Today’s passage is Proverbs 9. Wisdom builds a house and calls everyone to come to her feast. She says not to rebuke mockers and the wicked because they will hate you. She says to rebuke the wise because they will love you. Fear the Lord. Wisdom will reward you. In contrast, Folly calls out to come to her house for her feast but only death is inside.
Do you try to change others instead of yourself?
How have you responded to the Lord’s call to his feast of salvation and wisdom?
How have you suffered from your mockery and scorn?
I am not wise.
I want to have wisdom and understanding and I want to know God, but my attitude of correcting others gets in the way.
My long habit has been to mock and judge. I struggle to be gentle and forgiving.
I am visiting my family and looking at the folly of some, the waywardness of others and their overall lack of focus on their salvation, their relationship with God.
I want to correct them and point them in God’s direction, which I hope they will go.
But I can’t tell them directly because they will resent me and reject the message, just as Wisdom says in verses 7 8.
My wife reminded me that I am not the principal of my family.
I am son, brother, father, grandfather, uncle and cousin.
I need to sit in Wisdom’s house and eat her meal and drink her wine in order to be the man God wants me to be.
I sat at my much loved step-daughter’s table this morning doing my QT and sharing the verses with her and sharing some of the talk I’ve had with my mother, my nephew, and my daughter.
I shared my new understanding of forgiveness as love.
I talked about how I spiritually abandoned her mother in her dying days and how I can’t abandon my family in the same way.
I shared how hard it is to talk about Jesus to my mother.
We talked about the frustrating impossibility of changing anyone for the better.
I said sometimes all we can do is pray, so I do.
Then she said she needed to make breakfast and I had better finish my QT.
I said I loved her and, though I liked talking to her, she was right and I did indeed need to finish my QT reflection.
Today is Father’s Day in Canada and there is a big BBQ party here with all the family except my sister coming.
A couple of us have summer birthdays, so that will be thrown in as well.
Today’s passage gives me hope that today’s party is Wisdom’s feast.
I pray I can eat wisdom and understanding today and be gentle and loving with my family and love them and receive their love.
I pray I can trust in the Lord’s openings to offer his love today because he is the Father of us all.
Application: speak words of love to my family and be open to theirs at the party.
Lord, let me sit in your house of Wisdom, let me know you more deeply and let me eat and drink of love and understanding.
