Sharpened to a Point
Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another. - Proverbs 27:17
My wife went to visit Spain when we were still in high school. While she was there, she bought me a very nice pocket knife, from a famous knife maker in Spain. I have kept this knife all these year, but a few years ago I brought it with me on a middle school boys camp out. One of the middle school boys wanted to ‘make’ kindling for the fire, so he grabbed my knife out of the can and used it as a hatchet to cut up small pieces of wood in order to start the fire.
You can imagine what this did to the blade. After that incident, the knife was not really good for much, so I stashed it away. A few months back I saw a friend was doing knife sharpening, so I dug it out and brought it up to him, to see if he could fix it. Much to my amazement, he was able to make the knife as good as new - but it wasn’t a fast or easy process.
Sharpening a knife today look much different than it did in the time of Solomon, who wrote most of the Proverbs. Solomon describes the process of sharpening an iron blade, telling us that it takes iron to sharpen iron. Images come to mind of heating the metal and filing away parts and pieces. A long, painstaking process used to make one piece useable for its intended purpose.
He tells us that a friend is used in this same way. A friend is used to help mold and shape us so that we are better used for our intended purpose. Just like shaping iron is not a fun process for the iron, it may not be a great process for us either. There will be hard lessons to be learned and difficult times as we grow into the person we were created to be, but it will all be worth it when we are glorified with God in heaven.
Verses like this should also cause us to use caution when choosing the friends that we allow to speak into our lives. While iron is used to sharpen iron, it is the one who is doing the sharpening who decides what is being made. Just as much as a friend can build you up, they can tear you down. As much as they can help share you into the image of God, they can also shape you into the image of this world. For this reason, we need to ensure that our friendships are grounded and rooted in the Word of the Lord.
We should weigh all of our relationships against the standards that the Lord has set for us. All of these relationships should be pointing us to Jesus. Make sure that your friends are doing this, and make sure you are setting the example in your conduct, speech, love, and faith as well. You could be the one sharpening someone else - so don’t neglect your responsibility to point them to Jesus.
