Proverbs - Intelligent Discipline

For receiving intelligent discipline - righteousness, and justice and uprightness. Proverbs 1:3 (DJP)

So ask yourself this: Why would Solomon write a book to give us something we could get easier and better by mystical channels? If the formula for wisdom is "Just add prayer and mystical openness, and pop! wisdom!" - then why waste all the quills and papyrus? Just tell us to go mentally limp, and you will save a few trees... or, rather reeds.

This "intelligent discipline" will not come to the intellectually lazy.  Intelligent discipline becomes ours only as we diligently apply ourselves to obtaining what Yahweh has objectively given, once for all time, in Scripture. To access it, we must open up, bear down, and accept instruction.

God's Wisdom in Proverbs, Dan Phillips, Kress, 2011, pp. 46-47.