Wisdom for Friendship | Proverbs 27
Brian Hedges | July 7, 2024
Let me invite you to turn in your Bibles to the book of Proverbs. We are going to be in Proverbs 27. We’ll be looking at a number of proverbs along the way, but we’re going to begin by reading in Proverbs 27. Today the message is “Wisdom for Friendship.”
We’ve been working through portions of the book of Proverbs, trying to understand how life works. Proverbs gives us wisdom for the practicalities of life and ordering our lives according to the way God has ordered the world.
Today I want us to talk about this important theme of friendship. Now, this is an impossibly broad topic for one message, partly because the word “friend” is used in so many different ways, so many different contexts. When you hear the word “friend,” a number of different things might come into your mind.
For a few of us—and I would say precious few of us—when we hear the word “friend” we think about the philosophical discussions of friendship in, say, Plato’s Dialogues or Aristotle’s Ethics. It’s actually a good place to go. If you have any inclination in that whatsoever, I recommend reading them on friendship.
Many more of us probably think of Ross and Rachel and Monica and Chandler and Joey and Phoebe from the ’90s sitcom Friends.
Maybe, if you have a more biblical imagination, you think about the great friendships of the Bible, such as David and Jonathan or Ruth and Naomi or even Paul and Timothy.
You might consider the difference between male and female friendships. Men and women form friendships in very different ways. Women typically like to talk about their lives and their feelings and what’s going on in their worlds and share more intimately; men tend to talk about other things.
So maybe you’ve had this experience, wives, when your husband came back from a fishing trip or from the golf course.
You asked, “What did you talk about with your buddy?”
He said, “We talked about fishing. We talked about golf.”
“No, what’s going on in their family?”
“I don’t know! We talked about golf.”
It’s very different, our whole approach to friendship. So you might think of those differences.
Many of us when we hear the word “friend” will maybe think about some of our closest friends today. More regrettably, we might think of lost friendships. Or maybe you just feel a deep loneliness in your life and you just feel a longing for friendship. You know that people do have friends, you would like to have friends, but you find it difficult to make friends for yourself.
Well, wherever you are on that spectrum, I think the wisdom from Proverbs on friendship can be helpful to you this morning.
I want to begin by reading from Proverbs 27. Now, it’s important to note that in the book of Proverbs there are a number of different Hebrew words that are translated as “friend,” and sometimes the word that’s often translated as “friend” could also be translated as “neighbor” or “companion” or “person.” I’m going to read about four or five verses from Proverbs 27; all of them have one of these words that somehow has to do with friendship, and of course we’ll see other verses as we go along.
I want to begin by reading Proverbs 27:5-6, then verses 9-10, then verse 17. You can follow along on the screen. Let’s hear God’s word.
“Better is open rebuke
than hidden love.
“Wounds from a friend can be trusted,
but an enemy multiplies kisses.
“Perfume and incense bring joy to the heart,
and the pleasantness of a friend
springs from their heartfelt advice.
Do not forsake your friend or a friend of your family,
and do not go to your relative’s house when disaster strikes you—
better a neighbor nearby than a relative far away.
“As iron sharpens iron,
so one person sharpens another.”
This is God’s word.
I have a very simple approach this morning. I want to ask three questions. This is one of those what, why, and how sermons.
1. What Is Friendship?
2. Why Is It So Important?
3. How to Be a Good Friend (How do you do friendship?)
We’ll spend a little bit of time on each one of those and really get to the practical stuff at the end, the last third or so of the sermon on how to be a good friend.
1. What Is Friendship?
First of all, I just want to ask the question, What is friendship? How do we get a definition for friendship? There have been many approaches to this over the years, both outside the church and inside.
(1) You might think, for example, of Aristotle, who I mentioned a few moments ago. In his Nicomachean Ethics he said that there are basically three kinds of friendship. He said there are those friendships that are based on utility—that is, relationships we have with people because they are useful to us. We might think today of networking in our professional lives. You’re always trying to build relationships that maybe can be of some advantage later on. He said there are those friendships that are based on pleasure, what you can enjoy about someone or with someone. Then the best of all are those friendships that are based on virtue.
