What an important observation we come to today. How many painful events could have been avoided, were this passage taken seriously? As we think about the text, it is not limited to instruction that comes from your father, but from those who are older and have walked in wisdom. One of our biggest hindrances to this is that we love the idea of autonomy. For some of us, having an individual confront us with the possibility that we haven’t thought through all of the possibilities is more than we are willing to accept. If we are not careful, we can allow our craving to appear wise to drive us to foolishness. It is important to realize that most of the time we have seemingly legitimate reasons for disregarding the instruction of others. A very common, and yet very foolish reason for this is because we convince ourselves that “they just don’t understand”. While there may times where this is true, many times it is not. We love to convince ourselves that we are special and unique and endowed with special and unique circumstances. This line of thinking is par for the course in fools of all ages. The fact is, God uses older, wiser individuals to impart wisdom to us, if we will listen. Iron can only sharpen iron when the two pieces come into contact with one another. How will you respond to instruction today? Will you choose to be a fool or to be wise?