Relationship Priorities

Greeting

Good morning Lighthouse Church!

Turn to your neighbor and tell them, “How blessed are you that you are sitting next to me?”

Date Night Promotion

Before I get into my message this morning I want to talk to you about something coming up later this month that you cannot miss. It is our second (maybe annual) Date Night!

Date Night is a night to not only invest into your marriage, but also a Dinner Party with the other couples of Lighthouse Church. Last year’s Date Night was a blast! You heard from my wife, a panel of Pastors, and another amazing couple from our church. Well, this year, not only are we running it back, but we’re taking it up a notch.

The event is being moved to The Vistonian just down the street to give us some more room, we have invited guest speakers to come and share with us, and of course, we got a real fun dinner party to end the night!

So who can come?

This is for married couples, or couples who are already engaged.

This is not for dating couples, or for couples who one day want to get engaged. This is married couples, and for engaged couples where the guy has already dropped to a knee, she’s got a ring on it, and you are months away from the best decision of your life.

Sound good everyone?

So please register ASAP. We have to confirm final numbers with caterers, the venue, the coffee, and all of that good stuff.

This is going to be a great night and we can’t wait for you to be there and make that investment into your marriage.

Sermon Runway

Ok, let’s go… today my goal through the word of God is to help us get the right perspective on relationships, and today we’re talking about relationships in the context of friendships.

Today’s message is going to challenge some of what you think about relationships, and that’s actually my sermon title for today; Relationship Priorities.

I hope that this not only gives you perspective, but that it also gives you some handles on how to pick the right friends.

Now, in case you are thinking, “I don’t know how spiritual this is…” Please know that not only is this critical to your soul and salvation, but also to your future. If you aren’t married, it’s critical to your future spouse and your future children. That is how strongly I feel about today’s message.

Now, one of the things you need to know about Preachers is, we all get our messages from the same book - The Bible.

Sometimes someone gets a really solid take on a subject, and what preachers like to do is borrow that material and teach from that material as well. So today, I’m going to just share that I was impacted by Pastor Josh Howerton’s message about relationships, and there’s a good chunk of his notes in this message.

So let’s pray and then let’s get into this word that I believe is going to help many of you.

Introduction

In the Bible and in Jewish history, there are two kings of great significance. They might have the most significance over any other Jewish King in their history, though that is up for debate.

These two kings are David, and his son Solomon.

David was pulled from the fields as a shepherd and anointed to be King, and had a long and difficult journey to becoming King. Along the way he made some grave mistakes and he also didn’t listen to the leaders he surrounded himself with. In the end, David is known as being a “Man After God’s Heart” and is celebrated as a great king.

His son Solomon grows up in the palace. He’s given the best of everything and does not have the rags to riches story his father David had. When Solomon became king, he sought the Lord for wisdom, and God honored his request and made him not only extremely wise, but also extremely rich. If you are wondering how rich Solomon was in his time? Well, someone once did a comparative calculation to his wealth compared to the world’s wealth back then, and his wealth would be roughly 4 times the amount of Elon Musks wealth today. Even if you question some of that math, just know that in his day, he was probably the wealthiest person alive. But in the end, Solomon had a bad understanding of relationships and when died the Kingdom split, and for all of his success and wisdom, he got relationships wrong and paid a heavy price.

Transition

And that is what makes today’s message so important.

If you get relationships wrong, it has the potential to bring a lot of hurt and pain into your life. At worst, it can destroy your life and legacy…

The Problem with Nice and Mean

So here is where a lot of parents and children start to get relationships wrong.

Many people pick friends based on these two criterias - Are they Nice or Mean?

On the surface, this seems like a reasonable place to start, but it is very flawed.

You can make friends with a nice person who never challenges you to become a better person.

They can be so nice that they affirm every decision you make, even the ones that are bad for you or lead you down the wrong path.

The nice person might be the person that tells you things like:

“You deserve to be happy! Go ahead and date that boy even though your parents said no.”

“You do whatever your heart wants.”

“You deserve that thing, go ahead and get it by any means necessary.”

All those things sound nice, don’t they? They aren’t correcting you, they aren’t challenging you, and they aren’t mean…

But sometimes, you might meet a person who you think is mean, because they actually have the boldness to tell you what’s true.

I like friends like this! They might be a little rough around the edges, but they are going to tell you the truth…

I remember my Grandma being this way. I’m not saying she was a mean person, but she would tell you exactly like it is. She didn’t pull any punches. Sometimes my Mom and her sisters would try and tell her to be a little more PC, but Grandma was going to tell you the truth even if it came across as mean. She just did not care. She embodied that statement, “These facts don’t care about your feelings.” That was my grandma…

As she got older, she did start to peel it back a bit and I’ll never forget one time, this was like in the mid to late 2000’s when ripped up jeans were popular… I came into her house and my jeans were ripped at the knees and she started staring at me and giving me that up and down. How many of you know what that up and down is? And I was just waiting for my grandma to give me the business at some point because I knew she did not approve. Well, a bit later she came up to me and I knew it was coming… she said, “I figured out why you’re wearing those pants that are ripped at the knees. It’s because you’ve been praying a lot!” And she laughed and walked away… That was my grandma…

So Nice and Mean are a bad way to pick relationships.

