Proverbs 10:23
Carrying out a wicked scheme is enjoyable to a fool,
and so is wisdom for the one who has discernment.
It’s fun to be wise. All the cool kids are wise these days. I know you want to be too. The only disadvantage is you don’t get to do your evil-plan laugh. If you didn’t get that veiled “Friends” reference, perhaps you’re not as old or cool as me.
Have you ever tried to plan a surprise party? If the person you were trying to plan it for is very observant, chances are they might have picked up on something that you were doing. Perhaps it’s because it’s unnatural to do surprise parties. I tried to do one for my wife once. She doesn’t like surprises. So, when she noticed that I was trying to pick up the house and get everything around the house nice and clean, she knew I was up to something. She is awesome at the cleaning, and pretty much does most of it, so when I was doing it she had to figure that something was up.
Anyway, she pretty much figured out that people were coming over. But along the way I had to tell a few lies to her. Especially when she was figuring out that something was going on, I really had to step up the lies about it. Which is all the more reason not to do surprise parties. Unless you’re really good at hiding things. My wife pulled together a surprise party for me without me knowing one thing. I don’t know what that says about me.
If you’re not picking up on it, I didn’t enjoy the process much. Maybe it’s because I’m wise. I doubt that. I do know that I didn’t really enjoy having to tell lies along the way to try to cover things up. And for that, I’m glad. I don’t want to be comfortable telling lies.
And I certainly don’t want to find pleasure in carrying out a wicked scheme, as a fool would do.
Instead, I want to find my pleasure in being wise and walking this way. And I think that’s what we’re going to notice as we all start walking like that. I think we will see that the ways of the wise are enjoyable. When we start living rightly, we will find true joy and pleasure in it. It may seem hard at first to go against the ways we have been taught to think, but once we get over that, it’s going to be joyous.
Why will it be fun? Because the proverious life isn’t set up to torture us, ultimately, it’s set up to free us from the bondage of foolishness. When we are living as a fool we can’t see outside our own little world, but when we start to become wise, we begin to see life from a totally different perspective. We look back on our foolish ways with disgust and spite. For now we see that the way we are living is actually freedom. And in that freedom there is joy!
