God is at the center of 'how to be'
Good friend, take to heart what I’m telling you;
collect my counsels and guard them with your life.
Tune your ears to the world of Wisdom;
set your heart on a life of Understanding.
That’s right—if you make Insight your priority,
and won’t take no for an answer,
Searching for it like a prospector panning for gold,
like an adventurer on a treasure hunt,
Believe me, before you know it Fear-of-God will be yours;
you’ll have come upon the Knowledge of God.” Proverbs 2:1-5
ng.” Proverbs 2:1-2, The Message
Proverbs, as many know, is a book of Wisdom. Sometimes Wisdom (especially when capitalized) seems so far off, so intangible. And yet, it’s really a simple way of living. Listen to what Eugene Peterson says:
“Proverbs is a how-to book. The problem we have with it is that tells us how to do something we aren’t particularly interested in doing. It isn’t that we can’t understand what the proverbs say. It’s that we don’t want to do what they say, which means we have a motivation problem.
One of the ways to deal with that problem is to see that the goal of the ‘Fear-of-God’ isn’t competing with other legitimate goals in our lives but is rather a completing goal. It puts guts into the other things we’re doing. In a sense, what is being said here is that all of us want more than we have; all of us are nagged by an inner sense of incompleteness. What is missing, according to Proverbs, is the ‘FEar-of-God’ and the ‘Knowledge-of-God.’ Eugene Peterson, Conversations
