Episode Transcript
Alright, if you'll take God's precious Word and turn the book of Proverbs, chapter 11, verse 15, the title of the message tonight is "Tangled in Trouble."
So the book of Proverbs is taking us back to the topic we've already looked at, which is a topic of being a surety, and we're going to be looking at it in a little different light tonight.
In chapter 6, Solomon warned us against being surety, and now in chapter 11 he brings the topic up, saying in verse 15, "He that is surety," and everybody is experiencing trouble in life, everybody does.
You can have a good run for a while, but eventually you're going to experience trouble.
A lot of people in our church, as we mentioned earlier, are experiencing health trouble.
We go to Brother Billy for mechanical trouble.
I took my car to him last week to have some mechanical trouble fixed on it.
People come to me with spiritual trouble.
People are going to have trouble.
There's some trouble you just cannot avoid in life, but most of the trouble we have in life we can avoid.
If we can't avoid it, why not avoid that trouble?
Most trouble we bring on ourselves.
Brother Larry didn't ask for trouble with his back.
I didn't ask for trouble with my vehicle overheating last week.
But when you become surety for someone, you are asking for trouble.
When we were in chapter 6, and I taught on surety-ship, one of our church members came up to me after the service later and said, "I wish someone would have taught this to me years ago," because they had gotten bit, being surety.
So you're asking for unnecessary trouble.
The Hebrew word translated "surety" here tonight means "to braid."
We've got any girls with braided hair?
Not tonight, it's all straight.
To braid.
That's what surety is.
When you braid hair, you're literally making surety out of those strands.
When a woman braids hair, let's say she takes three strands of hair, and she's weaving and braiding those strands together.
Those strands, when she gets through, become one.
You take three strands and make one ponytail, or whatever you're making out of it.
But the three, being interwoven together, they are braided together, stranded together as one.
In the same way, let's say that you have three men.
Man number one wants to borrow money.
Man number two wants to loan money and make some interest off of it.
You've got plenty of folks wanting to do both in life.
Plenty wanting to borrow, plenty wanting to lend.
Now those two men can decide to work those details out in between themselves.
If man number two wants to loan money to man number one, and man number one wants to borrow that money on those terms, that's between those two men.
But let's say man number one says, "Man number two won't loan me money.
He doesn't trust me to pay it back.
So why don't you cosign for me?"
In other words, when he's saying cosign, what he's saying is, "He doesn't trust me to pay it back, so I want you to make yourself responsible for paying my loan to that man."
That's what cosign means.
Anytime you hear the word cosign, because surety means to make someone responsible for another person's obligation.
I don't want to be responsible for anybody's obligation, but my obligations.
Anytime you braid yourself into someone else's obligations, you're becoming surety, and you're just tying yourself in to that trouble.
So let's say that man number one asks you to cosign for him so he can borrow money from man number two.
If you say yes, you just become man number three, or woman number three.
And man number three is the biggest loser in the deal.
Why?
Man number three isn't getting the money.
Man number three isn't getting the interest on the money loaned.
The only thing man number three gets is the potential trouble, the obligation.
That's all he gets.
I had a former neighbor of mine a few years back contact me.
The man that was a next door neighbor of mine when I lived in Fort Worth, and her and her husband, we lived next door to them, great people.
And I sold my house to a realtor and her husband.
And the realtor's husband wanted to buy a new, I think it was a Kubota tractor.
So he goes to the Kubota dealership.
Kubota dealership says, "Well, your credit's no good.
We can't, you know, they don't have the money to buy it."
So he'd have to get it on credit, and his credit was no good.
Kubota dealership says, "We can't sell it to you on credit unless you get a cosigner."
So he goes to my former neighbor, sweet, retired elderly people.
He says, "Would you cosign on this tractor for me?
You all can use the tractor anytime you want to.
I just keep it at my house."
They go down.
They don't cosign it.
They go down and they fill out all the paperwork for a member as if they were buying it themselves.
But they made themselves responsible for that tractor, and he got it.
And that worked for a little bit, until one day he decided to move to Houston, and he and the tractor were gone.
All gone.
What did they do?
They didn't need that tractor.
They didn't even want that tractor.
