Every parent’s worst nightmare is to see their kids keeping bad company. Chances are that the bad company will have bad consequences. So – what company do you keep?

It’s great to be with you again at the beginning of another week. Do you remember when we were growing up? You know, when you were in your teenage years your parents would tell you this or tell you that and we’d just roll our eyes into the back of our heads wouldn’t we? What do they know?

When we were teenagers the very best counselling advice of our parents, well we’d ignore most of it. It was like water off a ducks back. Now we can both look back on those years and recognise our own immaturity. That’s what it was, part of our growing up was going through that ‘know it all’ phase. Truth be known we didn’t know it all and we still don’t know it all.

I remember my mother saying things to me like, ‘Don’t hang out with the wrong crowd.’ ‘Be careful of the company you keep.’ Yeah, right! What would she know? Typical teenage attitude. Hopefully I’ve done a bit of growing up since then.

So what about today, here and now? When we get the counsel of someone else, someone that’s older or more mature or someone who just sees things that we don’t. How do we react? Do we still roll our eyes into the back of our heads or do we listen to and benefit from that advice?

You know maturity is an interesting thing as we grow. We grow in our own ability to discern what is good advice. With some advice, when you listen to it from people and you think it might be hard advice, it might be tough advice but its good advice and we accept that.

And other advice, people may be give advice in their own interests or whatever. We look at that advice and think, ‘No, no, no, that’s not good advice. I’m going to reject that advice.’ And truly it’s a balance between the two.

If we accept all the advice we ever get, well we’re going to be all over the place. We’ll believe the last person that we talked to, we’ll be flip flopping, we just won’t have any security in our lives. On the other hand, if we accept no advice, well we’ll never learn, we’ll never grow. We’ll end up stunted emotionally and financially and spiritually because we just never take on anything new from anyone else.

The answer is in that balance of discernment. The courage to accept the good advice, even when it’s criticism. It’s easy to accept encouragement isn’t it? It’s harder to accept criticism and then to do something about it. Well that really takes courage. Wisdom is about rejecting the bad advice, having nothing to do with it but having the courage to accept the good advice.

Where do we get our advice from? This week and next week on the program we’re going to explore an old Yiddish proverb, that proverb that goes like this. It says, “Every generation has to learn for itself, the stove is hot”.

It’s a great proverb and it’s true you know, when we’re teenagers and we’re running around and we know it all and we make mistakes and it hurts and we learn through those experiences, don’t we? But we also learn by letting out the good advice that we get from other people.

That’s about learning to grow. It’s mixing advice and experience in real life and growing and maturing. And when you look at ten bits of advice that one of the wisest men that ever lived, King Solomon, gave to some young men in the Book of Proverbs.

We’ll put them under the microscope, we’ll tune into his advice from this older man to the younger men and see whether there’s any food in there for us. See if there’s anything there for our lives.

The first bit of advice he gives in that book is about keeping bad company. Now any parent knows that if our kids keep bad company that doesn’t all go well for their future. That bad company is a bad influence and it can be terribly, terribly destructive in our kids when their growing up.

And this is what Solomon says to the young men about keeping bad company.

“Don’t be tempted by bad company or listen when they say, ‘come on, let’s gang up and kill someone just for the fun of it. Well they’re all well and healthy now but we’ll finish them off once and for all. We’ll take their valuables and fill our homes with stolen goods. If you join our gang, you’ll get a share.”

“Don’t follow anyone like that or do what they do. They’re in a big hurry to commit some crime or even murder. They are like a bird that sees the bait but ignores the trap. They gang up to murder someone but they’re victims. The wealth you get from crime robs you of life.”

Pretty deep isn’t it. It’s pretty profound.

Okay, hopefully most of us aren’t murderers. Hopefully most of us aren’t going to go and mug someone and rob them. But we kind of do that sometimes in life through our behaviour and our attitudes and our dishonesty and aggressively looking after our own interests above other people’s interests.

And it turns out that keeping bad company is different from being around bad people. You go to work. You go to Church. You’re a member of a club. You interact with people and some of them are great. Some of them are fantastic. They’re wonderful to be with. And some of them are downright awful. That’s life.

