What wonderful friendships we have developed on this blog, not superficial but deep because of the Lord knitting us together. Indeed, blest be the Tie that binds! We are different, which is so good. Patti said we are like a “colorful bouquet.”

I’ve met several of you in person, and several of you have made trips to meet one another in person. At one retreat, Bing brought me love notes in a little box from so many of you. We encourage, pray, and are also, as Proverbs 17:17 says, like iron sharpening iron. The miles separate us, but the bond of a threefold cord is not easily broken.

Click below to download the sermon and I’ll put the text in the appropriate days. I strongly advise listening as well as reading, for he is anointed as a preacher. 

https://gospelinlife.com/sermon/friendship-2/

Sunday:

1. Share a specific way you have sensed the love of God through a friend on this blog.
2. Share another way God has shown you His friendship this week.

Monday: Proverbs for this week

3. Do three things with each proverb. Read it carefully and then put it in your own words. For the sake of this group, ask any questions the proverb brings to mind. I will do the first in red but you do it too. Different translations may help you ponder each proverb more deeply.

A. Proverbs 17:17 A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.

My paraphrase: True friends are not “fair weather” friends. Brothers are there when life is really hard.

Question from me! After Keller’s sermon, I saw this proverb differently. He said you may not like your biological sister, but you will be loyal to her, for she is family. What do you think about that? 

B. Proverbs 18: 24 A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

C. Proverbs 25: 17 Seldom set foot in your neighbor’s house—too much of you, and he will hate you.

D. Proverbs 25:20 Like one who takes away a garment on a cold day, or like vinegar poured on soda, is one who sings songs to a heavy heart.

E. Proverbs 26: 18 Like a madman shooting firebrands or deadly arrows 19 is a man who deceives his neighbor and says, “I was only joking!”

Tuesday: The Uniqueness of Friendship

4. Fun question: Did you recognize the reader of the Scriptures? (He is famous!)

Read/Listen:

In the Bible, wisdom is certainly not less than being moral and good, but it’s much more. It’s being so in touch with reality that you know what the right thing is to do in the vast majority of the situations the moral rules don’t apply to. The vast majority of your decisions, you’ll have a whole lot of different choices in front of you. In most cases, no matter what your understanding of morality is, no matter what your moral standards are, there will be many, many, many options that are all moral. They’re all allowable morally, but which is the wise one? Wisdom is the ability to know what the right thing is to do in the situations the moral rules don’t address. The theme today is a crucial one in the book of Proverbs. Proverbs says you’re not going to be a wise person, you will not lead a wise life, unless you are great at choosing, forging, and keeping terrific friendships. You will not make it in life unless you are really good at choosing, forging, and keeping terrific friendships. If we’re going to take a look at these verses on proverbs, we can understand them and learn from them under these four headings. We’re going to learn the uniqueness of friendship. We’re going to learn how we discover a friend. Then thirdly, we’re going to learn how we forge a friend. Last of all, we’re going to learn where we get the power for friendship. The unique necessity of friendship, the discovery of friendship, the forging and building of a friendship, and how you get the power to do that. 1. The unique necessity of friendship First, let’s take a look at the uniqueness of friendship. Take a look at the first two verses, especially the second one. “… there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” Do you know what that’s saying? A friend can be better than a sibling. You have to realize this is being said in a culture that was much more family oriented than ours … far more family oriented than ours. Why would that be? Why would a friend be better than a sibling? Well, look at verse 17 (the first verse). “A friend loves at all times, and a [sibling] is born for adversity.” Here’s what this is trying to say. The people you’re related to by blood (your family) are going to be there for you in adversity because they care. There’s loyalty. There’s memory. They’re going to be there for you, but they may not like you. They may not want to go out for a drink with you. You’re not the person they want to hang out with, you see? A friend is someone who has chosen you. The word sticks (“… there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother”) is a Hebrew word that’s often translated in the Old Testament cleave. It means commitment out of a passionate love. A friend is better, in many ways, than a sibling. This is trying to say something the Bible says, especially the book of Proverbs. That is, there is a unique necessity to friendship. Friendship brings something into your life that family can’t bring, that romance can’t bring, that neighbors can’t bring. Nothing else can bring it.

