Pastor Tim continues our series in Proverbs, considering what the Proverbs tell us about whom we should spend time around.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Good evening, and welcome to Steadfast. I’m so glad to be here with you once again as we continue our series, Proverbially Speaking. Tonight we’re going to be thinking about whom we spend our time with. Who are the people that we keep company with? Scripture has a lot of things to say about this, and it’s something that probably all of us are going to wrestle with if we seek to be faithful to what Scripture calls us to do.
So let’s go ahead and come before our God, ask for His guidance, and then dig right in to Proverbs. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for your Word, and thank you for these friends that you have brought here to share in the study of your Word. It’s such a joy for us to get to dig into your Word together. Lord, would you guide us tonight as we think about how you call us to interact with other people, whom you call us to spend our time around, and how you call us to show your love in the world, that we might do it, that we might follow your will more perfectly. Through the power of your Holy Spirit, we pray, in Jesus’ name, amen.
It’s an age-old dilemma, isn’t it? Whom should we spend our time with? We have a limited amount of time, and we also know that different people influence us in different ways. What are we called to do? Let’s hear what it says in Proverbs, starting in verse 20 of chapter 13.
It says, “Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.” Who should we spend time with? Scripture says we should spend time with those who have wisdom, and from Proverbs, we see throughout it, the picture of wisdom is spending time with those who delight in the word of God, and God’s wisdom. A fool is the one who rejects God’s wisdom.
As I was thinking about this proverb, I found myself thinking of an old seminary friend. He used to be someone that, when we would talk, he would be thinking very deeply about scriptures and asking great questions about them and how to apply them in life, thinking deeply about what God’s word had to say about different things. But I’ve noticed something that’s changed over the years in him.
He’s serving as an employee at a Christian school now, but you’d never guess it from the things that he shares and posts and talks about. He reads theologians, but not ones that are thinking deeply about what scripture says we should do on things, but rather those who question scripture and want to impose their own will upon it. He posts about movies and TV shows, but they’re ones that it’s almost hard for me to get my mind around that a Christian would be watching because they’re so contrary to what God values. He tweets about politicians, but they’re ones that often mock what God has to say. But he says he’s a Christian. He works at a Christian school. How does this fit together?
And what’s striking is the more he spends time immersed in culture and around people and reading people who oppose what God says, the more he himself becomes like them. Scripture calls us not to do that. Scripture calls us to value God’s word, of course, and also to seek to be around people who instill God’s wisdom in us.
And my friend’s story isn’t the story that’s unique to him. It’s the story that we see repeated in scripture because many of the people in scripture had the same struggle. For example, let’s turn for a moment to the story of Samson, a story that we see come up oftentimes in children’s Sunday school lessons, and we sort of simplify it, but Samson was more than a guy that had long hair. Samson was a man who was set apart by God before birth to proclaim his kingdom, to proclaim who God is, and to defend God’s people.
Take a look at what we see in Judges 13 where an angel appears and speaks to Samson’s parents when they first learn that Samson is to be expected. The angel says, “For behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor shall come upon his head, for the child shall be a Nazarite to God, and he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines.”
So Samson’s story is one that’s set from before birth. He has a mission, a mission from God. He is going to be someone who is going to defend the Lord’s people. And he’s going to be set apart. He’s going to have a special set of rules, Nazarite vows, that certain people in scripture would take to set themselves apart as wholly as they represented God to the world.
What do we see in Samson’s life? If you look at most of it, his life isn’t the life of someone we would think of as deeply holy and pious, someone who was seeking after God’s will, but rather someone who got very enmeshed in the world and sought after the world’s will. For example, consider just a few verses later, we jump ahead a number of years and we see Samson coming to his parents and he says he wants to marry this woman from the Philistines, the very people that Samson was supposed to defend Israel against.
And it says his mother and father said to him, “Is there not a woman among the daughters of your relatives or among all our people that you must go to take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?” But Samson said to his father, “Get her for me, for she is right in my eyes.” Samson bought into the culture and he looked at this dominant Philistine culture and he looked at the people in it and he wanted to be essentially a part of it. He wasn’t concerned with trying to follow what God said was important. He was concerned with what was right in his eyes.