Wise, Foolish and Evil

Now I am going to show you what the Proverbs shows us, and it is a better criteria for choosing your friends.

Proverbs 14:16–17 NIV

The wise fear the Lord and shun evil, but a fool is hotheaded and yet feels secure. … the one who devises evil schemes is hated.

So there are wise people, there are foolish people, and there are evil people.

Your job is to figure out who you are walking with so that you can be very cautious in your relationship with them.

You cannot treat everyone the same because not everyone is the same.

Your responsibility is to discern what kind of person they are. And if you need help discerning, talk to your parents or other leaders to help you discern.

The Wise Person

The wise person is a person who is led by the Spirit, and is actively aligning themselves with the word of God.

To be a wise person doesn’t necessarily mean that this is a book smart person. In fact, there are a lot of smart people, who are not what the scriptures would call a wise person.

Knowledge comes from school, wisdom comes from the Spirit.

Proverbs 13:20 NIV

Walk with the wise and become wise.

These are the people that you want to not only be hanging with, but you need these people in your tightest circle.

We all have our circles of friends right? That’s ok that you do… even Jesus had his tightest circle.

So we have people you know from school or work. Then you have some acquaintances that are a little tighter. Then you have your friends that are even tighter. And then, you have your core or your inner circle, and you want this group to be wise.

I don’t care how young you are, or how old you are, you want this circle to filled with wise people.

When you walk with the wise you become wise

The Foolish Person

The foolish person is led by Flesh, and is actively aligning themselves with other influences around them.

They get their news from social media headlines, and they don’t actually ever listen to the whole story, just the parts that they agree with.

Proverbs 12:15 NIV

The way of fools seems right to them, but the wise listen to advice.

Foolish people are led by feelings and desires. They are often times the ones that the Bible call “sheep”. They just go with the crowds because it’s safer and easier to let other people do the thinking for you.

A bit of a generalization here, but the contrast is necessary: Foolish people have good hearts but undiscipled minds.

Parents, your children fall into this category. They are foolish. Not evil, but they are not yet wise. So parents, your job is to disciple them, help them choose their friends, and teach them to become wise. - Right now my eldest son is on the one chapter of Proverbs every day for the rest of the year… why? I want him to become wise. All the parents walking this out with me?

To followers of Jesus, having these kinds of friends in your life can be good, as long as you are the one who is influencing them to wisdom. These are the ones who most often come to Christ and are transformed to a wise person.

The Evil Person

The evil person is led by the demonic, and they actively oppose God’s word and the Kingdom of God.

They openly hate and oppose the word of God.

Even if they think that it is coming from ‘good place’.

To pick and choose the parts of Gods word that agrees with your feelings, is a rejection of the word of God. It takes the whole Bible to make a whole man.

The evil person calls the truth hate because truth sounds like hate to evil people.

Evil never stops itself, it must be stopped.

Proverbs 29:2 NIV

When the righteous thrive, the people rejoice; when the wicked rule, the people groan.

An evil person does not actually care about the good of people, they only care that people will oppose what is good.

Wise people need to avoid evil people, especially as they are growing and maturing.

An evil person will corrupt a wise person faster than a wise person can consecrate an evil person.

1 Corinthians 15:33 NIV

Do not be misled: “Bad company corrupts good character.”

When we look back at Solomon, he was a wise person until he married evil women.

I’m sure they were nice, but they openly opposed God by worshipping idols and false gods.

In time, Solomon allowed for idols and temples to be built for these false gods and evil entered into God’s promised land.

Finding Your People (Conclusion)

Your closest relationships need to be with other committed Christians.

2 Corinthians 6:14 NIV

Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?

This isn’t just a relationship verse it is a life verse. You need yoke yourself with believers so that together, you pull yourselves into the right direction. You pull yourselves into wisdom. You grow in Christ together and become stronger and more fruitful together.

Next week we launch our Connect Groups here at Lighthouse, and we want for every single one of you to find your place in a connect group. We have lots of couples who are in, but we also have more than a few families who are out and in isolation.

This is especially bad for men…

We have more groups for women than we do for men. I know some of you men think that you don’t need anyone, but let me take you back to our two kings, David and Solomon. All throughout their history we see David surrounded by a band of brothers. While he is ascending from shepherd to king he had Jonathan, and then as a man on the run he had the men who hid in caves with him, and eventually as king, he had his mighty men.

But do you know who didn’t have a band of brothers? Solomon. We never read about Solomon having a band of brothers.

And even though David made mistakes, he had people around him and he was able to pick himself up again.

Solomon had no one telling him that his permissive attitude was setting a course of destruction for Israel.

Men, you need to have people around you. You need brothers who love you.

Not buddies…

I know you have golfing buddies, and running buddies, and work out buddies… But your relationship with them is centered on your hubby, and not the word of God.

You need Godly men with a Bible centered relationship that is pulling you in the right direction.

Call

Here is how we are going to close. Right now we are going to make a commitment to join a group. Make up your mind right now. Right here. We aren’t going to start making excuses for living in isolation.

Second, we are going to evaluate the relationships in our lives and start putting people in their proper place…

Finally, we are going to commit to becoming a wise person. How do we start that? Wise people are led by the spirit. No more important decisions without prayer. No more decisions without seeking God’s will and counsel for your life.