5. List two main points from the above section.

6. How is friendship different than family? To probe more deeply, how is it different than marriage?

7. Why should we be loyal to family even if they have hurt us or if we not “kindred spirits?”

Wednesday: Irreplaceable

I always knew I could get grumpy if I was deprived of sleep or food, but it wasn’t until I moved to Seattle as a young mom that I realized how sad I was without friends. It was Patti’s Bible study that rescued me!

Listen/Read

You have to remember that, because every culture will be putting friendship on the backseat, and yet it’s irreplaceable. That’s the first point. Why? A liberal individualistic culture like ours always puts erotic love, romantic love, sexual love first. Take a look at our culture, okay? Do we have plastered across all these glossy magazines who is best friends with whom? No. No, it’s who is sleeping with whom? Why would you care about who is best friends with …? But sleeping with? I want to know. Right? I mean, you want to know. Well, maybe I do want to know. In this stack, let’s put all the CDs of songs about romantic love. Then over here, let’s put all the songs about friendship. Just a quick example. The one Blockbuster set of movies that has ever been made not about romance, not about family, but about friendship is The Lord of the Rings. The beauty of friendship is the main theme of it. However, if you read the book, you’ll know the romantic stuff is in the appendices. It’s in the appendices! Of course for Hollywood, we had to pull that out of the appendices, and we had to stick it center. We had Aragorn and Arwen. The love affair had to be right in the center. It wasn’t in the book. Why? You see, our culture isn’t turned on by friendship. It’s not the most important thing. To Tolkien, that was what the book was about. In a liberal, individualistic culture, romance is the most important relationship. In a traditional, conservative culture, family. See? Father, mother, sibling, brother, sister. That’s the most important. In a socialistic, communitarian culture, it’s the civic relationships. It’s your relationship with your neighbors. Every culture will always put friendship into the backseat. Why? Because friendship is not a biological or sociological necessity. It’s the only love that is absolutely deliberate. It will not push itself upon you. C.S. Lewis, in his famous essay on friendship, says, “Friendship is … the least instinctive, organic, biological … and necessary. It has least commerce with our nerves; there is nothing throaty about it; nothing that quickens the pulse or turns you red and pale.” What this means, of course, is if it wasn’t for erotic love, you wouldn’t exist. If it wasn’t for family life, you wouldn’t have been reared. If it’s not for neighbor love, you couldn’t even survive crime and oppression, that sort of thing. Therefore, in a busy culture like ours, in an incredibly busy culture like ours where we’re working long hours and we’re traveling, all the other loves, all the other relationships, will push themselves upon you. Oh yeah, they will. You still have to deal with your family. You still have to have civic relationships. You have to have vocational networking to have a job. You’ll still want to have romance, but friendship, which takes incredibly deliberate amounts of intentionally spent time over time will always get squeezed out. Yet the book of Proverbs says you won’t make it without friends. Friendship love brings something into your life that is unique. I mean, you’re talking about a family-oriented, traditional culture that says a friend in many ways is better than a sibling, brings things into your life a sibling can’t. The book of Proverbs continually says fools perish either for lack of friends or for poorly chosen friends. See, we walk around in our culture saying, “I am who I choose to be.” You are not who you chose to be. I’ll tell you who you are. In the early stage of your life, you are what your family made you. In the rest of your life, you are who your friends make you. It’s your community that forms you. It’s your community that shapes you. In the early days, it was who your family was that shaped you. Now it’s who your friends are. The book of Proverbs says you perish for a lack of or for wrong friends. Point one. All right. Then what do we do? How do we get friends? All right.

8. What does every culture put friendship in the backseat?

9. How does your life show whether you value friendship or not? Be specific. If it shows you do not, what would the Lord have you do?

10. Keller says “your community forms you.” Give a few examples of that.

11. How have you chosen your closest friends? How do you keep them alive? 

12. How can you avoid “visiting your friend too often or for too long?”

13. Any other comments on the above?

Thursday: Discovering Friends

I love this point. The best friends are the ones we discover through the Lord. I’ve mentioned before that I discovered my late friend Anne was when I asked her what brought her to the Lord and she said “T.S. Elliot’s poem, Hollow Men. “I didn’t want to live a hollow life.”

I loved that poem, felt rescued from a hollow life, and knew I had discovered a Kindred Spirit!

