Proverbs 5:1-23
October 27, 2024
preached by Pastor Don Willeman
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Time of Reflection Quotations

“But I, miserable young man, supremely miserable even in the very outset of my youth, had entreated chastity of Thee, and said, ‘Grant me chastity and continency, but not yet.’ For I was afraid lest Thou shouldest hear me soon, and soon deliver me from the disease of concupiscence, which I desired to have satisfied rather than extinguished.”

~ The Confessions by Augustine (354-430), bishop in Roman North Africa

“I would do anything for love
I know it’s true and that’s a fact
I would do anything for love
And there’ll never be no turning back.”

~ Meatloaf, “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”

“The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.”

~ G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) in The Illustrated London News, January 9, 1909

“Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.’ Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. …They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess.”

~ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Sermon Passage

Proverbs 5:1-23 (ESV)

¹ My son, be attentive to my wisdom;
incline your ear to my understanding,
² that you may keep discretion,
and your lips may guard knowledge.
³ For the lips of a forbidden woman drip honey,
and her speech is smoother than oil,
⁴ but in the end she is bitter as wormwood,
sharp as a two-edged sword.
⁵ Her feet go down to death;
her steps follow the path to Sheol;
⁶ she does not ponder the path of life;
her ways wander, and she does not know it.

⁷ And now, O sons, listen to me,
and do not depart from the words of my mouth.
⁸ Keep your way far from her,
and do not go near the door of her house,
⁹ lest you give your honor to others
and your years to the merciless,
¹⁰ lest strangers take their fill of your strength,
and your labors go to the house of a foreigner,
¹¹ and at the end of your life you groan,
when your flesh and body are consumed,
¹² and you say, “How I hated discipline,
and my heart despised reproof!
¹³ I did not listen to the voice of my teachers
or incline my ear to my instructors.
¹⁴ I am at the brink of utter ruin
in the assembled congregation.”

¹⁵ Drink water from your own cistern,
flowing water from your own well.
¹⁶ Should your springs be scattered abroad,
streams of water in the streets?
¹⁷ Let them be for yourself alone,
and not for strangers with you.
¹⁸ Let your fountain be blessed,
and rejoice in the wife of your youth,
¹⁹ a lovely deer, a graceful doe.
Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight;
be intoxicated always in her love.
²⁰ Why should you be intoxicated,
my son, with a forbidden woman
and embrace the bosom of an adulteress?
²¹ For a man’s ways are before the eyes of the LORD,
and he ponders all his paths.
²² The iniquities of the wicked ensnare him,
and he is held fast in the cords of his sin.
²³ He dies for lack of discipline,
and because of his great folly he is led astray.