Wisdom For Relationships
Sermon Notes
Introduction
Over the course of this Proverbs series, we’ve dealt with a lot of topics. We’ve discussed fathers and mothers, sex, anger, money, and other hot button issues. One thing you may have noticed is that Proverbs talks a lot about how we deal with people. We’ve dealt with some specific people in our lives so far, but Proverbs also provides a lot of great wisdom for how to deal with all the other relationships in our lives: friends, coworkers, and other relationships. While most of our best memories in lives likely revolve around people, it’s equally true that many of our deepest pains and regrets also involve relationships with people. With those kinds of high highs and low lows, it only makes sense that we dig further into God’s Wisdom for Relationships. We’re going to be looking at a bunch of different verses this morning, so get your flipping fingers ready or just pay attention to the screen.
Context
We’ve gone over the broad context throughout the series, so just here’s a quick synopsis to get us started. Keep in mind that most of these Proverbs are written by King Solomon, who was and still is regarded as one of the wisest people to ever live, and he collected these wisdom teachings to pass on to his sons. These aren’t blanket promises per se that living wisely will mean we will never face difficulty. What Solomon wanted to communicate is the value of living according to God’s wisdom in our fallen world. We will still experience the difficulties of this world, but we will bring far less of it upon ourselves by avoiding foolishness.
So that is the context of the book of Proverbs as a whole. Now let’s take a look at some specific Biblical context about interpersonal relationships and their importance to the Christian life. We’re going to quickly look at something Jesus taught in Matthew 22:37-39 when He was asked which commandment was the greatest by the Pharisees. His answer goes beyond what they, and often we, would expect.
37 He said to him, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. 38 This is the greatest and most important command. 39 The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. 40 All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”
Jesus starts with the importance of our relationship with God. We’re to love and follow Him completely. What’s interesting is that He doesn’t stop there. Remember, the Pharisees only asked Him for the greatest command, not the Buzzfeed ranking of them. So, Jesus tells them that the second greatest commandment deals with interpersonal relationships, Love your neighbor as yourself. Take a look at how He links them, though. He says that the second is like the first. They’re interconnected. He means that you can’t truly uphold either of them by themselves. You can’t say you love God but hate people, and you can’t truly love people without properly loving God for who He is. Essentially, instead of these being two separate commandments, Jesus says that they are two parts of the same command. He stresses the importance of our interpersonal relationships.
That leads us to the Big Idea for today’s message: We need wisdom for relationships, because how we relate to each other is practice for how we relate to God.
Sermon
Let’s dig into what Proverbs has to say about these important relational proving grounds. We’re going to start by looking at some of the things that Proverbs says do not belong in Godly relationships. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it is some of the most common things mentioned throughout the book.
What does not belong in Godly relationships:
1. Dogged Disputes: Prov. 18:18-19, 20:3
18 Casting the lot ends quarrels and separates powerful opponents.19 An offended brother is harder to reach than a fortified city, and quarrels are like the bars of a fortress.
The first things that certainly do not belong in Godly relationships are what I’m calling Dogged Disputes. These are disputes that go beyond a simple argument or disagreement to the point where we bite down hard on our position like a bulldog and refuse to let go. We’ve all been in these kinds of disputes. It gets
to the point where we don’t necessarily care about getting our own way as much as we are focused on the other guy not getting their way. We start looking like what verse 19 talks about. We lock ourselves up in our fortress and dig in for battle. Our online culture is a breeding ground for these kinds of disputes. There’s no immediate consequence, so we feel like we can fire off whatever kind of harsh comment we think of at each other. We can polarize ourselves into our own niche little camps and take cheap shots at each other. Or maybe you experience this in your normal relationships with your friends or family. It causes you to always be on guard or walk on eggshells around them, because you know if the argument starts, it isn’t likely to stop any time soon. We all know how devastating these kinds of disputes are on our relationships.
Theologian Derek Kidner really sums this up beautifully. “[This] proverb so understood is a forceful warning of the strength of the invisible walls of estrangement, so easy to erect, so hard to demolish.”
Take a look at the interesting advice given in verse 18. Casting the lot is the BC equivalent of rolling the dice or flipping a coin. Priests in Israel would actually carry around some lots called the Urim and Thummin to help them settle simple disputes or questions between people. It was their way of trusting God’s will over their lives. Now this verse is not saying to flip a coin over every argument, but to be willing to leave it up to God’s will displays that we are holding our desires with an open hand and not a clinched fist. You can see the attitude shift from biting down until you get your way to even be willing to leave it up to something like chance. We are called to seek God’s will over our own when it comes to disputes.
