The Company You Keep

Lekan was twenty-six when he joined the sales team of a distribution company on the Lekki axis. It was the job he had prayed for through two years of interviews and short contracts. The salary was good, the car came with the role, and the team welcomed him warmly from the first week. They covered for him when he got lost looking for a supermarket in Ikota. They taught him which buyers paid on time and which ones had to be chased. On Fridays they gathered at a lounge near the office, and the laughter around that table was the easiest laughter he had known since university.

He was a believer, and he did not hide it. They teased him about his Sunday service and called him “Pastor Lekan,” but there was no malice in it. He liked them. They liked him.

Six months in, a colleague showed him the fuel claims. Everyone on the team submitted receipts for more fuel than they had bought. There was a man at a filling station in Ajah who sold blank receipts with the station stamp already on them, two hundred naira each. “It is not stealing,” the colleague said. “It is how the company pays us properly. Management knows.” Lekan refused the first time. The second time, at the end of a hard month with his younger sister’s school fees due, he bought a booklet and told himself he would only use it once.

One evening the following year, he pulled up at the side of the road in Sangotedo, took the booklet from the glove compartment and filled in a receipt for forty litres he had never bought. He wrote the figure, signed it and put it in his folder. It was only when he was back in traffic that something cold went through him. He had not hesitated. There had been no argument in his conscience, no prayer, no struggle. A year earlier this would have felt like a crisis. Tonight it had felt like paperwork.

“When,” he asked himself, gripping the steering wheel, “did this become normal?”

That question is the subject of this teaching. Few people decide to become someone else. They drift there, one shared laugh and one small compromise at a time, inside relationships they genuinely enjoy. If you want to know who you will be in five years, it is worth looking carefully at the people you are walking with now.

Walking together shapes the walker

The book of Proverbs puts the principle in a single verse:

He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.

Notice the verbs. “He that walketh with wise men” describes a journey. Walking with someone is ongoing. You share a road, a pace and a direction. You talk along the way. You start noticing what they notice and ignoring what they ignore. Proverbs does not say, “He that once met a wise man shall be wise.” It speaks of a pattern of company, and it promises that the pattern will leave its mark: “shall be wise.”

Then the warning: “a companion of fools shall be destroyed.” In Proverbs the fool is rarely a person of low intelligence. He is a person who has no fear of God, who will not be taught, who treats sin as a joke and correction as an insult. He can be charming, successful and very good company on a Friday night. The danger Proverbs describes is that a companion of such a person gradually takes on the same posture toward God and wisdom, and in time shares in the consequences.

The same book makes the point about temperament: “Make no friendship with an angry man; and with a furious man thou shalt not go: Lest thou learn his ways, and get a snare to thy soul” (Proverbs 22:24-25). Lest thou learn his ways. Nobody sits you down and teaches you to be quick-tempered. You learn it by being around it. After enough time beside a man who explodes at every delay, you find that your own patience has grown shorter, your words sharper, and your sense of what counts as a reasonable reaction has moved.

This is how influence works. It rarely argues. It simply makes certain things feel ordinary. The first time you hear a colleague lie to a customer on the phone, you flinch. The tenth time, you smile. The fiftieth time, you are doing it yourself and wondering why anyone would make a fuss. Your convictions may never have been formally abandoned. They were simply worn down by repetition, the way a footpath appears across a lawn because people keep walking the same line.

The first Psalm traces this drift with great precision:

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the LORD ; and in his law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

Look at the progression. Walketh in the counsel of the ungodly. Standeth in the way of sinners. Sitteth in the seat of the scornful. First you are passing through, picking up their advice. Then you have stopped and are standing where they stand. Finally you have taken a seat and settled down, and you have adopted their scorn as well. The posture changes from moving to stopping to staying. That is exactly how Lekan’s year unfolded.

But the psalm does not stop at the warning. Its blessed man is defined by what he delights in: “his delight is in the law of the LORD.” He is like a tree planted by rivers of water. A tree does not resist drought by effort. It survives because its roots reach a source. The answer to bad influence is never merely to avoid people. It is to be rooted so deeply in God that you are the one bringing life into the places you go.

Evil communications corrupt good manners

Paul makes the same point in the New Testament, in a surprising place:

If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die. Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners. Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the knowledge of God: I speak this to your shame.

The chapter is about the resurrection. Some in Corinth had begun to say that there is no resurrection of the dead. Paul answers them at length, and in the middle of his argument he explains what that teaching leads to. If the dead do not rise, he says, then “let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die.” If this life is all there is, why not live for appetite?