I think we see that time and again, not only in scripture, but in our own culture, in our own lives, because we desperately want to do what’s right in our own eyes. And oftentimes that means looking more like the world.
My friend I shared about, I think part of the reason he wants to do that is if you acknowledge the things of the world and you post about the cool TV shows that are patently offensive but are popular, or you talk about the theologians that are questioning scripture, suddenly you get into certain circles and you seem like someone who’s in the know and stylish rather than some old fuddy-duddy that just wants to read God’s word.
In our culture, wanting to actually follow God’s word and be faithful to it doesn’t generally make people think about how wonderful you are and how trendy you are and how great you are. It makes people think, “Oh, you’re one of those people.” Maybe Samson felt a little of that, not necessarily exactly the same way, but the Israelites were looked at as these weird people with this monotheistic God who just had one God they wanted to follow. And the Philistines looked vastly superior in so many ways.
And so Samson over his life, at time and time again, compromises himself and becomes more and more enmeshed in the culture around him rather than doing what God has set him apart to do. What does it take before Samson can actually fulfill his purpose? It takes him dying. It’s only right before his death he’s been blinded, tied up, thrown in a Philistine prison, made a mockery of because here he is, this once great, strong, famous warrior who now has lost his strength. It’s only then he comes before the Lord and asks God to allow him one more time to achieve a victory for his God. Takes him dying.
We see this over and over again in scripture where people who have been given great gifts by God and great opportunities move away from those who would give them wise counsel. They move towards the world and worldly counsel and it tears them apart. Think about Solomon who does so much that is wise and good. He’s been granted great wisdom so that we still associate wisdom with Solomon. But what does he do? We’re told that he goes and marries a bunch of wives from different cultures and takes their gods and follows their customs and ultimately turns his heart from his God.
What do we see as a whole with Israel? Time and again they look at the other nations and say, “Look at how prosperous they are, how appealing their culture is and their technology,” and they say, “Why don’t we follow them a little bit more? Things don’t seem to be going that well for us.” As they do, they turn from the Lord and they ultimately degrade themselves because of it.
And scripture here in Proverbs 13:20, when it says that we should seek to be around those who are wise, gives us this challenge: Are we guarding ourselves against worldly influence? Are we guarding ourselves with God’s word and people who will turn us back to God’s word so that we don’t go astray like so many people do? Do we really think that we’re so much wiser and stronger than other people that if we buck the trend and we associate primarily with people who would turn us away from God’s word that we will be able to resist the pull of fitting in, of being like those people, of being appreciated by them because we like the same shows and we do the same things and we hang around with more of the same people?
Where do we compromise? Why do we compromise? I think ultimately because we want to. It sounds appealing. We want to be watching the things that set the trends. We want to be around the people that everyone says you should want to be around. We want to hold the political positions that are going to get people to applaud us. They keep tearing away at us, tearing away at God’s wisdom. And scripture says we shouldn’t do that. Instead, we should walk with the wise.
How do we do that? Do we cut off all the people that don’t presently acknowledge God’s wisdom, that don’t get everything right about God’s wisdom and set up a little community apart? We’ve seen people try that. And we try that in different little ways throughout our general Christian culture. For example, I remember in the church I grew up at, in the youth Sunday school room, they had this big poster up and it had this list of popular musicians of the time. And then next to them, the equivalent Christian musician that you should listen to instead.
It was sort of like going to the store and looking at the store brand and it says, “Compare to,” and it lists the name brand product. And it basically was doing that for a bunch of musicians. If you like this musician, now that you’re a Christian, listen to this musician instead. In a sense, it wasn’t a bad idea to help people understand what Christian musicians had different styles. But oftentimes it’s those sorts of superficial attempts at walking in wisdom that we do instead of the ones that really matter.
Do we need to reject all non-Christian art? Do we need to never watch or listen to anything other than Christian stuff? No, I don’t think that’s the idea of scripture at all. In fact, we see people like the Apostle Paul who can quote Greek poets. Scripture doesn’t say that we should reject even the good of our culture and only do a Christian culture instead. I don’t think that’s the point at all.