When we deal with people sometimes we have to deal with those people and everything in between. But it’s not whether we’re around them so much. It’s a question of influence. Look at what Solomon says again.

“Don’t be tempted by bad company or listen when they say, ‘come on, let’s gang up on someone and kill them just for the fun of it.”

It’s a question of whether we take their advice, whether we ‘keep company’ with them. Whether we let them influence what we think and what we feel and ultimately, what we do.

Here’s the chain. They speak – we hear. Now when we hear we have a decision. We either accept or reject and if we accept it changes our behaviour and if it changes our behaviour it has consequences. That’s the important bit. When we hear do we accept or reject? Do we rely on them or not? Do we trust them or not? Do we put our faith in them to the extent that we let them change what we do or not?

It’s not that we’re around bad people. It’s not even that we hear them that’s the problem. It’s when we’re tempted by them. When we allow them to change what we do, it’s a question of influence.

Just in my own time in Gods word recently, I’ve been reading through the Book of Ezra, chapter 4, verse 4. There’s a situation where Israel’s people are back from a Babylonian captivity and they’re rebuilding the temple. It says this:

Then the people of the land discouraged Gods people and made them afraid to build.

You see, bad company can discourage us. It can lead us to complaining. It can be disruptive. It can make us suspicious. It can make us envious. It can make us dishonest. It can make us violent. Bad company is an entry point of bad influence from other people. And I have enough issues in my own life to deal with without taking on anyone else’s.

Now at the end of the day all of us want to live a good life. Sure we want to be comfortable. We want to be happy. But part of that is knowing that we’re living a good life. And that there’s goodness that we’re reaping the fruit from and God comes to us here, this stuff from Solomon is from the Bible and we go, ‘Oh, it was written 3,000 years ago. Oh, it’s from the Bible. Oh, it’s not for me.’

Come on, this is good advice, isn’t it? God is giving us fatherly advice born out of His love and His wisdom. Who do you hang round with? Come on, who are the people whom you allow to influence you? And are any of those ruining your life? Because if they are it’s like drinking in poison from them. It’s time to do something about it.

Bad company drags us down. Bad company has consequences. And when we sit here and go, ‘Well, that was a nice story from Solomon Berni’, we can ignore it and there will be consequences. Or we can take it on board and we can say, ‘wow, that is great advice. I never really thought of it that way’.

You know something, there are some changes I need to make about the people I hang out with. The choice is ours and the consequences, they’re ours too.

Sometimes, bad things happen in life. So often, they hit us without warning. Question is, what if anything can you do to be prepared beforehand?

Which one of us will ever forget that tsunami that hit on Boxing Day, the 26th of December, 2004? Indonesia. Sri Lanka. India. Thailand. Elsewhere. 200,000 confirmed dead and another 50,000 missing.

People were swimming, holidaying, working, having breakfast, sleeping. There were no dark clouds or storm clouds. No loud thunder crack. No wind. No earthquake. Nothing. But all of a sudden the oceans broke forth and swallowed everything in their path.

A friend of mine who visited Aceh in Indonesia told me of a boat in tree several miles inland. All without warning.

Well actually there was a warning. Seismologists in Australia and elsewhere immediately detected the under sea earthquake but there were no systems in place to tell the people on the ground. There were inadequate systems in the oceans to detect the coming tsunami and so for the lack of early warning systems, a quarter of a million people perished.

I just can’t begin to imagine the panic and the mayhem and the people drowning. I mean not being able to breathe, losing air, the terror and the death times 250,000.

This was the strongest earthquake ever measured. It measured 9.1 on the Richter scale. Now nothing could have stopped that wave from coming but early warning would have put people in a position to take action to save their lives.

Early warning would have put them on higher ground. Early warning, knowing that it’s coming and having a communication system in place and the evacuation procedures and resources in place would have saved probably the majority of those quarter of a million lives.

This week on A Different Perspective we’re looking at Godly advice –advice that can prepare us to deal with the issues of life.

When we were teenagers we had, I did, we had the ‘know it all’ attitude. We ignored mum and dad because they didn’t know anything and I guess as a result of that I know I walked through things, when I made mistakes and it’s caused me pain and I had to live through the consequences and I learned from that. I grew from that and I guess you did too. We all did. That’s life.