Then comes the warning: “Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.” Paul is quoting a line that was well known in the Greek world, generally attributed to the comic poet Menander. Even the pagans knew it was true. The word translated communications is homiliai, which means company, association, the people you keep talking with. The word translated manners is ēthē, from which we get ethics. It means habits of character. Bad company ruins good character.

What is striking is that Paul applies this to people who were mixing with false teachers inside the church. The bad company in Corinth was not out on the street. It was in the fellowship, sitting under teaching that quietly denied the hope of the gospel. Some of the most corrupting influences in a believer’s life come with a Bible in hand. A friend who mocks holiness, makes cynicism sound like maturity, or treats grace as a licence can do more damage than a colleague who openly rejects Christianity.

“Be not deceived.” Paul expects that we will think ourselves the exception. Every one of us believes we can sit in the seat of the scornful without becoming scornful. We think we are strong enough, discerning enough, settled enough. Scripture says that is precisely the deception. The person who says “they cannot influence me” usually has already been influenced.

And then: “Awake to righteousness, and sin not.” The word suggests sobering up, coming to your senses after a kind of drunkenness. That is what happened to Lekan at the roadside. He woke up. The goal of this teaching is to help you wake up sooner, before the drift has carried you far.

Paul never told us to leave the world

At this point some believers draw a dangerous conclusion. If bad company corrupts, then the safest life must be one with no unbelievers in it at all. Keep to church people. Avoid the office party. Eat lunch alone. Send your children only to Christian homes. Paul anticipated that mistake and corrected it in the same letter:

I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators: Yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then must ye needs go out of the world. But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat.

Paul had written an earlier letter telling the Corinthians not to keep company with sexually immoral people. They took it as a call to withdraw from everyone outside the church whose life did not match Christian standards. Paul says that is not what he meant. “Yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then must ye needs go out of the world.”

You cannot live in Lagos, work in an office, trade in a market or sit in a classroom without being around people who do not share your faith or your morals. Paul says that is fine. More than fine: it is where believers are meant to be. The separation he calls for in this chapter concerns someone “that is called a brother,” a person claiming to be a Christian while living in open, unrepentant sin, and the context is church discipline. The church is to deal with its own members. Those outside, Paul says a verse later, “God judgeth.”

That turns the usual instinct upside down. We tend to be strict with outsiders and relaxed with insiders. We keep a careful distance from the unbelieving neighbour while laughing along with the church friend whose gossip and greed are well known. Paul reverses it. Be open-hearted toward the world. Be honest within the household of faith.

Jesus Himself lived this way, and it scandalised the religious people of His day:

And it came to pass, that, as Jesus sat at meat in his house, many publicans and sinners sat also together with Jesus and his disciples: for there were many, and they followed him. And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners? When Jesus heard it , he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

He sat at meat in Levi’s house with “many publicans and sinners.” Eating together in that culture was a sign of acceptance and friendship. The scribes and Pharisees could not understand it. Jesus answered with a picture: a physician goes to the sick. He does not catch their disease. He brings healing into the room.

His enemies called Him “a friend of publicans and sinners” (Matthew 11:19). They meant it as an insult. It is one of the most beautiful titles He ever received.

So the question for a believer is never simply “Is this person a sinner?” Everyone you meet is, including the person in the mirror. The question is about the direction of influence. When Jesus sat with tax collectors, He was the one setting the agenda at that table. Zacchaeus went home a different man. Levi left his tax booth. The physician was in the room, and the sick were being healed. When Lekan sat at that Friday table, the direction had quietly reversed. He was being treated by the sick.

Two circles: the people you love and the people who form you

Punchline

It helps to recognise that every life has different circles of relationship, and Scripture treats them differently.

There is the wide circle: neighbours, colleagues, classmates, customers, the woman who sells you tomatoes, the man who fixes your car. Toward all of them the call is the same. Love them. Serve them. Be honest with them. Pray for them. Eat with them when you are invited. Celebrate their weddings and mourn at their funerals. Jesus said, “Ye are the salt of the earth” and “Ye are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:13-14). Salt is no use left in the shaker, and a lamp under a bowl helps no one. Your presence in that wide circle is part of your calling.

Then there is the close circle: the handful of people whose opinions you seek, whose approval you feel, whose habits you copy without noticing, whose voices you hear in your head when you make decisions. These are the people who form you. Proverbs 13:20 is mostly about this circle. You can be kind to a hundred people without being shaped by them. But you will be shaped by the five or six you walk with most closely.

Jesus’ own life had circles. There were the crowds, whom He taught and healed. There were the seventy, whom He sent out. There were the twelve, whom “he ordained... that they should be with him” (Mark 3:14). And within the twelve, there were three, Peter, James and John, whom He took up the mountain and into the garden. He loved the crowds fully. But He did not give the crowds the place He gave the three.

