Have you purchased a new daily planner, or a new calendar for your desk or wall? Are you the kind of person who gets a smart, compact pad of paper that will try to teach you a “Word of the Day” or “Chinese Character of the Day”?
We love the chance to learn something new each day. And the start of a new year is the perfect opportunity to cast our eyes on some new avenue of information.
What if this year, you choose to get more familiar with something very, very old?
I challenge you to make 2023 a year of Proverbs.
These are often chapters of our Bible that we studied a lot as children, but possibly haven’t looked at in great depth for a long time. We may not have ever studied them systematically. We may be more familiar with sayings like “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” than we are with the ancient proverbs that God has sent us from heaven for our success.
The goal of this project is to become more familiar with proverbs and to daily meditate on truths that will change our ideas about things that are fundamental to our everyday life: things like communication, relationships, discipline, money, and work.
The process is simple: read a chapter in Proverbs every day, sequentially, throughout the month. At the beginning of a new month, do it again, becoming more and more familiar with the truths set out in Proverbs, and making connections between the chapters as you read through them again and again.
Each week, I will post short meditations on certain proverbs.
Will you join me in this challenge?
An additional suggestion is to get a set of fine-tipped pens (here’s an Amazon link to the kind I use in my Bible). You may also like gentle highlighters, or colored pencils to mark out recurring themes. These will help you make connections within the same chapter as well as between chapters. If you do not like to mark your Bible, consider printing out the book of proverbs as a study tool that will be useful the entire year. (You can find the text at Biblegateway.com.)
Suggested colors and themes to notice:
Dark green—Words related to pleasantness or abundance (e.g. health, blessings, more, good, better)
Light green—Word related to truth and knowledge (e.g., wisdom, understanding, teaching, doctrine, knowledge, truth, proverbs)
Orange—Words of action (e.g. hear, justice, righteousness, trust, commands, speak, pay attention, guard)
Light blue—Words related to purity and forgiveness (e.g., water, life, salvation, cleanse, forgive)
Red—Words of warning and sin (e.g. foolishness, do not, death, scoffer, trouble)
Pink—Words related to love, family, friendship, joy (e.g. wife, brother, delight)
Finally, if you would like a journal for making additional notes, I have created a resource to accompany you for the 12 months of this process.
This journal is available in paperback on Amazon.*
