My dear readers,

Choose Your Friends Wisely!

Proverbs 13:20: “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.”

People cannot do without friends. God created man as a social creature, and interacting with people is necessary for life. A loner is never actually a loner. He is just one with few people in his life. If he honestly has no one in his life, his life would be incomplete, with no one to live for and share his life’s ups and downs. Loneliness characterises his life and shapes his extremely introverted personality. When he falls, he has no one to turn to for help. When he rejoices, it is in an empty room that reverberates the hollowness. When things fall apart, he is destitute and dies alone with no one to mourn or care whether he is alive or not. He will not be missed, for his life has impacted no one for good or bad. God did not make man in His image to become a recluse. People need people.

Friends are necessary in life. Friends are chosen for many different reasons. Some are for carnal reasons such as personal benefits, helpful advancement of work, and similar likes and dislikes in sports, food or chemistry. As long as these carnal reasons are satisfied, friendship remains. When these carnal reasons disappear, so will friendship and friends.

There are people you can quickly get along with and have a mutual, unstated attraction from the first meeting. There is the chemistry of getting along. These friends can last a lifetime. They may meet before they finish primary school. There is a bond between them that cannot be fully explained. They keep in touch despite living separate lives and hardly meet up except for occasional annual meetings.

All these people impact our lives and shape our characters. They are the chisels God's invisible hand uses to make us who we are today. The more time we spend together, the more our lives are transformed. The influence of good friends can transform us into people with good habits. Conversely, the influence of bad friends will transform us into people with bad habits. For example, a young man serving the military for two long years of national service will be impacted by the constant bombardment of vulgarity from the seniors in command. Subconsciously or otherwise, the constant vulgarity, like the incessant dripping of water that will dig a hole in hard stone, will “dig a hole” into the psyche of the young soldier.

Christians are also people whose lives can be impacted by the people they spend time with.

Proverbs 13:20a says, “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise.” The word “walketh” means to spend plenty of time together. When we stand together, the time together is short. We will soon be moving in different directions. These are like our acquaintances or people we work with. They will impact us but in a limited way. But when we walk together, we walk in the same direction. These are our friends. When we sit down and make decisions together, we spend the most time together, including going on holidays. These are loved ones and very close friends. All of them will transform us. God says we ought to be wise. Only Christians are wise in God’s eyes. When wisdom or wise people are mentioned in the Bible, it is the wisdom of God, i.e. God’s Word, and not the wisdom of man, i.e. man’s philosophies and thinking. The former is heavenly and eternal, whereas the latter is earthly and temporal, for man's wisdom will perish when the world ends.

Proverbs 13:20a means:

• Christians desire to walk with Christians – One of the first things a new Christian experiences in life is the new friends he gravitates towards. Before his salvation, his friends were like him, carnal. They talk and walk carnally because they all think carnally. Once he experiences true salvation in Christ, the mind of Christ is his new mind. The new mental transformation controls and determines his desires in life. He cannot help himself, for there is a desirable willingness in his heart to talk about his new love, Jesus Christ, whom he cannot share freely with his carnal friends. The awkwardness he now feels whenever he is with his carnal friends was never there before, but now it is like a gigantic dark cloud enveloping his soul. But the delight he now has with his Christian friends thrills his soul deeply with peace and freedom he never felt before. It consistently envelopes his soul, and he feels like he is the happiest man on earth. He longs and looks forward with great joy to being with his Christian friends, whom he now regards as his eternal and heavenly family because they share the same love for the same Saviour, Jesus Christ.

• New believers love Christian activities – Activities that do not have any spiritual benefits are now deliberately avoided. Once upon a time, before salvation, these carnal activities were addictively longed for. Hundreds, if not thousands, of hours were spent enjoying these carnal activities. After salvation, he finds the strength to break these chains of addiction that he once thought were unbreakable. New activities fill his heart and soul that were once considered nonsense and a waste of valuable time. Now, they have become the joy of his heart, bringing the most extraordinary delight to his soul. Attending worship services (morning

  and evening), Bible studies, Christian fellowships, serving God together, discussing biblical doctrines to know God better and church camps with little or no interruption by the cares of the world become the high points and centre of his existence. Little by little, he begins to realise that of all the activities he does on earth, these spiritual activities are the eternal activities that he will one day continue to do in heaven and in the presence of the Almighty God, his heavenly Father! 

   

How can he not desire to be with the wise?

However, God warns of a danger that every professing believer must take heed of. Proverbs 13:20b says, “a companion of fools shall be destroyed.” A companion is one who has friendship with others. He is not a company associate where there are only work relationships and he has no choice but to “walk” with them in the same office. The interaction is work-related. But friends or companions are made by deliberate choice. God’s warning is that he will be destroyed if he chooses to spend time with fools.

Who are the fools?

They are unbelievers who have heard the gospel of Christ and rejected it. Pride has thickened their hearts. They stubbornly refuse to humble themselves even after they have been told through God’s Word that they are great sinners before God. They do not care. In a sense, they thumb their noses in the face of God’s Word that warns them of hell if they die in their sins. The god of this world has blinded their minds to believe that a successful and fulfilling life is only measured by one’s earthly possessions. Their hearts are deliberately made dense by their lust for the things of the flesh and the eyes. They are obsessed with the praises of man and their standing in society. They are called fools because after being warned of the truth and that Jesus Christ is offering them salvation, they rejected them all. What awaits them is hell’s fire, and wailing and gnashing of teeth for eternity. They could have their destiny of hell changed to heaven, but they are too carnal to care. God will undoubtedly destroy these fools.

Likewise, he who finds companionship in these fools will be destroyed together with them because he will become like them. A believer has friends and loved ones who are unbelievers to whom he desires to reach out for Christ. But they are not the believer’s companions in terms of likes and dislikes. The things fools love to do are all of the world because their hearts and minds are deep in sin. They are spiritually blind and spiritually dead. They are in bondage to sin, and sin will one day pay them their wages, which is death. They go to sinful places that appeal to and inflame the lusts of their flesh and eyes. Their conduct and behaviour are self-centred. Lying and deception to be ahead and earn that longed-for promotion is their modus operandi. If one is a companion of such fools, he will behave like them, accompany them to sinful places, and he will do the things these fools do. He is also a fool like the fools he follows and imitates.

Who are your friends? Birds of the same feathers tend to flock together. Choose your friends wisely.