Knives are a really great universal tool. You can slice food. You can open boxes. You can cut rope. The sharp edge of the blade can be used to accomplish so many daily tasks and help out in a pinch for those “once in a blue moon moments.”
Unavoidably, knives dull. They lose their effectiveness and, eventually, their ability to perform the tasks at all. Regardless of how good the steel, all knives require sharpening. And the same is true for us as individuals. The trials of the world around us wear us down and we need refinement.There are a number of ways that sharpening can take place, not the least of which is the support of another. Proverbs 27:17 reads:
Iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens another.
Sharpening can certainly occur through encouragement (1 Thessalonians 5:11; Hebrews 10:24-25; Proverbs 12:25). However, that won’t always be the case. When you sharpen a knife blade, you are actually removing microscopic bits of the metal in order to refine it into a useful tool. The process can be painstaking. The same can be true when others sharpen us. Sometimes, people will need to tell us things that are difficult to hear, perhaps even painful to acknowledge. Yet, it is the difficult conversations where we will experience the most growth.
If we back up just a few verses in Proverbs 27, we read that “the wounds of a friend are trustworthy…” (v. 6). When people have our best interest at heart, sometimes it means having the hard conversation, telling us the thing we don’t want to hear – but, will ultimately lead us to being a strong servant for God in His kingdom.
May we all surround ourselves with people who can sharpen us and be receptive to those moments.
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