If you ask what God and the word of God mean by wisdom and folly, the answer will embrace three particulars: on the side of wisdom, these forethought, earnestness, perseverance; on the side of folly, in like manner, these improvidence, irresolution, unsteadiness. Corresponding to these three qualities of the builder are the three conditions of building: (1) To build you must have a plan; (2) building requires toil; (3) The proof of the building is growth. What now, is the house?
I. There is the house of the mind. It is the bounden duty of each one to build on some plan, and to begin early. If a plan is the first condition of building, toil, honest toil, is the second; and perseverance, brave and steadfast, is the third, and the most decisive.
II. The house of the life. Every one of us has a life the most weighty word, the most mysterious possession, the most responsible charge. It is a matter almost of life and death to make choice, amongst many possibilities, of the work which is to fill our lifetime. Wisdom will forecast, even in these things, the plan of her future.
III. We should have missed the very point of the text if we did not see, in the house spoken of, the house of the everlasting hope. Have you so much as settled the plan of this house of the, hope? What is your idea of the thing to be built? Let us not trifle with the house of the great hope. Let us lay deep the foundation, than which no man can really lay any other. Let us seize earnestly, let us hold tenaciously, any fragment of Divine truth which conscience attests and the soul can echo; let us piece each to each, with a new realisation until the whole stands out at last in its breadth and in its satisfaction; at the end of all, God Himself shall consciously enter, and fill the house of our soul's hope with the glorious illumination of His presence.
C. J. Vaughan, Counsels to Young Students,p. 31.
References: Proverbs 14:1-6. R. Wardlaw, Lectures on Proverbs,vol. i., p. 368. Proverbs 14:6.--W. Arnot, Laws from Heaven,1st series, p. 367. Proverbs 14:7. Ibid.,p. 373.Proverbs 14:7-12. R. Wardlaw, Lectures on Proverbs,vol. i., p. 378.