“My son, don’t forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commands; for they will bring you many days, a full life, and well-being. Never let loyalty and faithfulness leave you. Tie them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will find favor and high regard with God and people.” (Proverbs 3:1-4 CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever been around someone who was really churchy? They constantly spoke in terms and tones that just felt sanctified. You knew they were always going to do what was right in any situation. They were clearly right with God. And nobody really liked them at all because they were so boring and insufferable. Or how about this: Have you ever been around someone who was, for lack of a better word, a scoundrel? They always skirted at the edge of what was right, crossing it whenever it was convenient…or just fun. Everybody seemed to like them. But you were pretty sure they were not on a path that was going to bring them anywhere in the vicinity of God. What if you could have the best of both worlds? Let’s talk about how.

We see here yet another call from Solomon for his children to heed his wisdom. The passion on of wisdom from parent to child doesn’t happen by accident. Oh, they’ll learn from you whether you want them to or not. That’s inevitable. But if you want them to learn good and godly things, that takes effort and intentionality.

Just as an interesting side note, Solomon writes as a father speaking to his son. While he no doubt fathered many children given his enormous number of wives and concubines, only one son followed him as king. It only makes sense to imagine Rehoboam’s being on the receiving end of this wisdom. Yet Rehoboam was an idiot. For all of Solomon’s words, none of ten seemed to have penetrated his heart. You have to wonder how much of that lack came from the bad example Solomon set for his son in the second half of his life. For all the wisdom we might pass along, if our example doesn’t match it, they’ll hear that louder.

So, Solomon renews his call to embrace wisdom and then gives a command. “Never let loyalty and faithfulness leave you.” Now, he could be talking about loyalty and faithfulness to a lot of different things there, but contextually and from the standpoint of the Scriptures as a whole, we can be fairly certain he only really has one thing, or rather, one person in mind. Never let loyalty and faithfulness to God leave you. Be committed to His ways and His ways alone. Walk His path and don’t step foot on any other. Follow Him and no one else. And don’t ever quit doing that for the entire stretch of your life.

Don’t just be committed to His ways, though, commit yourself to learning them. “Tie them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart.” When I was in middle school, I made a choker necklace out of hemp string that I threaded the letters WWJD on. I designed it so that it could be taken off and on fairly easily with a loop-and-knot clasp. Except, I didn’t ever take it off. For months. Finally, it got to the point that the loop and knot were basically fused together. This was great until I played in a volleyball tournament that didn’t allow players to wear jewelry of any kind and had to cut it off. I made another one like it, but it never quite felt the same as that first one.

When you tie something around your neck, the idea is that it is with you everywhere you go. Solomon is calling us here to bring God’s word with us everywhere we go. This happens quite literally if you have a phone with a Bible app downloaded. You could study God’s word just almost anywhere; anywhere, at least, that allows you to have your phone out and on. Of course, being able to do that and actually doing that are two very different things. I wonder what kind of a difference it would make in us if we studied the Scriptures even half as much as we played games or scrolled endlessly on social media.

The other way we can take God’s word with us everywhere is to do the second thing Solomon says there. “Write them on the tablet of your heart.” Obviously that language is figurative. He’s talking about internalizing the Scriptures; memorizing them. Scripture memory isn’t something the church practices very often any longer. It may be a habit worth getting back into. When you memorize a verse in the Bible, that verse never leaves. You may not be able to recall it perfectly later, but the knowledge is hidden in your mind, and when He needs to, the Holy Spirit can draw that knowledge to the front of your mind to help guide and direct your steps. The more Scripture you hide in there, the more He has to draw on to do His good work in you.

Committing to memorizing even one verse a month will have a profound impact on how you think, which will in turn have a profound impact on how you live. I once took a year and memorized two verses every single week minus two weeks that were used for review. This really is something you can do if you commit the time and effort to it. And when you do, loyalty and faithfulness will stick around a whole lot better than they will otherwise.

Okay, but isn’t doing this just going to make someone really churchy? Wasn’t that the kind of person we were trying to avoid being around (much less becoming ourselves!) when we started? Well, maybe. There is undoubtedly a stereotype around the kind of person who talks about nothing but the Scriptures all the time, the homeschooling kid who goes to and wins Scripture memory competitions. But while that stereotype is sometimes earned, more often it is an effort by the Enemy to keep people from walking that path. Because people who walk that path and who let that Scripture truly penetrate their heart and mind become powerful advancers of God’s kingdom and he doesn’t want that.

More to the point, though, when we throw ourselves into God’s word and let that word become the primary shaping force of our hearts and minds, and if we do that in the context of a strong and healthy community of faith that both reinforces and positively directs our learning so that we stay both within the bounds of orthodoxy, but also learn to apply well what we are learning, we are not going to become the worst stereotype of churchy that the culture loves to mock. We will become wise. We will become winsome. We will become committed followers of Jesus who courageously obey His command to love the people around us after the pattern of His own love for us. And those kind of people everyone wants to have around.

If you want to become the kind of person who impacts the world around you in profound and positive ways, the kind of person people look up to, the kind of person whose opinion everyone clambers to have, what Solomon offers here and in the verse following this which we’ll look at next Tuesday is the way to go. The change won’t be instant, but if you let the Holy Spirit loose in your life, He will make you over into the image of Christ. And the thing about being like Jesus is that the only people who didn’t like Jesus were the ones who were most dedicated to stopping Him. Everybody else loved Him. Everybody else. Becoming like Him is exactly what you want to invest in doing. You will absolutely be glad that you did. So will everyone around you.