But as adults, sometimes we still do the same thing. There’s this wonderful Yiddish proverb that says, “Every generation has to learn for itself that the stove is hot.” And this week and next week on the program we’re exploring that through the Book of Proverbs. A book that King Solomon, one of the wisest men that ever walked this planet, wrote.

And the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament is a book of Solomon, as an older man, wrote for the younger men to give them Godly, mature advice for their lives. And sure, we need to take that advice and we need to take our experiences and live those things out and hopefully that’s how we grow.

These days I know that governments around the Pacific ring and the Indian ocean are spending lots of money on early warning systems. Hopefully we’ve learned from this whole awful tsunami exercise, that we can save lives, that we can do things beforehand to save lives when a tsunami hits.

And life, our lives, we have our tsunami’s too. The death of a loved one. Being retrenched. Failing at something. Sickness. Accidents. Broken relationships. Lostness. Depression. It’s an endless list isn’t it? We wouldn’t wish any of those things on anyone. We wouldn’t wish any of that on our own lives.

But here’s the thing. Those things do happen in life. Those things are consequences of our decisions. Ultimately to rebel against God. It’s what He tells us and they come without warning. There could have been one around the next corner, over the next hill, tomorrow, in the next half hour. We just don’t know but what could we do to get ready? What can we do to be prepared?

That’s the question and it’s a good question and Solomon gave his fatherly advice to the young men that spoke exactly into that. It spoke into that ‘know it all’ attitude. This is what he said,

How much longer will you enjoy being stupid fools? (Proverbs 1:22)

That’s pretty in your face and maybe we need that sometimes.

How much longer will you enjoy being stupid fools? How much longer? Won’t you ever stop sneering and laughing at knowledge? Listen, as I correct you and tell you what I think you completely ignored me and refused to listen. You rejected my advice and paid no attention when I warned you. So when you are struck by some terrible disaster or in trouble and distress surround you like a whirlwind, I’ll laugh and make fun.

Then you’ll ask me for help but then I won’t listen. You’ll search but you won’t find me. No, you will not learn. You refuse to pay respect to the Lord, your God. You rejected my advice and paid no attention when I warned you. Now you’ll eat the fruit of what you’ve done until you are stuffed full by your own schemes.

Sin and self-satisfaction bring destruction and death to stupid fools but if you listen to me you’ll be safe and secure without fear of disaster. (Proverbs 1:22-33)

Who’s talking? Well actually if you read the whole story wisdom is a person. Wisdom is speaking to these young men through this book of proverbs. “How much longer will you enjoy being stupid fools?”

Wisdom is speaking into this attitude of ‘I know it all. Life’s good, I’ll do what I like. I’ll do what feels good. God? Ha, oh goodness no, I know it all.’ It’s easy to feel that way. Easy to think that way in the good times isn’t it?

When life’s going well, when it’s a party, when we’ve got plenty of money, plenty of food and our health’s good. We can breeze along, we can go and do stuff and I guess to some extent, enjoy our lives. We’re never satisfied though. We’re never fulfilled. But I guess we can, in some sense, enjoy.

And then God gets in our faces like that. You know I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that you and I are together today. God gets in our faces with something like, “How much longer will you enjoy being stupid fools?”

We all need that. We’re influenced by a whole bunch of things. We take a whole bunch of influences from television and radio and from people and from life and books and ideas. We suck those in, very uncritically we are influenced.

Will we be influenced by Gods wisdom? How much does Jesus have sway in our hearts? Because when Jesus talks about wisdom, He talks about self-sacrifice. See there’s a cost. There’s a discipline. There’s a gentleness. There’s a joy. There’s a peace. But those things come at a cost.

Jesus said:

Take up your cross and follow me.” “Don’t try to live your life because if you do, you’ll lose it but if you’re prepared to lose your life for My sake, you’ll gain it. (Matthew 16:24-26)

And God’s wisdom lays down solid foundations in our lives day by day by day. But here’s the crunch. We need to do that before the tsunami hits. In every day of our lives, when things are going well, that’s when we need to be drinking in Gods wisdom. Laying it quietly down in the DNA of our souls before the tsunami hits.

