Choose Your People Wisely

Who Are You Becoming? The People You Walk With Are Shaping Your Soul

You may not have intentionally chosen the person you are becoming—but the people you walk with are shaping your words, desires, habits, and relationship with God.

Why You Should Watch This Message

We often blame the wrong crowd for the damage in our lives. But what happens when we realize the problem is not only the people we chose—the problem is also the person doing the choosing?

Through Proverbs 13:20, this powerful and deeply personal message reveals how the people closest to us quietly shape who we become. Some relationships may not openly pull us away from God, but over time, God becomes smaller, prayer becomes less important, and things that once troubled our hearts begin to feel normal.

But this message does not end with a warning. It leads us to the gospel.

Jesus, the true wisdom of God, willingly entered the company of sinners. He did not become like us; instead, He took the judgment and brokenness we deserved upon Himself at the cross. He was crushed so that broken people like us could be forgiven, restored, and made new.

You cannot simply change your friends and fix your heart. You need Jesus to transform you from the inside out.

This message will challenge you to examine who is influencing your life, confront the foolishness within your own heart, and begin walking closely with Jesus and wise believers who will help you become more like Him.

Key Takeaways

• The people you consistently walk with are shaping the person you are becoming.

• A foolish influence is not always obvious; it may be someone you genuinely love and enjoy.

• The deepest problem is not merely the crowd around us, but the foolishness within us.

• Jesus is the only friend who can transform the heart from the inside out.

• God uses Christian community to help rescued sinners grow in wisdom.

• You cannot subtract your way into wisdom—you must add wise, godly people to your life.

The company you kept may have broken you, but Jesus is still standing with His hand extended, saying, “Come to Me. Walk with Me.”

Who Are You Becoming? Walk With the Wise

Closing Application

The question is not simply, “Who are my friends?” The deeper question is, “Who am I becoming because of the people I walk with?”

Take an honest look at the voices shaping your heart, your habits, your priorities, and your relationship with God. Are the people closest to you helping you love Jesus more, or is God slowly becoming smaller in your life?

You may need to create distance from influences that are pulling you away from Christ. But you cannot subtract your way into wisdom. You also need to intentionally add wise, mature believers who will pray for you, challenge you, encourage you, and help you keep walking with Jesus.

This week, take one practical step. Ask one godly person to meet with you. Tell them, “I need someone to help me walk faithfully with Jesus.”

And remember: changing your crowd cannot change your heart. Only Jesus can do that. He entered the company of sinners, took the judgment we deserved, rose from the grave, and now invites us to walk with Him.

You do not have to repair yourself before coming to Christ. Bring Him the broken pieces. Come as you are, trust Him, and begin walking with Jesus today.

• Transcript: Pastor Rajiv Khatri

WHO ARE YOU BECOMING?
WALK WITH THE WISE

Proverbs 13:20 | Word-for-Word Transcript with Section Subtitles

West Palm Beach, FL Church

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THE KID WHO BECAME HIS CROWD

All right. This morning, I want to tell you about this kid. He was well behaved. He got straight A's in elementary school, middle school, honor roll in almost every quarter that he was in school. He was the kind of kid you would look at. You look at him and you'd think, this guy, he's gonna be okay. He's gonna do just fine. But then he started running with a different crew. He started spending a lot of time with them, hanging out with them. Late nights. The people he was hanging out with, that's who he started to become. The words that came out of their mouth started coming out of his mouth. Their habits became his habits. Their trouble became his trouble. And look, it's not like anybody sat him down and you know told him or trained him or taught him that, hey, you're gonna be somebody else now. You're gonna be the kind of guy that that you're gonna be somebody else. And by the time this kid was 19.

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Some of you know that kid.

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Some of you were that kid. I mean, some of you you can look back at your own life and point to the exact time frame your life started to turn. In fact, maybe you can even see a link, a connection. Maybe it was the the group you started hanging with. Now look, you didn't you didn't set out, you didn't intentionally or consciously make a decision to set out to be somebody else. You just started spending time with people. And you liked them. They were fun. They took you in when nobody else did. And you came out the other side as a person you never planned to be. Some of you are still in it. Some of you know the exact face that I'm describing right now. See, for many of you, the the people you picked have cost you more than you've ever actually wanted to admit to anybody else.

