And welcome back. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. I want to thank you for joining me again today. We are in a 30 part series from my book Biblical Wisdom for Business Leaders. We’re going over these 30 sayings from Proverbs and how I’ve applied them in my book to Business leadership.
And so today this is the 8th of this 30 part series and we’re going to be talking about avoiding those who are all about the money. This is improper, chapter 23, verses six through eight. But before we get going on that, I just want to let you know that you can head over to Bibleandbusiness.com and take a look at the podcasts and the articles that I’ve written over there. And these are the ways that you’re able to get a hold of me either through Facebook, by email, LinkedIn or on Twitter. So I’d appreciate you following and liking some of the things that I’m doing with Bible and Business.
So let’s dive in here to Proverbs, chapter 23, verses six through eight, and let’s see what we can learn today. Here’s the text do not eat the bread of a man who is stingy. Do not desire his delicacies, for he is like one who is inwardly calculating. Eat and drink, he says to you, but his heart’s not with you. You will vomit up the morsels that you have eaten and wasted your pleasant words.
Now this saying is similar to the 6th saying, if you recall that one, that the setting is with dining with another person. Here the setting is a stingerly kind of a miserly, a selfish man. He has invited us to dinner and the sage instructs us to not desire his delicacies. This line is identical to the first line of verse three back in saying six. So whereas we’re warned about becoming intoxicated by power and the wealth of a rich and influential person, in the 6th saying here in this 8th saying, we’re cautioned about giving compliments too quickly and accepting hospitality from a stingy person who really is not very sincere about being hospitable.
His hypocrisy is expressed in the phrase his heart is not with you. Coupled with the words the bread of a stingy man. I think both phrases refer to his ulterior motive of appearing welcoming and giving when he really is not. In reality, he’s inwardly annoyed at spending the money to even give you a simple meal. This guy, he’s stingy, he’s miserly, he’s selfish, he’s all about the money, though he tries not to appear so.
The other part of this is that we’re not to be too quick with our compliments. The phrase you will vomit up the morsels that you have eaten is really likely an expression for being revolted at yourself or about your own behavior when you realize the hypocrisy of the host. In other words, you’re giving compliments to this host and you realize later that he was actually really hypocritical and his heart wasn’t with you at all. And he wasn’t trying to be hospitable or generous towards you. And yet you complimented him about it.
You’re going to be revolted at how quickly and maybe how deeply you gave out those compliments. So the phrase waste your pleasant words indicates that we’ve been too quick. We’ve been too effusive with our compliments. We have allowed ourselves to be deceived by his pretenses. We did not exercise careful discernment about his character, and instead we were quickly taken in by his veneer of hospitality and charisma.
And because we can never take aback a word that has been spoken, we later become embarrassed by our own words and our behavior when we finally realize he is not who he made himself appear to be. In other words, we were gullible. We were not discerning in business. We’re going to run into this on a regular basis. We’re going to have colleagues, people that we meet who attempt to mask their true intentions in our professional relationships.
These people will be good to us only to get something from us. So be careful and work with people for a while before you really start to trust them. When it comes to vendors and sometimes even taking on customers, be wary of taking on new vendors or customers who consistently demonstrate that they’re mostly interested in getting a little something extra from you all the time, rather than just paying market rates for your products or your services and being happy with that. So here’s an example. You might encounter a customer who’s always asking for a discount, maybe a unique payment schedule where it pushes out the cash that you’re going to receive for a long time.
Or maybe they’re always trying to negotiate something free in addition to the products and services that they’re already buying. At some point, you’re going to feel like the customer is starting to use you for their own selfish purposes. Like just a fair exchange of services and products at a fair market rate is not enough for them. So if that’s where you feel like maybe you’re starting to get used or this customer is just really a miserly customer, let them go. Just let them go.
Life is really too short to spend a lot of cycles on people who are all about the money. And I would say whether they are customers or vendors or even partners, if you bump into people who are all about the money, and I have met some who are, you really don’t want to do business with them. It’s just not worth it. These people may turn out to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but their lives can also be very empty and very vacuous as a result. So let’s not pursue temporary fame, wealth, or fortune, right?
Let’s be discerning about who we’re sitting down to dine with. And let’s not be all about the money. Let’s be about the relationship. Let’s be about the products and the services. Let’s be about something that’s far more valuable than money, such as pointing people to Jesus Christ in the marketplace.
So when it comes to giving out compliments, yeah, hand them out when it’s appropriate to do so, but don’t just give them out randomly and don’t overdo it. Right. Don’t ingratiate yourself to someone with power or wealth or to someone that you’re trying to build a relationship with. This really leads me to a particular point. We’re always telling our kids how awesome they are, how wonderful, what a wonderful job they did.
Great job, buddy. These little three and four and five year olds, I think sometimes we hand out our compliments with superlatives that are a little too over the top. And we should be careful for that because in my mind, our strongest superlatives of compliments, in other words, praise and worship really should be for God. If God is awesome, then we are not. We need to find another word for that, whatever that means in the compliment.
Can you use the same word for people? Sure, of course you can. But my instincts tell me I can’t point to chapter and verse here, but my instincts tell me that we need to reserve our strongest superlatives for God and yet be accurate and encouraging with our compliments with others when it’s appropriate to do so. So in our next episode, we’re going to be in two different verses in Proverbs that actually really talk about the same thing. Proverbs 23 nine and Proverbs twenty four seven.
And we’re going to have our first introduction to fools, and we’re going to talk about having minimal contact with a fool. That’s what’s next in this series. But until then, I want to thank you for joining me today. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. And so I hope you’ll join me again in this series on biblical wisdom for business leaders.
30 sayings from Proverbs. But until we see each other again, I hope you go out and make it a great day. Take care.