Welcome to 31 Days in Proverbs! I am so glad you are here! This is a brand new devotional style Website Blog committed to the study of the Old Testament book of The Proverbs. This post gives you an overview of how this site is arranged and how to follow along.

You can also read “Why Proverbs” here, which gives the short version of how I got started doing word studies in The Proverbs.

Timothy Keller captured the very persistence of The Proverbs in his book, God’s Wisdom for Navigating Life. In this book he wrote, “Indeed, one of the main messages of Proverbs is—you’ve never really thought enough about anything.” Well said! If there is a lofty thought to be considered about life or a topic to be considered about ordinary daily needs and wants; The Proverbs deals with both extremes and everything in between and this amazing biblical text does it in a down to earth style.

The Proverbs is considered one of the poetry books, Hebrew poetry to be exact. It captures our imaginations with its imagery of ants putting sluggards to shame and its parallelisms of good vs evil or wisdom vs foolishness. We smile as we imagine our words being as sweet as a honeycomb and we cringe to think of a beautiful yet foolish woman being compared to a gold ring in a pig’s snout. The Proverbs captures us and challenges us in ways least expected. It is also one of the easiest books of the Bible to read with its short and concise verses. 

However, we must heed the warning of the principal writer of The Proverbs, King Soloman, to not just hear (read) a Proverb, but to discern and to understand. To do that we must take each Proverb in its entirety and in its context within a chapter and then the whole of Proverbs and then within the entire Bible. It is easy and quite tempting to pluck a Proverb out of the whole and arrange it to our liking so we can live any way we want and be no better off than if we read nothing at all.

It takes great effort to treat each Proverb as one piece to an intricate puzzle that must be sorted and arranged together correctly to see clearly the beautiful picture of God’s plan and purpose of our lives. Just as our lives are multidimensional and complex, so are The Proverbs. And just as we don’t appreciate when someone makes a judgement about us based on one piece of who they see, we do a horrible disservice when we single out one Proverb and then assume it reveals the whole dimension of a particular topic or theme.

31 Days in Proverbs is a series of blog posts for each month of the year, with each month focusing on a single word and its variations in a devotional study style. My goal in each post is to take you, the reader, through Proverbs each day looking for the particular word/s for that thirty-one-day cycle. As a reader of these posts, you will notice that a certain word or theme may not appear until chapter two or beyond, so some chapters will be skipped completely in the daily posts. Some Proverb chapters will use the word/s multiple times and thus there will be several posts from that chapter. That is to be expected. Each month’s worth of posts is not exhaustive in scope, but rather presents thirty-one examples of each of the selected word/s or theme of words and then expounds the word/s in a devotional study style. 

Readers are encouraged to read a Proverbs chapter a day starting with Proverbs chapter one on the first day of the month and continue numerically. While you read intentionally look for the word or words of the theme for that month. It might seem a bit confusing at first, but you will catch on. 

In one year, together, we will have read through The Proverbs 12 times and studied 12 word/s…themes…topics! Pretty Amazing!

Don’t Panic if you miss or take a break! You can jump in anytime and begin with any blog post. Each post is self containing in its main topic.

The purpose of each months posts is to be a guide through The Proverbs and to assist you, the reader, in searching through this rich book by digging deeper into the selected word and its variations so you may know the depths of God’s love and grace and mercy!

(Scripture quoted on this site are taken from the NASB 1995 version unless otherwise noted.)