Now let’s take a look at something else that doesn’t belong in our relationships. 2. Quick Anger: Prov. 15:18, 22:24-25
Being quick to anger is a killer in our relationships. Louis did a whole message on what Proverbs says about being quick to anger, so we’ll just apply it to relationships here. While this overlaps with the first point to some degree, I separated them, because they can affect relationships a bit differently. While disputes usually center around a difference of opinion or decision, anger can damage a relationship over anything. It can be a misplaced word, a misunderstanding, a real or perceived slight, or really anything.
18 A hot-tempered person stirs up conflict,
but one slow to anger calms strife.
How many times have you been in a fight and if you’re being honest can’t even pinpoint why your actually mad, just that you are? It’s a killer for our relationships.
Again Derek Kidner really summarizes this verse perfectly. “The point here is that quarrels depend on people far more than on subject-matter.”
There’s another aspect of anger that we have to consider in relationships, take a look at chapter 22:24- 25
Notice the perspective shift from how we should act personally to who we should associate with. Wisdom is vital when it comes to who we choose to be in relationship with. We’ve all learned or are learning this lesson the hard way. If you’re one of our students in the room, this is likely an area that causes some strife between you and your parents. They ask you about who is going to be at certain events or parties, and you know that you being allowed to go depends on the answer to that question. While that seems so frustrating in the moment, it is your parents way of living out this Proverb. Who we make our friends has huge impacts on how we live out our lives. So, we need to choose wisely. This proverb is talking about anger, but it applies to any number of sins as well.
We need to evaluate if our friendships and associations are teaching us to follow God more closely or the world. What ways are we learning from our friends and what is entangling us? This doesn’t mean we should never be around non-Christians, because we are called to go into the world to make disciples, but it should cause us to take inventory of who gets to hold those friendship roles in our lives that have influence over us. We’ve had to deal with the effects of a contagious disease for the last year or so, the Bible is clear that anger and other sins in a relationship are just as contagious as any germ and is to be avoided.
Let’s take a look at one more specific thing to be avoided in chapter 25. 3. Gossip and Lies: 25:18-19
It’s clear that Gossip and Lies are death sentences to our relationships. We won’t spend a ton of time on these, because these verses are very clear. Verse 18 goes against the non-biblical proverb of “sticks and stones” that we all learned as kids. Words most certainly can hurt and feel like a sword or arrow. Lies about people or talking behind their backs is a sure-fire way to break trust, and a relationship has a hard time recovering when trust gets broken. The illustrations are great in these verses and communicate so clearly. Is this next bite going to be normal or agony because of this bad tooth? I hope I don’t step off of this curb the wrong way or my bum ankle is gonna roll spill me into the street. When you feel that way about a relationship, it doesn’t bode well.
Proverbs 6 gives us a great summary of all of these points and our Big Idea. 4. All summed up: Prov. 6:16-19
24 Don’t make friends with an angry person, and don’t be a companion of a hot-tempered one,
25 or you will learn his ways
and entangle yourself in a snare.
18 A person giving false testimony against his neighbor
is like a club, a sword, or a sharp arrow.
19 Trusting
an unreliable person in a difficult time
is like a rotten tooth or a faltering foot.
16 The LORD hates six things;
in fact, seven are detestable to him:
The “six, in fact, seven” language here is meant to emphasize the final item in the list. It also tells us that this list is dealing with a specific area of sin and not meant to be an exhaustive list. As we’ll see this list is going to center around sins that we commit in our relationships with other people.
Notice that all of these sins on the list play out in relationships. It also spans every aspect of how we can sin. There are sins of attitude and thought listed, a couple that deal with how we speak, and others that deal with direct or physical action. We’ve discussed most of these things already. And look at what the last item is that gets the most emphasis. (One who stirs up trouble among brothers) God takes damaging relationships seriously because they are our practice for how we relate to God. And it’s vital that we understand this, because the consequences of treating our relationship with God in some of these negative ways like we do in our human relationships can have dire consequences.
Those are some of the pitfalls that can derail relationship, now let’s move to what a Christian relationship should look like.
The Goal of Christian Relationships: Discipleship
Proverbs 27:17
17
Most of us have heard this verse before. It’s the verse that most people think about when it comes to friendships, mentoring, and Christian community. It emphasizes something that we push for strongly at our church, that discipleship happens best in the context of relationship. Sometimes we overcomplicate things or freak out when we hear a word like Discipleship. It sounds like a fancy church term but it essentially breaks down as the process of growing to be more like Jesus, in the same way that Jesus’disciples spent time with him and learned from him. A disciple is just someone that is dedicated to learning from someone, in our case it is Jesus, and we dedicate our lives to growing as His disciple.
