Proverbs 19:17-21

Stop and feel the staggering exchange in this verse. When you have pity on the poor, God counts it as a loan made to Him — the Lord of heaven stoops to become the poor man's surety and takes the debt onto Himself. The poor man's hand is the treasury of Christ. No pagan moralist ever produced a motive for kindness equal to this; it is enough to open the tightest fist. What you put in that hand, you have lent to God, and He always repays — and if He does not repay in money, He pays in something incomparably better (a saint might be harmed by being repaid in cash, when what his soul needed was the discipline of going without). But guard the verse from the merit-mongers: this is not buying God's favor. It is He who puts the desire into your heart in the first place, and then graciously accepts the act as though it were spotless. Grace from first to last — and an open hand is simply faith with skin on.

Discipline your child while there is hope — early, while the twig still bends — and do not let his crying stop you from doing what love requires. The woodman can bend the young sapling; he cannot turn the oak after fifty years. There is far more real mercy in what looks like harshness than in a false tenderness that ruins the child — sparing the rod is how parents make themselves miserable. But read the second half carefully, because it fences the rod on the other side too: "let not thy soul spare for his crying" warns against the parent's softness, but Scripture equally warns against the parent's temper — do not poison discipline with raw anger, do not go so far as to crush the child; correction driven by revenge is not correction. Parents who use the rod in a rage need a rod to their own backs. The model is our Father, who chastens "while there is hope," in love, never willingly afflicting (Lamentations 3:33). Discipline betimes, and discipline calm.

The hot-tempered man must be left to bear the consequences of his temper, because if you keep bailing him out you only have to do it again — and each rescue makes the next explosion bigger. The undisciplined child of verse 18 grows into exactly this man of great wrath, and punishment grows out of his sin like a plant from its seed, until "he who acted as a brute must suffer as a man." A man of great wrath is a man of little happiness. Sometimes the kindest thing is to stop catching him when he falls and let the fall teach him. Your worst enemies are the passions of your own heart.

Take advice now so that you will be wise at the end — for childhood and youth are vanity, and the great regret of the foolish is Moses' lament, "Oh, that they were wise... that they would consider their latter end!" (Deuteronomy 32:29). A little wisdom is a very great attainment, and a Christian must live and die learning. The time to gather wisdom is before you need it.

Here is the rock under the whole chapter. A man's heart is full of plans — and they are not wrong to make — but the counsel of the LORD is the one that stands. Man proposes; God disposes. Pair this with chapter 16: "a man's heart deviseth his way, but the LORD directeth his steps." Together they give you the two great truths of how God runs the world — your real freedom to plan and act, and His supreme control over the outcome — and they exclude both blind fate and blind chance. God's counsel is His plan of the world and of salvation, the one solid reality rising above the endless tangle of human schemes; even the worst of men and the devils themselves are unknowingly employed in carrying out His decrees. He makes the tongue of Caiaphas preach the priesthood and the pen of Pilate publish the kingship of Jesus. So all is clear above, however cloudy it is below; all is calm in heaven, however stormy on earth — one will alone reigns. To make plans and never reckon with that will is practical atheism; to submit your plans to it is the only wisdom — and the only peace.