What happens when good advice is ignored? That’s the question Bill English answers in today’s podcast on Advice and Wisdom, When Good Advice is Rejected.
Here is the transcript:
And welcome back. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business want to thank you for joining me today. It’s so good to see you again. Look, I’m in chapter five, which in my book, the Christian Theology of Business Ownership, this chapter deals with advisors and wisdom. This is an eight part video series that I’m doing and today is the third episode of these eight parts and we’re going to look at a biblical example of when advice was ignored.
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So in the first two videos of this series, we talked a lot about receiving advice, how a Christian business owner should receive advice, and then I went over four cautions in the last episode. Today we’re going to look at a biblical example of when good advice was ignored and the really negative results that happened by ignoring that good advice. But before we get going, I just want you to head over to Bibleandbusiness.com, take a look at my articles, listen to my podcasts, and you know, I really write for Christians who own businesses and for the Christian business owner who is serious about integrating their faith into their role as an owner. This is not a site. I don’t write for people who want to get rich quick.
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I don’t even write for people who really care if they’re rich. The people that I write for are Christians who have a mature walk with God and who want to be the best stewards they can be, irrespective of whether or not they become rich in life. I’m not a prosperity gospel guy. I think the prosperity gospel is a heresy and it’s a lie straight from the pit of hell and I don’t endorse it at all. And so if you’re looking for get rich quick schemes or the seven secrets of the Bible and what the Bible says about becoming rich and becoming a millionaire, I’m not your guy.
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And I don’t think you should be pursuing that anyways. You really should be pursuing the heart in the face of God and let God bless you financially as he wills. And a lot of that comes from Matthew 25. The parable of the ten talents. Won’t get into that now.
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But anyways, I invite you to head over to Bibleandbusiness.com, take a look at my site, and you can also, by the way, get a hold of me anytime you want to at Bill@bibleandbusiness.com Bibleandbusiness.com, you can just email me. A number of you already have. You’ve emailed me with the problems in your business. You’ve emailed me to say, what should I do here? And as often as not, we end up on the phone talking with each other and I kind of pay it forward with you a little bit, right?
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This is what I would do if I were you. And most of the time the advice works out. Sometimes it doesn’t. But I still enjoy interacting and hearing all the stories out there myself. I’m a Christian entrepreneur.
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I run a business right now, a health care organization with 550 employees. And so I know what it is to lead a business. I know what it is to consult with businesses. I’ve been doing it for 30 plus years and really enjoy integrating the scriptures with business ownership. And I know you do too, or you wouldn’t be here at this site.
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And so thank you for joining me. Thank you for coming on board. Let’s get going. Let’s take a look at what happens when good advice is ignored. This is taken from Second Samuel, 16 and 17.
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This is the story of a hippophel’s advice to Absalom, okay? And I’m not going to sit here and read. I have three slides to try to get through the story. I’m just going to read parts of them and that’ll help kind of move us along a little bit. David prayed to the Lord, turn a hypothelic counsel into foolishness, which, by the way, the Lord did not do in this story.
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Instead, the Lord caused Absalom to pay attention to bad advice from Huche, which we’re going to see in just a minute. But the reason David prayed that is because a hit of felt counsel at that time was considered the same counsel as that of God. That’s what it says here in the Scriptures. Now, in those days, the council of A Hitafell was as if one consulted with the word of God, and so was all the council of a hit of bell esteemed both by David and by Absalom. And so what a hitlevel did, he essentially told Absalom here, he said, go into your father’s house and have sex with his concubines, do it in public, and that will tell everybody that you’re the guy that’s in charge now, right?
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Because only the king can do that. And so that’s what he did. And then Hithefell also Absalom did that by the way he went, and he had sex with all the concubines and all of Israel saw it, so to speak. It was in public and he was claiming the kingship by having sex with all of the concubines. What happens here now is that Hitherfell comes to Absalom and says, you know what?
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Give me some men, I’ll pursue David, I’ll strike him down dead. And everybody else in his party will bring back and the people will be one. There will be a peace, there will be unity, and you will be the king. And look at the last line here on the slide. The advice seemed right in the eyes of Absalom and all the elders of Israel.
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So a lot of people are turning their back on David. They want David out. They want Absalom to be king. He’s ingratiated himself. If you were to go back and read some more in Second Samuel, you will find that he has ingratiated himself and that kind of thing.
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He’s very charismatic, he’s good looking and he’s just he’s the leader that people want. But then Absalom says he kind of throws everybody at curveball. And he says, Why don’t you call Hooshai, the architect also, and let’s hear what he has to say. And Hushai comes in and basically says, the advice that a Hitefell is giving you epsilon is really bad advice. And the reason that Hushai says that is bolded here, I’ve emphasized it in the slide.
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It says, for the Lord had ordained to defeat the good council of a Hitafell so that the Lord might bring harm upon Absalom. God had already determined that Absalom was not going to be the next leader of Israel, and God had already decided Absalom has to go. The only question is how and when, right? But the first thing we have to do is to get Absalom to reject good advice from a Hitafel, okay? So notice that when a Hitafel saw that his counsel was not followed, he saddled his donkey and went off home, set his affairs in order, and he killed himself.
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Why did he do that? Because he was no longer part of the inner circle with Absalom, and he knew that his days would be numbered because Hushai was now the main advisor to Absalom, and he knew that he could never repair relations with David. SFL had been an advisor to David for years, yay Verily, decades, and he had turned his back on David and betrayed him. And he knew that if David came back to town that he would be killed. And so he just goes and he puts his affairs in order, and he commits suicide.
