Perfume And Incense Bring Joy To The Heart

Proverbs is not a single sermon written one afternoon. It is a collection, gathered over a long stretch of Israel’s history, and the headings inside it tell you as much. Much of the book is tied to Solomon (Proverbs 1:1), yet chapter 25 opens by saying these are proverbs of Solomon that the men of Hezekiah king of Judah copied out, which places part of the work generations after Solomon himself. So when I read 27:9, I am reading a line that someone thought worth preserving and passing down, because they had watched it prove true in real lives. That settles me. This is not a one-off observation jotted in a margin. It is tested wisdom, the sort that survives because it keeps earning its place. Proverbs sits in what we call the Bible’s wisdom literature, alongside Job and Ecclesiastes, and its aim is wonderfully practical: how do you live well, day by day, under God. A line about friendship is exactly the kind of thing it exists to teach. Chapter 27 leans into that subject especially, circling round again and again to friends and to the people who live closest to us.

The picture in the first half of the verse is chosen with care. In ancient Israel a good scent was not cheap or everyday. Fragrant oils and incense were costly, often imported, and in scripture they keep turning up around worship, hospitality and honour. The same world of holy incense and anointing oil is set out in Exodus 30. So the comparison is doing more than calling counsel pleasant. It is calling it precious, set apart, the sort of thing you do not receive every day. There is craft in the proverb’s shape, too. Hebrew poetry often works by laying two lines side by side so the second answers the first, and that is just what happens here, with the joy of perfume and incense matched to the counsel of a friend. The word I do not want to hurry past is ‘earnest’. This is not idle chatter or easy agreement. Some take it as counsel that comes from deep within a person, weighty and sincere, and that fits the feel of the line, even if I would not press the exact shade of meaning too hard. The sweetness, then, is not in soft words. It is in honest ones, given by someone who has thought and felt their way to them first.

Read the rest of the chapter and the proverb stops looking like it stands alone. Three verses earlier, Proverbs 27:6 calls the wounds of a friend faithful, and a little further on, 27:17 gives the well-known picture of iron sharpening iron. The chapter keeps returning to one idea: love that is willing to be honest does us more good than affection that only flatters. The wider Bible carries this right through. Think of Nathan walking in to confront David (2 Samuel 12), or of Jonathan going to David in the wilderness to strengthen his hand in God (1 Samuel 23:16, one of the cross-references this verse points to). None of those moments were comfortable, and every one of them was a kindness. For me it reaches its deepest note in Jesus, who called his disciples friends and spoke of laying down his life for them (John 15:13, 15). He is the Wonderful Counsellor of Isaiah’s promise (Isaiah 9:6), the one whose word is always for our good. Every honest, loving friend is, in a small way, an echo of him.

I have been on both ends of this verse, and the harder end is giving the counsel, not receiving it. It is so much easier to nod along. When a friend is about to make a choice I quietly think is unwise, the cowardly move, dressed up as kindness, is to say nothing and keep the warmth between us untroubled. The proverb gently refuses to let me off. Yet notice it does not ask me to be blunt, or clever, or right about everything. It asks for counsel that is earnest and friendly, the way a good scent fills a room rather than slapping you in the face. What helps me is to earn the right to say the hard thing by showing up for the easy things first. Then I try to pray before I speak and to pick my moment with some care. I have also learned to stay near the friends who will do this for me, the ones who love me enough to risk my mood. When such a word lands well, it really does lift the heart for days, like perfume on a grey morning.

Honesty on its own is not rare. Plenty of people will tell you exactly what they think, and a few of them seem to enjoy it. Kindness on its own is not rare either. We all know someone so warm they would never dream of saying a hard word. What this verse is reaching for is the unusual person who manages both at the same moment, the friend who tells you the truth and somehow leaves you feeling loved rather than flattened. That is harder than it sounds. On a good day I can usually muster one or the other, and the two together only when I have prayed about it first. Perfume turns out to be a fitting picture, because a lovely scent is honest about something and still welcome. It does not pretend. It simply makes the truth of a room more bearable, sometimes even glad. Counsel offered this way carries the same double note. It does not blur the facts, yet it arrives wrapped in obvious care, so the heart can take it in without bracing for a blow. When you find a friend like that, hold on to them. They are worth more than a shelf of costly bottles.

