Monday Morning Cover to Cover

What is one verse that speaks to your heart from Proverbs 1 through Proverbs 18? A few of us are reading the Bible chronologically and that's where we are. Share one verse with us or whatever you'd like, and then link us to your blog if you posted about proverbs.

GUARD Your Heart
“Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” Proverbs 4:23. And we were called to really live. No cruise control. Am I living by focusing on the events of my life that need to be resolved; am I living my life about what is happening to me in order to improve my situation---if I am, my focus is on the wrong things unless I am experiencing the goodness of my God. If I am on guard, I am asking myself what is happening to me deep down at the core of my heart when I face my life not just trying to solve my problems and make my life work. In the book, Finding God by Lawrence Crabb, he tells us to be on guard against “good enough Christianity.” He says sometimes we are fighting the wrong battles: we want people to feel better, to enjoy relationships, to feel identity and meaning---and “we don’t need Jesus to know those three things. We need to be broken over what is ungodly in our lives.” Guard our heart where all the passion flows out.

GIVE Thought to Your Ways - Proverbs 14: 8 says "The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways." What changes our ways? When we try to figure out our sin by a checklist, it rarely disrupts us to repentance. We just try to get better. A friend of mine told me that parts of our heart are committed to two things: “penance and self-improvement.” I corrected my son at the breakfast table the other morning on an issue and his immediate response was: “You’re right. I need to do better, Mom. I’ll try harder.” We want our children to receive correction but as he was walking out the front door for school, I said to him: I don’t think God intends for you to try harder to be a good Christian. I wonder what his God was saying to him that he needed to repent of? The Christian life isn’t about trying harder to be better. It’s about being dead to sin and alive to God.” I just finished reading Frederick Buechner’s autobiography, Telling Secrets. He writes about how fully alive Jesus Christ lived his life. “People are so apt to drift along on the surface of their lives, not really seeing or hearing or feeling very much because most of the time they are little more than half alive, the rest of the time they are dazed, dreaming, or detached. Most of us escape so much by being less than fully alive, but Jesus seems to escape nothing: the dead sparrow, the woman touching the hem of his robe, the disciples shooing away the children, the sawed-off little crook named Zaccheus up in a tree.” Seek to be alive. I believe I have asked the wrong questions for way too long, trying to solve my problems and bring them to resolution. But, my beautiful God has so shown up and I am so alive in ways I have never been before. I wish I could find words to tell you what my God has done---just ask my husband. It used to be about all the unbelievable things God has done for me---He has! No more---now my life is all about the beautiful God He is! He is!

GRACE to You for His Eyes are Everywhere - Proverbs 15:3.... The eyes of the LORD are everywhere,keeping watch on the wicked and the good. “The right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge.” Another quote by C. S. Lewis. “When a man is getting better, he understands more and more the evil that is left within him." Where sin abounds, grace is there all the more. "When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness, less and less.” No escaping God's eyes. Lucy saw Aslan in Prince Caspian, The Chronicles of Narnia. Alsan’s eyes were on her and she knew it. But what did she do with it? She ignored Him. Are we dismissing our God this day? When in steep trouble in the midst of a losing battle, Lucy came to Aslan for help, and he asked her: “What stopped you from coming to Me?” He is saying to us all: Come. Come closer. Come in this moment where you are. We don’t need to improve ourselves to get there nor do we need to do penance. We don’t need to apply the proverbs and clean ourselves up. We need to repent from what we are doing that our beautiful God has brought to our minds and heart. The prodigal son was welcomed---not corrected; lavished with love----not with discipline.

I have been giving thought to my ways these past couple of years when my world fell apart. Lewis writes: “People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says: if you keep a lot of rules, I’ll reward you.” Get down all the sayings of Proverbs and you’ll know what to do in any given situation. Doesn’t work that way. I told my students this week what this author wrote that every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than what it was before. Yes, we are asking God to slowly turn things around for us that we are truly alive in Him and to others and to ourselves; the alternative is turning things into a state of war and hatred with God and others and even self-hatred. We are always progressing toward God or idols.


I hear so much "Christian talk" that so misses me. Doesn't change my heart. I've thought so much this past year about what really changes people??? What has robbed you of walking with your God this day? Open our eyes, o gracious God, that we may see how to guard our hearts and give careful thought to our ways. Come. And He is saying, "come closer."