Message: Proverbs 24 isall about wisdom. No surprise, right? Verse 3 says that a house is built by wisdom and established by understanding. It’s so easy to read right past this but it’s literally an entire foundation to build on written in one tiny verse. When I read about the figurative “house” in this Proverb I believe it starts with our own lives, but that house also represents everything in life that we will ever try to build. It includes things like family, ministry, projects and businesses. Most of the time we will be building more than one thing at once but the success of each of these things depend upon the foundation we build on. Skills and desire alone will not ensure success. A foundation of wisdom includes some of the hard and boring things like discipline and lots and lots of repetition. As a young musician I had to learn scales as a fundamental part of practicing. I had to make sure that anything I played repetitiously was played correctly so I wasn’t reinforcing incorrectly. Athletes have to use proper form and repetitiously build skills into habit that would become second nature when they were playing a game. I used to laugh at a chant I heard during sports games saying “you’ve got to want it to win it, and we want it bad”. Although it’s true that you have to have passion and desire in order to play with heart, but some of these teams lacked basic skill because they didn’t build a standard of discipline. It didn’t matter how hard they chanted that they wanted it. They were missing a vital piece of their foundation. Our hearts are like the musicians and athletes because whatever we do repetitiously will become our foundation. If we repeat bad behavior or wrong choices we reinforce that behavior and it becomes our foundation. If we want wisdom to be our foundation we have to examine the cracks and flaws in our repetitions and adjust them. Then we can begin to add other extremely important elements like natural ability, knowledge and education. Verse 4 says that by knowledge the rooms are filled with every precious and beautiful treasure. I love that the analogy continues to show that wisdom built the foundation and structure, but knowledge filled the rooms. This challenges me to evaluate the areas in my life where I lack wisdom and the proper discipline to do things correctly, and instead rely on my raw natural ability or knowledge to try to wing it and pull it off.
