“My son, keep your father’s command, and don’t reject your mother’s teaching. Always bind them to your heart; tie them around your neck. When you walk here and there, they will guide you; when you lie down, they will watch over you; when you wake up, they will talk to you. For a command is a lamp, teaching is a light, and corrective discipline is the way to life.” (Proverbs‬ ‭6‬:‭20‬-‭23‬ ‭CSB‬‬ – Read the chapter)

I once saw a magnet on somebody’s fridge that made me chuckle. It said, “Ask a teenager while they still know everything.” The idea is one that is certainly familiar to anybody who has navigated the journey of parenting. The confidence of ignorance that youth invites is a potent draught. Nobody at that age wants to listen to the counsel of their parents. Even as we grow, though, we don’t get much better at taking sound advice. To do that means acknowledging that we don’t know everything, and for most of us we are loathe to do that. Solomon’s wisdom here is something all of us could benefit from. Let’s talk about it.

These four verses are the setup and introduction to a much deeper topic that we will start to explore tomorrow. It is one we have already seen, and which will come back around multiple times again before we get through this opening section of Proverbs. That’s really what Solomon is pointing toward with these words. This introduction, taken by itself, though, is general enough in its own wisdom that I thought we would take a quick look at it all by itself today. It breaks down into three parts after the initial command. Let’s take a look at each of them in turn.

The very first part is the command itself. “My son, keep your father’s command, and don’t reject your mother’s teaching.” As we have talked about before, this whole opening section takes the form of a father passing along crucial wisdom to his children. Verses like this one remind us that this isn’t just a father sitting by himself and doing this passing along of wisdom alone. He’s got his wife right there with him. And indeed while his role may be to take the lead in the process as indeed husbands are called by God to faithfully lead their families to Christ, they don’t dare lead all on their own. The wisdom that a mother brings to the table is essential to seek and heed. If you are a husband and father, you had better include her in that process. There’s a reason God gave her to you. You need what she has to say, and so do your children.

But while this is indeed a call for children to listen carefully to the counsel of their parents, on a broader scale, this is a reminder of the worth and importance of seeking and heeding wise counsel generally. We need to be willing to take good advice from wise people in our lives and in the world around us. Ultimately, we need to be willing to receive and obey the wisdom of the Scriptures. The foundational assumption here is that we don’t know enough on our own to navigate life successfully. If you think you do, you’re wrong, and you will soon discover the error of your faulty assumption. As you go through life, keep a teachable spirit firmly in place.

Okay, so how do we do this? That’s what the first part here answers. “Always bind them to your heart; tie them around your neck.” The Proverbs are full of rich imagery to make them more memorable. We obviously can’t literally bind something to our hearts. And this isn’t a call to wear boxes containing tiny pieces of paper with good advice like a necklace. The point here is that we should strive to keep sound wisdom close to us. We should engage with it constantly. We should remind ourselves of it regularly. We should put in place triggers in our daily routines and call to mind sage advice we have heard.

There are all sorts of ways to do this. Set reminders on your phone. Make sure you are engaging with the Scriptures daily. And by engage I mean that you should be reading them casually, but also building in times to give them longer attention so that you can study them more deeply. When you encounter a particularly good idea, write it down and post it somewhere you will regularly see it. Memorize Scripture. That always seems like a scary practice at first thought, but it’s really not. You don’t have to memorize the whole thing all at once. Just focus on memorizing one verse at a time. If you do a bit of searching, there are some artists who make songs for which the lyrics are just verses from the Scriptures. Listen to those to aid your memorization. If good advice is going to be able to impact your life, you need to give it the opportunity. Keep it close. Constantly.

If you do this, Solomon says, you will benefit from it. “When you walk here and there, they will guide you.” As you go through your life, that sound counsel you have been intentional about internalizing will pop back up in your mind right at times you need it. This is especially true with Scripture memorization. When you lock that stuff away in there, the Holy Spirit whose word it is in the first place will be able to call it to your mind just when you need it to remember it. I can say from experience that this can happen at any time and in any situation. You never know when it is coming, but there it will be when you need it as you go through your day.

“When you lie down, they will watch over you.” When you have gotten to the end of your day, do you take a minute to review the events of the day like I do? I can’t help it. I replay various situations I have faced and wonder if I got them right. Here’s the thing, if you have bound wise advice to your heart and kept it tied around your neck such that they have been guiding you in the various interactions you have had during the day, your actions that were shaped by that advice will be well guarded. Things will be far more likely to turn out in your favor. Even situations that could have easily gone sideways will have a way of resolving themselves in your direction.

“When you wake up, they will talk to you.” The band Audio Adrenaline released a song years ago…okay, decades ago called “This Day.” The song talks about making prayer the first thing you do in the morning. The chorus goes like this: “I want to say a prayer before my feet can hit the ground. Lord, I give this day to you.” Those words bled into my brain and have shaped my thinking ever since. I couldn’t begin to count how many times I have woken up over the years with the opening lines of that song echoing in my mind: “It’s 6 AM. I’m so tired. The alarm sounds. A new day begins. Before I go and disturb this peaceful moment, I look to you.” Ever since hearing that song for the first time, when my brain first turns on in the mornings, I’m praying. That wisdom from the Scriptures that I have invested the time in learning is speaking to me. That’s a habit worth your time to develop.

The last part here tells us why all of this is the case. “For a command is a lamp, teaching is a light.” The wisdom of the Scriptures we pursue helps to shed light on the path we need to take forward to experience the best and fullest life possible. The psalmist echoed this time idea when he wrote “your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” A light helps you see where you need to go. It reveals obstacles and pitfalls along your path. It lets you see not only where to go but what to avoid. That’s what this wisdom does.

And should you happen to drift off course, “corrective discipline is the way to life.” The challenging words and even consequences you face when you have acted in ways that reflect the foolishness of sin rather than the wisdom of righteousness are lighting for you the path back to life. All you have to do is take it. That doesn’t mean the road will be short or the path easy, but it will get you where you want to go if you will take it.

If you don’t have good and wise sources of advice in your life, seek them out. If nothing else, throw yourself into the Scriptures. They will unfailingly be a path to life for you.