Proverbs 5:11-14 (NIV) 11 At the end of your life you will groan,
when your flesh and body are spent.
12 You will say, “How I hated discipline!
How my heart spurned correction!
13 I would not obey my teachers
or turn my ear to my instructors.
14 And I was soon in serious trouble
in the assembly of God’s people.”
Proverbs 5:11-14 (NLT) 11 In the end you will groan in anguish
when disease consumes your body.
12 You will say, “How I hated discipline!
If only I had not ignored all the warnings!
13 Oh, why didn’t I listen to my teachers?
Why didn’t I pay attention to my instructors?
14 I have come to the brink of utter ruin,
and now I must face public disgrace.”
Deuteronomy 32:29 If only they were wise and would understand this and discern what their end will be!
Isaiah 47:7 You said, 'I will be queen forever.' You did not take these things to heart or consider their outcome.
If you don't listen to good advice and stay away from the strange woman who entices you sexually, you will one day come to the end of the matter, you will be in mental anguish, bad health and have squandered your blessings.
This "groaning" is actually a loud wail of despair which indicates mental suffering. "Your flesh and body" indicates the whole of your fleshly, earthly body will be consumed in diseases that had their start in your debauchery. It could be sexual diseases, the wasting from drugs and alcohol, premature aging, hepatitis and infections, etc. All the diseases that come from a risk filled lifestyle. You wasted the good health God gave you and abused your body and now the consequences have set in. You have wasted the intelligence that God gave you and now your mind reels in mental anguish and your memory is shot. You wasted the money and resources God blessed you with by spending them on drugs, alcohol, smoking, wild women (or men), parties and now you don't have enough to live on. You have wasted the opportunities God blessed you with in education. A free public (or private) school education, maybe college education and you squandered those opportunities in order to spend your time by partying.
I think of so many young people who finally graduate high school. Not everyone in the world has that opportunity. Many never receive any education, much less all the way through high school. Then these immature teenagers receive scholarships or their parents pay for them to go on to college! What a blessing because not everyone gets that chance! I didn't! But so many of these young people only see college as a chance to get out of the house and move into a teenage "heaven" full of parties, drinking, sex and wild living. They can't keep up their grades, they flunk expensive classes, they don't take the opportunity to learn and educate themselves... they've wasted the expensive opportunity God gave them. If they ever do graduate, they still have so little education for the money they spent because they wasted the opportunity to learn!
Maybe they are offered a good job. But they waste that opportunity because they have no work ethic. They come in late, leave early, steal, take every opportunity to avoid actually working, and before long they lose their job. A waste of a blessing.
Maybe they find a good person to marry but they waste that wonderful opportunity to have a good marriage because they either won't marry them or they marry them and run around on them, partying and abusing their trust and it ends in divorce. How many expensive weddings have parents given their children only to see the marriage end in divorce. A selfish, immature, spoiled brat cannot function in a long-term relationship because, in their mind, it's all about them.
In the end, these people will look back on all the missed opportunities and all the squandered and wasted blessings. Their life is a path of trash. They've trashed all the good that came their way: wadded it up and thrown it on the ground as just so much trash. Why would God continue to give you any blessings, when you've been so ungrateful and treated His largesse as just so much trash?
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Thank God, He is merciful and gracious, slow to anger! He is holding out the biggest blessing of all... Jesus Christ! With repentance, Jesus forgives and washes all the sin away. You may still have to deal with the consequences, but you can be forgiven and start again. Please, never forget that! God is holding out that forgiveness, in a free offer of salvation, until your last breath. Once you've died, the offer is no longer on the table. But He will offer it to you all the way to the end. But don't take that for granted because you never know when your end will be. A plane could fall out of the sky right now and land on your house and your life is instantly over. You had no time to accept Jesus Christ. So best to accept Him now.
For all my studies on Proverbs click HERE.
when your flesh and body are spent.
12 You will say, “How I hated discipline!
How my heart spurned correction!
13 I would not obey my teachers
or turn my ear to my instructors.
14 And I was soon in serious trouble
in the assembly of God’s people.”
Proverbs 5:11-14 (NLT) 11 In the end you will groan in anguish
when disease consumes your body.