The way that we describe the process of discipleship at City Awakening is through the term 3D. That stands for Discover, Deepen, and Display. As Christians, our lives are a constant cycle of these three things. They’re not a list that we check off, but a cycle that we keep working through. We Discover who God is and what He is done. We do this through His Word, prayer, and community in the church (relationships). We then Deepen our faith in Him based on what we have discovered. This means we begin to crave knowing Him more, we understand His Word better, and we look for ways to serve Him. Then we Display our relationship with God even more. This means that our behaviors change in order to align more with who God is, and we share our faith with others so that they too can Discover who God is. Our relationships are the place that we live this out. We want our relationships with others to result in mutual sharpening and growth, whether that’s us reaching out to a non-Christian or learning from someone vastly more experienced in the faith than us. We want everyone at City Awakening to be a part of this, so please dig more into relationships here either in one-on-one discipleship relationships, MCGs, service teams, or anything else that we do.
16 The LORD hates six things;
in fact, seven are detestable to him:
17 arrogant eyes, a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
18 a heart that plots wicked schemes,
feet eager to run to evil,
19 a lying
witness who gives false testimony,
and one who stirs up trouble among brothers.
Iron sharpens iron,
and one person sharpens another.
Discipleship through relationships is an incredible blessing, but we can’t fool ourselves into believing that it is always the easiest process. As we’ve already discussed, there can be a lot of thorns and difficulties in our relationships. The Bible is honest about this fact and is clear that those risks and pains are well worth it. Take a look at verses 5-6 in this same chapter 27.
Proverbs 27:5-6
Culturally we may not like the idea of this verse. Today, love means not only fully supporting the decisions of someone else, but even celebrating them. Biblical love is different, though. It is not loving for me to see you in sin or stagnation and not say something about it. Rebuke and correction are gifts from God, because they get us to open our eyes to our sin and repent of them in God’s grace. And the Bible is clear that one of, if not the main, way that rebuke and correction come into our lives are through godly relationships.
I love the contrast in this verse. First of all it’s honest about how correction often feels. It hurts, it feels like a wound, we don’t like it. But discipleship is supposed to wound like a surgeon does. It isn’t random and pointless; it’s targeted and helpful. It should point to something that needs to be fixed or removed. There will very likely be pain in that process, but it leads to a better life afterward. Then Solomon doesn’t do the easy flip of the metaphor and say that enemies just hurt us for no reason. Instead, he completely contrasts it and talks about how many bad relationships actually wound by flattery. Their kisses are excessive, their flattery is unending. They affirm us so much that we, of course, come to believe that we are generally if not always in the right. It’s like if a doctor saw a cancerous tumor on a scan of your body and just proceeded to give you every sticker and lollipop in the basket without dealing with the tumor. You feel great leaving the office, but you’re dead in a few months. This should be a big wake up call for us, because you and I are far more likely to be this kind of enemy to someone than the kind that sets a trap for them or actively seeks to destroy them. We can say and feel that we truly love and care about someone but be the friend that is excessive with praise when a surgical strike is what is needed. We all need the wisdom of God in our relationships because of this. We need it to help us avoid the many pitfalls of relationship and lead us to the goal of relationships: growing closer to our Savior.
Big Idea
This clearly teaches us our Big Idea: We need wisdom for relationships, because how we relate to each other is practice for how we relate to God.
Our personal relationship aren’t just places for us to have fun or pass our time here on Earth. They are the places where we put to the test what we believe and know about God. They are the areas that we are called to live out the mission of God. While there are a lot of things that are important in the world that we can work on, Jesus’ final command to His personal disciples (his friends and family) wasn’t to learn everything possible or find the cure for diseases or end all wars or invent great technology or any other great causes in the world. His final command was to go and make disciples. It was all about going and living out the true purpose of Christian relationships.
5 Better an open reprimand
than concealed love.
6 The wounds of a friend are trustworthy,
but the kisses of an enemy are excessive.
Maybe you’re here today and need to start with the first Commandment we talked about earlier. You need to start loving the Lord with all your being. Today can be the day that you start living that out and see it play out in your human relationships. Maybe you already follow God but need to repent of how you’ve treated the personal relationships in your lives. There are some relationships that you need to start thinking about more strategically when it comes to discipleship or relationships that you need to either end or set boundaries around because there’s some contagious sin that affecting your life. We know there are many pitfalls in our relationships, but we can trust in the steadfast relationship we have with God to teach us how to handle these.