Scripture: Proverbs 6:1-11
Video Link: https://youtu.be/-TP-QDgpdto
Structure:
- Introduction
- Guard your authority
- Take responsibility for yourself
- Conclusion
Introduction:
Good morning everyone.
In a moment I’m going to list some words and as I do, listen carefully and see if you can pick up the common thread: Kiwi, Kākāpō, Morepork, Fantail, Tui and Black Robin. What is the common thread with these? [Wait]
That’s right, they are all native birds of New Zealand.
Today we continue our series in the Old Testament book of Proverbs. Proverbs offers practical wisdom for living. It gives handy life hacks for people starting out in the world.
Often when we read Proverbs it seems like a random collection of unrelated sayings. And sometimes that’s because it is. Other times though it’s possible to find a common thread.
A couple of weeks’ ago we heard about the importance of guarding your heart. This morning we look at Proverbs chapter 6. If we were to read the whole chapter, we would notice one of the common threads tying Proverbs 6 together is responsibility.
Most of Proverbs 6 deals with our responsibility to God and our neighbour, but the first 11 verses (the focus of our message today) is primarily concerned with personal responsibility. That is, our responsibility to and for ourselves. From Proverbs 6, verse 1, we read…
My son, if you have put up security for your neighbour, if you have shaken hands in pledge for a stranger, 2 you have been trapped by what you said, ensnared by the words of your mouth. 3 So do this, my son, to free yourself, since you have fallen into your neighbour’s hands: Go—to the point of exhaustion—and give your neighbour no rest! 4 Allow no sleep to your eyes, no slumber to your eyelids. 5 Free yourself, like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter, like a bird from the snare of the fowler. 6 Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! 7 It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, 8 yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. 9 How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep? 10 A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest—11 and poverty will come on you like a thief and scarcity like an armed man.
May the Spirit of Jesus illuminate God’s word for us.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the common threads with this reading is the idea of responsibility, in particular personal responsibility. For responsibility to be life giving though, it must always go together with authority.
Being responsible means you are the one who will be held accountable for the outcome. While authority means having the resources and decision making control you need to get the job done and achieve the outcome.
Responsibility plus authority equals freedom.
Conversely, responsibility minus authority equals captivity.
To make someone responsible for something but then take away their authority to act, is unfair. It puts that’s person in a difficult position.
Responsibility without authority is like saying, you must cook a meal to feed your family but I’m tying your hands behind your back first. Or, you must build a house to provide shelter but I’m taking away your land and your tools.
In order to maintain our freedom, we must keep responsibility and authority together; we must guard our authority and not give it away thoughtlessly.
Guard your authority:
In verses 1-5 of Proverbs 6, the teacher gives a real life example of what separating responsibility from authority looks like; putting up security for your neighbour.
This scenario imagines someone, you might not know all that well, asking you to act as guarantor for a loan. Maybe they need some cash for a business venture. They come to you and say, “I’ve got a proposition for you. Act as guarantor on my loan so I can buy this field. I’ll flip it for a quick profit and give you a cut.”
Whatever the reason, they want to borrow money from someone else and they ask you to pledge your tractor or your house or something of value you possess as collateral against the loan.
If you agree to do this, then you are making yourself responsible for their debt and you are giving away your authority. You cannot control whether or not this strange neighbour will repay their debt. Maybe they will and you will be okay, but if they don’t you will lose your tractor and your house and your financial freedom. In any case, you will lose sleep while you wait to find out.
Agreeing to help someone in this way might seem like a smart thing to do, but it is foolish because it ties your hands. It puts you in their power.
You may have noticed the word hands is used multiple times in these verses. Quite often in the Bible hands is a poetic way of talking about power. To be in someone else’s hands is to be in their power, to be captive, not free.
If you (in the heat of the moment) rashly say you will cover someone else’s debt, then do everything in your power to get out of the arrangement as soon as possible. Take a lesson from the gazelle and the bird caught in a trap. Free yourself before it is too late. Better to humiliate yourself temporarily than to become a slave permanently. Better still not to get yourself in that position in the first place.
Now, it is important to note that the teacher is not advocating stinginess or meanness toward people in need. Elsewhere, in the law of Moses, God encourages those who can afford it to lend money to the poor and to help those in need.
But lending money to the poor (who may or may not be able to pay you back) is different from mortgaging your land for them. Because when you lend (or give) money to someone, you limit your liability and you guard your authority. You maintain your freedom to be generous in other words.