Those kinds of relationships continue to make sense today. You probably have friends in all of those categories. Of course, we would acknowledge that if you have friendships that are only based on utility, you’re only friends with people because of what they can do for you, that’s pretty shallow and pretty self-serving. Or if you’re only friends with people that make you personally happy but there’s not any deeper, richer, shared values and the building up of character and especially a shared faith, those friendships are not going to be as deep and as meaningful and as lasting.
(2) There’s a Christian who wrote a classic on friendship, a Cistercian monk in the twelfth century named Aelred of Rievaulx. He wrote a beautiful treatise called Spiritual Friendship, and he gives a somewhat different taxonomy of friendship. He talks about carnal friendships, worldly friendships, and spiritual friendships.
The carnal friendships, he says, spring from baser affections. This is “mutual harmony in vice.” These, of course, would be the friendships that we want to avoid. These are the people who bring out the worst in you.
There are worldly friendships, similar to Aristotle’s first category and kindled by the hope of gain, but best of all are the spiritual friendships. Aelred said these are “cemented in similarity of life, morals, and pursuits among the just,” and in his view this is the only valid, the only true kind of friendship.
It’s especially that kind of friendship that we have in mind—spiritual friendships, friendships that are rooted in a common faith and a common love for Jesus Christ.
(3) When you turn to the Scriptures, the Scriptures use a number of different images for friendship. First of all, there’s this idea of the knitting of souls together. That’s actually the language of the Bible that’s used in 1 Samuel 18 about Jonathan and David, when it says that Jonathan was “knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” This was a close friendship between these two men who had a common love for the Lord, for Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews in the Old Testament. It was this that bound them together. The idea of souls knit together is the idea of union of hearts and affection and a deep commonality in the deepest parts of one’s life.
Here’s another image. (Both of these come, by the way, from a wonderful dictionary, The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery.) The second image that’s used is that of the face-to-face encounter. This is language that’s used specifically about Moses and his relationship with God, which is called friendship. So in Exodus 33 we read that “God spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.” This face to face image implies conversation. It implies a sharing of confidences and consequently a meeting of minds, of goals, of a common direction in life.
Let’s take a minute to note the importance of this aspect of friendship—face-to-face encounter. So many of our so-called friends today we encounter only through a screen, but if your only friendships are relationships you have with people through a screen, that’s not really a real friendship. What you need is the proximity of being in person and face to face interaction with another person where there really is a sharing of the heart together. We’ll talk more about that as we go along.
Then a third category we might add, or a third image that’s used in Scripture, especially in the New Testament, is that of partnership or participation or fellowship. All three of those words translate the Greek word koinonia. Sometimes that word can be used of a business partnership, but Paul uses it to talk about the partnership in the gospel. You see that, for example, in Philippians 1:5. It’s the word that’s used of the early church in Acts 2 when it says that “they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship.” They were devoted to fellowship; that is, there was a deep partnership and participation together in the great realities of the gospel and in the work of the Spirit in their hearts and lives. This is a key category for us to understand Christian friendships. We’re partners together in Christ.
(4) What is the irreducible core of friendship? This is the last thing to consider under this definition, under the first point. The irreducible core of friendship. I want to give you three things that I think form the core of friendship. You have to have these three things if you’re actually going to have a real friendship relationship with someone else.
First of all, there has to be common interest. You have to have common ground with another person. We see this even with children. Children who tend to get along together well find something in common together. I remember some of the very first friendships I had. One was with a kid who lived on a farm several miles away from me. We both lived out in the country, we both collected baseball cards, we both liked to play guns. I mean, that was the stuff that pulled us together. A little bit later I had another friend, and we read the same novels. We met each other; the very first day we realized we’d been reading the same books, and immediately there was a close relationship with one another.
This is essential to all kinds of friendship, not least of all spiritual friendship, where our common ground is our relationship with the Lord. Nobody’s written about this than C.S. Lewis in his wonderful book The Four Loves. I want to share a couple of quotations with you. Lewis said,
“Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which till that moment each believed to be his own unique treasure or burden. The typical expression of opening friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one!’”
That’s what happens when people really begin to have friendship. You discover that you like the same sport or you read the same books or you enjoy the same movies, or you’ve experienced the same trauma in your past, or you grew up in very similar kinds of families or you’re from the same part of the country. There’s a certain commonality that immediately pulls you together.
One of the implications for us is that if we’re going to have a wide and rich diversity of friends we actually have to have a somewhat wide, diverse span of interests. People who have very narrow interests find it very difficult to build friendships, because they don’t have anything to build a friendship on, to build a friendship about.
