Proverbs 6:1-15
Turn in your copy of the scriptures
to Proverbs 6. Tonight we’ll look at verses
one through 15. And next week we’ll look at verses
16 through 19. I thought it would be good to
break apart this little section of sayings and keep 16 through
19 special. It’s kind of a unique feature.
of the wisdom literature. Let’s give our attention now
to God’s word beginning in the first verse of chapter six of
Proverbs. The father continues speaking
to his children and says, My son, if you have put up security
for your neighbor and had given your pledge for a stranger, if
you are snared in the words of your mouth, caught in the words
of your mouth, then do this, my son, and save yourself. For you have come into the hand
of your neighbor. Go, hasten, and plead urgently
with your neighbor. Give to your eyes no sleep and
to your eyelids no slumber. Save yourself like a gazelle
from the hand of the hunter, like a bird from the hand of
the fowler. Go to the aunt, O sluggard, consider
her ways and be wise. Without having any chief officer
or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food
in harvest. How long will you lie there,
oh sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep? A little sleep,
a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty
will come upon you like a robber and want like an armed man. A worthless person, a wicked
man, goes about with crooked speech. He winks with his eyes,
he signals with his feet. He points with his finger. With
perverted heart, he devises evil, continually sowing discord. Therefore,
calamity will come upon him suddenly. In a moment, he will be broken
beyond healing. Amen. This is God’s word for
us. I wonder how many life lessons
you have learned the hard way. And the chuckle says a few. How many lessons have you learned
through what we call the School of Hard Knocks? How many of you
wish maybe you had been raised better? How many of you wish
maybe your parents had taught me this or that? Or maybe your
lament is, I wish I had listened and life would have been easier.
Well, the Proverbs give us topics galore, endless topics to teach
us what’s wise, to tell us what’s foolish, and to compare and contrast
different ways of living. And there are three sayings tonight
in chapter six, three topics, and we’ll give them all a S.
There’s surety, there’s sloth, and there are scoundrels. And
so we wanna look at what wisdom we can learn from a father, from
our mothers, from those wiser than us about these three things,
surety, sloth, and scoundrels. So the first thing we wanna look
at is putting up surety, and that comes in verses one through
five we just read those maybe you have a friend who is down
and out and it’s a very common thing for them to say hey loan
me some money right and so you’ve done well and you say well maybe
this isn’t such a bad thing But we watch those afternoon television
shows, right? The judge shows. There’s friend
A and friend B. Friend A says I loaned my friend,
friend B, some money. Of course, they’re not friends
anymore, right? Loaning people money personally
never goes well, usually. And they’re at odds with each
other. I thought you gave me the money. No, I loaned it. Well,
the judge says, where’s the promissory note? It goes on and on. But
maybe you have a friend who’s down and out, and you want them
to get ahead like you have. And so maybe the most common
way to think about this in our day and age is to cosign a loan.
Maybe you have a kid who things just aren’t going well for them.
And so you get this brainy idea, maybe if I cosign a loan for
a car, They’ll feel better about themselves. I’ve heard this one
before, actually. I’ll cosign a car or cosign a house. And what’s the wisdom of Forrest
Gump? Stupid is, stupid does. If they’ve done it before, they’re
going to do it again. And now you’re on the hook for
it, right? And so putting up surety, a father teaches his
son, is a very foolish thing to do. Maybe you are feeling
a little altruistic. Maybe you’re saying, my friend
would do it for me if the tables were turned. And so we strike
hands in security. We give our word. We give our
pledge. And notice the words in verses one through five. We’re
all of a sudden ensnared. We’re caught. The hands of another
are around us. We are the hunted. The fowler
is going to cast his net over us. And so while it may be generous
for us to help out a friend in need or a brother in need, it’s
often foolish. It was considered in the ancient
Near East a foolish thing for a young person to do this because
they had no wealth to reach back into. To put up surety for another
was to bring, likely, ruin on themselves. But maybe you have
a little extra, and maybe there’s a biblical principle sometimes,
we help others even if we lose a little. Well, that’s for an
older, wiser person to do, one that can absorb the bump. as
it were. But for a young person, never
sign papers with another, for then you will be ensnared. And
notice the urgency. Give no eyes, verse four, to
sleep. Give your eyes no sleep. Give
your eyelids no slumber. Save yourself like a gazelle
from the hand of the hunter and like a bird from the fowler.