What this message from Solomon says is if you think you can conjure up Gods wisdom in the middle of the storm, forget it. You need to have laid that foundation in walking every day with Him before and you do that and if you listen to me, says God, you’ll be safe and secure without fear of disaster.

We sometimes can’t stop the tsunamis in life. They just happen. But can I encourage you to thirst after Gods wisdom. Just do one thing for me. Go to the gospel of Mark, it’s the shortest of the four gospel accounts, takes two to two and a half hours max to read.

And as you read it on a piece of paper just jot down the Jesus wisdom bits that really blow you away. The ones that jump out at you. Let Him turn your world upside down.

The question is, will you listen?

It’s easy to judge other people’s weaknesses, through the lens of our own abilities. Pretty quickly, we can come to the conclusion that none of them really measure up.

Before I became a Christian you know what my favourite saying was? It’s so hard to soar like an eagle when you’re surrounded by turkeys. I guess I was a bit of a social Darwinist. I believed in the survival of the fittest.

Every year on my annual confidential report when I was an officer in the Australian army, they’d end up writing something along these lines. This officer does not suffer fools gladly or words to that effect. And I guess each one of us, as we judge the abilities of others through the lens of our own particular strengths, can come to that same conclusion.

It’s so hard to soar like an eagle when you’re surrounded by all these turkeys. The point is, we all think of ourselves as the eagle and the other people as the turkeys. Depends on your perspective I guess. But you don’t need a PHD in psychology to figure out that if we all wandered around with that same attitude, well it’s going to be a pretty ugly world to live in, isn’t it?

This week on the program we’re unpacking the old Yiddish proverb that goes like this, ‘Every generation has to learn for itself, the stove is hot.’ And I guess as we look back on our lives as we’ve grown and matured, well you look at your teenage years and you remember the fun and you remember ignoring your parent’s good advice because we knew it all. I did. I knew it all. I’m sure you did too.

I didn’t need my parents to tell me what to do. I knew it all. And as we grow and we learn, well you know, maybe I don’t know it all. I think maturity comes when we say, ‘Boy actually, there’s a lot that I don’t know.’

Growing up and maturing is really about getting better at discerning and accepting advice. Figuring out what’s good advice that we take into our lives and that we act on and that we allow to influence us and to change us. And what’s the bad advice that we steer clear of. That’s the theory anyway. But often we still ignore and reject good advice.

If you’re a parent you’ll know that you have the experience, you see the consequences of what your kids are doing but sometimes they just won’t listen. Sometimes they just have to go out and learn for themselves that the stove is hot. They have to live out the consequences of their own mistakes.

But you know something, it’s not just teenagers. It’s you and me. Nothing changes. It’s exactly the same for us because we’re pretty good at ignoring good advice too.

And this week and also next week we’re going to be looking at some of God’s wisdom in Solomon’s book of Proverbs where he talks to a bunch of young men and says, ‘Look, I’ve been around the block a few times. You know I’ve seen it all. I’ve done well, I’ve made mistakes and here’s some of the wisdom. Go and suck on this for a while. Go and get this wisdom into you cause it’s good.’

We don’t know if the young men listened or not but what we can do is we can tune in to the advice and say, ‘I wonder if there’s something in there for me.’

Today we’re going to look at another piece of advice. We’re going to look at how we treat other people. What we do and what we say about them. This is what Solomon writes:

When God blesses His people their city prospers but deceitful liars can destroy a city. It’s stupid to say bad things about your neighbours but if you’re sensible you’ll keep quiet. A gossip tells everything but a true friend will keep a secret. (Proverbs 11:11-13)

Mm, it’s not a bad little passage. It starts off by saying, “When God blesses His people their city prospers.” And you know something, that’s Gods heart. God’s heart is to bless us physically and spiritually and emotionally and socially with a most abundant life. That’s what Jesus promised. Yes that includes sacrifice. Yes that includes living through difficult times. But ultimately God wants to bless us.