But they just braided themselves in between those two people.
So guess who came out ahead?
The guy wanting the tractor got the tractor.
The guy wanting to sell the tractor got to sell the tractor.
And man number three got stuck with the bill.
Didn't get the tractor or the money from the sale.
When you become man number three, you're just putting yourself on the chopping block for man number one and man number two.
Like three strands of hair, you're braiding yourself into trouble.
You've interwoven yourself into the unnecessary risk being taken by two other people.
Today we wouldn't say we braided ourselves into trouble.
We'd say we got ourselves tangled up into trouble.
But it's the same idea.
Whether you're thinking of braiding or tangling, or we'd say mixed up.
Don't get yourself mixed up into that.
Well when you're braiding hair, you're mixing it up.
It's the same thing.
Being surety isn't simply co-signing along for someone though.
Again, you're making yourself responsible for another person's obligations.
Whatever those obligations are, whatever undertaking that person has, you're becoming the guarantee that they will perform that undertaking.
Whether it is paying back a loan, whether it is making sure they show up for court.
That's why a bail bond is called a surety bond.
It's because you're saying, "Okay, we don't trust this joker to show up for court.
But now if you'll put some money up for them, you can be responsible for making sure they show up for court."
No.
If they can't show up for court on their own recognizance, they can sit in jail.
Or they can put up their own money for their own bail bond.
But old Richard doesn't want to do it.
I don't want to make myself responsible for anybody but me.
The important thing to remember is that it's not your responsibility to pay somebody's loan back.
It's theirs.
It's not your responsibility to make sure someone shows up in court.
It's theirs.
It's not your responsibility to fulfill anybody else's responsibility.
It's theirs.
So when you braid yourself into another person's responsibility, you're simply creating unnecessary stress and trouble for you and your family.
When you become sure that you're not only braiding yourself into another person's trouble, but you're almost always braiding yourself into another person's poor judgment and irresponsibility.
Almost every time.
Here's the kingdom truth for you tonight.
There are plenty of people who will happily unload their responsibility on you.
Repeat it again.
That is a kingdom truth.
That's why we have the warning about surety here.
Because it is a human fact.
There are plenty of people who will happily unload their responsibility on you.
It won't bother them a bit.
Someone asked me the other day, "Well now, while you're healing up, Richard, if you need me to come over your house and do anything for you, let me know."
I appreciated it.
I said I'd have to be flat on my back for a long time before I'd ever let anyone help me.
I'm really big about handling my business.
It's important to me.
I don't like someone else having to handle my business.
I like being responsible.
And everybody should feel that way until they can't be responsible.
And then it's another story.
Then we pitch in and we help someone who can't.
But there's plenty of people who will happily unload their responsibility on you.
They don't think like the average person does.
They think, "Oh, they've got to pay the bill.
Hey, that's good business."
They see it as good business.
They see it as sharp trading if they can dump their responsibility off on you and get away with it.
I've had so many people call the church asking us to pay for their hotel bills.
I mean lots of people call the church, "Yeah, I need you all to...
Can you all pay?
I'm up here at a hotel.
I'm about to get kicked out of the hotel.
I stayed here last night.
I have no place to go.
I'm going to see if maybe you all would be able to put me up for the night at the hotel."
So it sounds real sad someone's going to be kicked out on the street.
Well, guess what?
Folks are on the street every night.
And you start digging into it.
I think if I remember the facts right, the last person that called asking us to pay for the hotel bill was a woman.
She started digging into it.
I dug into it for fun.
I dug into it to teach her a lesson, not to find out if we were going to pay the hotel bill.
We weren't.
We don't do that.
We're not Central Baptist Bank or Central Baptist Church.
And I said, "Well, what's the problem?"
She said, "Well, my boyfriend kicked me out of his trailer."
I said, "Well, okay.
Well, how long have you been living there?"
"I've been living there for a while."
I forgot how many months, however long it was, she'd been living there.
I said, "Well, you don't have any money saved up?"
"I don't have any money."
I said, "Well, what about your job?"
"Well, I don't have a job."
So here, what do we have?
And to her, it sounds like, poor me.
Look, I have no money, no place to stay, no job.
I'm about to be out on the street.