And so if you’re thinking about these passages in light of a
father teaching his son something, what’s the end result of being
a fool here? You might lose your shirt for
the sake of your friend. But what’s the end result if
you live wisely? You still got your shirt, right? That’s what
we ought to think of here. Well, the second S in our study
tonight is sloth. And you find that in verses six
through 11, the sloth, the sluggard, the lazy person. We’re gonna
see plenty more of this one in the book of Proverbs. But the
lazy person lives for the moment. They do not live for the future.
And so they eke out a living moment by moment, day by day,
hour by hour, usually living off of the goodness and welfare
of others. They live for the moment and
not for the future. They are the sloth, the lazy
one. And so the lesson here for the
child, for the one learning wisdom, is to look to the aunt. The ant
is the smallest creature in the animal kingdom, but has the greatest
industry. You ever get an ant hill in the
yard and you, with fascination, follow them around? That is before
you pour something on it or in it or whatever. and take care
of it. We don’t want anthills in our
yard because they are industrious. And what will those anthills
do? They’ll tear things up. So we want them gone. But we
know something about them. You know, they are, as these
verses say, they are without having any chief, without any
officer, without any ruler. And yet they prepare bread in
summer and gather food in the harvest. And apparently the lesson,
the object lesson here is You’re lazy. There’s going to come a
day when you’re going to need something. We go to the Walmart,
right? We go to the Harris Teeter. We
go to the Aldi’s or whatever the places we go for groceries.
But this year, you went in there and guess what? The shelves were
empty. I can remember back in March,
we were debating, what should we do for April and May? If what
they’re saying is true, what should we do? So we did what
the aunts did. Well, I didn’t, but my wife did.
Went all over town, and we got the paper towels and the toilet
paper. We stocked up the pantry, and we made it through May. Well,
just last week, we got to thinking, you know, this election is probably
going to get a little crazy. Some of you are going to go rushing
to the grocery store tonight just because I say this. But
we did a similar thing this week. I shouldn’t say we. My wife did. But that’s a wise thing, isn’t
it? Store up while you can, for there may be days where there
is want. And if you have plenty in your
barns or in your pantry, You are like the ant. Maybe some
of you can think back to Y2K. You still got some of those dried
beans and rice and whatever else. You’re always prepared. But think
about other biblical stories where Being prepared is a good
thing. Remember Joseph and his brothers
hated him. The coat of many colors, that
really set his brothers at odds. And they sold him to some Midianite
traders. He went off to Egypt. He got
put in jail for 10 years, but he interpreted the dreams. And
what did he do? He became the steward over Egypt
and he saved the whole ancient Near East from famine by his
wisdom. And you only have to flip just
a few pages over in your book of Proverbs and you land on Proverbs
31. And it speaks of the woman who fears the Lord, the industrious
wife. She does all that is necessary
to prepare her household for winter. But this is not the case
with the sloth. The sloth loves to sleep, even
sleep through harvest. And verse nine gives great warning.
How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise
from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come
upon you like a robber and want like an armed man. So again,
think of the end that you’re trying to teach the young generation. Do you wanna be poor, broke,
and hungry? Or do you want to have the pantry
full? I can remember, I think I gave
a little allusion last week to the Laura and Mary story, so
forgive me two in a row, but you remember the long winter?
Now Manzo and Royal were living in their little claim shanty,
and what did they have behind their false wall? They had corn
all the way up. And they didn’t tell anybody
about it, but what did they eat every night? Pancakes. Those
boys were raised well, weren’t they? If you read the Farmer
Boy, you realize that that was an industrious household. There
was not a moment wasted, not a crop wasted, not a byproduct
of that farm wasted. And so here you have these two
boys that did what a lot of people did. They moved out west for
the promise of free land. Most people starve to death.
