Proverbs 23:24-25
“The father of the righteous will greatly rejoice; he who fathers a wise son will be glad in him. Let your father and mother be glad; let her who bore you rejoice.”
Children who grow up to be wise are a joy for their parents. This is true for earthly parents, and it is true for God our heavenly Father. In a fallen world, raising wise children is a big challenge. There are many negative influences seeking to tempt young people and lead them off-path.
Proverbs 23:26
“My son, give me your heart, and let your eyes observe my ways.”
The Lord calls us to give our hearts to him. He calls us to see and obey his standards, or what this proverb refers to as “my ways.” The world seeks to distract us with deception; the Lord seeks to lead us with truth.
God is a God of truth. The Lord speaks truly, and his truth must always be the standard by which we live and work. Indeed, to be disloyal to God’s truth is a failure of love as well as intellect. As described by the book of Proverbs, unfaithfulness to God is a matter of adultery and not merely apostasy. Without a commitment to truth, there can be no healing or renewal in society. Without truth, there can be no difference between right and wrong. Without truth, the world is gray and everything is reduced to “Says who?”
Since the Reformation in the 16th century, the gospel has now reached the furthest ends of the entire world, and the Christian faith is the world’s first truly global religion. Yet in the process, because of her flaws and failures, the Western church has lost its credibility in the wider culture, and has triggered serious resistance to the message of the gospel.
The rejection of the timeless truths of Christianity, as well as resistance to the church as a culture-shaping institution, has resulted in the creation of societies that are more secular than any in history. It has produced a culture and way of life without God that marginalizes the church and reduces it to irrelevance in many modern countries.
This socio-political reality raises a profound question: Can Western civilization survive if its strongest pillar—the Christian faith—is removed from influence altogether? Can post-Christian secular society provide the foundation for human dignity, individual liberty, institutional accountability, and personal responsibility, which were the gifts of the gospel to America and the West and are crucial to Western freedoms and social structure?
Or will the freedoms and democratic principles that have shaped America and the West continue to be suppressed by the soft tyranny of the post-Christian bureaucratic, all-encompassing, and government-heavy societies toward which we are rapidly moving? What appears to be certain is that if the Christian faith fails to recover its integrity and cultural influence, post-Christian secularism will dominate, democracy will continue to erode, and liberty will be lost. At some point, the freedom to preach and practice the faith will also be lost.
It is into these social and cultural conditions that the Lord speaks to you—his child—the truth of this Proverb: “My son, give me your heart, and let your eyes observe my ways.”