Again, Lewis brings this out with great clarity. He tells us that this is really the precondition for friendship, and he says,
“This is why those pathetic people who simply ‘want friends’ can never make any. The very condition of having friends is that we should want something else besides friends. Where the truthful answer to the question, ‘Do you see the same truth?’ would be, ‘I don’t care about the truth, I only want [you to be] my friend,’ no friendship can arise. Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travelers.”
This is important for us to recognize. If you do happen to be someone who struggles to make friends, this might be the reason why, because you’ve not cultivated the kinds of interests that allow you to bring anything to a friendship. You have to have something to share with others. We need to develop and cultivate our world and our inner life and our interests, and they need to be diverse enough that we can make friends with others.
Friendship has to be about something greater than yourself, in other words. Samuel Johnson, the famous essayist, wrote this to his less famous friend James Boswell. He says, “You have but two topics: yourself and me, and I am sick of both.” Maybe you feel that way in some of your relationships with others. You have to have something to talk about more than yourself and more than another person. You need something in common.
Let me just apply this to marriage. We talked about marriage last week, and one of the key components to marriage is friendship. There has to be good friendship for a marriage to thrive. Sometimes when couples begin to drift apart over the years and they find themselves in those empty-nest years and they have no relationship left with one another, because he’s devoted all his time to his career and she’s devoted all of her time to raising the kids in the family or to her career, and they haven’t really kept up a common ground with one another, they’re going to find great distance in the relationship. One of the most important practical things you can do for your marriage is cultivate common interests together. Do things together. Build that relationship. It will enrich your marriage.
So, common interests. That’s the first thing that’s needed.
Here’s the second: shared time and space. There has to be proximity if there’s going to be friendship. If there’s no proximity, it’s like taking the oxygen from the fire. The friendship’s not going to burn.
I think this is implied in Proverbs 27:10, where it says, “Better a neighbor or friend that is nearby than a relative far away.” The proximity is important to the relationship.
Again, to quote Aristotle,
“Friendships based on virtue need time and intimacy. The wish for friendship develops rapidly, but friendship itself does not. Nothing is so characteristic of friends as spending time together.”
Proximity matters. One of the things I’ve recognized over the years is that when I’ve had a close friend and one of us moved away and we’re no longer in the city or even in the same state, that friendship will decline to some degree. Even if there’s still goodwill, there’s just not the time together. We’re not in the same space. Or when I’ve had good friends in the church but then one of us leaves and goes to a different church, then that relationship is not going to be the same as it was before because the time and the space is no longer there. We just don’t have proximity.
If you want to have deep, rich friendships, you have to have proximity to your friends. You have to spend time with one another. You have to be in one another’s presence for there to be friendship.
Again, it just suggests application, doesn’t it? One of our problems is we are so busy in our lives that we don’t make time for this. It’s just easy to push this off to a more convenient time. But if you do that, don’t be surprised if your friendships are dying on the vine. You have to nourish them or you’re not going to have them. There must be shared time and space.
Thirdly, there must be a mutual commitment to one another. Friends are in a relationship where each is committed to another, if it’s a virtuous friendship, if it’s a good friendship, and if it’s a Christian friendship. You see that in Paul. You see that in Philippians, as he writes to these Philippian believers. He founded the church; he’s talking about their partnership in the gospel, his love for them, his commitment to them, his confidence in God’s work in their lives, his prayers for them, praying without ceasing. What is that? It’s a commitment to them. You see it in the Philippians’ commitment to Paul, as they are supporting him in ministry and praying for him and caring for him and concerned about his needs.
That kind of reciprocal, mutual commitment is absolutely essential to friendship. Of course, as believers we have the greatest reason for building friendship of all in our common faith in Jesus Christ. This was the insight of Aelred of Rievaulx. He said, “For what more sublime can be said of friendship, what more true, what more profitable, than that it ought to be and is proved to begin in Christ, continue in Christ, and be perfected in Christ.” This is where the richest friendships will be found, in our shared commitment to one another based on our common commitment to Jesus Christ.
So, what is friendship? We’ve tried to get to the core of friendship with these three things.
2. Why Is Friendship So Important?
Second question: Why is friendship so important? I will be shorter with this question, because I think all of us intuitively recognize the importance of friendship. We want friends. We feel that our lives are happiest when we have friends, and we know the loneliness when we do have deep friendships. But let me still just give you a few reasons why friendship is so important.
