This verse opens the saying about drunkards and gluttons, Proverbs 23:19–21.
Quick answer
Before naming the danger, the father asks for two things: hearing and steering. "Guide your heart in the way" makes the son the active pilot of his own desires, which is exactly the capacity the coming verses will test.
Read the whole unit
The saying moves from this appeal to the command (do not mix with the party crowd, v. 20) to the outcome (poverty and rags, v. 21). The appeal comes first because the command will be useless to a drifting heart.
Read the whole unit
A three-verse saying against joining the party crowd, and the first of this chapter's two drinking texts. The structure is a father's appeal (v. 19), the command with its company named, winebibbers and gluttonous eaters (v. 20), and the economic forecast (v. 21): the drunkard and the glutton come to poverty, and drowsiness dresses a man in rags. The saying's concern is not pleasure but trajectory; it watches the table companions a young man chooses and reads his future in them. Its warning is sociological before it is moral: you become your banquets. The heavier, more compassionate treatment of drunkenness itself waits at 23:29–35; this saying does the earlier, preventive work of choosing company.
What this verse contributes
This verse contributes the saying's verb: guide. A heart, in the sages' picture, is not a weathervane that merely registers where the wind is; it can be steered, set on a road, kept there. That assumption dignifies the son before the warning arrives. He is addressed not as an appetite waiting to be captured by whatever company sits down next to him, but as a steersman who can choose his way, and therefore his table.
Related: Proverbs 4:23 · Proverbs 14:15
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.