Y'all need to buy me a hotel.
This is desperate.
I'm going to be out on the street tonight.
No place to go.
Y'all people are Christians, right?
I need to buy us a hotel.
Put me up in a hotel.
Now, that's just the information I'm giving.
But what I've already been given in that information, number one, she's been living in sin, shacking up with some fella.
Number two, she knows she has no money and has taken absolutely no responsibility for her own life to acquire any while she's living in a free place to stay.
No responsibility to make sure she can get her any place to stay, have any money to save, to be responsible for her own life at all.
So what's she doing?
She's saying, "I want you to now be responsible for me who has failed to be responsible for myself.
I want you to now become surety.
Take on my obligations and put that burden on you.
You be obligated for me."
You're interweaving yourself into someone's irresponsibility.
And it's not the church's responsibility to work for this woman.
It's not the church's responsibility to plan for the future for this woman.
It's not the church's responsibility to take responsibility for this woman.
It's her responsibility.
We're not put here to pay another person's bills.
And to do so would be to braid ourselves into her irresponsibility and to shore her up and come to her rescue in her sinful lifestyle.
When people ask you to be surety for them, it often involves a sense of urgency to get you to act.
Almost always involves a sense of urgency.
"I'm going to be out on the street tonight."
"Well, then, how old are you?"
"Well, I'm 35."
"Well, why weren't you planning for tonight 20 years ago?"
And now, suddenly tonight, we don't even know who you are, and suddenly you're calling.
It's our responsibility.
But that's just a scenario.
But it almost always involves a sense of urgency to get you to react as if it's an emergency.
And when someone uses a sense of urgency to ask you to take on their responsibility to support themselves, always remember, and I know many of you heard this, and if you haven't, here's a good time to learn it.
Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
And when this is the case, it almost always involves a stranger.
If you'll look back in the text, he goes on to talk about the person that is sure to look for a stranger.
"I didn't know the woman that called this church."
"I didn't know who that person was."
It's almost always for a stranger.
That's why the Holy Spirit has Solomon worded this way.
Because that's how people are.
There's going to be a sense of urgency, and the sense of urgency means you don't have time to know who this person is who's asking you to braid yourself into their trouble.
You can't have all the facts almost every time when you put yourself into someone's trouble that you don't know.
After all is said and done and you learn the story, you'll think, "Man, I wish I'd have known that."
Well, the reason you didn't know that is because that person was a stranger to you.
And you may have known that person's name, that person may have lived next door to you, but you did not know the circumstances in that person's life as you should have, and you responded and entangled yourself in without the background you should have had.
Don't do it.
A lot of times people living next to you can be strangers.
They sure can.
But in most cases, if you knew the whole story, you would not give these people your money, you would not tangle yourself up into their trouble.
In most cases, these strangers use your lack of knowledge about them to cause you to become surety for them.
They give you just the amount of information they want you to have to invoke sympathy from you to get them to act on their behalf.
By the way, that's what panhandlers do.
They're trying to get you to braid yourself in to their irresponsibility, their failure to plan, their failure to take on responsibility, because if I can stand on a street corner for hours at a time on my feet, holding a sign out like this, those guys are in better shape than I am.
Y'all watch me at work.
I'll stand up for a little bit.
You know what I'm going to do after that?
I'm going to sit down.
Y'all watch me when y'all are standing up singing Sunday morning, old Richard's sitting down.
Why?
Because I had been stood up an hour over there, and I about had to do it for another 30, 45 minutes here, so I get my rest in while I can.
These guys, they can stand for days just there like that.
God bless you.
God thank you.
God bless you.
Thank you.
God's not blessing you for that, because you're taking money and you're intertwining yourself into someone's irresponsibility.
Next time you see someone in the corner and you really want to help them, hand them a job application.
Now, I'm serious now.
I'm serious.
You go up there and if you're the person that always says, "Oh, I just feel so sorry for them and I just ooh," and you've got all those emotions, then go to one of the good employers in town, go to Walmart, go to someplace that's got a for hire sign sitting out, get a job application from a few places, and when you see them, just pull up and say, "God bless you," and then hand them a job application.
That's what we ought to do.