(1) The first is the value of friends. A great friend is of great value in our lives. Proverbs 20 says, “Many claim to have unfailing love, but a faithful person who can find?” It’s holding out for us the scarcity and the rarity of finding a friend. It shows us that a really good, faithful friend—someone who’s faithful to us in a relationship to us—is something to be treasured, something to be valued.
Aristotle said, “Without friends, no one would choose to live.” C.S. Lewis said,
“Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘Sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’”
If you ever read one of the biographies of C.S. Lewis, this will come out really strongly in Lewis’s life. He lived in the same place for most of his adult life and cultivated deep and rich friendships for many years that brought great joy to his life, which was troubled in many other ways. So friendship is valuable.
(2) But it’s also scarce. There’s a scarcity to good friendship. A good friend is actually hard to find. We find it difficult to find these kinds of relationships, to build them, and then to maintain them and hold onto them once they have been found.
I think there are a number of reasons for this. There’s the radical individualism of our culture. I’ve quoted here before Robert Putnam’s sociological study Bowling Alone, where he’s looking at the breakdown of social capital in the United States in the twentieth century. He just points out that earlier in the twentieth century people were involved in bowling leagues, but by the end of the twentieth century people were bowling by themselves. They’d lost the relationship. So that became something of a metaphor for this breakdown of social capital. Well, in the world in which we live today, that continues to be a problem for many reasons.
Another thing that has led to the scarcity of friendship is the sexual revolution. Ivy Schweitzer, in an academic essay, says that popular Western culture developed an obsession with individual selfhood and sexual desire that marginalized friendship. I think one of the problems we see in our day is that almost every relationship gets sexualized in some way, and friendship has kind of fallen off to the wayside. It’s why sometimes there’s suspicion when you have two people of the same sex who are close friends. Can they actually just have a friendship? Well, we can, but we’ve lost the skills for that because we tend to sexualize everything.
There’s been the breakdown of the nuclear family, where the skills for friendship should be learned when those healthy relationships and relationship skills are being built in the growing of years.
Then the rise of social media is another reason why friendship has grown scarce. I don’t know about you, but I have something like two thousand friends on Facebook, and probably less than one thousand of those people have I actually met face to face. Yet these are called friends. Now, I’m fine to have the acquaintance. People have found me and “friended” me because of sermons or books or whatever, and that’s fine. But let’s be clear on what friendship is. Friendship is not something that’s on your social media friends list; that’s an acquaintance, maybe. But a real friend is someone that you have a face-to-face relationship with that is not mediated by a screen or a social media platform.
Just Google this: “How social media is killing your friendships.” I’m sure it will be an interesting read.
Finally, the pandemic, of course, pulled us out of each other’s lives for three months, in some cases much longer, and the political polarization that’s happened in our country over the last ten years or so. All of that has led to deep breakdown in relationships in families, in churches, and between friends. It’s all the more reason why it’s important to go back to the most foundational aspects, the most foundational building blocks of friendship, especially our common faith in Jesus Christ.
(3) Here’s another reason why friendship is so important: because friendships have great power and influence in our lives. This is where Proverbs begins to give us really practical advice about friendship. Proverbs highlights for us the influence that friends can have for either good or for ill.
For example, Proverbs 12:26 says, “The righteous choose their friends carefully, but the way of the wicked leads them astray.” How carefully do you choose your friends?
There are many warnings in Proverbs about wrong friends. Here are a few, quickly.
Proverbs 13:20: “Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm.”
Proverbs 16:29: “A violent person entices his neighbor and leads him down a path that is not good.”
Proverbs 22:24-25: “Do not make friends with a hot-tempered person, do not associate with one easily angered, or you may learn his ways and get yourself ensnared.”
Those are three passages that are warning about the toxic effects of negative people, sinful people, wicked people in your life.
Of course, in the New Testament perspective we would have to say that we are called to love everyone. We’re called to love our enemies. We certainly should be building relationships with unbelievers; we want them to know the love of Christ. But those people that you let into your inner circle who influence your decision-making, who shape your character, whose ways become contagious so that you begin to imitate them even unconsciously, those better be people of high caliber of character and a deep faith in Christ. They need to be people of wisdom, or you’re going to suffer as a result.