Instead, we need to actually use God’s wisdom and ask about the things that we’re consuming and the people we’re spending time with and the things that we’re doing and say, do these mesh with God’s wisdom? Do these things draw me closer to what the Lord would call me to be and to do or do they push me further away? Because when we start to buy into that, well, we will just separate and be around those who will already have everything right and will only be involved in things that already describe everything perfectly and only listen to things that already get absolutely everything about scripture right. For one, we’ve set an impossible standard, but we also end up just being this little community for ourselves and not for the world, not those who speak God’s truth to the world.
It degrades ultimately into this present mess that we find our culture in both on the side of the Christians and the non-Christians where we have this boycott cancel culture where everything’s about taking the people and the things I disagree with and seeking to eliminate them, to boycott them, to ultimately get them thrown out rather than actually speaking about God’s love. We become those who are angry rather than those who are joyful and excited about what God is doing.
And if we speed along in scripture a little bit and we jump to the book of Jonah, we see a man who basically does exactly what I’m describing. You see, scripture calls us to love other people, but Jonah doesn’t really have a lot of love for other people, especially people that are outside of Israel. He goes to the other extreme. While Samson couldn’t get enough of being around the people of the world, Jonah wants nothing to do with them.
And God says he’s going to go to Nineveh and proclaim God’s judgment. Jonah wants to run. Jonah does run. It doesn’t go very well. You might say he had a fishy excuse, but Jonah wants to run because Jonah says, “I don’t want anything to do with those people.” Lord, don’t you know these people are bad news? They persecuted us in Israel. I don’t want anything to do with them. In that, while there’s some truth to what he was thinking and saying, it ultimately loses God’s heart.
Take a look at Jonah chapter 3, verse 9. Jonah says that the reason he didn’t want to go and preach God’s word is he said, “Who knows? God may turn and relent, turn from His fierce anger so that we may not perish,” or rather the people thought that. Jonah also thought that God might do that, though, and that’s what we see next. It says that Jonah was displeased exceedingly, and he was angry. Why was he angry? Because the people heard the judgment of God, and they thought, maybe God will have mercy on us if we respond.
And in fact, that’s why God offers judgment throughout scripture, is to cause people to repent. And Jonah knows that. So Jonah looks at that and is thinking the same thing. He thinks, if I go and preach this, maybe these people that I hate, that I feel like are just totally opposed to everything good and everything wise, they could actually decide to follow God, and they wouldn’t get destroyed.
What does God say in chapter 4, verse 11? He says to Jonah, “And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” What’s God’s question there to Jonah? Yeah, these people are doing really bad things, but they don’t even know their right hand from their left hand. There’s all these creatures that I’ve made there. There’s all these people made in my image. Jonah, shouldn’t I seek to see them come to me?
And all Jonah can think is, “I just want them all to fry. They’re bad. I want nothing to do with them.” That’s not God’s heart. God’s heart isn’t for us to be like Samson and just integrate into the world and become like the world. To love the world as it is and just want to be it. But His call also isn’t to hate the world like Jonah does. What is His call? His call is to love the people in the world as He does, and that’s what we see in the life of Jesus.
For example, take a look at Mark chapter 2. Jesus, it says, went out again beside the sea. And all the crowd was coming to Him, and He was teaching them. And as He passed by, He saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting at the tax booth. He said to him, “Follow Me.” And he rose and followed Him. And as He reclined at a table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and His disciples.
For there were many who followed Him. The scribes and the Pharisees, when they saw that He was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to His disciples, “Why does He eat with tax collectors and sinners?” When Jesus heard it, He said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but the sinners.”
You see, the Pharisees, much like Jonah, got the idea that God calls us to a certain level of holiness, that God has called His people together. And they said, Jesus is flaunting this. He’s hanging out with the worst elements of our society. What’s wrong with this so-called teacher? He doesn’t even know who he should be around. They probably would have applauded Him if He’d been like Jonah, and He’d turned and looked at the sinners and the tax collectors that He was around and constantly proclaimed their judgment, but with a desire that all of them would perish in God’s judgment.
