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Proverbs 5:10 · World English Bible

Proverbs 5:10 Meaning Lest Strangers Feast on Your Wealth

lest strangers feast on your wealth, and your labors enrich another man’s house.

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What does Proverbs 5:10 mean?

The mind's true wealth is its capacity to love and to see innocence, and the ego spends this on nothing, filling a house that gives back only emptiness. Every effort made in the service of separation enriches a stranger, for the ego is a stranger to the mind's own nature and can never be made at home in it.

From the Christian Psychology reading below.

Proverbs 5:10 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Christian Psychology

The mind's true wealth is its capacity to love and to see innocence, and the ego spends this on nothing, filling a house that gives back only emptiness. Every effort made in the service of separation enriches a stranger, for the ego is a stranger to the mind's own nature and can never be made at home in it. The labour feels endless because it is poured where nothing can hold it.

Bring the same energy to forgiveness and it returns at once. What was spent on a stranger was always meant for love.

Strangers: thoughts of separation that are alien to the mind's real nature, taking its gifts and returning nothing. The house of a stranger: the ego's project, where all the mind's effort disappears because it rests on emptiness.

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Christian Psychology lens

Live Proverbs 5:10 today

  1. Look at where your last hour actually went, and ask if you would buy that hour again at the same price. No scolding, just an honest look.
  2. Give one person today the attention you were about to spend on a stranger's post. A real question and a real listen costs less than you think.
  3. When you catch yourself building a case against someone in your head, put that same energy into imagining why they did it. The second one gives something back.

Where am I pouring myself out and getting nothing back?

The same truth in other traditions

Tao Te Ching 44

The one who spends themselves chasing more is always poor. Knowing what is enough, you already have it, and the spending stops.

Stoicism · Seneca

We act as if time were cheap, and it is the one thing we cannot be repaid for. Count what your days are going to, not just your money.

Buddhism · right livelihood

Effort poured into what harms returns nothing you can keep. The same effort, turned toward what helps, comes back the moment it is given.

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