So, “When God blesses His people their city prospers.” Notice Solomon doesn’t write the individual prospers. He’s talking about something much bigger, much more wonderful. The community as a whole prospers. That’s great. We in our societies these days, I don’t think we do ‘community’ so well. We all have TV’s and internet and cars and we often don’t see each other but God wants to bless the community. Together we’re blessed. In fellowship we’re blessed. “But deceitful liars can destroy a city.”

Isn’t that amazing? Deceit and lies can rob the city of Gods blessing. I’d have thought nothing could rob us of Gods blessing but it turns out that deceitful liars rob us of Gods blessing and destroy that city. It’s like having one or two rotten apples in the barrel that spoils the whole barrel.

Why is that? Well, because dishonesty undermines trust and trust is the bond in that city that holds the community together. And when trust is undermined, relationships break down.

Over the years as a consultant I guess I’ve worked in well over 200 organisations. The work I’ve done in the Information Technology industry. And it’s interesting when you go into an organisation, often they talk about themselves as either being a high trust or a low trust environment.

And I have to tell you, high trust companies, they’re a joy to work in. But where the culture is a culture of low trust, it’s absolutely horrible. It’s brutal because people are always worrying about being stabbed in the back. In a high trust environment it’s not about winning. In a low trust environment it’s about winning.

It’s an interesting contrast between golf and cricket. In golf you mark your scorecard incorrectly and you are duty bound to disqualify yourself. I saw Greg Norman do that in a big tournament once. He came back the next day and said, ‘I’ve made a mistake on my card. I’m disqualifying myself.’

But in cricket these days, when people hit the ball and they’re caught and the umpire didn’t quite see it they’re supposed to walk. They’re supposed to say, ‘Well, I know I hit it, I know I’m out’. But these days they don’t. I don’t like that.

When God blesses His people the city prospers but deceitful liars can destroy a city. It’s stupid to say bad things about your neighbours, if you’re sensible you’ll keep quiet.

Why? Don’t you just love getting mileage about people’s faults? ‘Have you heard? Did you know? Oh really.’ We love to gossip. So when we make a blunder, do we want it up in lights? Do we? What is it about us that somehow belittling others publicly, somehow that makes us feel bigger and better? What it does is it breaks down the trust and the relationship between the people and people stop feeling safe.

A gossip tells everything but a true friend keeps a secret.

When someone covers up for your mistakes. You know when you’ve made a blunder and you think, ‘Ah well, I’m for the high jump now.’ And someone steps in, maybe your boss or co-worker or maybe a friend or maybe a family member and they take the blame or they divert the attention or they make an excuse for your mistakes. Doesn’t that cut you to the heart? Doesn’t that say something to you? That’s a true friend.

We are so busy sometimes in life complaining about one another. Telling other people about our neighbour saying, ‘Well I heard them arguing over the fence last night’. Come on, we don’t need to do that.

When God blesses His people their city prospers but deceitful liars can destroy a city. It’s stupid to say bad things about your neighbours, if you’re sensible you’ll keep quiet. A gossip tells everything but a true friend will keep a secret.

This is God’s wisdom. Okay, Solomon wrote it down to some young men 3,000 years ago. Isn’t there something in there for us, here and now, though? Is there something in that? A bit of God’s wisdom that can make your life better today.

There’s a timelessness. There’s a something that rings true about it doesn’t it? When you hear God’s wisdom there’s a goodness and a peace. There’s a cerebral curb appeal, you want to pull up next to it because it feels good, it feels right. You know why? Because it’s from God and it is.

And God wants to bless His people. God wants their city to prosper and sometimes we’ve just got to keep our traps shut and not complain about other people and give Him the room and love them and let them make mistakes in a high trust environment.

What do you think?

Other people’s weaknesses can really grate on us, can’t they? And when they do, we just love to tell everyone else about them! But that can get ugly.

It’s great to be with you again today. I was in a taxi recently, it was one of those ones that was getting a bit old and rattly to be on the road. Things squeaked and shook as we drove along. Well fair enough, but the further we drove, well I realised we were feeling every bump.

Obviously the shock absorbers were shot. They’re the bits that kind of cushion the body of the car from the impact of every bump and every pothole. In fact, the better the shock absorbers are, the better the ride. Years ago before I went into full-time ministry, I owned a really expensive car. It was the most unbelievably smooth ride. It had fantastic shock absorbers.