WALK WITH THE WISE

This morning, let's open up our Bibles or you can follow on the screen. Proverbs chapter 13, verse 20. It's one verse. It says, walk with the wise and become wise. For a companion of fools suffers harm. Walk with the wise and become wise. It says, walk. Not meet once in a while, walk with them, live life alongside them, listen to them, watch them, follow their example, stay close enough that they begin to rub off on you. And then look at what the verse says. Look what it says happens when you do that. You become wise. Not because you you tried harder, but because you kept walking with wise people. And look, you already know that this is true. Yeah, anybody who's who's worked a job knows it. You know, new guy shows up, you know, he shows up at the job site or the crew and he's polite, he's he's he's quiet, he works hard. You give him six months, now he's got the same chip on his shoulder as the man who's been there for 20 some odd years. Same complaints, same attitude. It's not like anybody handed him a manual to start acting that way. He just spent time with this new group and he caught it.

THE HOUSE GETS INTO YOU

You know, it starts young too. You know, a parent, as much as we think we do, a parent doesn't watch their kid change day by day. I mean, my daughter, my three-year-old daughter, looks the same today as she did yesterday. But three years go by, four years, five years. And as parents, we we don't want to necessarily admit all this, but our kids start to talk like us, think like us. In fact, they get mad the same way we get mad. No, nobody taught them that, at least not on purpose. They just lived in the house. And the house got into them. That's all of us. Every one of us is living in somebody's house. Now, I'm not saying we're we're we're a bunch of mere robots. That's not what I'm getting at. Look, some of you grew up around foolishness, and by God's grace, you didn't become like that. But you'd be living a lie if you said the people around you haven't rubbed off on you. They have. They're rubbing off on you right now. But look, there's good news hiding in that. Because if if the shaping happens in some sense on its own, then the part that's on you is simpler than you think. Look, you don't have to be strong enough to remake yourself. Nobody's strong enough for that. But you get to choose who you walk with. You pick the company, and God uses that company to change you.

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In fact, he is the rock that begins to change you.

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WHO HAVE I BEEN WALKING WITH?

So now, if this is true, if if we become like whoever we walk with, then there's a couple questions that we start asking ourselves, just naturally start asking ourselves. Well, who have I been walking with? And who have I become that I never meant to become? Now I want to challenge you on that one. I want you to be honest with yourself. See, because most of us, we only focus on the first question. And what do we usually do? We start making a list of all the people we've been walking with and we stop there. We only think about that person or that person. It's always about somebody else, and we neglect something. We neglect looking at ourselves. I want you to look at the second half of the verse again. A companion of fools suffers harm. You see, the first half, walk with the wise, become wise. But the verse doesn't stop there. It takes a turn. And the turn is a warning. You keep company with fools, and it says you suffer harm. Right? The fools. Now, that word for harm in the original language, it doesn't mean a little bit of trouble. It means broken, shattered. It actually means smashed into pieces. A companion of fools suffers harm. They suffer being smashed into pieces. And again, when we hear that, most of us, maybe every one of us, we start doing the same thing. We start naming the fools in our lives. And look, for some of you, that list started a long way back. Actually, for all of us, it started a long way back. We didn't pick our first crowd. You were born into it. You didn't choose the house you grew up in. And the people who were supposed to teach you how to how to live maybe didn't know how to live themselves. And look, it wasn't your fault. So don't misunderstand me. God has never held your beginning against you. He saw that house. He knows exactly what that house has done to you while you were in it. But while you might be right about your parents, you can still be stuck. You can be dead accurate about every wrong thing they did and be 45 years old, 50 years old, 60 years old, and nothing about your life has actually changed. Why? Well, for some of us, that house taught you what normal feels like. And then you went out into the world and you found people who felt like that. Again, some of you might know exactly the kind of people I'm talking about. Maybe you got a name or face in your head already. And maybe you're already thinking, I you know what? There's a point to this. I need to get them out of my life. And you might be right on that. If that's where your mind is going, you might be right. That's not a mean thing. It may be wisdom. When you finally walk away from a crowd that's been taking you down. If that's what you're thinking about doing, then that might be the right thing. And look, nobody in this room is going to tell you to go back to it. But I want to make sure you understand something. I want to make sure you understand what I'm actually worried about this morning.

