Bill Edgar’s article focusing on teaching life-giving truths to our children reminded me how much I’ve learned from the book of Proverbs, even as an adult.

I’ve learned more from Proverbs as an adult than I did as a child, though it wasn’t really planned. When I was discipling a young man who had been converted out of a difficult childhood and young adulthood, we decided that daily shared devotions would be important. By necessity, we conducted those devotions over the phone. We read through many Bible books, but every day we also read a chapter of Proverbs—chapter 1 on the first day of the month, chapter 2 on the second of the month. My friend’s background had been so devoid of basic, practical, daily wisdom that he craved this time each morning and would often talk about how it convicted him at that moment. How it refreshed me to hear such honesty and godly conviction!

Before we stopped our partnership in devotions, we had read the book of Proverbs about 100 times. I had begun our devotions thinking I was primarily doing this for my friend. But I soon realized my igorance: I had appreciated just a few facets of this colossal gem that is Proverbs. This was more than a book of wise thoughts for the day. It was a book of life and death, salvation, witness, integrity, goals, and the preciousness of my time and attentions.

For a while, chapter 24 was a rough one. At a time of life when I was fed up with my laziness in sharing the gospel with the lost, I read these words: “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work?” (vv. 11-12). While this verse applies to those in different kinds of peril, it inevitably draws our attention to the eternal.

I thought not just about personal witness but our corporate witness. “Prepare your work outside; get everything ready for yourself in the field, and after that build your house” (24:17). For our livelihood, there is an order and priority that we neglect to our own peril. Yet how many of us have, along with our congregations, put nearly all our attentions and efforts into maintaining programs and buildings while the spiritual harvest fields lie untended by us? Such a strategy is not sustainable.

To close that chapter I would read: “I passed by the field of a sluggard, by the vineyard of a man lacking sense, and behold, it was all overgrown with thorns; the ground was covered with nettles, and its stone wall was broken down” (24:30-31). My inaction in evangelism was not neutral, and it was not erased by a new day. My failures had accumulated and borne a garden of weeds. It was time, not just for my friend to be convicted by God’s words in Proverbs, but for me to be convicted as well. It was time to repent. Proverbs is a book of wisdom, and it is a book of life.