Proverbs 17:3

"The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold,
but the Lord tests the heart.” NRSV

Crucibles and furnaces, when used with silver and gold, aren’t used to test whether or not these elements are what they proclaim to be. Rather, crucibles and furnaces are used to extract the impurities that have become infused within the elements.

Impurities in precious metals permeate the elements. It becomes impossible to actually see the impurities; the elements appear pure until subjected to the purifying process. For example, 10k gold is only 41.7% gold. (Only 200k gold is pure gold.) And yet, 10k gold jewelry is impossible to discern with the naked eye from 18k gold (which is 75% gold).

The fact that these two things are put together in this verse:

• purifying precious metals, and
• the Lord testing our hearts

tells us that this proverb is talking about the same thing. When the Lord “tests” our hearts, He isn’t doing it to determine whether or not we are His, but rather to remove the impurities of lust, pride, ego, anger, unforgiveness, selfishness, and other habitual sins that still remain. He is testing us because He loves us and wants us to be as true to Him as we can be.

His testing is a blessing, not a punishment.

What is it we want from the Lord? Most of us, when we are brutally honest, will admit that we want the things that appear to make this life easier. We want money and luxury and power and the admiration of those around us. But thankfully God’s plans for us are much broader than that. He knows that the things of this world are temporary, like paper houses. He wants to give us that which will serve us over the long haul of eternity, a pure heart and a soul that longs after Him. Only those things can we take on life’s final journey. Only those things last.

When He allows us to be faced with trials and hardships and even pain, He is putting us through the crucible to remove the impurities of sin. He wants to purify out those things which come between us and Him. He wants us to focus on those things which are truly important.

As parents, we need to take that same tack toward our children. When we “help” them by removing or lessening life’s consequences, we may be actually hindering God’s lessons in their lives. They don’t need us to make the way easier for them; they need us to pray for them and walk beside them as they walk the path God has prepared. He’s not concerned about whether or not the way is hard; He’s concerned about whether or not they will develop the strength to persevere.

The way of the Christian is hard. The Lord Jesus Himself told us that it is the hard road: “For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:14 NRSV). As people, our natural tendency is to want God to make the road easy for us. It can’t be. We need the crucible to remove the impurities.

Oh, dear ones, let us be among the few who find the narrow gate, the hard one, that we might rejoice with God in eternity!

© 2008 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved. International copyright reserved. This study may be copied for nonprofit and/or church purposes only without permission when copied in its entirety (including this notice).

Proverbs 17:1

“Better is a dry morsel with quiet
than a house full of feasting with strife.” NRSV

Abraham Maslow is a psychologist who developed what he calls the “Hierarchy of Needs.” The basic premise is that one cannot focus on higher-level needs until the lower level needs are met. One of the lowest level needs is safety.

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past half-century about emotional abuse. And while I think that, as a people, we need to toughen up a bit (well, actually a lot), there is truth that, in order to withstand emotional assault in other places, we need to have at least one place that is safe. This proverb asserts that the one place of safety needs to be home. And I agree.

Home should be the one place where we can count on those around us. It used to be that loyalty to family was paramount. If you couldn’t count on your friends, on your coworkers, on your neighbors, you could count on your family. Sadly enough, that’s often no longer true. We live in a society where the people most likely to hurt us are those with whom we live.

Why is that? Why are we so untrustworthy with those who depend upon us the most? I think it’s because we have swallowed the lie that “a house of feasting” is worth the price . . . the destruction of relationships. We are so enamored with commercials that we believe what they say, lock, stock, and barrel.

I was married once before. My first husband was an alcoholic. He was also a very talented man who thought everyone hated him. And so, he just wouldn’t come home. He’d go to bars or liquor stores, buy alcohol (and other things), and simply not come home. One day in a very honest state, he told me that he wanted to be like the men on the beer commercials, the men who would surrounded by people who loved them and who thought they were just wonderful.

He was convinced that he could find love and acceptance among the other losers in the bar rather than to come home and receive the love and acceptance that his family was waiting to give him.

As Christians, do we look outside of our families for emotional safety? There are sometimes reasons why we do that: an unfaithful spouse, an abusive parent, a neglectful child. But rather than continuing to look outward, why don’t we work on developing a healthy family? It takes not only the work of those others, but ours as well. It takes prayer and patience and forgiveness. None of us is perfect (by a long shot), but we can work on having a house of quiet, even if we only have a dry morsel, rather than looking for that house full of feasting with strife.

© 2008 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved. International copyright reserved. This study may be copied for nonprofit and/or church purposes only without permission when copied in its entirety (including this notice).

Proverbs 16:33

Proverbs16:33

“The lot is cast into the lap,
but the decision is the Lord’s alone.” NRSV

Do you know what’s going to happen today? I don’t. We can plan and hope and dream, but the fact is that no moment even truly exists for us except this one moment. Who knows what will happen next? Only the Lord.

There is nothing wrong with planning for the future, as long as our plans don’t hinder our becoming what God has planned.

“Then Jesus told them a parable: ‘The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry. But God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.’” (Luke 12:16-21 NRSV).

In this time of uncertain economy, it is a natural tendency to begin to close oneself in, to become tighter with our money, to become more worried and concerned, to allow the uncertainties overwhelm us. I think that Jesus chose to talk about a “rich” man in this parable because we often see money as being the protection for the future. If we have enough money, the future will be fine.

The fact is, we don’t know what tomorrow will bring. The Lord might call any one of us Home tonight and all of us concerns would have been for naught because they wouldn’t now matter. Rather, what is important is making sure that we stay to the task, that we carefully analyze our hearts and our behaviors so that we are continuing—even in times of great stress—to exhibit the fruit of the Spirit.

Paul talked about the Macedonian church that gave even though they were extremely poor (2 Corinthians 8). They gave even beyond what they could “afford” to give: “they voluntarily gave according to their means, and even beyond their means” (v. 3). In these times when each of us is wondering whether we will be able to keep our homes, whether or not we will be able to keep our cars or go on our vacations or pay for our children’s schooling, we need to be even more conscious about giving to others. Our faith—our true trust in God to supply our daily needs—is demonstrated by our willingness to provide for those around us who are also in need: “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:15-17 NRSV).

Do we truly believe that “the decision is the Lord’s alone?” In other words, do we truly believe that He is in charge, that He is able to provide, that He will take care of us? Then, in times such as these, we should become even more generous, even more giving, even more interested in the concerns of others and how we can help.

My dear ones, He is fully able to provide for us! We need, in great love, to provide for each other.

© 2008 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved. International copyright reserved. This study may be copied for nonprofit and/or church purposes only without permission when copied in its entirety (including this notice).