Acting as guarantor for other people’s debt is not only personally irresponsible, it’s also socially irresponsible. It places a strain on community relationships that the neighbourhood is not strong enough to bear.
As one commentator puts it, the principle of wisdom here is: take responsibility for what is yours and do not take responsibility for what is not. [1]
So how might this apply in our context today?
How many of you here have received a phone call or an email or a text message from a scammer, trying to get access to your bank account details. [Wait] It’s disturbing really. Proverbs 6 is a warning to be alert and not allow yourself to be scammed.
Some people will play on your emotions to get money out of you. They will appeal to your fear, or your ego or your greed. Whatever strategy the scammer uses they are trying to put you in their power by getting you to hand over your authority while making you responsible.
Keeping responsibility and authority together has a broader application though than not acting as a guarantor and avoiding scammers. Money is not our only resource. For most of us these days, time is a more valuable thing.
When we over commit ourselves and try to do too much with the limited time and energy available to us, we effectively give away our authority and make ourselves responsible for more than we can handle. We become slaves to an over busy schedule; trapped on a treadmill of never ending activity.
I imagine most people here don’t need to be told to work harder. More likely you need to become more discerning about what you commit yourself to. That can be difficult. Our need to feel useful, to find meaning, purpose and a sense of belonging often drive us to take on more than we can handle.
One of our church values, here at Tawa Baptist, is freedom to be involved.
‘Freedom to be involved’ means we don’t put pressure on people to do lots of church stuff. We let people become involved in church life at their own pace.
We don’t guilt people into doing things and we don’t load people up with so many church responsibilities that they lose authority (or control) over their lives.
We try to encourage people to maintain a healthy balance, allowing time for family, time for church and time for engagement with the wider world. Hopefully too, time for fun and rest.
The risk with freedom to be involved is that some people might think they have a license to kick back and cruise. To be slack and to take without giving anything back. But that is not a responsible use of freedom.
Freedom to be involved is about contributing in a way that is life giving for you and the community. We want people to be involved in church life from a place of personal authority and responsibility, because you want to and you can.
It’s like Jesus said in Matthew 11: “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”
The wisdom of Jesus does not separate responsibility and authority. The wisdom of Jesus calls us to do what is in our power to do and to trust God for the rest.
Take responsibility for yourself:
Responsibility plus authority equals freedom. If the first five verses of Proverbs 6 talk about the importance of guarding your authority (keeping some control over your life), then the next six verses underline the importance of taking responsibility for yourself. Verses 6-8 tell us to learn from the ant…
6 Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! 7 It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, 8 yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.
A sluggard is a lazy person, someone who does not take responsibility for themselves. They have authority over themselves but they don’t exercise it in a positive or constructive way.
Ants keep authority and responsibility together. Ants have their own authority. They are not slaves at the mercy of a dictator. Ants have autonomy over themselves, no one tells them what to do. And how do they use their authority? How do they use their freedom? Wisely and responsibly.
Ants work hard, carrying loads much bigger than themselves. But they also work smart. They make hay while the sun shines. They go with the grain of the seasons, putting themselves to work when the environment is most conducive to a good outcome, during the summer harvest, when conditions are right and food is plentiful.
Another wise thing about ants is that they work together. Working on your own (especially doing heavy physical labour) can be quite tough. But when you work as part of a team, there is a certain buoyancy or energy that carries you. Somehow the work doesn’t seem so overwhelming.
But wait, there’s more. Ants are good for the environment too. Ants turn and aerate the soil, allowing water and oxygen to reach plant roots. Ants also help with seed dispersal. In the very act of taking responsibility for themselves, ants make a positive contribution to the environment.
It’s similar with us human beings. Personal responsibility forms the building blocks of social responsibility. As we work to earn a living, taking care of ourselves and our family, we contribute positively to society.
The ant is a model of setting a goal, making an appropriate commitment in community with others and sticking with it. The ant teaches us to avoid those responsibilities that are not ours so we can be free for those responsibilities that are ours.
Verses 9-11 paint a picture of what not taking responsibility for yourself looks like. The outcome of shirking our responsibility is poverty.
A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest—11 and poverty will come on you like a thief and scarcity like an armed man.
