Proverbs 5:15-19

Now the chapter turns, and this is where it stops being a warning and becomes a gift. God's answer to the counterfeit is not a cold shower. It is the real thing: married love, celebrated without one ounce of embarrassment.

The picture is water in a dry land. In Solomon's world, a well was a family's most guarded possession — privately owned, jealously protected, sometimes literally sealed to keep it pure. "Drink waters out of thine own cistern" — your marriage is your own well: fenced, sealed, yours. The deepest pleasures God gives in this life are not the public ones; they spring up inside a guarded boundary. The old poet Herbert saw the logic of the fence perfectly: if God had made all things common, man would have built fences; since God built the fence, man breaks it and "every ground will plough." The fence is not where God ended your freedom. It is where He concentrated your joy. As one old Scot put it: God made the family; man made the casino.

And what does verse 18 actually command? Not "tolerate the wife of thy youth." Not "provide for her." "REJOICE with the wife of thy youth." Then verse 19 goes further than most preachers will: be satisfied — filled, like a man drinking his fill — and "be thou ravished always with her love." Ravished: carried away, intoxicated, beside himself. God commands a man to stay drunk on his own wife. That is in the Bible, in the Authorized Version, on purpose. The Lord who built marriage built the delight into it, and He is not glorified by a husband treating His gift like a chore. He hewed that cistern, gave it to you, and filled it — and when you draw out of it what He put in, you receive from Him and give Him the glory. Here is the hinge of the whole chapter: it is not the having of a wife that guards a man; it is the loving of her. A married man whose heart is at the office, the screen, or the gym is standing at the strange woman's end of the street already — because restless dissatisfaction at home is the recruiting ground for everything in verses 3 through 14. Tend the well and the counterfeit loses its customer.

So tend it. The old preachers got wonderfully practical here, and their list hasn't aged a day. Because the stream is so pure, small drops discolor it: the husband's cutting remark about his wife in front of the children "stirs the mud at the bottom for many days." The evenings always spent elsewhere. On her side, the constant drip of sharp, discontented words — "a poisonous acid in the well." None of these are felonies; all of them foul wells. And the converse: courtesy, presence, the soft answer, effort made for each other and not just for company — these keep the water sweet. Verses 16–17 add the overflow: a blessed marriage waters the streets — children, first of all ("let thy fountains be dispersed abroad"), little springs from your spring, carrying the water of a godly home out into a dry town; and hospitality besides, because home-joy hoarded goes stagnant, and the only way to keep it sweet is to let it run over for the good of others.

A word to the single man reading this: this section is not closed to you. It is your blueprint. The verses that tell a husband to drink from his own well tell you the well is worth waiting for, worth choosing carefully ("first choose thy love; then love thy choice"), and worth arriving at undiluted. And to the reader married to hard years rather than honeymoon ones: the command is not "feel lucky" — it is "rejoice with," an action verb, and the watering of a dry well is work God blesses. For all of us, Paul lifts the whole picture one more level: this love is the earthly portrait of "Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it" (Ephesians 5:25). A man learning to cherish his wife is tracing, with a human hand, the love of Christ.