It turns out that relationships are like that too. When we clash with people, as we do, if there’s a good shock absorber there it cushions the blow. The question is, where do you find good shock absorbers for a relationship?

This week on the program we’re unpacking that wonderful Yiddish proverb, “Every generation has to learn for itself, the stove is hot.” It’s about growing and learning isn’t it? How do we do that? It really impacts the quality of our lives and the lives of those around us.

Somehow, you know, sometimes things we really should know about life fall between the cracks. Between the education system and our parents and our family. We don’t always really learn all the things that we need to know to live a great life. Jesus said, “I have come that you may have life and have it abundantly.”

Sometimes patterns of behaviour, entrenched ideas, things we do wrong rob us of that abundant life. King Solomon was one of the wisest men that ever walked the planet and 3,000 odd years ago he wrote a book called the Book of Proverbs that was written as a piece of advice to some young men.

He was saying, ‘Look, I’ve been around the block. Have a listen to this stuff because your life will be so much better for it.’ So what we’re going to do is tune in on that discussion between Solomon and these young men and sort of say, ‘well is there anything there for you and me that we can really benefit from, here and now, 3,000 years down the track?’

Yesterday we saw what we say about other people makes such a difference in relationships. We read this bit from the Book of Proverbs.

When God blesses His people their city prospers but deceitful liars can destroy a city. It’s stupid to say bad things about your neighbours, if you’re sensible you’ll keep quiet. And a gossip tells everything but a true friend will keep a secret. (Proverbs 11:11-13)

It’s good advice isn’t it? We can contribute so much to relationships that we’re in simply by not criticising people. Simply by not gossiping about them. You know when you and I make a mistake, we don’t want the whole world to look at us and say, ‘Oh well, Berni made a stupid mistake, didn’t he?’

And we really appreciate it when other people who are around us, when they cover for us or they don’t say anything or they just, they just let us be. We knew we made a mistake. It’s good isn’t it when we have true friends like that?

A gossip on the other hand tells everything but a friend will keep a secret. That’s the advice that says, don’t criticise other people. It will benefit you and it will benefit them. Keep your trap shut some days, as blunt as that is.

Because when we do that we rob ourselves and we rob other people of Gods blessing. It’s astounding. It’s extraordinary that something I can say can rob other people of a blessing that God has planned for them. And certainly rob me of Gods blessing for me.

We need to learn to control our tongues and when we’re just fit to tell someone else how stupid they are, don’t. Keep your mouth closed. Don’t rob them and don’t rob yourself of Gods blessing.

But sometimes, at home or at work or socially, we come across someone who just comes out swinging at us.

And then what? What can we do then to make a difference? What can we do then that will act like a shock absorber when we clash with that person? That’s a good question. Well Solomon goes on in his Book of Proverbs and it’s in chapter 15, verse 1, that he gives us this piece of advice: A kind answer smooths angry feelings but a harsh word stirs them up. A kind answer smooths angry feelings but a harsh word stirs them up.

You know when someone spits out angry words at us, we have a choice. We can give them a kind answer or a harsh response. And the kind answer soothes angry feelings and a harsh response stirs them up.

People feel anger for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it’s quite rational. Sometimes they’ve been really wronged and that conjures up a sense of indignation and anger in their hearts. But if they’re insecure the smallest thing can set them off.

People can be slighted by such tiny things even though anger can have a rational component. Very often anger is really irrational and people spit out angry words and they spit them in our direction and we feel as though we need to spit back. We feel as though we need to protect ourselves. We have a natural reaction which is, well, I’m going to fight back.

We do it so often but you know something, when someone is having an irrational moment. I’m going to ask you a question, how helpful is it for us to spit anger back in their face? I know there’s a powerful kind of ‘I want to do this’ but how good is the result going to be?

“A kind answer smooths angry feelings but harsh words stir them up.” In other words, we’re going to make it worse. If they’re having an irrational moment and we decide to have an irrational moment too, wow watch out. Let me give you an example.

