Series: Youth for Jesus
Number: Vol. 8, No. 45
“Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm.” (Proverbs 13:20NIV) Who is talking to us in our opening bible text? It is Solomon. And what is his instruction to us? it is that we should walk with the wise. In other words, we are to make wise people our companions.Now why do we need to do that? Why do we need to make wise people our companions?
According to Solomon, it is one of the ways to become wise. And as he further points out, if we ignore this instruction and decide to choose fools as our companions, we are bound to suffer one form of harm or the other. It is only a matter of time.But then, we must also understand that walking with wise people will not necessarily make us wise. It is our purpose of walking with them and our attitude towards learning from them that will determine whether our walk with them will result in our becoming wise or not.
What I am saying is that we have to be intentional in choosing to walk with wise people. That means we must intentionally look out for people that are truly wise around us that we can walk or fellowship with. Doing that in itself will be wisdom on our part. But it has to be done because there is no guarantee that wise people will freely flow into our lives. And where wise people are not readily around us to walk with, we had better begin to look elsewhere for companionship.Also, apart from being purposeful about choosing wise people as our companions, we also need to be purposeful about learning from them ways of wisdom. Otherwise, though we walk with them for decades, we will still not be wise.
Rehoboam, for instance, lived with his father Solomon for a number of years before he became king in his place. Yet he did not demonstrate wisdom at all but foolishness at the beginning of his reign. Why? His focus was most likely not on learning ways of wisdom from his father but on some other things. What other things? We are not told what they might be in the account. Perhaps his focus was just on becoming the next king after his father or on pleasure or on his father’s wealth.At any rate, though Rehoboam had a very rare privilege of being the son of Solomon, the wisest man that ever lived on earth before Jesus came, and also of living with him, he did not learn much wisdom from him. That was because he was not intentional about learning wisdom from him. So, he ended up having fools as his companions and suffering terribly for it. (Cf. 1Kings 12; 2Chro 10)
Now we too can expect to suffer terribly in life, if our companions are fools. And if we don’t want that, we had better begin to intentionally look out for the wise people among all the people in our lives that we will choose as our companions or counsellors. And once we recognise them, we should begin to take every righteous step that will make it possible for us to walk with them and also learn from them. Then perhaps we already have some of such people as our companions, we should not make the mistake of wasting the opportunity we have to learn from them by focussing our attention on less important things like pleasure, riches or positions in our relationships with them. Otherwise, even if we gain these things through our relationships with them, we, like Rehoboam, will still lose them at some point for our lack of wisdom. So, let us mind ourselves.
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