This distinction frees you from two errors at once. It frees you from the fear that makes you withdraw from unbelievers, because the wide circle is where you are sent. And it frees you from the naïvety that lets anyone into the inner place, because the close circle is where you are formed.

Paul’s teaching about the unequal yoke belongs here: “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers” (2 Corinthians 6:14). A yoke binds two animals so that they pull in the same direction and walk at the same pace. Paul is speaking about binding partnerships, the kind of relationships in which you are committed to move together and cannot easily act on your own convictions. Marriage is the clearest case. A business partnership can be another. A friendship that has become so central that you cannot say no to it is functioning like a yoke, whatever you call it. You may work alongside anyone. Be careful whom you are harnessed to.

A practical test: who do you call when you have a decision to make? Whose reaction do you picture when you are tempted? If those people would cheer you toward compromise, they are in a place in your life they should not occupy. Keep loving them. Change their seat.

Discernment without superiority

There is another danger, quieter and in some ways worse. A believer can become so concerned about bad influence that he starts to see himself as better than the people around him. He holds his colleagues at arm’s length, speaks of “those worldly people” with a curl of the lip, and thinks of his separation as a sign of spiritual rank. That is the posture of the Pharisees in Mark 2, and Jesus rebuked it.

Paul gives the antidote: “For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures” (Titus 3:3). To the Corinthians, after listing a whole catalogue of sins, he says simply, “And such were some of you” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Every believer is a former fool who was rescued by kindness he did not deserve. If you are now walking in wisdom, it is because grace found you while you were in bad company. That should make you gentle.

Discernment is about influence, not worth. When you limit how close someone comes, you are not judging their value before God. You are recognising your own weakness. The alcoholic who avoids the bar is not saying the people inside are worse than him. He is saying he knows what happens to him in that room. The believer who declines the Friday table where every conversation turns to mockery of marriage may still love everyone at that table. He simply knows what repeated exposure does.

Daniel is a model of this. He was carried to Babylon as a young man and placed in a training programme designed to turn bright Jewish exiles into loyal Babylonian officials. They gave him a Babylonian name, a Babylonian education and food from the king’s table. Daniel did not run from Babylon. He studied its literature, served its kings and rose to high office. He worked faithfully alongside people who worshipped other gods for the whole of his long life. “But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself” (Daniel 1:8). He drew a clear line, and he drew it respectfully, asking permission of the official over him and proposing a test.

And Daniel did not stand alone. He had Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. When the king’s dream threatened all their lives, Daniel went home and “made the thing known” to his companions so that they could pray together (Daniel 2:17). He lived in the wide circle of Babylon, fully engaged and fully faithful, because he had a close circle of people who feared God. That is the pattern. Engagement with the world is sustained by a circle of wise companions.

How to tell what your company is doing to you

Influence is hard to see from the inside, so it helps to ask some honest questions. Not every relationship that challenges you is harmful, and not every comfortable friendship is safe. Here are a few ways to discern.

What has started to feel normal? Think back two or three years. Are there things you now laugh at, say, watch or do that would have troubled you then? If so, ask where you learned them.

Nugget

What do you hide? If there are friends whose company you would be embarrassed for your spouse, your pastor or your children to see, that embarrassment is information. Light does not need to hide.

How do you feel about God after time with them? Some friends leave you hungrier for prayer and more grateful for your life. Others leave you restless, discontented and cynical about the church, your marriage or your job. Pay attention to the aftertaste.

Who is setting the agenda? When you are together, whose values steer the conversation? If you are always the one adjusting, always the one keeping quiet, always the one laughing politely at what grieves you, the influence is running one way.

Remember too that company today is not only physical. The voices you listen to through your phone are company. The comedian who makes marriage a running joke, the influencer who makes greed look like ambition, the WhatsApp group that forwards bitterness every morning: these are companions, and they are walking with you for hours a week. “Evil communications corrupt good manners” applies to communications that arrive by data bundle.

These questions are not meant to produce suspicion of everyone. They are meant to make the invisible visible. Most of us will find at least one relationship where something needs to change. Sometimes that change is distance. Sometimes it is a conversation. Sometimes it is simply that you stop being silent.

Becoming the company others need

The best protection against bad company is good company, and the best way to find good company is often to become it. The writer to the Hebrews describes what believers are meant to be for one another:

Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; (for he is faithful that promised;) And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is ; but exhorting one another : and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.

“Let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works.” The word consider means to pay close attention, to think carefully about someone. The word provoke is the surprising one. It usually describes stirring someone to anger. Here it means stirring someone to love. Christian friends are meant to study each other with a purpose: how can I stir this person toward love and good works?

