This verse sits inside the lecture on wisdom handed down, Proverbs 4:1–9, in the grandfather's quoted speech.
Quick answer
Wisdom repays loyalty with protection: stay with her and she preserves you, love her and she keeps you. The relationship runs both directions.
Read the whole unit
The lecture on wisdom handed down is the only one where the father steps aside and lets an older voice speak. He begins by addressing his children, plural this time, and then reaches back a generation: when I was my father's son, tender and the only one in my mother's sight, he taught me too. From verse 4 the lecture becomes a quotation, and as the NKJV punctuates it, the grandfather's voice carries all the way through verse 9. So the son is hearing his grandfather through his father, and that is the lecture's real argument before it makes any other: this wisdom is not one man's opinion. It is an heirloom, tested across generations, handed down the way land or a name is handed down. What the heirloom says is startlingly single-minded. Get wisdom. The verb is the marketplace word for acquiring, and it hammers through the speech four times, joined by warmer verbs as the speech builds: do not forsake her, love her, exalt her, embrace her. Wisdom is spoken of as a bride to be cherished, not a course to be completed, and the promised return runs the same direction: she will preserve, keep, promote, honor, and finally crown. The lecture asks one generation's most valuable possession to become the next generation's first pursuit.
What this verse contributes
This verse turns acquisition into devotion. Wisdom is "her" now, a person to be loved rather than a purchase to be shelved, and the grandfather promises that the love is answered: she will keep you, and the keeping verb is the same guard word the son will hear again at the summit of this chapter, "keep your heart" (4:23). The order is worth noticing. Before the son is ever told to guard anything, he is told that wisdom guards him. Protection in this book is first something wisdom does for her people, and only then something her people learn to do.
Related: Proverbs 2:10–11 · 2 Thessalonians 3:3
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.