12 You will say, “How I hated discipline!
If only I had not ignored all the warnings!
13 Oh, why didn’t I listen to my teachers?
Why didn’t I pay attention to my instructors?
14 I have come to the brink of utter ruin,
and now I must face public disgrace.”
Deuteronomy 32:29 If only they were wise and would understand this and discern what their end will be!
Isaiah 47:7 You said, 'I will be queen forever.' You did not take these things to heart or consider their outcome.
If you don't listen to good advice and stay away from the strange woman who entices you sexually, you will one day come to the end of the matter, you will be in mental anguish, bad health and have squandered your blessings.
This "groaning" is actually a loud wail of despair which indicates mental suffering. "Your flesh and body" indicates the whole of your fleshly, earthly body will be consumed in diseases that had their start in your debauchery. It could be sexual diseases, the wasting from drugs and alcohol, premature aging, hepatitis and infections, etc. All the diseases that come from a risk filled lifestyle. You wasted the good health God gave you and abused your body and now the consequences have set in. You have wasted the intelligence that God gave you and now your mind reels in mental anguish and your memory is shot. You wasted the money and resources God blessed you with by spending them on drugs, alcohol, smoking, wild women (or men), parties and now you don't have enough to live on. You have wasted the opportunities God blessed you with in education. A free public (or private) school education, maybe college education and you squandered those opportunities in order to spend your time by partying.
I think of so many young people who finally graduate high school. Not everyone in the world has that opportunity. Many never receive any education, much less all the way through high school. Then these immature teenagers receive scholarships or their parents pay for them to go on to college! What a blessing because not everyone gets that chance! I didn't! But so many of these young people only see college as a chance to get out of the house and move into a teenage "heaven" full of parties, drinking, sex and wild living. They can't keep up their grades, they flunk expensive classes, they don't take the opportunity to learn and educate themselves... they've wasted the expensive opportunity God gave them. If they ever do graduate, they still have so little education for the money they spent because they wasted the opportunity to learn!
Maybe they are offered a good job. But they waste that opportunity because they have no work ethic. They come in late, leave early, steal, take every opportunity to avoid actually working, and before long they lose their job. A waste of a blessing.
Maybe they find a good person to marry but they waste that wonderful opportunity to have a good marriage because they either won't marry them or they marry them and run around on them, partying and abusing their trust and it ends in divorce. How many expensive weddings have parents given their children only to see the marriage end in divorce. A selfish, immature, spoiled brat cannot function in a long-term relationship because, in their mind, it's all about them.
In the end, these people will look back on all the missed opportunities and all the squandered and wasted blessings. Their life is a path of trash. They've trashed all the good that came their way: wadded it up and thrown it on the ground as just so much trash. Why would God continue to give you any blessings, when you've been so ungrateful and treated His largesse as just so much trash?
Thank God, He is merciful and gracious, slow to anger! He is holding out the biggest blessing of all... Jesus Christ! With repentance, Jesus forgives and washes all the sin away. You may still have to deal with the consequences, but you can be forgiven and start again. Please, never forget that! God is holding out that forgiveness, in a free offer of salvation, until your last breath. Once you've died, the offer is no longer on the table. But He will offer it to you all the way to the end. But don't take that for granted because you never know when your end will be. A plane could fall out of the sky right now and land on your house and your life is instantly over. You had no time to accept Jesus Christ. So best to accept Him now.
- There were three things mentioned in these verses that happen when you don't follow the good advice of godly wisdom. What were they?
- What are some of the reasons you can think why young people refuse to follow godly wisdom and disobey God? Are the reasons worth it?
- Can you think why there would be the loud wail of mental anguish when someone doesn't follow godly wisdom?
- Losing your health to risky life choices is sad when God warned you about it all along. Have you ever suffered in your body due to disobeying God and not following godly wisdom? If you haven't, aren't you glad you didn't?
- Did anything come to your mind when we talked about wasting and squandering God's gifts and blessings? Do you need to repent of doing any of that yourself? If so, God is ready to forgive. Go to Him. Do you know someone who is doing that now and needs your prayers?
For all my studies on Proverbs click HERE.