Proverbs 13:15-20 Complete Jewish Bible
15 Good common sense produces grace,
but the way of the treacherous is rough.
16 Every cautious person acts with knowledge,
but a fool parades his folly.
17 A wicked messenger falls into evil,
but a faithful envoy brings healing.
18 Poverty and shame are for him who won’t be taught,
but he who heeds reproof will be honored.
19 Desire fulfilled is sweet to the soul,
but turning away from evil is abhorrent to fools.
20 He who walks with the wise will become wise,
but the companion of fools will suffer.
The Word of God for the Children of God.
Glory be to the Father,
and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen, amen.
Faith, Kingdom and Culture – on a Collision Course
Jesus has warned us in Luke 18:7-8 that when the end is near, He will not be able to find faith on the earth. And that could mean only one thing: Christian men and women’s faith is going to come under severe attack and whatever that is that is attacking our faith from all sides will somehow get the upper hand.
The first thing that is certainly going to attack our faith and it is the world.
The “values” of this world will try to hard sell themselves as the same as the values of our God. But they are not. The values of this world are a moving target, constantly changing, and the value, values, of God are unchanging, constant.
The values of this world will try to hard sell themselves to you by enticements. The values of God are laid out plainly, precisely, in His Word, no enticements, and someday, you. me, we, will need to make a choice to accept or reject them.
Today, we are going to take a closer look at a second possible collision course with our faith and those are the toxic individual and group relationships that we are each probably in, and everybody has those relationships that we maintain.
For this devotion, you need to do an inventory of people you are in relationship with, and you need to honestly evaluate if they are helping you to get closer to God, or are they trying to bully, strongarm or subtlety pull you away from God.
And if they are trying to bully, strongarm or subtlety pull you away from God and your faith then they aught to be prayed over, possibly considered as toxic.
Today, we are going to look at some of the characteristics of toxic relationships, and then you, me, we have got to pray, decide if you are going to maintain those relationships or are you going to let your faith win, bring them to faith in God?
So, just as our faith is on a collision course with the world; our faith is also on a collision course with those relationships that threaten to, raise the red flag risk, to move us away, trying to separate us, remove us from God and from our faith.
SCRIPTURE TEXT REFERENCE
(20) Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm. Proverbs 13:20 – NIV
My Only Point is this …
If God wants to bless you, God sends people into your life that will be a blessing.
If the devil wants to harm you, the devil will send people in your life that will inevitably harm you. Our job is to determine who those people are that is going to be either a blessing and who are those people that are going to be harmful.
To rightly discern who is going to be a blessing, and who is going to be harmful greatly matters.
In I Corinthians 15:33 we are told “Do not be misled. Bad company corrupts good character.”
You hang with the wrong people, they are going to bring you down, you are not as likely going to bring them up. And since that is straight from the Word of God, we know that is true, and so if we are in those toxic relationship (those that bring us down) our fellowship with God is going to suffer and inevitably our faith will suffer. Those toxic relationships collide head on against our faith.
Psalm 1 Complete Jewish Bible
Book I: Psalms 1–41
1 How blessed are those
who reject the advice of the wicked,
don’t stand on the way of sinners
or sit where scoffers sit!
2 Their delight
is in Adonai’s Torah;
on his Torah they meditate
day and night.
3 They are like trees planted by streams —
they bear their fruit in season,
their leaves never wither,
everything they do succeeds.
4 Not so the wicked,
who are like chaff driven by the wind.
5 For this reason the wicked
won’t stand up to the judgment,
nor will sinners
at the gathering of the righteous.
6 For Adonai watches over
the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked
is doomed.
The great King David knew this, so he tells us in Psalms 1:1– (1) Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers,
Paul, the author of the majority of the New Testament, knew this when he instructed the Ephesians church in Ephesians 5:7-9 (7) Therefore do not be partners with them. (8) For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (9) (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness, and truth)
So, I cannot stress enough how important it is to know the characteristics of harmful relationships. I want to share with you these three of them today.
There are people in your life who knew you back when and they want to hold you in their past, in the good old days of “before”. Those relationships are toxic.
(17) So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. Ephesians 4:17 – NIV
I am not the same person I was before I knew Christ.
Today, as I look back on my life before Christ, I don’t even like the person I was before I knew Christ.
I am so thankful that God saved me and made me a new creation and is even now changing me day by day.
But every one of us who are Christian have some family or friends, neighbors, that knew us back when we were not Christian, and they liked the way we acted back then prior to our salvation because we acted funny, foolish, just like them.
We might have gone out and partied with them; drank and smoked with them; used the same vulgar language as them; did drugs just like them, committed some petty act with them and had no regard for the things of God just like them.
And now they see the difference in you, and they don’t necessarily like it.
And so, they confront you, challenge you, bully and strongarm you let you know their displeasure with comments such as “What happened to you, you use to be able to go out with us and have a fun time, now you are this ‘high holy roller’?”
