Proverbs 5:15–17 • Solomon has spent an entire chapter painting the strange woman as dark as he can. Now in verse 15, he pivots — because you can't scare a man away from sin. You have to draw him to something better.

⛪ Preached at Pilgrim Baptist Church • Cookeville, TN • May 17, 2026.

📚 Part of our verse-by-verse expository series through Proverbs

There was a man who grew up near a freshwater spring on his grandfather's land — cold, clear, running year-round. When he got married, he stopped tending the path to it. The brush grew over the trail. And one day on his way to work, he passed a creek. It looked cool in the summer. At first he just stopped to look. Then one day he drank from it. The water was muddy and dirty. But the path to the spring was overgrown. A man will drink what is close before he will drink what is clean.

That's the sermon. The devil doesn't need to light a fire in your heart. He just needs to put something dirty close enough to reach. Proximity will get you before passion ever does. Solomon's answer isn't a fence — it's a well worth coming home to. Tend your marriage. Drink deliberately. Because thirst is a liar, and the mirage always looks real in the desert.

This expository message works through Proverbs 5:15–17 and reveals:

• Why Solomon can't just scare a man away from the strange woman — he has to draw him to something better

• The wife as a sealed fountain and enclosed garden (Song of Solomon 4:12)

• Why the sealed garden isn't stuck — sealed means safe

• The cistern vs. the well: stored history vs. living spring — and what both picture in a marriage

• Why thirst is a liar and the command to drink deliberately

• The difference between a wife who loves and a strange woman who performs

• The plural fountains of verse 16 — your children are not your legacy, they're his army

• Why fatherlessness is not a social problem — it's a sin problem

• "The devil doesn't need passion when he has proximity"

• The woman at the well (John 4) — Jesus as the living water you've been searching for

• Isaiah 53:10 — "He shall see his seed": every soul that drinks becomes a child of God

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