THE HIDDEN DANGER OF THE WRONG CROWD

See, when most of us think about the wrong crowd, we immediately get a picture in our mind. Maybe we picture criminals, you know, or or the obvious, the very blatant, obvious bad influences. See, that's not how Proverbs usually works. I'm talking about the people you genuinely enjoy being around. The friends you love, the ones who have always been there when you needed them. And every time you're with them, God gets a little smaller. You pray less. You think about him less. The things that used to bother you don't bother you anymore. Now look, they never pressured you to walk away from God. They didn't have to. They just live like he wasn't there. And you've been around them long enough that maybe you started to do the same. That's the fool Proverbs is warning us about. Now, again, I don't want you to misunderstand me. Let me tell you what I'm not saying. I'm not telling you to cut every person out of your life who doesn't know Jesus. Jesus didn't do that. In fact, he was called a friend of sinners. That's not what this sermon's about. This is about who is forming you, who is influencing you, who is teaching you, let me put it this way, who is teaching your heart what to love? That's what I'm talking about. You know, when we were, when my family and I, when Sarah and I and our kids, we were living overseas, everyone around me said cheers. That's how you say goodbye. Cheers. End of conversation, cheers. Somebody hang, you know, hands you your change at the supermarket, cheers. Get off the phone, cheers. Now, let me be on the record by saying I never decided or intended to start saying that. Nobody ever sat me down and said, Rajiv, from now on, you're gonna start saying cheers at the end of almost every sentence you say. But I came back to the US and I'm in a store here in West Palm Beach. Young man rings me up at the supermarket, hands me my bag, and what do I say to him? Cheers! And he gives me this really strange look. You know, he's like thinking, Well, cheers. We don't have glasses, we're not we're not drinking together. Why is he saying cheers? He had no idea what I was saying. And I'm standing in the checkout line and I'm thinking, why did I say that? Where did that even come from? But I knew exactly where it came from. It came from the people I'd been walking with. I'd been walking with them long enough, and what their words were started to rub off on me and became my words. Now look, that's a funnier one. That's a lighthearted one. But some of the things we pick up, it isn't funny at all.

THE PROBLEM IS ALSO THE ONE DOING THE PICKING

And it's easy for us to merely blame others for what you picked up. But here's the thing. Here's the thing about the crowd you might be running with right now. Nobody dragged you to that crowd. You went. You chose. And if you're honest, you went because something in you liked it. There was something about that crowd that tugged on a desire that was already in you. They didn't force a thing on you, they just offered you what you already wanted. In fact, it took me years to admit that about my own life. See, the problem was never only the people I picked. The problem was also the one doing the picking. The fool wasn't just the crowd. The fool was me.

I THOUGHT I WOULD BE THE INFLUENCE

You know, again, overseas, Sarah and I were on fire to reach people who didn't know Jesus. We wanted to share our faith. We wanted to share the gospel with people who didn't know Jesus. And God opened a door for us in India with a certain type of crowd, kind of the high society type, the kind of people that get invited to everything. You know, designer event parties, liquor brands throwing different events. And we went to all those things. We went because we thought if we get close enough to these people, if we really become their friends, we'll be able to tell them about Jesus. And let me say this that's not a bad desire. That's a good desire. But I didn't have anybody wise walking with me, no one speaking truth into my life, no one close enough to tell me that when I start to look more like them, then I look like Jesus. You see, I went in there thinking I'm gonna be the one who influences them. But I wasn't the influence. I was the one being influenced. And I didn't even notice it was happening. Little by little, we start to look more like them. And when the day finally came when we started to talk to them about Jesus, you know what some of them said? Well, why do we need Jesus? What why do we even want Jesus? I mean, look at how you live. You live just like us. What difference would it actually make? You see, I went in there wanting to bring them the gospel, and they couldn't even see it in me. Because I start to look more like them.