but not these two because they were industrious. They had been
raised well. So you look at the end. Look
at the end. Do you want to starve? Do you
want to be prepared? Do you want to be poor? Or do
you want to have plenty? And so there’s the sloth. And
then the last little section, the last S is scoundrels, verses
12 through 15, where it says here, a worthless person. Some
of y’all know that in the Hebrew the the word for man is Adam
right Adam simply means man or Then this worthless man that’s
two words jammed together in The Hebrew language here in Proverbs
chapter 6 and it’s it’s Adam and then the word Belial Belial
is kind of a word for like a worthless or satanic type person and so
you have a Adam Belial here that’s the that’s the phrase and it’s
Interesting word picture, isn’t it? We say to our kids when they’re
going to go running around, don’t you go running around with so
and so. They’re worthless, right? They’re trouble. Or we have some
sort of moniker for them because we know that if your kids, our
kids, go running around with them, oh, there’s going to be
trouble. For these are troublemakers and that’s the warning here.
We’ve had a warning against giving up security now or then a warning
against being lazy now This is a warning about the company you
keep and notice what these troublemakers do their speech their eyes their
finger their feet but most of all their heart a worthless person
a wicked man goes about with crooked speech and He winks with
his eyes, he signals with his feet, he points with his finger.
With perverted heart, he devises evil, continually sowing discord. And then the warning, calamity
will come upon him. Suddenly, in a moment, he will
be broken beyond healing. It’s a powerful thing to see
what’s going on in our country through social media, through
the news media, through intimidation, through all sorts of lies and
deceit. And it’s really got our nation
in a bind, doesn’t it? I think a lot of people are awake
and they see this. And in many ways, they feel powerless
to do anything about it. But we want to stay away from
those whose speech is crooked, whose eyes signal, whose hands
signal, whose feet signal, but most of all, whose heart shows
discord. I flip around the TV channels
a little bit here and there to see if what I hear is really
true. And it really is. It’s pretty nasty out there on
the television. If you were to watch the news
today, I think you would really believe that there’s a dark winter
coming, wouldn’t you? If you were to watch just Joe News Channel,
local or national, you would believe that the sky is falling.
You would believe that there are people that want to kill
you and eat you. You would believe literally everything that hears,
and it would be doom and gloom. And so it’s very interesting
how powerful people of crooked hearts are. Don’t we just feel
refreshed when somebody tells the truth? Even if it’s a truth
that makes them and their personal viewpoint uncomfortable, they
still tell what’s true anyway, what’s reality. So there’s a
warning here. And it ought to be an encouragement
to us. When there are scoundrels, when
there are those who sow discord and those who devise evil, calamity
will fall upon them. They’ll be broken beyond healing
and God will take care of it way better than we can, better
than our bumper stickers and our t-shirts and better than,
you know, anything we could devise. And I found this to be true and
I think maybe you have in time. You know you you get in the company
of scoundrels and they always fall as God’s Word says they
always fall in their own traps They set a net for you, but they
themselves are ensnared in it and so this ought to give us
great comfort because God always has a sense of humor, you know,
Joseph got put in a pit and But later he put lots of food in
a pit. And guess who came with their
empty sacks? His brothers and his father,
and they needed food. So God always has a way of turning
the tables. And so what’s so important here
that we ought to teach our children? Well, I think there’s something
greater than these three things. We ought to teach our children
Christ. We ought to show them their sin. We ought to show them
their need of a savior. Yes, we should teach them these
life and death issues. But don’t you know that a person
who’s a new creation in Christ will avoid foolish relationships,
whether it’s with scoundrels or putting up surety for someone
who on their own cannot pay. And for sure, a good Christian
will adopt the great Christian work ethic of working hard as
unto the Lord, in a way that’s not pleasing to man, but that’s
pleasing to Christ himself. And so there’s lots to teach,
there’s lots at stake, but the most important lesson is to capture
the heart. The heart we keep from sowing
discord and from turning others astray, but we aim at the heart
and aim at salvation in Christ. and pray that as they become
new creations, they will live wisely and bring the next generation
to know the Lord. Let’s pause and pray God’s blessing
on these things. Lord, we thank you for the warnings
from scripture that over and over remind us what to avoid
and how to live. And we pray that in Christ Jesus,
we would be wise. In Christ Jesus, we would be
industrious. And in Christ Jesus, we would avoid those who would
ensnare us and drag us. into evil and difficult situations. We ask for your blessings in
Christ’s name. Amen.