This verse closes the saying in Proverbs 23:22–25.
Quick answer
The saying ends as a charge to the son: live so that your father and mother are glad, and the mother who bore you rejoices. Their joy is put partly in your hands.
Read the whole unit
Verses 22 through 25 form a frame of parents around the command to buy truth, and this verse closes it with the mother, matching the mother of verse 22: the one not to be despised in her old age becomes the one rejoicing.
Read the whole unit
A four-verse saying about honoring the people who formed you and the truth they handed you. It opens with a command spanning a lifetime, listen to the father who begot you, do not despise your mother when she is old (v. 22), sets its famous centerpiece, buy the truth and do not sell it (v. 23), and closes with the payoff seen from the parents' side: the father of the righteous greatly rejoices; let the mother who bore you be glad (vv. 24–25). The structure is a frame: parents at the beginning, parents at the end, and truth in the middle, because in this saying the two are one subject. The truth a son was taught and the parents who taught it are honored or despised together, and a child's wisdom is the one gift that reaches a parent's old age.
What this verse contributes
This verse contributes the turn from description to charge. Verse 24 said what a wise child produces in a father; this verse tells the son to go produce it: "let them be glad." The grammar hands him agency over someone else's joy, which is the saying's closing gift and weight at once. And the last word returns to "her who bore you," the woman whose stake in you is bodily and original. The Thirty Sayings do not end their family teaching with duty; they end it with the picture of a rejoicing mother, which is duty's whole point.
Related: Proverbs 17:6 · Proverbs 31:28
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.