“What happened to you? You changed, you betrayed us and we don’t like it.” “We wish you would come back, be our friend, go back to the way you were.”
Tell me … does any of this have the very slightest ring of familiarity to you, to someone you know? Is there a God sound of the great shofar’s call to “truth?”
We read, study, and pray over Scripture from Ephesians 5 where Paul says I understand you were just like your unsaved family and friends before you knew Christ, but now you are different and so you got to live a separated life.
Even Jesus, Himself, while He was performing His earthly ministry, people wanted to hold Him in His past.
In Matthew 13, Jesus returned to his hometown to minister to the people.
But the people did not want the Jesus who was ministering in the town and villages instructing the people and performing miracles, but they wanted the Jesus of the past. Mary’s son, the son of a carpenter, one of their town folks!
They wanted Jesus the young boy not Jesus the master Rabbi, changing all that they believed and Savior of the world. They wanted to hold Him in the past.
And so, if people tried to hold Jesus in the past, we certainly will have people in our lives who want to hold us in our past. They want us to go back to the old ways rather than be glad that we are growing in our relationship with Christ.
Those people are toxic.
There are people in your life who will always tell you what you want to hear, those people are toxic.
(3) For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 2 Timothy 4:3 – NIV
I come up with ideas all the time; some of them I confess are brilliant, but some of them I confess are the dumbest ideas on the planet.
I don’t need someone in my life who will tell me that my brilliant ideas are brilliant; and my dumbest ideas are echelons beyond the worlds dumbest.
Proverbs 12:26 Complete Jewish Bible
26 The righteous guides his friend’s way rightly,
but the way of the wicked will lead them astray.
I need someone of faith to tell me that my dumb ideas are really dumb. I need to hear 100% truth revealed through the Word of God and the Holy Spirit of God.
And the person who does not tell me the genuine truth according the Word of God may be out to cause me to fall into error. And what gets injured? My faith!
You don’t need a preacher, if you came to him for advice, to tell you what you want to hear. He better tell you what the Word of God says. If he tells you what you want to hear, he could lead you astray. If he tells you the truth you may be as angry as heck at him, but he told you something that can set you free if you only rightly discern God’s righteous truth, listen to the Holy Spirit within you.
You may not want to hear this, but this is the truth.
When I was growing up my parents had no problem telling me something I did not want to hear. No, you cannot use the car tonight. No, you cannot have that $20.00 to buy that thing you don’t need. No, I am not stopping everything I am doing and take you to your friend’s house or to the movies right this minute.
Do you know what so many, too many, parents will do today? They tell children what they want to hear, they let their immature children take charge of living.
You are not helping your children by doing everything they want, giving them everything they want, jumping when they say jump. Let me tell you children don’t always do the right thing and sometimes what they want is not going to be good for them and they need to know you as the parent is in charge not them.
It will teach for when they will have a boss over them later in life. If you are doing those things for your children (letting them do what they want, go where they want, and jump at their orders), you may think that you are being a good parent, but you are not – they do not know better. You are being a toxic parent.
They do not have enough intellectual and moral and emotional maturity to tell anyone what gender they know they should be instead of what they were born with, created, shaped in the Womb by God with-they cannot grasp all the long term permanent implications – that parents know very well but will not teach.
“We need to stand up, affirm them in their choices …” “it is their life, after all!”
The ever living, ever revealing, Words of God’s truth, commands 2 completely different lessons be taught and then retaught to all of the coming generations …
Genesis 1:26-28 Complete Jewish Bible
26 Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, in the likeness of ourselves; and let them rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the animals, and over all the earth, and over every crawling creature that crawls on the earth.”
27 So God created humankind in his own image;
in the image of God he created him:
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them: God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the air and every living creature that crawls on the earth.”
Psalm 139:1-18 Complete Jewish Bible
139 (0) For the leader. A psalm of David:
(1) Adonai, you have probed me, and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I stand up,
you discern my inclinations from afar,
3 you scrutinize my daily activities.
You are so familiar with all my ways
4 that before I speak even a word, Adonai,
you know all about it already.
5 You have hemmed me in both behind and in front
and laid your hand on me.
6 Such wonderful knowledge is beyond me,
far too high for me to reach.
7 Where can I go to escape your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I climb up to heaven, you are there;
if I lie down in Sh’ol, you are there.
9 If I fly away with the wings of the dawn
and land beyond the sea,
10 even there your hand would lead me,
your right hand would hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Let darkness surround me,
let the light around me be night,”
12 even darkness like this
is not too dark for you;
rather, night is as clear as day,
darkness and light are the same.
13 For you fashioned my inmost being,
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I thank you because I am awesomely made,
wonderfully; your works are wonders —
I know this very well.
15 My bones were not hidden from you
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes could see me as an embryo,
but in your book all my days were already written;
my days had been shaped
before any of them existed.
17 God, how I prize your thoughts!
How many of them there are!
18 If I count them, there are more than grains of sand;
if I finish the count, I am still with you.
