Proverbs 29:24

Proverbs 29:24  Whoso is partner with a thief hateth his own soul: he heareth cursing, and bewrayeth it not. When I was in high school, I knew a young man who hung around with the wrong crowd. Once he was driving his car and had one of those friends with him. He was stopped by the police and they found drugs on the passenger. Since they were both in the car together, they both went to jail. My friend eventually got out of his trouble, but he learned a hard lesson. He should have read our verse. Our verse would have saved him a lot of trouble. Our verse says that if you hang around with a thief, you hate yourself! Bewrayeth is an old English word that just means that when you hear the cursing of this wicked friend, you do not correct him. You don't tell him to stop his cursing, You just let him continue to speak wickedness. Even though you may not curse and use vulgar language yourself, when you are around someone who does, you hear the vulgar language and it gets into your head. And when wicked language gets into your mind, it won't be long before you are saying it yourself. There is an old saying, "If you sleep with dogs, you wake up with fleas." Can you tell me what that means? No one wants fleas. They bite you and itch just like a mosquito bite. But if you sleep with a dog, you are going get the fleas that the dog has. So how does this apply to our verse? If you hang around with a thief, pretty soon you are going to be acting like a thief too. And that isn't good. Solomon warns us about it, and I am warning you about it. Watch who your friends are. If you hang around with bad friends, pretty soon you will be like them. You should hang around with good friends. Pretty soon you will be like them.