It is worth going back to that line from earlier in the chapter, because its second half is just as sharp. The wounds of a friend can be trusted, it says, while the eager kisses of an enemy cannot (Proverbs 27:6). Read it slowly and it turns your instincts inside out. The thing that stings may be the love, and the thing that fawns may be the betrayal. Flattery is no small fault in this book. A few chapters on, it warns that whoever flatters a neighbour is spreading a net under their feet (Proverbs 29:5). It feels like affection and works like a snare, because it tells you what you want so that you will think well of the flatterer, not so that you will do well. Honest counsel runs the other way entirely. It will risk your good opinion for the sake of your actual good. Then the chapter gives its famous image of iron sharpening iron (Proverbs 27:17), and I notice it needs two blades and a scatter of sparks to give one of them an edge. Neither piece comes away untouched. That friction, awkward as it is to sit through, is how a true friend leaves us keener than they found us.

I have never actually spotted this verse on a scented candle, so I will not pretend I have. But I can tell you precisely which half would go on the label. Perfume and incense bring joy to the heart. Friend and counsel quietly dropped, because a pleasant room is the easy half to sell and a hard conversation is not. That is not wicked. It is just thin: a line about the cost of honest love shrunk down into a line about nice smells.

The misuse that worries me sits inside church walls rather than in a gift shop. Someone winds up to say something sharp, reaches for this verse, and calls what follows earnest counsel, as though quoting Proverbs first converts criticism into kindness. Earnest is not a licence you issue yourself in the car park beforehand. It is a verdict the other person returns weeks later, once the friendship has held and the word has done them some good. If you need 27:9 to justify what you are about to say, my honest guess is that you have not yet earned the right to say it.

Teach this verse on its own, without leaning on the rest of chapter 27, and I would not open with friendship at all. Start with the smell. That is where the writer starts, and it costs your listeners nothing to agree with you. Everybody in the room knows what a good scent does to a heavy day, and half of them already have a particular one in mind, a grandmother’s kitchen, a church at Christmas.

Then the hinge. In the wording we have it is two small words, so does, and they carry the whole weight of the thing: a jar of costly perfume on one side of the scales, a hard conversation on the other. Most talks I have heard hurry straight past that. The claim being made is far bigger than “honest advice is good for you”. It is that a true word from a friend lands the way a scent lands, in the body, before your mind has caught up and started arguing with it.

Then the last clause pulls the net tight. Not counsel in general. Counsel from a friend. The stranger’s opinion, the consultant’s report, the excellent book somebody lent you, none of it qualifies here, because the sweetness this proverb promises comes out of relationship and not out of information. That is the point I would end on, because it decides whether anyone listening is actually within range of the verse or only admiring it from outside.

This verse belongs in small particular places rather than on a banner. I would write it in a card for someone standing down after years of leading a midweek group, and I would not let it float there on its own. Underneath it I would name the things they actually did: the evening they told you gently that you were burning out, the year they said the true hard thing about your marriage that nobody else would go near. It sits well in a eulogy for a friend of that kind, though I would not read it cold to a room of mixed grief. Perfume and incense beside a coffin need a sentence of explaining, or they come out sounding like a fragrance advert.

Where I would keep it in my pocket: at the top of a difficult one-to-one, where it quietly pre-authorises whatever comes next, and in any church meeting where the loudest voice is dressing a complaint up as earnest counsel. Proverbs 27:9 describes a friendship that already exists. It is not a starting gun for telling a hard truth to someone you barely know.

Chapter 27 opens with a warning not to boast about tomorrow, since you do not know what a day will bring (27:1). That is a proverb about the limits of what any of us can see from inside our own skin. We plan the week as though we had already read it. We have not. Then, further down, the same worry comes back in a gentler key. Proverbs 27:19 sets a face and a heart side by side, and the usual English rendering has water giving a face back to whoever leans over it. The Hebrew there is tightly compressed and I have seen it read more than one way, so I would not build a doctrine on it. Even at its most cautious it says something that unsettles me: I do not have clean access to my own heart. I need a surface outside myself to show it back to me. Set 27:9 inside that and it stops being merely a verse about friendship. The friend who gives earnest counsel is doing in words what the water does in silence. They are the surface I cannot be for myself. And the chapter closes where it began, telling you to know well the state of your flocks (27:23), because riches do not last and attention does. One plea runs the whole length of it: pay attention, because nothing that matters to you, the flock, the friends, your own heart, will announce itself.

