“Disaster pursues sinners, but good rewards the righteous. A good man leaves an inheritance to his grandchildren, but the sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous. The uncultivated field of the poor yields abundant food, but without justice, it is swept away. The one who will not use the rod hates his son, but the one who loves him disciplines him diligently. A righteous person eats until he is satisfied, but the stomach of the wicked is empty.” (Proverbs‬ ‭13‬:‭21‬-‭25‬ ‭CSB‬‬ – Read the chapter)

Disciplining kids is tough. As a parent, you always wonder whether you are doing right. Were you tough enough to match the misdeed? Too tough? What exactly is an effective punishment or even merely a consequence in light of what they did? Is that even the right way to think about it. Of course, this is all much easier when it comes to other people’s kids. Then you always know with perfect clarity and discernment what they should have done. It’s just with your own kids that it becomes challenging for some reason. But what is clear is that you have to do it. Not disciplining them at all isn’t an option if you want them to turn out even remotely well. Solomon agrees. Let’s talk about this and a few other matters as we finish up chapter 13 today.

Have you ever felt like trouble is just nipping at your heels? Sometimes those moments come when we are fairly well minding our own business, but I find they more often come when I’m in the midst of a string of bad decisions. One foolish decision leads to another which leads to another, and suddenly it seems trouble is right there ready to pounce every chance it gets. This is perfectly in line with what Solomon says here. “Disaster pursues sinners. When you are walking a path of sin, disaster will be all around you. One false move, and it will catch you in its trap. Every step you take feels haunted by it. It is just waiting to get you.

Not so the righteous. Or rather, just the opposite is the case. When you walk a path of righteousness through this life, good things are going to come your way. There’s not going to be some kind of a one-to-one correspondence here as if karma were a real force in this world. Rather, when you treat others fairly and with kindness, they are likely to return the favor. When you are generous and gracious, people will often respond in kind. When you have worked hard to the glory of God, He will honor your labor with the fitting rewards.

“A good man leaves an inheritance to his grandchildren, but the sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous.” The point here is not that you should be saving up for the future. Rather, Solomon’s attention here is on the fruits of honest, hard work and righteous living. When you work hard and live within your means, the odds are good that you are going to gradually accumulate a respectable amount of wealth. This is not a guarantee (remember that none of the proverbs are), but generally speaking, this is how things most often go. You will amass more wealth than you need. You will amass enough to be able to leave your descendants more than one branch down the family tree.

But if you do the opposite—don’t do much hard work; refuse to live within your means; constantly look to take advantage of others for your own gain; and etc.—you won’t be able to leave anything to anyone. You’ll use everything you have just to keep up your lifestyle. You will wind up working for those with plenty, turning over your hard earned resources to them, wishing you could have what they have. That’s no way to live. Far better is to work hard and honestly than to walk a path of sin. The rewards may not be as immediate, but they will come, and when they do, all the effort will be made worthwhile.

“The uncultivated field of the poor yields abundant food, but without justice, it is swept away.” Mass starvation used to be a common thing across the globe. Fifty years ago, the world did not produce enough food to adequately feed all the mouths it produced. Calls for population control spurred by fears of apocalyptic famine seemed to make sense. But the issue wasn’t actually a lack of resources at all. We had uncultivated feeds. That is, we needed human innovation, unencumbered by injustice, to create the potential for solving the crisis. And indeed, that is exactly what happened. Advancements in agricultural science allowed farmers to be vastly more productive in vastly more places than was previously possible. Now we produce far more than enough food to feed an even larger population than we had then.

Yet there are still people facing food insecurity (a new term made up to keep people engaged in the issue since genuine starvation almost never happens anymore) across the globe. Why? injustice. Hunger is not a resource issue anymore, but a justice one. People who can’t get enough food to feed themselves and their families fail to do so not because of scarcity, but because of injustice in the governmental systems under which they are living. It is bad, evil, sinful leadership that is to blame.

As followers of Jesus, we are called to be warriors for justice. We are called to help make sure that the poor who can’t get access to adequate food resources to be able to feed themselves and their families are enabled and empowered to do just that. This can take many different forms and levels of direct involvement, but these kinds of efforts put us in line with the passion of Jesus by getting both His love and His justice right. To wish them well without doing anything to bring relief is meaningless. Yet if our efforts to bring relief are not primarily driven by love, they will quickly veer off track. This has to be a both-and affair.

“The one who will not use the rod hates his son, but the one who loves him disciplines him diligently.” Let’s start here: this is not advocating for parents to beat their children. It does not mean we should all have a literal discipline “rod” that we use to corporally punish our misbehaving children. Whether or not a parent uses corporal punishment is up to the parent, but if that path is to be pursued, it must be pursued with wisdom and gentleness. It is frightfully easy – especially in a moment of high passion – to cross the line from proper and appropriate discipline to abuse. That doesn’t mean spanking should be taken entirely off the table, but a great deal of judiciousness operating within a set of boundaries that are strictly adhered to must be the guide.

What this does mean is that as parents we should discipline our children well. The whole “gentle parenting” thing where we try not to let our kids hear the word “no” so much is a joke. Don’t be afraid to tell your kids “no,” and to hold the line on that against their pushback. Because there will be pushback. Sometimes there will be a lot of pushback. Other times they won’t pushback so much as just ignore you and do whatever it is they wanted to do anyway. In those times, there needs to be consequences for their actions. These consequences need to be meaningful and significant – significant enough to convince them that this isn’t a path they want to try to walk again. Hold them accountable for their actions. What this looks like is going to vary depending on the age of the child and the severity of the act of rebellion, but it needs to be done all the same. A failure to discipline well is really a failure to love well.

In doing this, we need to be clear what the objective of the discipline is at the outset. This is something parents can agree on well ahead of time as a general principle for all their acts of discipline. Is your goal going to simply be punishment for offending acts? Or is it going to be restoration of a broken relationship? Are you going to aim to make a point, or to lead them to a path of reconciliation? Clarity around that will help determine what you do and how you do it. Let me offer this one piece of advice: Make restoration of the relationship broken by rebellion your ultimate goal. Make sure that even in discipline your kids would rather be with you than not.

“A righteous person eats until he is satisfied, but the stomach of the wicked is empty.” I think there are two ways to understand this last proverb in the chapter. Those who pursue a path of righteousness will find themselves able to obtain the resources they need to meet their needs. Those who don’t, often won’t. That’s simple enough to understand. Good and wise choices lead to abundance where bad and foolish choices leads to scarcity. People become trapped in a cycle of poverty because they become trapped in a pattern of making bad or foolish or even simply shortsighted choices. Righteousness leads people out of this kind of a mess.

The other thing to see here is that a righteous person only takes enough to satisfy himself. He doesn’t exhaust his resources just because he can. He takes enough for now, and saves more for later. His financial decisions are driven by wisdom first, not passion. That wisdom can be informed by passion, but wisdom stays firmly in the driver’s seat. When we look beyond our immediate and demanding appetite, we can see a path forward toward abundance that will otherwise remain obscured to us. Let us receive what God gives with gratitude, use what we need, and plan for the overflow to be a blessing to others. Then we will always have enough, and we will be using what we do have in line with God’s intentions for it. He will bless and magnify those efforts.