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Welcome to Proverbs 365! This blogging project is my attempt to read one chapter of Proverbs daily and then share a piece of wisdom or lesson learned from within that daily chapter. Proverbs are God’s version of daily Best Practices: they help us through good times and bad. When life becomes stressful, Proverbs are there to help us make better choices. Feel free to join me in Proverbs 365–either on your blog or by leaving your daily Proverbs lesson in the comments below!

Proverbs 1

Out of Proverbs 1 today, it is verse 7 that jumps out at me.

7 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge,
but fools[c] despise wisdom and instruction.

I’m a studied person.  I have loved learning since I was very little.  I often can’t get enough knowledge of how things work, of facts, of details.  My iPhone has become one of my favorite things in the world, simply because any time I want to know something, I can look it up right then and there.  I may not have had the best grades in school, but it wasn’t for want of learning.  It often was because I was busy off learning, imagining or trying to learn something new instead of doing my homework for the things I’d already learned in school.

Yet there is a huge difference between knowledge and wisdom.  I didn’t learn this until I found the Lord almost ten years ago.  I had believed in God for most of my life–yet knowing him, fearing him are very different from believing that he exists.  And as those grew in my heart, I found a whole new well of knowledge and wisdom growing within myself.

Fear of the Lord isn’t being afraid of him–it is a passionate love, respect, awe, devotion and so much more.  Fear of the Lord isn’t being terrified he will strike you down.  No, fear of the Lord is knowing his awesome power, his amazing all-encompassing love, his total perfection–and then chasing after His ways because His ways are the best ways. It is when you learn that fear, that respect, that we begin to truly understand knowledge and wisdom.  He will begin to feed you his knowledge, and develop His wisdom in your heart.

That has been the big lesson for me in the past ten years.  That true knowledge and wisdom come from the heart, not from the head.  I can ‘know’ something and still not understand it.  What good is knowing a fact, if I can’t understand what it means?  That is knowledge.  The application of it in love and justice–that is wisdom.

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