More Than One Voice

Where there is no wise guidance, the nation falls, but in the multitude of counselors there is victory. (Proverbs 11:14, WEB)

A man convinced he can think his way out of this alone is usually the man most trapped in it. The proverb speaks to that directly. Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety. The word abundance is striking. It does not say one trusted voice is enough, though one is far better than none and most men do not even have that. It points to a fuller kind of safety that comes when a man opens his life to several honest people, each seeing a different angle, each able to catch what the others miss, so that no single blind spot can take him all the way down.

Lust thrives on the private counsel of your own mind, which is compromised on exactly this subject and will always argue for what it craves. Your own reasoning at eleven at night is not a reliable guide, and the more alone you are with it, the more convincing it becomes. Other voices break that spell. A leader who has walked this road and knows its bends, a brother a few steps ahead who remembers where you are standing, a wife who prays for you and sees you up close, the steady counsel of Scripture read in the morning before the day has a chance to argue with it, these together form a kind of guardrail your own thoughts cannot provide. Any one of them can be wrong on a given day. All of them together are hard to fool.

If you have kept your circle of counsel small, whether out of shame or pride or simple habit, widen it. Let more than one wise voice into the real parts of your life, not just the parts that are easy to show. Ask God this week to surround you with wise men, and to give you the humility to actually listen when they say something you did not want to hear.