Proverbs 15:32The MessageAn undisciplined, self-willed life is puny; an obedient, God-willed life is spacious. See the chapter |
27 Cross References
“Why bother even trying to do anything with you when you just keep to your bullheaded ways? You keep beating your heads against brick walls. Everything within you protests against you. From the bottom of your feet to the top of your head, nothing’s working right. Wounds and bruises and running sores— untended, unwashed, unbandaged. Your country is laid waste, your cities burned down. Your land is destroyed by outsiders while you watch, reduced to rubble by barbarians. Daughter Zion is deserted— like a tumbledown shack on a dead-end street, Like a tarpaper shanty on the wrong side of the tracks, like a sinking ship abandoned by the rats. If God-of-the-Angel-Armies hadn’t left us a few survivors, we’d be as desolate as Sodom, doomed just like Gomorrah.
But you, God, you have an eye for truth, don’t you? You hit them hard, but it didn’t faze them. You disciplined them, but they refused correction. Hardheaded, harder than rock, they wouldn’t change. Then I said to myself, “Well, these are just poor people. They don’t know any better. They were never taught anything about God. They never went to prayer meetings. I’ll find some people from the best families. I’ll talk to them. They’ll know what’s going on, the way God works. They’ll know the score.” But they were no better! Rebels all! Off doing their own thing. The invaders are ready to pounce and kill, like a mountain lion, a wilderness wolf, Panthers on the prowl. The streets aren’t safe anymore. And why? Because the people’s sins are piled sky-high; their betrayals are past counting.
When a man has a stubborn son, a real rebel who won’t do a thing his mother and father tell him, and even though they discipline him he still won’t obey, his father and mother shall forcibly bring him before the leaders at the city gate and say to the city fathers, “This son of ours is a stubborn rebel; he won’t listen to a thing we say. He’s a glutton and a drunk.”
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! Those who hear and don’t act are like those who glance in the mirror, walk away, and two minutes later have no idea who they are, what they look like.
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