For years I read this proverb as settled comfort. Then I sat properly with Job’s friends and saw how badly it can go. Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar travelled a long way to be with a man in ruin, and for seven days said nothing at all (Job 2:13). That silence is the best thing they ever did for him, and I would call it a kind of earnest counsel myself, though that is my reading and not something the book claims. Then they opened their mouths. Chapter after chapter they told Job what they sincerely believed: that this does not fall on the innocent, that he must have sinned, that if he searched himself he would turn up the reason. They were not cruel. They meant every word. And at the end God turns to Eliphaz and tells him that he and his two friends have not spoken of him what is right (Job 42:7). Earnest is not the same as accurate. I cannot unread that sentence now when I come back to Proverbs 27:9. Job’s friends were entirely sincere, and they made a broken man feel worse by insisting his agony had a tidy moral cause. A friend can love you and misread you completely, then hand you their honest, mistaken diagnosis as though it were medicine. That does not break the proverb for me. It tells me the proverb describes earnest counsel when it is also wise, and quietly admits the two do not always travel together.

I want to slow down on the incense, because it carries more weight here than the perfume does. Perfume is worn. Incense is burned, and once it is lit you cannot call it back. It rises, thins, and is gone. Scripture keeps reaching for precisely that to picture prayer: Psalm 141:2 asks for a prayer to go up like incense, and much later John sees golden bowls of incense that are the prayers of the saints (Revelation 5:8). So when Proverbs wants an image for earnest counsel, it lands on the one substance the Bible already spends on words rising to God and being received there. Whoever set down 27:9 lived centuries before John and had nothing of Revelation in view, and I am not claiming some hidden design. The pictures simply rhyme, and the rhyme has stayed with me for years. A friend’s honest word is not merely nice to be given. It is nearer to an offering: lit, handed over, gone up, not coming back to the one who spoke it. Which is part of why it costs the speaker something. You cannot half burn incense. Once the true, hard, loving thing has been said, it is out of your hands, which is where it belonged all along.

Not everyone reading this has had that friend. Some have spent a lifetime among people who only ever said the easy thing, or worse, among people whose honesty was plain unkindness wearing this verse’s clothes. Others had the friend once, heard the true word perfectly clearly, waved it away, and live now inside what followed. I do not think Proverbs 27:9 has much comfort for either, and I will not pretend otherwise. It describes a gift. It does not promise the gift will arrive, and it cannot undo the cost of one refused. Two things I would still say, and neither is a slogan. The first is uncomfortable, and I offer it carefully, because it is not always true and it would be cruel to assume it: sometimes, only sometimes, we teach the people who love us to stop trying, by what we did the last time one of them was honest with us. That is worth sitting with quietly, and you are the only person who can tell whether it fits. Plenty have simply had the bad luck of shallow company, and no amount of self-examination will conjure a friend who was never there. The second is that if you carry the ache of a warning you ignored, this proverb is not scolding you. It was never written to reach backwards. It faces forwards, and it hands you something to become: the friend who says the earnest thing to somebody else, even though nobody ever managed it for you.

Line up a few English Bibles at 27:9 and watch what happens. The first half never moves: perfume, incense, joy, the heart. The second half will not hold still. The wording on this page gives you earnest counsel from a man’s friend, and that is the rendering I have loved for years. Others push the sweetness of a friend forward and locate it in his heartfelt advice, which tilts the emphasis in a way you can feel as you read. And some, following older Greek readings rather than the Hebrew, end up somewhere far darker, with the soul torn rather than gladdened. I do not read Hebrew and I am not going to bluff you about it. What I can tell you is that a verse does not fracture like that unless the line underneath is genuinely hard, and this one is short and compressed even by the standards of a book that loves brevity. The sort of half-line where a translator has to decide what the words are doing before a single word of English can go on the page. I find that steadying rather than alarming. The people who copied this book out and handed it on did not quietly sand down the awkward bits to spare us the trouble. They kept what they had, wrinkles and all, and left their uncertainty showing. Which is, when you sit with it, the very thing the proverb is praising.

• Who has been the friend whose honest word changed the direction I was heading, and have I ever thanked them for it?
• Is there a true and loving thing I have been avoiding saying to someone, and what is the fear underneath my silence?
• Do I drift towards friends who flatter me, or towards the ones who will gently tell me the truth?
• When I remember that Jesus calls me his friend, does it change how I receive his correction through scripture and through other people?

If you want to keep going, you could read more of this book at Proverbs or sit with another verse on friendship over at our topics page.