But when they saw Him instead offering forgiveness, offering fellowship, they looked at Him and thought He’s just one of those compromisers like Samson. He’s just going to be one of those people that does all the things that sinners do, that watches all the things that sinners watch, that listens to all the things that sinners listen to. He is no good. He doesn’t care about wisdom. He’s just walking in the way of the fool. But that’s not what the proverb is about. It’s not what Scripture’s overall testimony is about.
You see, what we need to do is not to guard ourselves against people in general, to separate ourselves out into this separate little Christian society, but to guard our hearts so that when we’re around other people, we can show them God’s heart.
Alan P. Ross says that the challenge of this proverb is to examine who is influencing you. Are you allowing God’s Word and the wise to influence you and then you’re spending time with other people and in that showing God’s love and His wisdom to them? Are you spending time around people that don’t know the Lord and allowing them to turn your heart away from the Scriptures? We need to seek wise counsel. That’s at the forefront of this, and we see that in Proverbs 15. It says in verse 22, “Without counsel, plans fail, but with many advisors, they succeed.”
We need to surround ourselves with people whom we can trust, who will always call us back to Scripture and what God values rather than the things of the world. If we’re rooted in that, then we don’t have to worry.
We think about Samson’s challenge. It’s not that he was involved in the Philistine city. It’s that he didn’t care, even when his very wise parents said, “Wait a second, what are you doing?” He just wanted to do whatever was right in his own eyes or what was right in the eyes of the people that he liked to spend time with that weren’t godly.
Who are our closest friends? Whom do we let speak to our hearts? This is the challenge, and certainly it’s the challenge that Samson’s parents give him when they question him trying to marry someone from the Philistines. The idea of being married to someone who doesn’t believe is contrary to Scripture because of a very clear reason. To actually go out and seek to allow someone to have that close of access to us and to be able to speak to us who’s not going to turn us towards God’s wisdom but to something else is dangerous.
And likewise, close friends, advisors, business partners, anyone that we’re going to spend a great deal of time with, anyone that we’re going to allow ultimately to guide us and shape us as we inevitably do in close relationships, these people should be people that we seek out for their wisdom in following the Lord, not in other things. They shouldn’t be people who are great in the eyes of the world but great in the eyes of God.
And when we ignore that, we do so at our peril. But when we instead gather around ourselves people who are wise and will help us to be more godly and more biblical, then when we’re around people who don’t yet know our God, who don’t yet know what His word says, we will be firmly rooted. And if we start to be absorbed into the culture, if we start to turn a blind eye to things, if we start to not listen to what scripture says, we have people who will support us and challenge us and help us. And likewise, we can do the same for them.
It’s why it’s so important that we find ourselves in churches that both say and do what scripture says. Because if we’re going to actually be members someplace, if we’re going to join someplace and be a part of someplace, we need to make sure it actually affirms what God says. And does what God says. Because when we abandon part of that, we’re allowing a deep part of ourselves and our hearts to be misguided or at least pulled in the wrong direction.
Here are two questions we need to ask ourselves. First, whom do I allow an undue influence on my life? Are they my friends? Are they people I work with? Are they a church and its leadership that isn’t biblical? There’s a whole bunch of different things we could fill into this blank, but whom is it? Because probably all of us have a blind eye to certain people in our lives who really shouldn’t have as close of access to our heart and our mind as we allow them. We should ask that question. And we should make sure that we’re walking in the way of the wise.
But then there’s a second question we need to ask as well. Whom have I avoided being influenced to? Whom have I walled off because I’m so busy trying to walk in the way of the wise, I forgot that one of the callings of the wise person is to proclaim God’s love. Whom am I being more like Samson towards, in other words, and who am I being more like Jonah towards? And oftentimes in one person, we can be doing both. We can be just like Samson, engaging in things that are displeasing to God, absorbing and consuming culture that is displeasing to God, while at the same time cutting other people off because we’re so busy thinking about how they aren’t measuring up to what God would want.
And in all things, of course, we’re called instead to follow Jesus. Jesus came into this house of this tax collector viewed as someone who would have been a deep sinner because he was aligned with Rome against the people of Israel. And worse than that, he would generally take money for himself in a corrupt fashion as part of his tax collecting. But Jesus looked at his heart and He saw someone who desired to turn from that and to start to walk in the way of the wise.