Now, how often have you all have ever in your lifetime seen a panhandler?
That's everybody.
How many of you all have ever seen one of your good friends out panhandling?
That's nobody.
Do you know what that means?
They're all strangers to you.
And that's how they get you to give.
They're strangers.
You do not have the capability of knowing the background, but you do know this when you see them.
Here they are on the street asking people who work to give them money when they should be inside working for their own money.
That's what they should do.
If they can stand there and ask for money, they can greet at Walmart.
They can go push buggies there in the parking lot at Walmart.
They can do that.
It's okay.
It's not being cruel.
We're just teaching the Scripture here.
It's almost always a stranger, just like the Scripture says, standing on the side of the road trying to unload their personal responsibility to provide for themselves on you.
They take advantage of your lack of knowledge.
They're only going to tell you the amount of information they want you to know.
It's probably not going to be true, most of it.
And when you lend someone credit, when you lend someone credit without doing a proper background check, do you know what you're doing?
You're lending to a stranger.
If you're giving credit to someone, meaning, "Okay, I'll sell you this vehicle."
Here, you go ahead and take the vehicle now, give me a down payment, and you just bring me a couple hundred dollars a month.
You just gave that person credit.
You just made yourself responsible for that person paying you off because you just let your car go.
And so now you didn't do the proper background check, so now they're a stranger to you.
You let someone move into a house.
Man, I did this.
I did it.
I had a house I rented out when I was a young man.
I didn't know anything about doing background checks on people and things like that and finding out where they last rented, where they work at, and all these other things.
I didn't know anything about that stuff.
I let them move into my house.
You done that?
They stiff you?
I got stiff too.
Now, here's the neat thing.
They kept the house cleaner than we did.
They just wouldn't pay for it.
We paid for the house.
We made the monthly house payments.
These guys wouldn't pay.
They were older than my parents, and they didn't care.
I was a 20-something-year-old man, and, "Oh, well, just stiff him.
He can pay for it."
You know what I was doing?
I was basically making myself surety for a stranger.
I did not do due diligence on my part to know enough about the person that I led inside my property.
My fault.
The Bible says when you do this, it says you're going to smart for it.
Look back in your text.
Whoever makes themself surety for a stranger, look in your text, "Shall smart for it."
In other words, you're going to feel pain for it.
It's going to hurt you in some form, whether it's a loss of money that you just give away for no good reason, they're going to go buy a dope for it, whether it's not being able to...
Because for a while, when I rented my house out, were you making a house payment one place too?
Yeah.
Now you're making two payments.
That's the way I was.
I'd pay for their house and my house.
And so I was smarting for it.
It hurts.
That's what smart means.
If you're young and you haven't heard of it, it's "Ouch!
That's smarts."
Well, smart means you're going to get hurt for it.
You're going to pay for it.
I've given people money before, trust them to pay me back.
I sold a gun last year to somebody.
And I said, "Well, you can just pay me back so much a month."
And at first that person paid on time.
And then they got behind.
That's how you use almost always how it works.
And they got behind.
And then they come and they say, "Well, I'm a little late this month.
I had some expenses come up."
Now that sounds good, but if you ever knew what those expenses were, it'd make you mad.
That person ended up being like, I think, four months behind.
Finally, this week, they came up to me.
They owed me $61.
They're saying, "Sixty-one dollars," and they'd be paid off.
Meanwhile, I get to hear stories about things she's doing.
Going out and buying ammo to practice with the gun.
Hey, pay for the gun, then go buy your ammo, okay?
Finally, she comes up, she owes me $61, and knows it.
She hands me $60 cash and says, she says, "I know I owe you $61."
She says, "Here's $60."
She said, "I spent the other dollar playing pool this weekend."
What am I supposed to say?
Well, did you win?
You know, what am I supposed to say?
Like I said, people are more than happy to unload their responsibility on you, and it doesn't matter how well you teach it.
They're just not going to get it, because they're willing for you to take that responsibility.
I had a good friend of mine years ago ask advice on whether or not he should loan money to a mutual friend of ours.
I happened to know the background of this person's financial background.
I said, "No, I don't recommend you do, because that person I know personally has a problem paying people what they owe."
