Billy Sticker explores two Proverbs verses about blessing and hardship. A soft heart that worships God brings blessing, while a hardened heart brings trouble. Faithful choices and hard work yield profit, as Proverbs 14:23 says: hard work yields profit.
Hey guys, Billy Sticker here and was reading through Proverbs this morning and a couple of verses stood out to me. I wanted to share. This is actually out of the NIV 84 translation. Verse 14 says, Blessed is the man who always fears the Lord, but he who hardens his heart falls into trouble. In the New Testament, whenever Jesus was being tempted by Satan, Jesus quoted Old Testament scripture and he replaced the word fear with the word worship. When he said, you know, you should worship the Lord your God and no other. Well, I think it's good for us to do that throughout, you know, whenever we look at some of the Old Testament scriptures, whenever it says we should fear the Lord, I like looking at it like that. We should worship the Lord and doing the same thing. Here it says, blessed is the man who always worships the Lord, but he who hardens his heart will fall into trouble. I think that's simply saying that when you have that reverence, you have that respect and that you're always God conscious that that's just being blessed, that God can bless you whenever you're in that mindset. But when you start to harden your heart, then some of that's just shut off. Verse 20, it says, a faithful man will be richly blessed. And I think that says a couple of things. One, being faithful, just making good choices, just doing what's right. And I think it can also mean being diligent. The daily diligence, doing things daily, that's going to get you to where you want to go. Proverbs 14:23 says, all hard work brings a profit. So not just some of it, but doing things, being faithful in, working hard, and you'll be richly blessed. Anyway, just a couple of verses I want to share this morning.
