This verse sits inside the lecture on wisdom handed down, Proverbs 4:1–9, in the grandfather's quoted speech.
Quick answer
Lift wisdom high and she lifts you; embrace her and she brings you honor. What you promote ends up promoting you.
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 states the exchange at the heart of the speech: rank confers rank. To exalt wisdom is to give her the seat your life actually obeys, above appetite, above ambition, above the crowd's opinion, and the grandfather testifies that she repays the seating arrangement with promotion of her own kind. The principle cuts both ways and explains many lives: whatever a man exalts shapes what he becomes, and plenty of men are made small by the smallness of what they hold highest. "Embrace" keeps the marriage warmth of verse 6; this is loyalty, not technique.
Related: Proverbs 3:35 · 1 Samuel 2:30
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.