01/15/2021 – Day 243 – Proverbs 20 – 21 – 20:27: “Humility is daily clothing of the Christian.”
Proverbs is chock full of non-rhyming couplets of words of wisdom. It occurs to me to ask: Are there one or two that you can single out in this reading assignment, that perhaps caught your attention? I personally think we could ask that one question throughout each Proverbs assignment all the way through, and each time we would hear from brothers a testimony that we had not considered , that was truly edifying in our own sanctifying walk. I’ll scroll down abit here below and share two that jumped out at me:
20:6: “Most men will proclaim each his own goodness, But who can find a faithful man? “
- I think I have shared with you that Dennis Prager has spent a good part of his life guest speaking at college campuses. One such visit at Berkeley, they pitted two leftist students against him to stage a debate. Dennis is amazing, he never loses his cool in the midst of hostile audiences. In the midst of this heated exchange, Dennis stopped with a show-stopping premise and a question behind it: “I think I can boil all our disagreement between us down to a one sentence foundation: Do you believe that man is basically good?”
- Here is a Leonard Ravenhill quote: “We miss the mark telling people who are morally good, and very excellent many of them, that Jesus Christ came into the world to make bad men good. He did not. That’s a fringe benefit. The first argument God has with a man is not that he’s bad, it’s that he is dead in trespasses and in sin. And Christianity is the only Gospel in the world, the only message in the world, where a man’s God comes and lives inside of him.”
20: 27: “The spirit of a man is the lamp of the Lord, Searching all the inner depths of his heart.”
“And I was so intrigued with the verse, I looked up in my Matthew Henry commentary and Matthew came through: “The great soul of man is a divine light; it is the candle of the Lord, a candle of his lighting. Conscience, that noble faculty, is God’s deputy in the soul; it is a candle not only lighted by him, but lighted for him. By the help of conscience we come to know ourselves. The spirit of a man has a self-conscienceness (1 Corinthians 2:11); it searches into the dispositions and affections of the soul, praises what is good, condemns what is otherwise.”
Is that not sublime? Interesting, Matthew Henry segregates his Proverbs commentary for each individual couplet in the reading.
Soli Deo Gloria!