Wife comes home and says to her husband, ‘You know something, I’m always at the bottom of your priority list’. And her husband says, ‘No you’re not, I’m just so busy, you don’t understand my pressure’. And it’s on for young and old. They have an argument, they have a blue. There are tears. There is anger. They don’t talk to each other for a few hours.

Let me ask you, what good did that exactly do for anyone? Come on, what good did it do? Why did it happen? The wife says, ‘I feel as though I’m rock bottom of your priority list’. And the husband reacts back. Let’s replay that situation for a minute. This time the husbands going to be a shock absorber. “A kind answer smooths angry feelings but harsh words stir them up.”

The wife says, ‘You know something, I’m always at the bottom of your priorities’. The husband says, ‘I want to bite back but I’m not. I’m going to be the shock absorber here.’ And so he says, ‘Honey, why do you feel that?’ And the wife spits out all the things that she’s feeling at the moment.

You know women need to do that often, a lot more than men do and it’s really important thing that a woman can do that with her husband and he doesn’t rip her head off in the process.

And the husband listens to all these things and it feels like accusation after accusation. It feels so unfair but he says, ‘No, I’m going to be the shock absorber here. She’s obviously feeling unloved.’ So he says, ‘You know something, I love you but I get busy sometimes doing stuff. Hey listen, the kids are out at youth group tonight, why don’t we duck down to that little cheap restaurant down the corner and have dinner?’

It’s not rocket science but it’s something we need to learn because when people throw accusations our way we want to fight back sometimes but a kind answer soothes angry feelings. Harsh words, on the other hand, stir them up.

So when people throw these things at us, we have a decision to make. We can say, ‘Well, that’s how they feel. I won’t always agree with you but you know something, today, today I’m going to give them a kind word. Today I’m going to let them express exactly what they feel without me throwing stuff back in their face.’

Today, I’m going to take God’s advice. Today, I’m going to be a shock absorber in this relationship and I’m going to soothe those angry feelings.

Pretty good advice when you think about it.

Let’s face it – we all love to get our own way. But if we never take advice from other people, not only do we miss out on their creativity, but we’ll probably miss some of the pitfalls just up ahead.

It never ceases to amaze me how poor we can be at taking good advice when our lives depend on it. Smoking’s a good example. Diet. Exercise. We do have the most amazing ability to ignore good advice. Why is that?

Well partly because good advice invariably involves changing something today so that we benefit tomorrow. Let me be more specific than that. Changing something almost always means giving up something that we really like. Fried foods to manage cholesterol. Salt to manage blood pressure. Even emotionally we may see something as being our right even though it’s destructive to those around us.

But at the end of the day our ability to take good advice, well it’s going to have a huge impact on the quality of our lives. This week on the program we’ve been unpacking that powerful Yiddish proverb, “Every generation has to learn for itself that the stove is hot.”

And of course we all go through the process of growing up and changing from being kids to teenagers to adults where we look at parents and adults and teachers and we go, ‘Oh, just get out of my life. You know you don’t know what you’re talking about’.

We know it all when we’re teenagers and then we grow up into adults and of course we grow into wonderfully balanced mature people that never have a problem taking advice – yeah right!

We often grow into adults who are nothing more than big teenagers. Teenagers are wonderful but we know that teenagers have some growing up and some learning to do to become adults. But when we take this ‘know it all’ attitude well into our adulthood, we do so at our own detriment.

Now we allow ourselves to be influenced by a whole bunch of different things and the thing that influences us the most tends to be our own needs. ‘Oh well, I want to buy that car. I want to have that holiday. I want to do what feels good to me, right here and right now.’

It’s okay. As long as it’s in balance but I can say I love fried foods and have a coronary. Or we can allow people and ideas and advertisements to influence us without really thinking it through.

I was sitting with a group of student in a tutorial a while back and we were looking at the communication styles and the faults in communication in the media and it asked them to bring some different articles from the media so we could have a look.

Its amazing how, in the media, journalists put spin on things. You know, put stuff in there that are really little hidden time bombs that we just consume day by day, uncritically and they become part of us.

There was an advertisement in there for frequent flyer points and the caption was, “The more you spend, the more you earn.” And attached to the earning side of the equation they had these wonderful pictures of holidays and gifts and plane flights and hotels.