Parents, this is one of the most important things we can do for our children, is help our kids learn to make good friends, the right friends, and protect them from the kinds of friends that will pull them away from Christ.
Friends have tremendous influence in our lives for good and for evil. There are many warnings about the evil effects of friendship in Proverbs. Here’s an example of great power for good in our friendships. This comes from Michael Haken in his book on friendship, where he talks about some of the church fathers, and he quotes the church father Gregory of Nazianzus, who wrote of his friendship with Basil of Caesarea. He said,
“In studies, in lodgings, in discussion I had him as companion. We had all things in common, but above all it was God, of course, and a mutual desire for higher things that drew us to each other. As a result, we reached such a pitch of confidence that we revealed the depths of our hearts, becoming even more united in our yearning.”
It’s a beautiful example of deep and rich friendships based on the right things and of how those friendships can have a positive influence in our lives. These are reasons why we need friendship, the importance of friendship.
3. How to Be a Good Friend
Here’s the question now for the rest of the message: How do you do this? How can you be a good friend and develop rich friendships with others? I want to give you four principles of friendship from Proverbs in about the last fifteen minutes here.
(1) Number one, open your heart. Proverbs stresses for us the qualities of intentionality and transparency in our relationships with others. You have to open your heart if you want to have close friends.
Look at Proverbs 27:9 and 17. It’s interesting; here you have two kinds of images that really speak to the two different sides of friendship.
Proverbs 27:9: “Perfume and incense bring joy to the heart, and the pleasantness of a friend springs from his heartfelt advice.”
Then Proverbs 27:17: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”
Tim Keller calls this the “sweetness and the sharpening” of friendship. There’s a sweetness and there’s a sharpness to friendship. The sweetness is the perfume, right, the incense that brings joy to the heart, the kind of rich relationship that brings joy into one’s life. But for friendship to be balanced there also has to be this iron-sharpening aspect. There has to be the kind of transparency and openness with one another that can actually challenge us.
Derek Kidner says, “Friendships should be reassuring and bracing.” This implies transparency, frank and open exchange of ideas, the willingness to challenge and also be challenged. It’s only when you have both of those things that you get the sweetness and you get the iron sharpening iron.
You can evaluate your friendships under this category by just asking a couple of questions. First of all, do you disclose your own thoughts and feelings to other people? Do you open your heart to others? Do you share your soul with others? Are you able to be vulnerable and to be transparent?
Just as important, do you make it easy for other people to do this with you so that others can actually share their hearts with you? It really takes both of those things. It takes a two-way sharing. If only one person is doing all the sharing—I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had over the years where I’ve done 80 percent of the listening and where I’ve basically listened to monologues. This is something that we easily slip into, where people just talk and talk and talk, but they’re never really pulling out, drawing out the heart of another person. If you don’t have that two-way street, there’s not going to be a deep and rich friendship.
Listen to how Peter Brown, in his excellent biography of St. Augustine, gives attention to Augustine’s friendships and how it drew this aspect out of Augustine. He said that in Augustine’s younger years he said that the wise man could live alone with the mind, but in his later life he prayed for friends, and he said,
“For when we are harassed by poverty, saddened by bereavement, ill and in pain, let good men visit us, men who can not only rejoice with those that rejoice but weep with those that weep and who know how to give useful advice and how to win us to express our own feelings in conversation.”
That’s a great definition of a friend! Able to give useful advice and to win you to express your feelings in conversation. A rich friendship is going to have that two-way street. You have to open your heart with intentionality and transparency.
(2) Here’s the second principle of friendship: seek to understand your friend. Open your heart to your friend, but also seek to understand your friend. As the old saying goes, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
Here the Proverbs highlight for us the qualities of tact and empathy. There are a number of places that do this. You might think of Proverbs 25:11, which says that “a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.” Whatever the precise imagery there, the idea is that it’s a word that is spoken at just the right time, in just the right way. It’s the right word. Here’s someone who’s speaking with wisdom, speaking with tact.
Contrary to that, you have many negative examples. Some of these are even kind of humorous. There are those people who are unable to enter into the emotions of another person.