THE FOOL WAS ME

So, if the fool is me, then I've got some real problems to start wrestling with. Because guess what? I can't just walk away from myself. I I I I can change every friend I've got, but I'm still stuck with the one person I can never leave. Me. So how do I solve that? Well, I need somebody to do for me what I cannot do for myself. I need a different kind of friend. And there's only one person who has ever walked into a room full of fools and didn't become like them. Everybody else who has tried, who has ever tried, came out looking like the room. I did, I know you guys have. Don't tell me you haven't, you have.

THE ONE FRIEND WHO DID NOT BECOME LIKE THE ROOM

But there's one man who walked into a room and the room caught him instead. I want you to listen to this verse one more time. Walk with the wise and become wise. For a companion of fools suffers harm.

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Now, we've been reading that as a warning.

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But it's more than that. You see, this proverb ultimately finds its fullest expression in Jesus. You see, here's something in the Hebrew, your English Bible can't actually show you. Companion of fools, that word is Rohe. Suffers harm, that word is Yerohe. You say them together, Rohe, Yerohe, they almost rhyme. Solomon built the sentence so it would sound like what it means. Run with the broken, get broken. Keep company with the smashed, get smashed. That's what happens. And it did happen. Jesus, the wisdom of God, the ultimate true wisdom of God, came down and became a man. And do you know what they called him? I said it earlier, a friend of sinners. Now they said it to insult him. They meant it as a charge against him. They said, look at who he eats with. Look at who he hangs out with. He was the companion of fools on purpose. He chose to walk with the very people this verse warns us about. But he chose it with eyes open. And the verse says, the companion of fools suffers harms. Yerohe smashed, broken to pieces.

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That's what they did to him.

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THE ROCK TOOK THE HAMMER

R.C. Sproul said it like this. He said, He took our place, he being Jesus, took our place under the law. He was a curse, it was a curse that he bore. It was a curse that he bore, the sentence of the law acting as our substitute. In other words, the hammer of God's justice should have come down on every clay pot in this room. What do I mean by that? You're a clay pot. I'm a clay pot. The crowd we ran with are clay pots. The crowd we became clay pots. The hammer of God's justice should have come down on us. Instead, it came down on the rock. And the rock took it. But the rock did not break. And the clay pots, you and me, by God's grace, were spared. You see, that's the gospel. The companion of fools suffered the harm that we deserved. Not because he was a fool, but because he chose to love fools like us. See, he came all the way down here, walked with us, and kept walking until they killed him. Why? So that we could walk with him and live and no longer be fools.

JESUS CHANGES US FROM THE INSIDE

Now I want you to stay with me here. Because I said something earlier that that I don't want you to think that I'm about to take it back or I'm contradicting it. I told you that I could change every friend I've got and still be stuck with myself. I meant that. Let me explain it a little further. See, no person you ever meet, as wise as they are, there's no person you're ever going to meet that can reach down inside you and get the fool out. Your best friend can't do it. Your spouse can't do it. Sarah has tried for years, hasn't worked. This church can't do it. Jesus can. See, Jesus doesn't just walk beside you. He comes to live inside you by his spirit. He doesn't just rub off on you from the outside. He makes you brand new from the inside. That's what that's what nobody else in your life can possibly do. Nobody can do that. And that's why he had to go to the cross for you. Because the only way the fool gets fixed is if somebody takes what the fool had coming to him. And we had judgment coming to us.