So, in that situation, my friend was wise to not make that person a stranger to him.
In other words, I want to find out about this person before I loaned him money.
He did what was wise.
He found out that person financially was no longer a stranger to him.
Having that information, he says, "No, thank you.
I'm not going to make that loan."
I come to find out he ended up owing more and more and more people.
It got worse and worse and worse.
Always investigate before you invest, and always remember that if you're not sure, then don't braid yourself into another person's trouble.
There are financial institutions that can afford to take those risks, and they're in the business of taking those risks, of loaning money, of putting themselves out like that.
If a professional will not loan your friend the money, there's a reason they won't loan them the money.
If a bank's not willing, if a person that's in business to loan money, won't loan a person money, then neither should you.
Unless it's a family member or something, and you just feel the moral responsibility for doing so.
That's between you and God.
Here's the kingdom and truth.
If you can't afford to lose it, then don't loan it.
If you can't afford to lose it, then don't loan it.
I started to order it this way.
If you can't afford to lose it, then you can't afford to loan it.
Both of them are true, but if you can't afford to lose it, just think to yourself, when I'm handing this money over, because when I sold that gun on credit, I said to myself, "You know what?
If they don't pay me back, I will disrespect the person, but it's not going to hurt me.
I can afford to lose this, so I went ahead and let them have it on credit.
You know what?
I lost one dollar on the deal.
It's some pool all somewhere.
I wrote it off."
I could afford to lose it, but if you can't afford to lose it, then don't loan it.
It says here, "You're smart for it."
On the other hand, Solomon said, "If you look back in your text, as we close, 'And he that hateth surety-ship is sure.'"
I like to play on words here.
"He that hateth surety-ship is sure."
He hates surety-ship, but the person who hates it is sure.
He's the sure person.
A person that makes it his policy to not entangle himself into another person's responsibilities is sure.
That means they aren't suffering the instability, because sure means it's sure, it's solid.
It's standing solid, it's immovable.
They're not suffering the instability of the person that's requesting them to be surety.
Because if you're someone's surety, you're only as sure as that unstable person is.
Their instability becomes your instability.
They're not going to pay their rent.
You can't count on them to pay their rent.
That means you've got to count on yourself to pay that rent if they're in your rent house.
The fewer people you're responsible for, the better off you'll be.
Now, with all that said, I'll close saying this, it's okay to help people.
That's not what Solomon's teaching.
That's not what I'm teaching tonight.
It's okay to help people.
But you can help people without legally binding yourself with their obligations.
You see the difference?
Someone say, "Hey, I can't make the rent this month.
Can I afford to lose--" How much is rent now?
$900,000 a month?
Yeah, it's crazy.
Can I afford to lose $1,000?
Can I afford to help them out?
If they don't pay me back, can I afford to do that?
Well, maybe I can.
I love this person.
Maybe I'll help them out.
I just won't expect it back.
Okay, $1,000.
But you know what?
You're not legally bound to that.
You didn't sign any lease papers.
You didn't make yourself legally responsible.
So next month, you don't have to if you don't want to.
If that person doesn't show any signs of making themself responsible, go out and hunt for a job or whatever the situation is, you're not on the hook legally.
So it's okay to help people without-- You can help them, but that doesn't mean you have to necessarily legally bind yourself with their obligations.
So try to do that if you're going to help someone.
If you help someone, then you can help them on terms that you're comfortable with.
Not on terms that some finance company makes.
Not on terms that some renter makes.
Not on terms that some court or bail company makes.
If you become surety for them, then you must help them on somebody else's terms.
Don't do it.
Help them on your terms.
Be a helper, but not a surety.
Make sense?
Well, we'll go ahead and stop.
Man, that's good wisdom.
Be a helper, but not a surety.
There is a difference.
Father, we thank you so much for your precious word.
We thank you, Father, for teaching us about strangers.
It's so fascinating to me how you intertwined in your word a request for a person to obligate themselves with a stranger, someone that is not well known.
I thank you, Father, for teaching us, Lord, your word.
I love you.
I thank you for the wisdom of your word.
I thank you for opening our eyes to it and sharing it with us.
And I pray we'll digest it and put it to use in Jesus' name. Amen.