Discovery of friendship What do I mean by a discovery of friends? Go to the second proverb just briefly. “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” Notice it’s not a contrast between two equal groups of people. Companions, acquaintances, associates, associations. You can have many. One friend. This is getting across the idea that true friends aren’t that many. You can’t have that many. They’re relatively rare compared to your other relationships. They’re relatively rare. Let’s go two-thirds of the way down. Here’s the reason why. Proverbs 27:9, says, “Perfume and incense bring joy to the heart, and the pleasantness of one’s friend springs from his earnest counsel.” The pleasantness of one’s friend. This word pleasantness is a word for sweetness. It’s a word that always had to do with honey. Sweetness. This is saying real friendship is like sweet food, delectably sweet food. Here’s why that’s pretty interesting. One of the things that surprised me (and of course, what do I know about cooking anyway?) is all the commentators pointed out that, when the book of Proverbs was written, nobody had sugar yet. Nobody had sugar yet! People did not know how to sweeten food. Today you can make almost any food sweet. It all depends on what you want to do. You create sweetened food, but back then, you had to discover sweetened food. There were certain foods that were naturally sweet, and that was it. What does that point us to? Just this. Friendship requires a foundation, an affinity, a common love, a common vision that can’t be created, that can only be discovered. In one minute, I’m going to turn around and say the foundation isn’t enough; you have to build on the foundation. There’s an affinity that must be discovered. It cannot be created. The two essays I looked at in getting ready for this sermon were Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay on friendship (which you can find on the Internet) and C.S. Lewis’ famous essay on friendship (which is in his book The Four Loves). They both talk about this. Ralph Waldo Emerson says something like this: “Friendship does not ask, ‘Do you love me?’ so much as, ‘Do you see the same truth?’ Are you passionate about the same thing?” C.S. Lewis puts it like this. The typical expression of opening friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought that no one but myself …” That’s the beginning of a friendship. “You too? I thought I was the only one.” “… though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a friendship than a love affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; friends hardly ever talk about their friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each another; friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.” Do you see what the point is there? What makes a friend is not, “Oh, do you want to be my friend?” but, “You too? You think that’s important too? You love that too?” That creates a friend. That’s the reason why it’s a unique … It brings something unique into your life. Lewis goes on to really make it very, very plain. He says, “That 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 see nothing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a friend,’ no friendship can arise … There would be nothing for the friendship to be about … Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travelers.” That’s the reason why, first of all, friendship has to be something you discover. By the way, this is one of the reasons why Aelred of Rievaulx, who was a twelfth-century monk who wrote a whole book on friendship, said that of all the loves … We’re not talking about parent/child, brother/sister, or husband/wife. Of all the loves, this is the one he says that has the least intrigue. In other words, this is the least icky love. This is the love in which you don’t constantly have as many hurt feelings and people upset and talking, “What about our relationship?” You see? It has to be discovered before it can be forged. There’s a foundation, but let’s keep on going.

14. Share a time when you “discovered” a friend.

15. Keller takes 2 Proverbs — the one about he who has many companions will come to ruin and the one that compares the counsel of a good friend to honey. What point is he making about being wise with friendship and discovering a godly friend?

16. Why isn’t enough just to want someone to be your friend — what must you have and why? What wisdom does this give you in discovering a wonderful friend?

17. What other comments do you have?

18. Next week is Thanksgiving. If you are the host, is there someone who might be alone you could invite and love? (I am excited that Cristian is coming to our Thanksgiving!)