Proverbs 25:20: “Like one who takes away a garment on a cold day or like vinegar poured on a wound is one who sings songs to a heavy heart.” This is the person who is being naively optimistic, trying to cheer up a friend, but in a way that doesn’t actually enter into the real, lived emotions and experiences of the friend. It’s a lack of empathy, it’s a lack of understanding. Proverbs says this is like somebody taking away a garment on a cold day. You’re just adding insult to injury; you’re making things worse! Proverbs warns us not to do that.
Or take the inappropriate use of humor. Proverbs 26:18-19: “Like a maniac shooting flaming arrows of death—” Just think of an archer here who’s setting arrows on fire and just randomly sending them out into the city; who knows where they’re going to land. This person’s crazy. “Like a maniac shooting flaming arrows of death is one who deceives his neighbor [or friend] and says, ‘I was only joking.’” It’s the practical joke gone wrong. It’s the person who is deceptive and then laughs it off. They’re actually spreading destruction.
Or missing the mood of the moment. Proverbs 27:14: “If anyone loudly blesses his neighbor early in the morning, it will be taken as a curse.” Let all the early birds in the room take heed! You may be married to a night owl, and maybe they’re just not up for the cheeriness before they’ve had their morning coffee. People are different; you have to understand the moods of people and be sensitive in the way you interact with them.
Positively, we have to learn how to express deep sympathy, deep empathy, deep understanding of one another. A good friend will do this and will even draw that out. Proverbs 20:5—this is a beautiful one: “The purposes of a person’s heart are deep water, but one who has insight draws them out.” The ability to draw out the heart of a friend takes great skill. It’s the skill of seeking to understand. So, open your heart and seek to understand.
(3) Thirdly, speak the truth. Find friends who will be honest with you even if it means wounding you with words of tough love, and cultivate friendships where there can be this mutual exchange that is marked by courage and candor.
Proverbs 27:5-6: “Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.”
I’ve used the illustration before, but I think it’s so good here. This comes from the very first Star Trek film, Star Trek the motion picture. This is the one that has so much talking in it and so little action that critics called it “Star Trek the motionless picture,” because it really is a lot of talking on the Starship Enterprise. But it goes deep into the relationships between that original Star Trek crew—Captain Kirk, who’s now an admiral, and Spock and McCoy and so on. There’s a scene in the film where Kirk, who’s been an admiral, takes over the command of the Starship Enterprise, demotes the present captain, and he’s just pushing people around, telling them what to do. He’s being harsh—I mean, it’s the urgency of the moment and he’s trying to lead. There’s a moment where his dear friend, Dr. McCoy, pulls him aside and says, “Jim, you’re pushing. Your people know their jobs.”
It’s a wonderful moment that shows how a friendship should work. You need people like that in your life. You need people who can call you on the carpet, who can lovingly rebuke you, who can say, “You’re mishandling that situation. You’re misreading the room. You’re not handling that conversation or that decision right. This isn’t Christlike. You’re showing pride here, not humility.” We all need that.
Proverbs encourages us to seek those kinds of friendships and to seek them in contrast to friendships that are characterized by flattery—Proverbs 28:23, Proverbs 29:5. I won’t read them, but do a study on flattery in Proverbs.
I will read this one, Proverbs 17:9. “Whoever would foster love covers an offense, but whoever repeats the matter separates close friends.” That highlights yet another problem with friendship. It’s those who speak the truth, but they speak the truth about their friend, not to their friend. It’s the old problem of gossip. Those who are always talking about their friends behind their backs will soon find that they have no friends left. Oscar Wilde said, “A true friend stabs you in the front.”
(4) Go the distance, number four. Speak the truth, open your heart, seek to understand, and then go to the distance. Now Proverbs highlights constancy and faithfulness in friendship.
Look at Proverbs 17:17. “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity.” Or Proverbs 18:24, “One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” That word “stick” means to hold fast to, to cling to. It’s the idea of being joined closely. It’s used of holding fast to God himself, but here it’s friends who hold fast to one another, who stick to one another.
Go the distance in your friendships. Once you’ve found a great friend, bind yourself to that friend. To use the famous friends of Shakespeare, “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, / Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.” Bind these friends to you. Don’t lose the good friends in your life.
In order to maintain those friends, you have to have constancy. You have to have faithfulness. Again, Proverbs 27:10: “Do not forsake your friend or a friend of your family; do not go to your relative’s house when disaster strikes you. Better a friend nearby than a relative far away.” Don’t forsake your friends. Go the distance with your friends.