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All of this from Second Samuel 16 and 17. I invite you to go read the story if you’d like, to kind of get all the details and maybe stop the video at this point and then come back here once you’re done. Look, here’s some notes that I took, and there’s going to be some more notes here in just a moment. The writer calls the advice of a Hit of bell good. So let’s go back here for just a moment.
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Absalom says, Give me your counsel. What shall we do? Here’s what you should do. In those days, a Hitefell gave counsel as if it was the word of God. In other words, the writer is saying that a Hitlefell gives good advice, right?
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And so that indicates that Absalom really should have heated his heeded that advice. He should have listened to a Hitler fell, but he didn’t, right? And it isn’t that Absalom didn’t hear physically the good advice, he just didn’t perceive it as such. And this leads me to one of the core points in chapter five in my book. And it’s this good advice can be confused as bad advice when one is living in a place of sin.
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Look, Absalom is living in a place of rebellion and arrogance against his father and arrogance about himself. He is living in sin and he hears good advice and he confuses it with bad advice. Confusion is often the result of sin. And that’s what Moses was really driving at here in Deuteronomy 2000 and 820 when he said to Israel, if you do all of these sins, the Lord will send on you curses and confusion and frustration and all you undertake to do. But notice that confusion, the Lord will send confusion on you if you live in sin.
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And I just want to ask a really obvious question. Is there anybody within the sound of my voice who believes that we’re not confused today in the United States of America? And we are confused. We’re confused about what’s right and wrong. We’re confused about who we are.
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Heck, you know, a dog is a dog as a dog. A cat is a cat as a cat. We don’t even know if we’re a male or a female anymore. We’re the smartest ones of the bunch and we can’t figure out who we are. We are confused, and it is because of our sin.
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Our sin has confused us. We try to do the right thing. We try to do things to improve our society, and they keep backfiring on us. And the reason is because we have rebelled against Yahweh. We have abandoned Him, and we are now living in sin.
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And God is sending on us confusions. We think we’re smart, but we’re not. We think we’re strong, but we’re really weak. Now, look, this brings me to another point about all of first and second Samuel. And I grabbed these notes from Jim Hamilton’s book God’s Glory and Salvation on pages 158 and 159.
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In first and second, Samuel the Mighty and the handsome and the seemingly impressive people of the world, people like Saul, Goliath, Absalt, so forth, they are exposed as bankrupt, okay? They are the worldly strong and they are judged by Yahweh. And when they seek their own kingdom, they meet with a bitter end. But the small, the weak, the infertile, the unimpressive, people like Hannah, Samuel, Jonathan, David, they’re exalted. And they’re exalted because they are weak in the world’s eyes.
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So they rely on yahweh. They repent of their sins and they put their trust in Yahweh, in God. Look, I had an uncle once who said that, by the way, he accepted the Lord on his deathbed, but most of his life, he lived a pretty Godless life. He was a kind man, but it was Godless life. And he said that Christians are really weak people because they need a crutch.
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They just rely on the Bible and Christianity as a crutch. They can’t stand up on their own. And I was like, yeah, that’s true. We are weak. We do need the Lord.
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We need his forgiveness. We need his power at work in our lives. So, thank you. Yes, you recognize the truth. We are weak in the world’s eyes.
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We are small, we are unimpressive. But in god’s economy, it’s exactly the opposite. Look, the wisdom that we should be paying attention to is first of all, pure, then peaceable, then gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits. It’s impartial and it’s sincere. And you will find these elements in good advice throughout the Bible.
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And this gives you a track, really, james 317 gives you a track to run on for the type of advice that you should be listening for. And it gives you some standards to compare the advice to. So maybe somebody comes to you and says, this vendor is screwing us. They’re taking our money and not delivering what they said. We need to take them to court.
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Well, is that a peaceable advice? Is that open to reason? Is it full of mercy? There is advice that will go against these qualities here. And this is something that as a business owner, Christian business owner, you really do need to pay attention to.
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So here are some lessons. First of all, when you hear advice, and you’re always going to hear it as a business owner, people are going to give you advice, take it to God for confirmation. God, is this good advice and should I follow it? And secondly, consider less the impressiveness of the one giving you advice than the quality of the advice itself. Some very impressive, charismatic, charming, compelling, articulate people can give you really bad advice, and just because they deliver it in a wonderful way doesn’t mean that it’s good advice.
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So compare the advice against the James 317 criteria and consider less the impressiveness of the one giving you the advice. And then finally, as you do this, as you rinse and repeat, so to speak, steps one, two and three. Here you will learn to discern between good and bad advice. And in your spirit, it’ll just become refined inside of you and you’ll be able to hear advice and pretty quick know whether it’s advice that you should follow or not. In my next episode, we’re going to look at the opposite.
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Now we’re going to look at good advice that was accepted and what the results were of that. So I want to thank you for being with me today. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. As I said at the beginning, if you’d like to get a hold of me, just send me an email at bill@bibleandbusiness.com. I’d love to hear from you.
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I’d also ask that you take a moment and subscribe to this channel so that you are notified when the videos come out. I pretty much try to publish new videos every Saturday morning, central Standard Time at 09:00 A.m., and I try to get one published every week. So until we see each other again, thank you for joining me today. I hope you go out and make it a great day. Thank you.