Probing Proverbs: 4:1-2 My children, listen when your
father corrects you. Pay attention and learn good judgment, for I am giving you
good guidance. Don’t turn away from my instructions.
So much of Proverbs is dedicated to encouraging us to listen to
counsel and follow it! Many times we joke about how to get children to do
something…just tell them they can’t and then they will
want to! Sadly there
is a lot of truth in that, not just for children. We humans have a fallen
nature that insists on having its way. This nature can lead us to destruction.
Consider this true story:
Henry Nelson, of Wilmington, Delaware, was a veteran of
World War II. He had served as an instructor in the Army Chemical Warfare
Department. Yet he ignored a warning by the superintendent of the Riverside
Housing Development that the apartment he lived in was being fumigated with
hydrogen-cyanide gas, tore down the barricade at the door and went in after two
blankets. The neighbors saw him remove the sign and barricade and go in, and
they called the Development office. But when employees arrived it was too late.
Nelson lay sprawled on the living room floor with the two blankets in his arms.
Despite both written and verbal warnings, and despite his training in the Army,
he had gone to his death[1]
I know that I have that same stubborn nature in me and if I am
not vigilant it will control me. There are many things we can do to allow God’s
Spirit to control us. However, at times we will fail…the fallen nature we
live in will fight our spirit until the Day we go to the Lord, so what do we do
then. This passage speaks directly to that. God has invited all of us to join
His family, when we do He takes that very seriously. He desires to share all
that He is with us…and when we begin to behave in a way that would be dangerous or
detrimental to our well being, if we refuse to listen, He will, as a good
Father does, become firm and correct us! When we blow off sin as a “little” thing
that is failing! Falling into sin is never ok, however, the fall is not living
in failure, it’s what you do after the fall! 
How important it is for us to learn from our Lord’s
corrections. Why? Several logical reasons come to thought immediately. 1. Because He is our Father and His correction is founded in love, it is met for our good, not to satisfy some evil or ego in Him. God is perfect and would do no wrong. He knows what the end will be to our sin and is endeavoring to convict us into turning away from it. You might say, “But if He is God, He could make us stop!” True, yet that is not how He desires in most cases to lead His family. The “Jonahs” are very few in the Scriptures; for the most part, God yields to our choices, never relinquishing His Sovereignty, instead choosing to allow His children to grow through success or failure while also allowing them to reap what they have sown.
3. As we learn from our failures His correction will teach us good judgment, which in turn will bring principles of godly living to us, so instead of trying to juggle many specific issues, on whether each one is a sin or not, we will walk in wisdom and we will be “in tune” with the Spirit of God in such a way, that whenever we begin to veer off the path, we will sense it immediately. The key is not to turn away from His teaching. What does turning away look like?
Rejection is the most obvious, however, the deadliest and what
I consider the subtlest, is
emotional sorrow without any willful action to repent. Because we “feel” bad
we think we are listening, but the proof of listening is in obeying! Keep your
heart open.
The so what? When you are convicted by
the Holy Spirit concerning a sin, what are the things you do to address that?
Do you take an inventory of your life at the end of each day, not to be over
critical, instead to keep yourself sensitive to sin? Do you understand the
balance we need to have in accepting God’s grace in full and receiving His
chastening when we travel in sin? What does the statement in Romans 8 “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who
are in Christ Jesus” mean to you?
[1]
Tan, P. L. (1996). Encyclopedia of 7700
Illustrations: Signs of the Times (p. 1361). Garland, TX: Bible
Communications, Inc.