Notice how scarcity sneaks up and mugs a person. No one really sets out to be poor. Poverty ambushes people, it takes the sluggard by surprise. The point here is that being irresponsible is a lifestyle or a pattern. It’s a bad habit that eventually leads to disaster.
Now, in reading these verses, we need to be very careful. While being slack and not taking responsibility for yourself generally does result in poverty, it does not automatically follow that everyone who is poor is lazy or irresponsible. People can fall on hard times for a whole raft of reasons.
Sometimes people fall into the pit of poverty because they lack discipline and drift aimlessly through life. Other times though people find themselves in the pit of poverty because they have been pushed. There are often systemic reasons why people find themselves trapped in poverty.
You are probably aware of the saying, ‘Give a person a fish and they eat for a day. Teach them to fish and they eat for a lifetime’. That saying is well intentioned but a little naive. It assumes the world is fair, when it is not.
It’s not enough to teach a person to fish. Many of the world’s poor would fish responsibly if they could, but the authority to fish has been taken from them. We address systemic inequalities, we give people authority, by ensuring people have the right fishing equipment and fair access to the fishing pond.
To avoid poverty, we need to keep authority and responsibility together.
Thinking of systemic injustice, which takes away people’s authority and discourages personal responsibility, the ant has more to teach us. In the context of Proverbs 6 at least, the ant gathers its food in season, which is often quite different from the way we gather food.
We live is a consumer oriented culture, one in which we don’t necessarily know what we want but we feel we don’t have it and so we always want more. We are always consuming but never really satisfied.
As a consequence, our society gathers perpetually, with little or no regard for the demand and supply of resources or the needs of others. Affluent ‘out of season’ consumption can drive the price up and make life more difficult for the global poor.
So how does the advice of Proverbs, to not be lazy but rather store up provisions in season, fit with the teaching of Jesus? After all, didn’t Jesus warn against storing up riches on earth? Didn’t the Lord tell us not to worry about tomorrow because God knows what we need is able to provide?
Yes, Jesus did teach those things.
We need to keep in mind that the wisdom of Proverbs is not complete; it is not whole. Jesus completes the wisdom of Proverbs. He fulfils it. The wisdom of Proverbs is generally intuitive, it’s common sense. Whereas the wisdom of Jesus is often counter intuitive. It’s paradoxical.
Proverbs tells us how to identify and avoid pitfalls in life. Proverbs says, ‘This is what a pit looks like. Stay away from it’. But Jesus does more than that. Jesus looks for pits in order to lift people out of them. Jesus came to redeem and restore and make whole.
Proverbs builds a fence to protect people. Jesus builds a gate in the fence to connect people and show them the way.
Jesus brings some much needed perspective to the wisdom of Proverbs. Proverbs is very focused on this life and how to survive in an imperfect world, so much so that it puts us at risk of losing sight of the next life.
Part of Jesus’ message is to remind people that this life is not all there is. What we do in this life has consequences for the next life. The life to come is by far the bigger part. Wisdom dictates that our behaviour in this world needs to be informed by the life to come.
When Jesus said, don’t worry about the food you eat or what tomorrow might bring, he was not encouraging people to be lazy or irresponsible. He was encouraging the work of faith. He was setting people free from unhelpful fear and anxiety. He was broadening people’s horizons, helping the human mind to imagine a different reality, an eternal reality.
That does not mean we fold our hands and give up our jobs. We still need to work but we do so by the light of eternity, rather than the fear of not having enough.
The apostle Paul brings the teaching of Jesus and the wisdom of Proverbs together nicely when he says in his letter to the Thessalonians…
11 make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, 12 so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.
Conclusion:
We need to keep authority and responsibility together. When we do that we are free. Not free to do whatever we want, but free to love God, love our neighbour and love ourselves.
May the Lord give you grace to walk in freedom and righteousness. Amen.
Questions for discussion or reflection:
What stands out for you in reading this Scripture and/or in listening to the sermon? Why do you think this stood out to you?
- Why is it important to keep responsibility and authority together? What happens if we separate responsibility and authority?
- Can you think of examples (either from Scripture or your own experience) when authority was separated from responsibility? What happened?
- How might we guard our personal authority? How might we help others, in a way that respects their freedom and our own?
- What wisdom (life skills) can we learn from observing the ant?
- How does the advice of Proverbs 6 fit with the teaching of Jesus? How does Jesus complete (fulfil) the wisdom of Proverbs?
[1] Paul Koptak, NIVAC Proverbs, page 199.
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