Proverbs says the same thing in a vivid image: “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend” (Proverbs 27:17). Sharpening involves friction. A friend who only ever agrees with you cannot sharpen you. You need people close to you who love you enough to say, “That is not like you,” or “Have you prayed about this?” or “I don’t think you should sign that.”

Notice also that Hebrews ties this to “the assembling of ourselves together.” The early believers met regularly because they knew they would not hold fast on their own. In a city as busy as ours, it is easy to treat church as an event you attend rather than a family you belong to. But a believer who has no close Christian friendships is like a man walking through harmattan with no water. He may be fine for a while. The dryness will reach him eventually.

So ask God for wise companions, and then go looking for them. They may be older than you. They may not be the most exciting people in your church. Look for those who pray, who keep their word, who handle money honestly, who love their families and who can talk about Jesus without performing. Spend time with them. Invite them to your home. Let them see the parts of your life that need attention.

And then be that kind of companion to someone else. There is a young person at your workplace or in your church who is walking into the same drift you once walked into. You may be the friend who helps him notice before it goes too far.

Grace for those who have drifted

Some reading this already know the feeling Lekan had at the roadside. You look back and see how far the current has carried you. Things you once refused are now routine. Friendships you once enjoyed innocently have become the setting for habits you are ashamed of. You may feel that it is too late, that you have become one of them, that your faith was never real.

Hear the gospel. The same Jesus who sat with publicans and sinners sits with you. He did not wait for Levi to clean up before He called him. He did not wait for Zacchaeus to repay what he had taken before He invited Himself to his house. The kindness came first, and the change followed. “Awake to righteousness” is an invitation as much as a command. You can wake up today.

Waking up will involve repentance, which means a change of mind that leads to a change of direction. It may involve repair: confessing what you have done, making restitution where you can, telling the truth. It may involve changing some seats in your life: spending less time in certain places, building new friendships, finding a mature believer to walk with you. None of this earns God’s acceptance. You already have it through Christ. It is simply what it looks like to walk again in the light.

It will not necessarily involve cutting everyone off. You may find that the very people whose influence pulled you down are people God wants you to keep loving, from a different position. You are no longer seated at their table as a follower. You can sit there as salt.

Lekan did not sleep much that night. The next morning he went to his manager’s office with the receipt booklet and a list of every false claim he could remember. He expected to be sacked. Instead, after a long silence, the manager told him to put the amount in writing and arranged for it to be deducted over six months. “You know you have just made trouble for everybody,” the manager said. Lekan said he knew. He did not report his colleagues. He said that was for them to deal with, and for management to look into if they chose.

The next few months were awkward. The jokes about “Pastor Lekan” took on an edge. He was no longer invited to the Friday lounge, and for a while he felt the loss of that easy laughter more than he expected. He joined a men’s fellowship that met early on Saturdays, and over time two of those men became the kind of friends who asked him hard questions and prayed for him by name.

He kept greeting his colleagues every morning. He kept helping them chase difficult buyers. When one of them lost his father the following year, Lekan drove to Ijebu-Ode for the burial and stood with him at the graveside. On the way back, the colleague asked him quietly how he had found the courage to go to the manager. That conversation lasted the whole length of the expressway.

He was still in the world. He was no longer of it. He had simply changed who was walking beside him, and in doing so he had become someone worth walking beside.

Punchline

Look at the people closest to you. Ask who is shaping whom. Then go and keep company with wisdom, and carry it into every room you enter.

For reflection, practice and prayer

Teaching Companion

For Reflection

• Think back two or three years. What has become normal in your life that once troubled your conscience? Where did you learn it?
• Who are the five or six people who most shape your thinking and choices? Are they leading you toward wisdom or away from it?
• Where have you confused separation from the world with superiority over people? How might Titus 3:3 change your attitude?
• Which unbelieving neighbour or colleague is God calling you to love and serve more openly, from a secure place?
• Who in your life needs you to be the kind of friend described in Hebrews 10:24?

This Week

This week, write down the names of the people you spend the most time with, in person and through your phone. Beside each name, write one honest word about how that relationship tends to affect your walk with God. Pray over the list. Then take one concrete step: arrange to spend an hour with a wise believer you admire, and choose one unbelieving colleague or neighbour to bless with a specific act of kindness.

A Prayer

Lord Jesus, friend of sinners, thank You that You came to my table when I was far from You. Open my eyes to the influences that have shaped me without my noticing. Where I have drifted, wake me to righteousness and give me the courage to turn. Give me wise companions who will sharpen me, and make me that kind of companion for others. Keep me from pride toward those who do not yet know You, and send me into my workplace and neighbourhood as salt and light. Root me like a tree by the rivers of water, so that I bring life wherever I go. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.