Sure the more you spend the more you earn but you know something, the more you spend the more you spend and the more you spend is much bigger than the earning side of the frequent flyer points.

Now we know that but we allow our spending patterns and our credit card balances and our interest costs to be influenced by an advertiser who entices us to spend more so that we’ll get more frequent flyer points.

The flip side of that is even though on one hand we will uncritically consume ideas from the media and from other people, the moment someone comes along with a different view to our own we react. We push them away. We want them to agree with us.

A piece of advice that King Solomon gave to some young men a few thousand years ago, we’ve been looking at Solomon’s wisdom book of the Book of Proverbs this week and we’ll do that again next week, was this. He said, “Without counsel plans go wrong but with many advisors they succeed.”

I love tuning into Solomon’s advice. See he was talking 3,000 years ago as a man who’d been round the block quite a few times to a bunch of younger inexperienced men saying, ‘here’s some good, sound, Godly wisdom and advice’. And one of the bits of advice he gives them is Proverbs chapter 15, verse 22. He says: 

Without counsel plans go wrong but with many advisors they succeed.

Now consulting the Information Technology industry, as I did for many years, I’ve seen many large, expensive projects go wrong. I have to tell you why. I look at that little bit of advice from Solomon that was written 3,000 years ago, before computers were ever invented and I say, ‘Ain’t that the truth’.

On the one hand we want people to agree with us. I see ‘x’ this way, so does Fred, so does Mary, isn’t that wonderful? Good. I must be right and we can do it and the way I want to do it because we all agree.

That stuff, come on, it’s in our DNA. We want to control the outcome. We want people to agree with us. We want everyone to be on the same page. So we often don’t ask them. We often don’t involve them. We don’t want to hear bad news. We just want to do what we want to do because we want to do it and it’s grabbed out attention. I want to do it my way. I want to control the outcome.

Now my role in the Kingdom of God is I’m gifted to be a mouth, right? I’m gifted to talk and listening is something from the earliest age that I’ve had to learn. It doesn’t come naturally to me, to sit and to listen to someone and to understand.

But in 17 years of consulting my mentor, a guy called Graham who was 20, 25 years my senior, actually taught me to listen. He took me into meetings with him. He watched me fail to listen and talk over the top of people and he’d take me aside and said, ‘Berni, don’t talk over the top of people. Actually listen to them.’ He said, ‘In fact, the job that you have chosen as a consultant, if you don’t listen to them, you’re going to fail.’

So I came up with an inviolent rule. If I am in a space and someone else is talking while I’m talking, I stop talking. I don’t talk over people cause I want to hear what people have to say. It’s a hard lesson to learn but it’s one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned.

When you sit around a table and you have different people with different expertise and different ideas. We were planning a complex website once. It was wonderful. It was innovative. We didn’t quite know how to let people explore what we wanted them to explore and so we asked a number of people to come into a room for half a day and I just sat and listened to them.

And you know somethng, I would never have been able to come up with the sort of creative ideas they had. I would never, on my own, have had the perspective and the understanding and the wealth of knowledge and we benefited so much from tapping into these other people’s creativity.

And when I have my plans and my dreams and I just decide to roll forward with them and not include other people, I’m going to miss out on their ideas.

The counsel that involves other people brings in different perceptions, new ideas, new angles, new experience about risks and problems that we’ll hit. If I just steam ahead without those, I can miss those risks.

Without counsel plans go wrong but with many advisors they succeed.

On the board of our ministry, Christianityworks, there was a man once and he’d been on the board for a good many years and he came to me and said, ‘Berni, I don’t think I can add much value on this board.’ And he said, ‘I don’t think I should be on the board.’

And I said to him, ‘You know what value you add? You always come up with a different angle. You’re prepared to put a different point of view.’ And sometimes, to tell you the truth, over the years I found it frustrating because he stops the board from being a mutual admiration society. He brings a fresh perspective, a new perspective and I said to him, ‘That’s your value and without that I think we would miss some of the things going forward.’

Come on. Let’s surround ourselves with people who are different from us. Okay Solomon wrote this stuff 3,000 years ago but it’s pretty good stuff, isn’t it?