Proverbs 3:3-4

Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart. So you will find favor and good success in the sight of God and man. [ESV]

Steadfast love and faithfulness.

This is what God is.

We are to become more and more like God. To grow in steadfast love and faithfulness. We are to be formed around Him, not Him around us. Nowhere are we told to make God in our own image.

He is.

All we can really do is come before Him in reverent humility and get to know Him for who He is, and then conform to that image. Many conform God to their own image with no real seeking of who He is in truth and revelation. Then we follow after the god we made up.

I love how Rob Bell puts it, “We shape our god, and then our god shapes us.”

But why would we want to shape our own god when the true God is steadfast love and faithfulness?

It’s no wonder the writer here tells us that we will have favor with people. Who doesn’t enjoy steadfast love and faithfulness? Who doesn’t receive joy from someone who is an “Unconditional Love Machine”?

Keep on loving.

Keep loving everybody.

Continue being loyal no matter what.

Do what is necessary on your part to become more like God.

Drink continually from the fountain of God. Replenish often. So it may overflow onto the world.

What power or plan is there besides love that makes any real sense at all? That will last?

Also, this chapter begins with “My son” or “My child”.

God is speaking to us as His beloved ones, His adopted children. He was not stuck with us. He chose us, because He loves us, and now He is coaching us in how we can be fully alive, for His glory.

-Raymond C. Ortlund Jr.

Proverbs 3:11-12

My child, do not reject the LORD’s discipline, and don’t get angry when He corrects you. The LORD corrects those He loves, just as parents correct the child they delight in. [NCV]

Luke 20:17-18

Then Jesus looked at them and said, “Then what does this verse mean: ‘The stone that the builders rejected became the cornerstone’? Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken, and the person on whom it falls, that person will be crushed!” [NCV]

Jesus is the foundation to all things whether you accept Him as such or not. He just is. He is the foundation to the church. And if not, well, that church won’t last–not in any powerful, healing, transformative way.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

-C.S. Lewis