ZACCHAEUS: WISDOM ENTERS A FOOL’S HOUSE

There's a story in scripture, some of you might be familiar with. This guy named Zacchaeus, tax collector, which means he got rich taking money from his own people and handing it over to the Romans. He essentially was, he sold out his neighbors for you know for a piece of the pie, a cut. Now, everybody in that town hated him, and they had every reason to. He was considered a traitor for money. And one day, Jesus comes through the town, and the whole city comes to see him. And Zacchaeus, he really wants to see this guy. But Zacchaeus, he was kind of a short guy. He was a short man. So he couldn't see over the crowd. And nobody in the crowd is moving aside for him. Nobody's going to do him any favors because, again, he's a hated guy. So he runs ahead, this grown man, rich man, and he climbs a tree like a kid. Because the only way he's going to be able to see, it's the only way he's going to get a look of Jesus. And Jesus, he stops right under that tree. Out of that whole crowd, all those decent people who came out to see him, Jesus looks up into the branches, looks up there, finds the most hated man in the city, and he calls him by name. Come down, Zacchaeus. You know what he says? I'm coming to your house today. Now, I want you to catch what just happened there. Zacchaeus didn't find Jesus. Jesus found him. Zacchaeus didn't clean himself up first and then get invited. He was up in a tree. Jesus went and got him. Nobody preached at him. There was no altar call. There was no sermon. And then Jesus goes to his house and they eat dinner together. And by the time the meal was over, Zacchaeus stands up and says, I'm giving half of everything I own to the poor. And anybody I cheated, I'm paying them back four times over. Nobody made him say that. Nobody asked him for it. And Jesus says clearly, today, salvation has come to this house. The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost. And that what Zacchaeus' response, that's what happens when wisdom walk when wisdom himself walks into your door. When wisdom himself walks into your life, into a fool's house. He doesn't just lecture him, he saves him. And the man who gets saved can't help but start changing.

WALKING WITH JESUS CHANGES YOU

Here's what this means for you. When you come to faith in Jesus, you don't stay the fool. Now I know there are some of you who've been sitting here, and maybe for weeks, months, years, you have believed that's just who you are. A fool. End of story. You're not. You walk with Jesus long enough. He gets in you. Let me explain. You know when you go into a room where people are smoking cigarettes and you leave, and hours later your clothes still smell like the smoke? Right? You didn't ask for it. You just stood there and it got on you. Right? Now, Jesus isn't smoke in that way. He doesn't stain you. I'd rather think of it more like, he's more like perfume. You walk with him long enough, and people start noticing Jesus in you. They smell it on you. And you didn't earn it. You just kept walking with him. And it started showing. See, when you have a relationship with Jesus, the foolishness in your life, the foolishness in your mind and your heart starts reducing slowly, and wisdom starts growing in its place. And you'll notice, you'll be in a room, and something that would have grabbed you and grabbed your attention before maybe two years ago, well, it just doesn't grab you the same way anymore. And maybe you start to think, well, when did that happen? It seems like I've grown. Well, it happened while you were walking with them. While you were walking with Jesus.

THE ONE WHO WALKED INTO THE WORST CROWD AND ROSE

See the kid I told you about at the beginning of this sermon, he ran with the wrong crowd. And he became like them. And it broke him. That's a true story. That's a lot of true stories. Maybe it's a lot of your stories. Well, look, there's one who ran went who ran with a excuse me, who ran with the wrong crowd on purpose. He walked into the worst company on earth, but he didn't become like them.

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They smashed him on the cross. But that did not keep him down. He rose. He got up.

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He was resurrected. You see, you and I cannot put a clay pot back together. We we could try. But we're not gonna be able to put that clay pot back together. But God can. But you know what? He doesn't just glue you back together, he makes you new. Yeah, I know some of you came in here this morning carrying pieces, broken pieces. Trust me, I've been carrying pieces too. And Jesus, he has never once, never once told me to come back when I've all got all my pieces fixed, and I've got it all together first. He's never told me that. He just says, Come to me now, and I'll repair you. Yeah, the company you kept may have been killing you, may have been smashing you. But wisdom himself sat down in it. And when the hammer of God's justice fell, he took it. And he made the fool, you and me, his friend.

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Now I want you to look around the room.