The Days are Surely Coming or Have Now Arrived
(1) But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. (2) People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, (3) without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, (4) treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— (5) having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. 2 Timothy 3:1-5 – NIV
Paul admonishes Timothy that there are always going to be people who will tell you, everyone; “Oh, yes I am a Christian” and he or she know the right things to say and so they have a form of godliness or there may be people who are in the church house that have a form of godliness because of their church attendance.
But having their lifestyle revealed, by the way that they live, shouts, preaches, teaches, he or she is not a Christian. Paul tells Timothy to seriously avoid them.
That means there might be some wolves in the sheep house. They may be in the pew or in the pulpit. In fact, they may be in your pew, pulpit. They may be in our deacon body. And worse yet they might be the senior Pastor or Associate Pastor.
Paul is telling us, each one of us, to keep our eyes open out in the world and even in the church house. Those who are saved ought to know how they should be living, and if you don’t see that in the life of someone else you know who expresses that he or she is a Christian, bells and whistles and great blasts of the shofar ought to be ringing out and going off in your head. Keep your distance.
Why is that so important?
Remember 1 Corinthians 15:33 which tells us that bad company corrupts good morals.
Conclusion …
Matthew 18:12-20 Complete Jewish Bible
12 “What’s your opinion? What will somebody do who has a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine on the hillsides and go off to find the stray? 13 And if he happens to find it? Yes! I tell you he is happier over it than over the ninety-nine that never strayed! 14 Thus your Father in heaven does not want even one of these little ones to be lost.
15 “Moreover, if your brother commits a sin against you, go and show him his fault — but privately, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won back your brother. 16 If he doesn’t listen, take one or two others with you so that every accusation can be supported by the testimony of two or three witnesses.[a] 17 If he refuses to hear them, tell the congregation; and if he refuses to listen even to the congregation, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax-collector. 18 Yes! I tell you people that whatever you prohibit on earth will be prohibited in heaven, and whatever you permit on earth will be permitted in heaven. 19 To repeat, I tell you that if two of you here on earth agree about anything people ask, it will be for them from my Father in heaven. 20 For wherever two or three are assembled in my name, I am there with them.”
In closing remarks let me say this. Avoiding toxic relationships does not excuse our duty to witness to those who are being toxic. We are to witness to those who are lost, no question. Are we still not covenanted by God to be their best friends?
Jesus witnessed to publicans and sinner and told them about Himself and the salvation that He was offering, but He did not hang around with Him. He was usually with His apostles and the disciples. Those who lives resembled His.
We have a covenant duty to witness, and keep witnessing to all sinners but we also have a sacred duty to keep our faith strong by avoiding toxic relationships.
Those who have ears, let them hear with both of them …
In the name of God, the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit,
Let us Pray,
Psalm 119:105-112 Complete Jewish Bible
נ (Nun)
105 Your word is a lamp for my foot
and light on my path.
106 I have sworn an oath and confirmed it,
that I will observe your righteous rulings.
107 I am very much distressed;
Adonai, give me life, in keeping with your word.
108 Please accept my mouth’s voluntary offerings, Adonai;
and teach me your rulings.
109 I am continually taking my life in my hands,
yet I haven’t forgotten your Torah.
110 The wicked have set a trap for me,
yet I haven’t strayed from your precepts.
111 I take your instruction as a permanent heritage,
because it is the joy of my heart.
112 I have resolved to obey your laws
forever, at every step.
פ (Peh)
129 Your instruction is a wonder;
this is why I follow it.
130 Your words are a doorway that lets in light,
giving understanding to the thoughtless.
131 My mouth is wide open, as I pant
with longing for your mitzvot.
132 Turn to me, and show me your favor;
in keeping with [your] judgment for those who love your name.
133 Guide my footsteps by your word;
don’t let any kind of sin rule me.
134 Redeem me from human oppression,
and I will observe your precepts.
135 Make your face shine on your servant,
and teach me your laws.
136 Rivers of tears flow down from my eyes,
because they don’t observe your Torah.
23 (0) A psalm of David:
(1) Adonai is my shepherd; I lack nothing.
2 He has me lie down in grassy pastures,
he leads me by quiet water,
3 he restores my inner person.
He guides me in right paths
for the sake of his own name.
4 Even if I pass through death-dark ravines,
I will fear no disaster; for you are with me;
your rod and staff reassure me.
5 You prepare a table for me,
even as my enemies watch;
you anoint my head with oil
from an overflowing cup.
6 Goodness and grace will pursue me
every day of my life;
and I will live in the house of Adonai
for years and years to come.
Glory be to the Father,
and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen, amen.
Loving God, Living God, Loving Hope, Living Hope, Loving Living Life His Way! "Many things are possible for the person who has hope. Even more is possible for the person who has faith. And still more is possible for the person who knows how to love. But everything is possible for the person who practices all three virtues." - Brother Lawrence (1605-1691), Practicing the Presence of God (1692). 