Posted on 10/26/2021 10:16:03 PM PDT by Pilgrim's Progress
“Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart: so doth the sweetness of a man's friend by hearty counsel. Thine own friend, and thy father's friend, forsake not; neither go into thy brother's house in the day of thy calamity: for better is a neighbour that is near than a brother far off” (Proverbs 27:9-10).
We need to make sure we are the right kind of friend. Many people are practically cowards when it comes to their friends. They won't go to a friend and say, “Look, you are doing wrong and I am not going to do this and if you keep doing this you are going to ruin our friendship. Right?” “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” Right?
Go down to verse nine, and you find another attribute of friendship. Here and again, it is something that many times is misconstrued in the world. The world has its own species of this. “Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart: so doth the sweetness of a man's friend by hearty counsel.” For what it is worth, this is the only place in the Bible that the word “hearty” shows up. So, everybody wants a friend that they are close to and that they can sit down and tell their woes too. When they are disappointed by their career objectives not being realized they can sit down and cry on their friends’ shoulder. That sort of that sort of counsel.
Do you have friends you can sit down with and counsel about the things of God, because that is what this says here. That is what I said about the world having its own species of this where girlfriends get together and have tea and cupcakes or whatever and talk about their husbands and talk about their kids and talk about their careers and talk about their fingernails and talk about their hair and talk about their menopause and whatever else is going on, and many men do the same thing.
My point is the world has a species of this going on, but it is not the same thing. “Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart; so doeth the sweetness of a man's friend by hearty counsel.” This is talking about the right kind of counsel here. Right? Do you have friends you go to that you can count on for spiritual advise? How about you 14-year-old teenager? Do you have friends that you can go to that won’t steer you in a wrong direction? I never asked a teenager when I was a teenager a spiritual question. You could not have paid me to ask a spiritual question of another teenager. It was just something we didn't discuss? Well, we need friends around us that we can sit down with and talk about some spiritual things. We are going to live forever. We had better be able to deal with some folks about things that have to do with forever. It says, “Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart: so doth the sweetness of a man's friend by hearty counsel.”
Then it says, “Thine own friend, and thy father's friend, forsake not.” The world also has this species of thing and again it is not the same thing. How many times have you heard a person say, “This guy or this lady is my friend and I will stand by that friend no matter what? If they are gay, I am going to stand by my friend. If they rob a bank, I am going to stand by my friend. If they kill 50 people in a theater, I am going to stand by my friend because he's my friend and I am a faithful friend and I am going to be faithful to my friend, okay?” That is the world’s species. Have you heard that at some level or another? We've seen it in soap operas or romance novels. That is a theme in the world. That is a different species than what we have here in this passage, “Thine own friend, and thy father's friend forsake not,” okay?
The right kind of friend is the kind of friend that is doing right. Forsake them not, and by the way, your father's friend. One question to ask is, “I hope my sons and my daughter are friends with people who have been my friends. Not just friends with my friend’s kids; but I hope my sons are friends that are valuable friends, not only to me but to my kids.
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Great proverb! Glory to God!...ALL glory to God and our saviour Jesus Christ!
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