Prideful Penguins Need Proverbs 16:18

A Sampling from My Morning Quiet Time

A few mornings ago, I was reading through the 16th chapter of Proverbs, because it was the 16th of the month, and God led me to lay a familiar verse on my heart:

“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
~ Proverbs 16:18

If journaling through a Gospel or epistle is like sitting down at Chili’s, something that requires some time, then reading the day’s chapter of Proverbs on my phone serves as my Chick-Fil-A, a pleasant and quicker alternative to more in depth journaling.  On this particular morning, after already writing down what God led me to initially journal, I was engaging in part two of my Bible study process and reflecting on what I felt God had taught me by writing a summary of my morning’s quiet time with him.  I have come to find that this second practice helps with retention (in teacher world we call this “checking for understanding”).  For more on this two-part process, please look back at our Beginners Guide to Quiet Times Post.

While helping with my retention, I found myself using the pronoun “we” as opposed to “I.”  In other words, I found myself writing as if to an audience more than just God and myself.  So apparently, where I thought I was dining for two, I had to go back and tell the hostess that we needed a bigger table.

On that note, here is a sampling from my quiet time with God this past Thursday.  First what I took note of in verse 18, while reading Proverbs 16 and then the follow up notes I wrote in my “Times with God” Word document. I hope this both serves as an encouraging and insightful example of what or how you can journal in your own quiet times, and a little wisdom on the importance of heeding the advice of others.  Enjoy!

Part 1 – Note on Proverbs 16:18 from Bible Journaling Time

“I think I’m going to memorize this one.  So I looked up some words in Strong’s: haughty, pride, spirit, and there aren’t any curve balls.  So what I’m wondering is if God is using a kind of repetition here, to repeat the same idea twice, but in a different way, in the same verse, to really hit home how important it is to not be arrogant and the warning that happens when we are.”

~Highlighted this passage in blue, for multiple meanings, since I believed God to be using repetition (green-figurative language), that the passage required deeper insight (orange), and finally that it could be highlighted in pink too since I began memorizing it.

Part 2 – Reflective Follow Up Notes, “This Morning, God Taught Me _____”

• Thursday, August 16, 2018
  • Proverbs 16:1-18
  • This morning, God led me to write on my heart verse 18:
    • “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
  • Many of the verses leading up to this one involve the way one goes and choosing to follow or not to follow the Lord. Verse 9, “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps,” fits nicely into this category.  The Lord led me to look up in Strong’s more about differences between haughty and pride, but they both come out to meaning “arrogance,” or informally dictated, “I can do it myself and do not need the Lord,” (although rarely does one ever say such things in such a way).Anyways, I came to find that they mean the same thing, so I think we have God’s amazing rhetoric at work again.  This is the same idea repeated twice, within one verse, and next to each other.  That is, “if you do not trust the Lord as you walk, you will have trouble.”  You could even say “immediate” trouble.  So God uses repetition of an idea, close together (think John 1:1), and some parallelism¹ to really hit home this point.  It almost stands out more too, because so often in Proverbs we will see an antithesis² in the structure of a single Proverb, “If you do this good thing, good will happen, but if you do this bad thing, bad will happen.”  Instead of this frequent point-counterpoint, God doubles down on the lesson here to ensure his child knows how important it is, and we know this to be true because we have so frequently heard this verse in church.  Praise God for his use of repetition of ideas, parallelism, and all the wonderful ways he writes to let us know, in this case, the most important lesson of the Bible: always trust God.
    
    Lord, thank you for all that you have done for us, and all of the times and ways in which you walk with us and guide our steps down this road of life.  Help us to trust you always, and to never rely on ourselves.  Even when your guiding hand is not clear, and we allow thoughts or things of this world to distract us, please forgive us and continue to guide us with your righteous right hand.  We love you, to you be all the glory, and it’s in Jesus’ name by the power of the Holy Spirit I pray, amen.

1 – “Parallelism.” Dictionary.com, Dictionary.com, www.dictionary.com/browse/parallelism?s=t.
2 – “Antithesis.” Dictionary.com, Dictionary.com, www.dictionary.com/browse/antithesis?s=t.

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1. the repetition of a syntactic construction in successive sentences for rhetorical effect
2. the placing of a sentence or one of its parts against another to which it is opposed to form a balanced contrast of ideas, as in “Give me liberty or give me death.”