Proverbs 25:15-28

Use patience and kindness when you want to persuade leaders and watch them change their minds right in front of you. For your gentle wisdom will quell the strongest resistance. When you discover something sweet, don’t overindulge and eat more than you need, for excess in anything can make you sick of even a good thing. Don’t wear out your welcome by staying too long at the home of your friends, or they may get fed up with always having you there and wish you hadn’t come. Lying about and slandering people are as bad as hitting them with a club, or wounding them with an arrow, or stabbing them with a sword. You can’t depend on an unreliable person when you really need help. It can be compared to biting down on an abscessed tooth or walking with a sprained ankle. When you sing a song of joy to someone suffering in the deepest grief and heartache, it can be compared to disrobing in the middle of a blizzard or rubbing salt in a wound. Is your enemy hungry? Buy him lunch. Win him over with your kindness. Your surprising generosity will awaken his conscience and God will reward you with favor. As the north wind brings a storm, saying things you shouldn’t brings a storm to any relationship. It’s better to live all alone in a rundown shack than to share a castle with a crabby spouse! Like a drink of cool water refreshes a weary, thirsty soul, so hearing good news revives the spirit. When a lover of God gives in and compromises with wickedness, it can be compared to contaminating a stream with sewage or polluting a fountain. It’s good to eat sweet things, but you can take too much. It’s good to be honored, but to seek words of praise is not honor at all. If you live without restraint and are unable to control your temper, you’re as helpless as a city with broken-down defenses, open to attack.