Peace is a fruit of righteousness that implies cooperation, humility, integrity, communication, and cohesiveness.
- We gain access to Sovereign God by the reconciliation He devised.
- Joy comes because the peace we find in God gives us hope. Most of all, we have joy because we have salvation.
Resource
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All of that is predicated on our obedience. Obedience means to hear and carry out the instructions that God gives us.
We talked before that obedience has to get the heart level. Well, isn’t that what we’ve been saying? His laws and commandments are supposed to affect our character or our core – our heart level.
Stay True
“Never let loyalty and faithfulness leave you. Tie them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart” (Prov. 3: 3 CSB)
The remembering is supposed to help us be faithful. But it is interesting how the words are translated. I chose the loyalty and faithfulness for the verse.
Well, some of those look interchangeable. Some don’t. Let’s just look at loyalty/mercy and faithfulness/truth.
Loyal means “unswerving in allegiance.”
Mercy means “compassion or forbearance.” Forbearance means “a refraining from the enforcement of something (such as a debt, right, or obligation) that is due.”
Faithfulness means “steadfast in affection or allegiance.”
Truth means “the body of real things, events, and facts.”
It is interesting that the Christian Standard Bible uses both words to portray the concept of allegiance. We are to remain firmly entrenched in God.
The King James Version kind of gives that same impression. “Let not mercy and truth forsake thee …” (Prov. 3: 3 KJV).
When we think of mercy, we think of God’s mercy. When we think of truth, we think of Jesus saying “… I am the way and the truth and the life …” (Jn. 14: 6 NIV).
We have to take the mercy a step further, though. I think that is why other versions translated the words as love and kindness. Because we are shown mercy, we should show mercy to others. We have to do our job of proclaiming the gospel and making disciples.
The Disciple’s Job Description
Complete Job Description
Individual Description
Job Duty #4
Proclaim the Gospel (Mark 16: 15)
Job Duty #6
Make Disciples (Matthew 28: 19-20)
But we have to make sure our relationship with God is right before we can work to help others improve theirs. If God’s mercy and truth are going to be renounced, it is going to be us doing the renouncing. God isn’t going to leave us.
We have to be actively seeking God to make sure we don’t push Him out. Our allegiance has to be at the heart level, also. We have to be totally submitted to Him.
The Homilist had a really interesting sermon on Soul Literature. Included was the sentence, “The soul registers every impression made on it.”
Every experience we’ve had is there. Every thought is there.
It was also brought up that the literature implies correspondence, which requires training.
What are we doing when we are seeking God? We are getting our training from the Holy Spirit.
I loved the “… write them on the tablet of your heart” (Prov. 3: 3 CSB). We have to be receptive to the Holy Spirit’s teaching. They are just going to be promptings, so it may be really easy to let this world drown out His loving nudges.
Lord, I Have Shut the Door
Vocalist: Elaine Guthals
Keyboard: Chris Vieth
Finding Favor
“Then you will find favor and high regard with God and people” (Prov. 3: 4 CSB)
Our goal should be to “… find favor and high regard with God …” (Prov. 3: 4 CSB). No, I didn’t add the “… and people” (Prov. 3: 4 CSB).
Too many times, we try to please people first, and then get around to pleasing God. Wardlaw identified the problem. He wrote, “The men of the world may hate the principles of the man of God …”
Unfortunately, we may start to compromise our beliefs when we try to please people. Yes, we do want to build relationships with worldview people so that we can witness to them. No, we cannot change God’s laws and commandments to make them more palatable to worldview people.
We have to follow God’s laws and commandments to His standards. Storrs, in fact, says this verse gives us the secret of success.
Now, hook this verse with the last verse. “Never let loyalty and faithfulness leave you. Tie them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will find favor and high regard with God and people” (Prov. 3: 3-4 CSB).
Keep our allegiance with God. Get our obedience to heart level so that we change our character. When we do that, we will be successful.
Making the Connections
Remember, back in Hell Does Have Fury, we talked about memory. Memory is where our mind files our past history so we can recall it. We talked about having a memory on steroids in the eternal life. Things we can’t remember now will be remembered then.
There are some things we would rather remain forgotten. There are times, though, that we need to pull those memories out and address the associated issues.
We looked at these verses when we were looking at the context of Proverbs 3: 5-6 in Finding Favor by Acknowledging God. We said our obedience isn’t a one-and-done thing. God knows we will be working on being obedient for all of our lives.
Sometimes, we are going to lose our allegiance to God because we do start compromising with worldview people. We let the bright shiny sins tempt us until we give in and sin.
When that happens, we need to ask God to forgive us. We need to work on getting ourselves more in line with imitating Him.
The Homilist made a very astute observation. He wrote,
- “Life is a book which we are writing day by day.
- “The book of life should be a Christian book.
- “This book of life will have to be examined.
We have choices to make every day. That is where the free will comes in to play. Free will is the ability within us to make decisions, which determine actions that produce character.
We need to choose to obey God. The book of our lives will be read. We just talked about that, too.
How Do We Apply This?
Remembering helps strengthen our relationships with God. But it has to be coupled with evaluation ourselves. We need to take regular stock to make sure we are following God’s plan.
In a previous devotion, we had a worksheet to help us evaluate where we are at. This is one tool we can use to help focus our thoughts.
To read devotions in the Walk in the Spirit series, click the appropriate button below.
We’ve been asking these questions all along so we can prepare for when we are asked to defend our beliefs. Here is the worksheet again. How would explain to non-believers that they have gotten all the notice about Jesus’ return that they are going to get?
- What does the Scriptures say?
- What do I believe?
- Why do I believe the same/differently than the Scriptures?
- What are the talking points when witnessing to a non-believer?
Related Links
I have created a worksheet of the questions above. Click on the button below to access it.
If godliness is an attitude of reverence that is promoted by walking in His Spirit, we can do two things:
- Work on our attitude.
- Work on our walk.
To read a devotion in the series, click on the appropriate button below.
God wants us to be faithful to Him. He has given us guidelines in His Word so that we can be. He forgives us when we aren’t faithful — when we ask. He has given us the Holy Spirit to support us. We have to make it our choice to follow Him.
Father God. We choose to follow You. Lord, we know that we will continue to sin. We pray that it is not us purposefully sinning. Help us to obey your laws and commandments so that our character becomes more like Yours. Amen.
What do you think?
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