A Woman's Wisdom: How the Book of Proverbs Speaks to Everything (10 page)

being a friend

We’ve considered how the Bible guides us in choosing our friends. But that’s only half the equation. How can we
be
a good friend? We can
begin here:

There we see that deciding against entering into or continuing a close relationship with someone is not the same as a refusal to love. Sometimes love requires disassociation, as we just considered.

On another, less weighty note, Proverbs gives this piece of practical advice on being a good friend:

In other words, good friends don’t overstay their welcome. A practical way to love others is to be cognizant of their needs and the value of their calling and their time. Do friends duck our calls because they can never get us off the phone? Do they not invite us to drop by for mid-morning coffee because we might stay through lunch?

The wisdom of keeping our foot from being too often in our neighbor’s house can also be applied to the place we seek to hold in her affections. In other words, a possessive spirit will hinder us from being a good friend. We aren’t to treat our friendships as personal possessions. If we find ourselves jealous of the time a friend spends with others or distressed when she reveals confidences to someone besides us, we aren’t acting with her best interests
in mind.

Being a good friend also means knowing when to mind our own business:

There is always risk when we involve ourselves in the relational difficulties of others, yet sometimes we take the risk because it’s the loving thing to do. When we are asked to get involved by mediating an argument or offering advice, we do so, knowing full well that our involvement might come back to bite us. However, if we offer our two cents unsolicited, we might rightly be accused of meddling. Just because we believe that our third-party objectivity will provide insight that those directly involved in the difficulty are unable to see, it doesn’t mean our input is necessary. It takes discernment—and humility—to determine when to speak up and when to keep quiet. That being said, it is always right to seek the best way to confront blatant and unrepentant sin. Apart from that, however, it is often wisest simply to make ourselves available to help rather than to step up and try to
assert it.

At the same time, wise women don’t look away when their friends are caught up in sin, nor do they gloss over the sin when asked about it as we consider again a proverb we looked at earlier:

When a friend asks if we’ve noticed her recent thirty-pound weight gain, we tell her the truth. We use her question as an opportunity to dig deeper, perhaps asking if there is an underlying struggle that she has been using food to cope with. Our bluntness may wound her initially, but it will help her much more than saying, “What thirty pounds? I don’t know what you’re talking about!” when it is clear that we do indeed. Or when we’ve noticed that a particular friend has been acting a little too friendly with her married colleague, pointing it out is the act of a faithful friend. Ignoring it because it’s awkward or because we fear she will think we are legalistic is more like the kiss of an enemy.

the ultimate friend

So many of those we call “friends” pass through our lives in a season or two. What bonded us in the first place—those areas in which our lives intersect—changes over time, and then the relational glue no longer holds. Or one of us grows spiritually while the other does not. Friends will let us down, and we will let them down too. I’ve heard it said that if we get to old age with two or three friendships that have survived all of life’s changes, we should consider ourselves rich in friends. Jesus, however, is the ultimate friend and the only one who will never let us down. And this is a friendship that all wise women embrace. “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).

the world . . .

“Don’t let yourself come last! It’s important for you to be able to indulge in things that are just for ‘you.’ You
deserve it!”

—Jennifer LB Leese,

“Indulge Yourself! 20 Fantastic Ways to Feel Fantastic,”

The Woman’s Connection

the word . . .

It is not good to eat much honey,

nor is it glorious to seek one’s own glory.

—Proverbs 25:27

When you think of self-control, or the need for it, what probably comes to mind, if you’re an American, is eating. We live in a society that has more opportunity to indulge personal appetites than any society throughout history. And indulge we do, to the point that we don’t know how to stop. Our grocery stores provide us with hundreds of food choices, and some restaurant menus take as long to peruse as the latest issue of
Bon Appétit
. The Food Network features multiple how-to programs and cooking competitions, and good chefs today possess celebrity status.

Don’t get me wrong—I greatly enjoy watching many of these programs. But I can’t help but cringe sometimes at the disproportionate value placed on how something looks or tastes. Table settings are no longer discussed in terms of placemats and candles; today they are
tablescapes
. And just listen to what
Top Chef
judge Gail Simmons had to say about a contestant’s sauce: “That pepperoni sauce was just crazy. . . . It was intense! It was really intense. . . . It made us think, it was thoughtful and focused, and somehow it came together. It cracked me up.”
¹
Pepperoni has become so much more than just a tasty pizza topping; today it is thoughtful, focused, and amusing.

Some time ago, actor George Clooney was interviewed on television. He had lost a lot of weight for a movie role, and the reporter asked, “George, what is your diet secret?” And he replied, “I don’t eat too much.” It was apparent that the reporter didn’t quite know how to respond to his simplistic weight-loss strategy, so she changed the subject, but George unwittingly spoke some biblical truth:

That proverb speaks much-needed wisdom into our food-saturated culture.

Have you felt the extremes of overeating—not just the physical ones but the emotional “vomiting” that occurs after overdoing it? We always feel lousy afterward because we are filled with regret and self-recrimination. Despite those bad feelings, we tend to downplay the sin aspect of overeating. We soften it and refer to last night’s “overindulgence” and in more extreme cases to someone’s “eating disorder.” But no matter what we call it, the Bible calls it gluttony:

We are gluttonous whenever we eat more than we need, whatever the underlying motivation. We are gluttonous whenever we misuse God’s good gift of food to gratify ourselves or to escape troubling emotions or to seek control over life. That’s why those with the eating disorder anorexia also fall into the glutton category. Anyone who has ever misused food as a way to cope with stress, alleviate boredom, or escape loneliness knows the truth of this proverb:

In America today, eating, for many, is all about pleasure, but in many places around the globe, food is still more about basic survival. Eating disorders and other outworkings of gluttony aren’t prevalent in underdeveloped countries, but the abundance of food in the West has made it an easy avenue for the outworking of our sin. We take food for granted and misuse it rather than eating for the purpose of glorifying God with good health and with thankfulness for his bounty. Proverbs gives us a rule of thumb for eating biblically:

In other words, eating in moderation is good. It enables us not only to glorify God but also to enjoy our bounty of food as God intended.

what exactly is self-control?

