Wisdom For Peer Pressure Series

But how exactly do I do that? This passage provides us with some very practical advice and I’m going to break that down into two main sections:

• First, I want to talk about how to figure out when someone is “pulling my strings”.

• Then I want to discuss how we are to respond to that peer pressure in a way that will help us live to please God rather than to please people.

So as long as you’re under 104 - and I’m pretty sure that is all of you - this message is relevant for your life.

HOW TO FIGURE OUT WHEN SOMEONE IS “PULLING MY STRINGS”

Have you ever watched someone control a puppet? They do that by pulling on the strings attached to the puppet. Do you ever feel like others are trying to control you like that - like they are pulling your strings? Sometimes that can be a good thing. Like we talked about last week, when we’re young, we need our parents to do that in order to protect us. As I said earlier, some kinds of peer pressure are good for us. But sometimes people are pulling our strings in a way that is going to harm us. And we don’t always see that.

There are three words that all begin with the letter “H” that will help us to identify when someone is pulling our strings like that. You probably already know these intuitively but it won’t hurt for us to talk about them for a few minutes.

• Hide

We see this primarily in verse 11:

Proverbs 1:11 ESV

11 If they say, “Come with us, let us lie in wait for blood; let us ambush the innocent without reason;

Most of the time peer pressure lures us into hiding. Notice here that the sinners who are trying to entice others are lying in wait. They are ready to ambush others. In other words, they are not doing this out in the open, but they are hiding their actions from others.

Negative peer pressure will almost always ask you to hide something from others. Kids, you will be asked to hide things from your parents or your teachers. In your job, a co-worker might ask you to hide something from the boss or your boss might ask you to deceive a customer. Or it might be a friend who shares a juicy tidbit of gossip and asks you not to tell anyone where you heard it.

In the New Testament we frequently see the contrast between dark and light. And one of the functions of light is to expose sin:

Ephesians 5:13 ESV

13 But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible,

So whenever anyone asks us to hide something they are essentially asking us to choose darkness over light. And that not only harms us, it impacts our relationship with God and with others, too.

• Hurt

In verse 11, as well as throughout the rest of the passage, we see that those who are exerting the negative peer pressure are intending on hurting others - even to the point of killing them.

So when I’m pressured to go along with what someone else wants to do, I need to ask, “Is someone going to get hurt if I do this?” Here in Proverbs the hurt is pretty obvious because it involves physical harm. And sometimes we might be asked to do something like that. But more likely we’re going to be urged to harm someone in a much more subtle way - maybe to damage their reputation by spreading gossip or to hurt someone emotionally by going along with others as they make fun of a classmate. It might be doing financial harm to someone by swindling them out of their money with a pyramid scheme. Or it could be exploiting someone else for our own pleasure.