Proverbs Daily Devotional: Day 31
“A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies. Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value.”
Proverbs 31:10-11
This passage talks about a wife of noble character, but I want to start by helping any single ladies out there to know what to look for in a man. Here are 5 tips for finding a man: 1. It is important to find a man who loves you; 2. It is important to find a man who can make you laugh; 3. It is important to find a man who has a good job and can take care of you; 4. It is important to find a good man who you enjoy spending time with. 5. It is vitally important that these 4 men don’t know each other.
No man could be all of those wonderful things, right? Could a woman be all that Proverbs 31 describes? And is it fair to hold women to this standard? Two things – note in vs. 1 of this chapter that these are the sayings of King Lemuel, based on an oracle that his, wait for it, his mother taught him. So she’s going to be setting a pretty high standard for who is worthy of her son. Secondly, many scholars believe that this is a composite sketch of an ideal woman, and that it does not realistically describe any one person. For example – vs. 15 she gets up while it is still dark, yet in vs. 18 her lamp does not go out at night. Talk about burning the candle at both ends. Vs. 13-18 indicate that she is a business woman who works outside the home, yet vs. 27 tells us that she watches over the affairs of her household and her children. There are other examples throughout that raise a very high standard, and I don’t want to tell everyone that they need to both work and be a stay at home mom at the same time. This describes an ideal, an aspiration. So does the rest of Proverbs. So does much of the Bible. An ideal, a goal to strive for. We know we can never be perfect, only Jesus can. But we strive. We try. We live and we learn and we keep moving forward in our faith. Reading the Scriptures daily and applying them to our lives helps us to do that. I encourage you to continue to spend time daily with the Bible, and as you apply it, I believe God will use it to change your life for the better.
—Pastor Jeff
How quickly this month has rolled by as I worked to meet the challenge of making sure I read a Proverbs chapter everyday and read Pastor Jeff’s reflections. They have been thought provoking and challenge me to move forth in my journey of faith and living out that faith. I don’t know where the time goes and I was very challenged to be both a woman who had to work and a single mother as my children went into their teens. Life indeed was challenging and I often felt I burned the candle at both ends of the day and the night. But as I look back on that time I know I would not have it any other way. I hope to live out my faith by being following God’s call in my life and trying to the best of my ability to be an example of what He would want me to be. I don’t anywhere near succeed, however, God is always calling me to try! And in reading scripture I find the path that God wants me to follow. God’s blessings to all…and keep reading!