Friday: Constancy and Carefulness

. But now it cannot only be discovered; it must be forged. The foundation is not enough. You have to build. The book of Proverbs says there are four things you must do to create a friend, a true friendship. You could read these four things as the four marks of a true friendship (sort of as an evaluative guide), or you could look at them as four building blocks for creating a friendship. It’s fine either way. Here’s what these four are. The four marks of true friendship are constancy, carefulness, candor, and counsel. Constancy, carefulness, candor, and counsel. Let’s spend a little time on them because they are so crucial. First of all, constancy. What do we mean by constancy? I guess let’s take a look at the first two verses one last time. “A friend loves at all times …” What does that mean? Does that mean if you’re friends, you spend all of your time together? No, because don’t forget the third of the proverbs. “… too much of you, and he will hate you.” You laughed when it was read. Of course! What does it mean when it says, “A friend loves at all times …”? It means all kinds of time: good times, bad times, ordinary time, routine. In other words, you can’t be a friend without availability. You cannot be a friend without availability … constant ability. That’s part of what constancy means. Constancy doesn’t just mean availability. It also means being there when the chips are down. That’s what 18:24 (the second verse), is really about. Look carefully. Look what the contrast is. “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” A friend will not let you go to ruin. Most people know you and want to know you because you’re useful to them. Before you get all bent out of shape about that, I want you to realize most of the people you know you know because they’re useful to you. Most of your companions, your associates, most of the people you know … why do you know them? Why do you want to know them? Because they’re useful to you. Some of them are useful for having a good time. Some of them are useful for meeting other people. Some of them are useful for getting things done. You see, the people who only know you because you’re useful, when the chips are down, when you’re starting to collapse, and when it’s going to take a huge amount of involvement and expenditure to stay in a close relationship to you as your life is collapsing, that’s when your companions say, “Call me if you need anything,” but a friend is there, because a friend has deliberately made you not a means to an end but an end in yourself. A friend goes to the mat. A friend says, “I will do whatever it takes to keep you from falling into ruin. I won’t let you get to the bottom. I won’t. I’ll be there even when it costs me something.” Constancy. That’s a friend. Okay? A fair-weather friend, of course, isn’t a friend. Secondly, carefulness. The carefulness thing is pretty interesting. We have to ask ourselves a couple of questions. Why does a man deceive his neighbor and say, “I was only joking”? Why does a man loudly bless his neighbor early in the morning, and it will be taken as a curse? Here’s a man who is emotionally disconnected. “I don’t know your inner topography enough to know that this joke actually hurts you. I don’t know enough about what kind of morning person you are (or lack thereof) to know what I can do in the morning.” Most of all, look at the fourth proverb down. “Like one who takes away a garment on a cold day, or like vinegar poured on soda, is one who sings songs to a heavy heart.” What is a singing song to a heavy heart? By the way, the word song there means a song of joy. There’s emotional disconnection. I can be happy when you’re sad. If I can be happy when you’re sad, you’re not my friend. I’m not your friend. I’ll put it to you like this. Charlie Drew’s mother-in-law has a little saying Kathy and I try not to tell other parents, though it’s true. Charlie Drew’s mother-in-law says, “Here’s the essence of parenting. Once you start to have children, you realize for the rest of your life you’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.” For the rest of your life, you’re only as happy as your unhappiest child. Why? Because automatically, whether you want to or not, you are emotionally connected. You are emotionally vulnerable. You can’t sing songs when their heart is heavy. It just can’t happen. It’s automatic! Here’s what’s so amazing and scary about friendship. In friendship, you give the gift of emotional connection voluntarily. See, here’s how you can tell whether you’ve really let that person become your friend or that person is really your friend. They can’t go about singing songs when you’re heavy hearted. They can’t go about their job when you’re collapsing. You see, for a friend to do that, that’s amazing, because that’s such a gift. It’s a voluntary gift. A friend is someone … That’s one of the reasons why you can’t have too many, because you just can’t survive with too many friends in some ways. A friend creates that emotional connection as a gift and, as a result, is unbelievably emotionally sensitive to you, knows how you’re feeling, and therefore, is not using you but rather is committed to your emotional flourishing because he or she can’t flourish without your emotional flourishing as well. First of all, constancy. Secondly, incredible sensitivity. Emotional connection. Emotional vulnerability.

19. What does “a friend loves at all times” entail?

20. Give an example of a time a friend loved you when it cost her something!

21. Keller gives the 2nd brick as “carefulness” because true friendship will cost you, so you cannot be a true friend to everyone. Thoughts?

When I was young and was sending out over one hundred Christmas cards I asked the Lord, “To whom are you asking me to be true?” At that time He gave me 5 names. That was my limit in being really truly available, and it freed me. The list changed 20 years later due to death and due to one backing off. Then He gave me two new ones.

22. Challenge: Ask the Lord “To whom do you want me to be true?” Let us know what He shows you next week.

23. What do you learn from the proverbs about what emotional connection does and does not look like?

24. Other comments?

Saturday:

25. What is your take-a-way and why?