Maybe the greatest example of friendship in all literature is from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I’ve used this before, but for some of you maybe this will be new. Right at the heart of this book is the friendship between the two hobbits, Frodo and Sam—Frodo, who is the ringbearer, who is carrying the Ring of Power of Mount Doom to destroy that ring; and Sam, who is his faithful companion, who is helping him along the way.
There’s this wonderful moment near the end of The Return of the King where Frodo has become too weak to carry on. He’s almost there, but he’s too weak to carry on. This is how it reads.
“Sam bent over Frodo, rousing him gently. Frodo groaned, but with a great effort of will he staggered up, and then he fell upon his knees again. He raised his eyes with difficulty to the dark slopes of Mount Doom towering above him, and then pitifully he began to crawl forward on his hands. Sam looked at him and wept in his heart, but no tears came to his dry and stinging eyes.
“‘I said I’d carry him if it broke my back,’ he muttered, ‘and I will. Come, Mr. Frodo!’ he cried. ‘I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you.’
“As Frodo clung upon his back, arms loosely about his neck, legs clasped firmly under his arms, Sam staggered to his feet, and then, to his amazement, he felt the burden light.”
What a beautiful image of friendship! It reminds us of the New Testament exhortation that we are to bear one another’s burdens. That’s part of what we do. We help carry one another in friendship, and we do that as we are faithful to the end, through thick and thin, through whatever hardships may come our way.
Let me conclude in this way. Friendship is a gift, and it’s a gift that you can give to others. I want to encourage you today to give the gift of friendship.
Proverbs 20:6 says, “Many claim to have unfailing love, but a faithful person who can find?” The two words that are used there, “unfailing love” or “steadfast love” and “faithfulness,” are the two qualities that mark covenantal relationships in the Old Testament. They’re words that are used of God himself in Exodus 34, in his revelation to Moses. He is a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Those are the qualities that should mark your relationships with others.
This is a gift that you can give to others. When you give this gift, you are being very Christlike, because Jesus himself is like this. You see, friendship is not only a gift that we give to others, friendship is a gift that Jesus extends to us.
We see a wonderful example of that in the New Testament. Jesus is called the friend of sinners in Matthew 11 and Luke 7. Just think about Jesus as your friend. He sought out your friendship when you were still his enemy, he wooed you and won you to himself. He is full of empathy; he understands everything you’re going through. He’s entered into your suffering and his heart feels your pain. He forgives all of your sins and is patient with all your flaws. Most of all, he loved you enough to die for you. Jesus himself said in John 15,
“Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command,”
and the command there is especially the command to love one another.
“You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my father I have made known to you.”
Friendship is a gift you can give to others, but most importantly, friendship is a gift that God gives to you through his Son, Jesus Christ.
John Newton put it well:
“One there is, above all others,
Well deserves the name of Friend;
His is love beyond a brother's,
Costly, free, and knows no end…
“Which of all our friends to save us,
Could or would have shed his blood?
But our Jesus died to have us
Reconciled in Him to God…
“O for grace our hearts to soften!
Teach us, Lord, at length to love;
We, alas! forget too often,
What a friend we have above.”
Give the gift to others. Receive the gift from Jesus. Let’s pray.
Father, we thank you this morning that your word gives us both practical instruction for our relationships, wisdom for how to be better friends to others, but it also gives us the sweet promises of the gospel, reminding us that Jesus is the friend of sinners. He’s the greatest friend of all, the friend who has given himself for us. This morning we want to trust in Christ’s self-giving friendship and then imitate that self-giving friendship and love in our relationships with one another. We pray for the grace to do that. We pray that by your Holy Spirit you would work these qualities deep into our hearts and lives. We pray that you would help us to see the practical steps we need to take in the coming weeks and months to build deeper relationships in our families and in our church community, maybe with other friends and neighbors. Help us, Lord, to apply these things to our hearts and lives, to open our hearts to others, to seek to understand others, to speak truth, and to be faithful and go the distance in our friendships. Help us to do it all because of the common salvation that we share in Christ, because of the shared faith that we have in him.
As we come to the Lord’s table this morning, may we be reminded once again of the self-giving love of Christ, the friend of sinners, who gave himself for our sakes. Lord, as we take the elements of bread and juice, may we in our hearts once again give ourselves to Christ and receive from Christ all the grace he promises. So draw near to us in these moments, we pray in Jesus’ name for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