How would you define self-control? The first thing we might say is that self-control is something difficult. We know this from personal experience. We might define it this way: self-control is getting—and maintaining—a grip on ourselves, which includes a grip on our emotions, our speech, and all our physical appetites. Wise women recognize that mastering the art of self-control comes from submitting to
God’s
control in every area of life. To be self-controlled, therefore, is actually to be controlled
by God.

Self-control is also something we all
need
, and Proverbs tells
us why:

Ancient cities were surrounded by impregnable walls. These walls served as the front lines of defense against would-be attackers. We read in the book of Joshua that the Israelites were not able to get inside the city of Jericho until God miraculously caused the walls of the city to come tumbling down (Josh. 6:15–20). Understanding this aspect of ancient cities enables us to grasp the metaphor in the proverb. Without the walls of self-control, we have little defense against our enemies, which consist of anything that weakens or diminishes our ability to obey God and glorify him with our lives.

Paul teaches us something about self-control in his letter to the Galatians. In chapter 5 of that letter he makes a contrast between being led by our natural desires and being led by the Holy Spirit. He indicates the contrast by providing us with two lists. The first is a list of things, “works of the flesh,” that spring from our fallen nature, and the second is a list of traits, the “fruit of the Spirit,” that will be manifested in us as we are progressively mastered by Christ. The works of the flesh aren’t hard to pinpoint, as
he says:

In other words, certain habits and behaviors are shown to be sin by the negative fruit they produce, the ultimate outcome of which is separation from God and his kingdom. Every item on that list is an outworking of sin. Each has a controlling, addictive quality that, if left unchecked, will eventually take over and master
a life.

Elsewhere Paul provides us with a spiritual perspective on this downward spiral. Using sexual perversion as an example, he gives us insight into the heart-working of those who are enslaved by what today we call “addiction”:

Proverbs puts it
this way:

When people seek fulfillment apart from God himself, they initially think they are on the path to delight and freedom, but the reality is just the opposite. They are fools, because they are looking to gratify their cravings in what God has created rather than in the One who created them. Over time, God gives them up to their cravings. If you read that entire chapter of Romans, you will see that being given over to the sinful desires of our flesh is God’s ultimate judgment on
unrepentant sin.

Some time ago I ran into an old acquaintance whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years. As we caught up over coffee, he told me that since I’d seen him last, he’d spent many years away from the Lord and gotten caught up in unrestrained sexual sin. He was seeking the Lord afresh, he said, but he continued to struggle with desire for some of the perverted practices in which he’d engaged. As he told me a bit of this, he said with a wry smile, “I did some pretty awful things, and I’m surprised that God didn’t strike me down in the process.” He didn’t realize that his desire for perversion was itself a foretaste of what eventually would have happened in full measure had he not repented. Such is the nature of sin and God’s dealings with it, whether we are Christians or not. James Boice writes:

And this is right where Paul’s second list fits in: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law” (Gal. 5:22–23).

Here we discover that the self-control of Proverbs 25:28 isn’t a natural trait, something that, if we just try hard enough, we can master. Our understanding of it is much fuller as a result of what we find in Galatians. In both Testaments, it is clear that self-control is possible only by and through the living Lord. In Proverbs we know it as the fear of the Lord, living under him in trust, submission, and dependence. In the New Testament we get a much fuller picture. Self-control comes about through our union with Christ. Only those who live in fellowship with God can apprehend and maintain true self-control. Any of us can modify our behavior, but behavior modification is not the same thing as self-control, because, from a biblical standpoint, only one of those—self-control—has to do with the whole person—body, mind, and heart.

Who doesn’t want this? We all want to be characterized by self-control. But how? How can we live this way on a consistent basis? We all can relate to Paul, who said, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15). We would all prefer to be in control rather than to be controlled by something or someone, yet each of us struggles with how to lay hold of it in one or more areas of our lives. But God never leaves us in the dark where obedience is concerned:

And

Paul shows us that when it comes to getting hold of and maintaining self-control, there is a balance between what God does and what we do. As for our part, we are to walk by the Spirit and crucify our flesh; in other words, we are to starve the life out of the natural urges that threaten to master us, and we are to walk by the Spirit, which means presenting ourselves regularly to God’s Word and other believers so that, in the process, we will be transformed into the image of Christ. Paul was stating a fact when he said that if we walk by the Spirit, we won’t constantly succumb to things that harm us. If we are in Christ, we can be self-controlled women.

This is good news. If we have experienced repeated failure in our attempts to quit overeating, overspending, or whatever our particular struggle might be,
it doesn’t have to be this way
! But so often it still is. Too often we find ourselves like the broken-down city left without walls. What tears down our walls? Let’s consider five possibilities.

five hindrances to self-control

1) Competing Desires

One reason we struggle is that our desire for control is constantly at war with our desire for the thing we need control over. If you are a woman whose weight fluctuates like a yo-yo, you know what I’m talking about. Every winter you gain ten pounds, and every summer you take off eight. Over time, you resolve to lose those cumulative extras, and you do, only to find the scale climbing back up a few months later. Either you will eventually become discouraged and simply give up, or you will continue to yo-yo for the rest of your life.
But it doesn’t have to be
this way
!