The Word To Live By: 8-23-25
Phil Waggoner
The slacker does not plow during planting season; at harvest time, he looks, and there is nothing. Proverbs 20:24
The Word To Live By: “This is not the kind of promise I like in the Bible, brother.” I guess I see it the other way around. If I do plow during planting season, there will be a harvest. Plowing is preparation work. It’s slow and methodical, and once you get the first pass done, it’s simply back and forth, back and forth, through the field. However, it prepares the seedbed and causes weed seeds to be buried deeply so the crop gets ahead of them and chokes them out instead of the other way around (see Matthew 13:22). What Solomon is saying here is do the mundane prep work, the foundation to build on, and the harvest will be there. So, what is the mundane work he’s referring to? I think it is summed up in Galatians 6:9, “So we must not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up.” Combine that with Hebrews 10:23, “Let us hold on to the confession of our faith without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.” There’s your mundane, foundation-building work that you do all the time, every day. Another way to put it is live by faith, constantly. Hebrews 10:38,39, But My righteous one will live by faith; and if he draws back, I have no pleasure in him. But we are not those who draw back and are destroyed, but those who have faith and obtain life.” Now there’s the kind of promise you are looking for. Keep on plowing.
Read through the Bible in a year: John 5:19-47; 1 Chronicles 20:1-22:1; Zechariah 8;
Read through the New Testament and Proverbs: Proverbs 23, Matthew 27:34-66, 1 Corinthians 10
The sum of Thy Word is Truth Psalm 119:160