Jesus invited him to follow Him. And as He invites us to follow Him, too, He calls us to do the same, to help those who aren’t yet walking in the way of the wise, to walk in that way, while making sure that we root ourselves in people who are already walking that way. And to consume things that are already rooting us to walk in that way, so that we genuinely are leading people closer to Jesus and not simply being dragged to and fro, either away from people or just towards whatever people want.
I’m reminded of what a friend of mine once told me about curry. I have to confess, I’ve started to find certain things in Indian cuisine and Thai cuisine that I can appreciate, but we haven’t always had the best relationship. And I remember my first introduction to Thai food, it was this very, very strongly curried item. I don’t remember what it was anymore. Other than that, I had the hardest time getting through it and a friend of mine had met me at this restaurant and he was so excited to introduce me to this place and so I just had to grin and bear it and try to eat this curry thing that I could barely stomach.
And so when another friend invited me to go get some Thai food, he must have saw the grimace on my face and he asked me about it and I told him about this experience and he said, “The problem is there are too many people that don’t respect the curry.” Because in his opinion, curry could add wonderful flavor to food, but if you didn’t respect it and you allowed it to take over, it could destroy the food.
In our lives, we need to understand the seasonings that we’re bringing into our lives and certainly going and being with people who don’t yet know Jesus, they can give us great wisdom from their life experience. We can have wonderful relationships, but we need to ask what is the seasoning that’s ultimately seasoning my life? Am I getting enough of God’s goodness and righteousness both from His word and from other believers, people who are wise and knowledgeable, people who have more experience than I do, people who simply have a deep and abiding appreciation for whom God is that when I’m spending time with other people who don’t yet know Him, that seasoning in my life is too embedded, is too marinated in my life that it won’t go away?
Or on the other hand, am I too busy pulling in things from the world, pouring in all these seasonings that I’m really not sure what I’m even doing with because I just want other people to like me? We need to respect the curry. We need to understand how deeply we need God’s wisdom first and foremost so that when we’re around other people, they see the seasoning of God’s love rather than us being seasoned by the seasons of the world’s love.
Let us guard our hearts, but not guard our hearts by cutting people off, but rather guard our hearts so we can show God’s heart. That needs to be our prayer today and every day. So let’s come before God right now.
We look at the examples in scripture and it reminds us of how difficult this challenge is. Whom do we spend time with? Temptation can be like Jonah, just to want to cut anyone off that might be a bad influence, that might have hurt us, that might have even turned away from You in the past and just want them to get comeuppance, to want nothing to do with them. We know that’s not Your heart. But then on the other hand, it can be so tempting to be like Samson, to want to walk in the ways of those who do not love You because we want them to love us.
Lord, we know that is dangerous and deadly as well. Instead, would You help us that we might be more like Your Son through the power of Your Spirit, those who are willing to come into the lives of those who do not yet know You, Lord, who are rooted in Your wisdom, and because we are not You, and we aren’t able to always stand on our own like our Savior did, Lord, would You help us to surround ourselves with people who can remind us when we are seasoning our lives with the wrong things, that instead people might enjoy the wonderful aroma and the nourishment of Your seasoning in our lives as we share it with them.
We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Well, I hope tonight has been encouraging to you, and as we wrestle with this difficult topic, that this has been a help to think about what does God actually call us to do in it. Next week we’re going to think about how we care for the poor, a real challenge in our society and something that God has called to be a burden on our hearts. What do the Proverbs say about caring for the poor and the needy in our culture? That’s going to wrap up our little journey through Proverbs for this time, and so I hope you’ll join me next week for that.
If this has been an encouragement to you tonight, please give us a like or a share. By sharing and liking, you can actually help more people hear from God’s word and share in this exciting journey that we’re going on together. So it isn’t merely just clicking a button. You really are helping, and I am so thankful when you do.
If there’s any way I can be an encouragement to you this week, if I can be praying for you, feel free to shoot me an email at the email address on screen, leave a comment in the comments below or a prayer request, and we can pray together. And then do please come back next week and invite a friend as we wrap up Proverbially Speaking.
I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week, and I’ll see you again next week.
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