Pay attention

DEVOTION

PROVERBS

PAY ATTENTION

Prov 22:17-21

17 Pay attention and listen to the sayings of the wise; apply your heart to what I teach, 18 for it is pleasing when you keep them in your heart and have all of them ready on your lips. 19 So that your trust may be in the LORD, I teach you today, even you. 20 Have I not written thirty sayings for you, sayings of counsel and knowledge, 21 teaching you true and reliable words, so that you can give sound answers to him who sent you?

NIV

Pay attention and listen. Pay attention and listen. How plainer can it be? The world, the daily life we each live among the distractions of this world gives us all the more reason to pay attention and listen to the sayings of the wise. Who is the wise, God of course? Is they any other wisdom worth listening to? Sure man thinks he has some wisdom, but in truth God tells us if we lack wisdom we should ask him for it and he will give his wisdom to us liberally.

James 1:4-5

 5 If any of you lacks wisdom , he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.

NIV

But there is more here which we will need to spend a couple of days pondering. The first of those is to apply what we have been paying attention to and listening, to our hearts. Here again it surely requires ignoring the distractions of the world. How can we pay attention to more than one thing? In a world which heralds multi-tasking, we should not be doing so. We are told over and over again in various ways that we cannot multi-task, we cannot serve both God and money, or God and the world, or God and self, or the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the world. He says the wisdom of this world is foolishness to him. In fact he confounds the wisdom of the world. So then we cannot pay attention to both God and the world. We have to give up any attention we pay to the wisdom of the world and focus only in the wisdom of God and apply his wisdom to our hearts. That is a start, we will continue with the rest. But for now that is enough to ponder on. Pay attention.