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A CHURCH OF RESCUED FOOLS

Like look at each other's neighbors. Turn to your left and right right now. Look to your left, look to your right. There are people in this room who ran with the worst crowd West Palm Beach has to offer. And there are people in this room who ran with the best crowd, the right schools, the right addresses, and were just, they're just as far from God, or have and were just as far from God. Same room, both kinds of people. But all of us have the same rock. The same rock, Jesus Christ. And I want you to understand something. This church, this church is a church of rescued fools learning to walk with Jesus. That's what Belvedere is. That's what God is building here in this city. But I need you to understand something. You cannot, you cannot do it alone. This is not a walk you do by yourself. Right? What did the verse say? Walk with the wise. That's how God set it up. God saves you himself, and then he uses each of us to grow each other. He uses the people around you, the person you looked at to your left and right, he's using that person, the person sitting next to you, as it's a means that God is using and God is going to use to make you wise. Those are your people now.

ONE PRACTICAL STEP THIS WEEK

So here's what I'm asking you to do this week. Just one thing. Maybe you're here this morning and you've never walked with Jesus. Maybe you came because somebody dragged you in this morning. I want you to hear this clearly. You do not have to clean up first. You don't have to get a better crowd first. Jesus is a friend of sinners. That's not an accident. He came looking for the lost. He came looking for you. So you just come to him as a fool and you ask. Ask him to walk with you. That's it. That's how it starts. You turn around and you trust him. And you start walking with Jesus. And look, if that's you, I don't want you to leave here this morning without telling somebody. If that's you this morning and you're and you're making a decision that you want to walk with Jesus, come talk to me at the front after the service. Come talk to Sarah. Come talk to Ray. We've got a bunch of people here that want to talk to you and know what's going on in your life. So come find somebody. If you're walking with Jesus, but you're walking alone, before next Sunday, here's what I want you to do. Before next Sunday, ask one mature believer to have coffee with you. Tell them, I need someone to help me walk with Jesus. Don't be too proud for that. Because there's plenty of people in this room who'll say yes to your coffee. And for others of you, if you're still running with the old crowd, I want you to hear me carefully. I'm not telling you to cut everybody off today. I'm telling you to add somebody. Ask one wise Christian to walk with you this week. Look, you can't subtract your way to wisdom. You gotta let new people start walking with you to crowd out the old. So add some wise people to your life.

WALK WITH JESUS THIS MORNING

Look, here's where we are: a mess of pieces. Some of us are those pieces. But Jesus, he's the rock. And he didn't stay up on the mountain where no one could touch him or reach him or have a relationship with him. He came down into the company that smashes people, and he let it smash him at the cross. But he got up and he is still standing this morning with his hand stretched out to you, saying, Come to me, walk with me. So how are you going to respond? Walk with him, walk with Jesus this morning.

CLOSING PRAYER

Let's pray, Father. God, we love, we love you. Lord, we have been fools without you. But by your grace and by your mercy, you extended your hand to us, rescued us from our sin, rescued us from our foolishness, and brought us into a relationship with you through your Son Jesus. And God, we desire to walk with Jesus every day, every moment of every day of our lives. Help us to grow in our wisdom. Help us to add more wise people into our lives. Help us to not be influenced by the fools, but help us to be the influencers to the fools around us. Help us share the light of Jesus to the world. We praise you, and it's in Jesus' name we all pray. Amen.

West Palm Beach Church

Belvedere Church is a welcoming, Christ-centered church in West Palm Beach where imperfect people can encounter the grace of Jesus, grow in biblical truth, and learn to walk faithfully with one another. In this message from Proverbs 13:20, “Who Are You Becoming? Walk With the Wise,” we examine how the people closest to us quietly shape our words, habits, desires, and relationship with God. More importantly, this sermon points us to Jesus—the true wisdom of God—who entered the company of sinners, took the judgment we deserved, and now transforms us from the inside out. Whether you feel broken by past relationships, trapped in old patterns, or simply desire to grow closer to Christ, this message is an invitation to walk with Jesus and become part of a community of rescued people learning to grow in wisdom together.