Friendship

Sermon Transcript

Earlier this year a column appeared in the Minnesota Star Tribune by a columnist named Andy Brehm. It was entitled “The Friendship Recession”. In it, Brehm tells the story of how friendship seems to be on the decline in America. He cites a 2021 American Perspectives Survey, which reveals that over the past few decades, the number of Americans that claim to have no close friends at all has quadrupled. Not only that, but he shares evidence that we are spending less time on average with the friends we have, and it’s not because we’re spending more time with our families. He says the average American spends 9 hours more per week alone than just a decade ago. And, unsurprisingly, that means more Americans feel lonely. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy suggests we have a loneliness pandemic in the nation. He says at any moment, half of us are experiencing assessable levels of loneliness. So if you feel lonely, you aren’t alone, ironically enough, and you know it’s not a great feeling. Murthy says, “When people are socially disconnected, their risk of anxiety and depression increases. So does their risk of heart disease (29%), dementia (50%), and stroke (32%). The increased risk of premature death associated with social disconnection is comparable to smoking daily — and may be even greater than the risk associated with obesity.” A lot of factors can and have been considered to explain this phenomenon; I’ll touch on just a few today, but the point for now is simply that we aren’t doing great with friendship as a society. My assumption is that the rates of loneliness would be lower on average among members of Christian churches, yet even within the body of Christ, we can’t escape these challenges entirely. But today as we wrap up our topical study of Proverbs 10-31, we are going to see that God has given us his wisdom on how to cultivate wise friendships. Much like happiness that we looked at a few weeks back, you can’t manufacture real friendships. Especially in adulthood amid life’s various responsibilities, they take time and patience to develop. But you can cultivate wise friendships, and we’ll see three basic ways to do so in these proverbs: Choose your friends wisely, exchange wise counsel, and stick together.

 

Choose your friends wisely

 

From cover to cover, the Bible is clear that we must love all people because all people are made in the image of God. Jesus didn’t pull the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself out of thin air; he quoted it from Leviticus 19:18, a book of the Bible written over a thousand years before Jesus came, and written before the book of Proverbs at which we are looking today. You don’t choose to love some and not others; the Bible is clear on that. But the Proverbs are clear that we do, we must, choose our friends. Proverbs 20:19, for example, says, “Whoever goes about slandering reveals secrets; therefore do not associate with a simple babbler.” It does not say, “Therefore do not love a simple babbler”. Simple babblers are still images of God, and therefore deserve our love. But it does say do not associate with a simple babbler, or, we could say, do not choose a simple babbler as your friend.

 

Why? The answer shows us something of the difference between a more general love that we ought to have for all people and the specific sort of love shared between friends. Why should you love a simple babbler but not choose a simple babbler as your friend? A simple babbler has a pattern of revealing peoples’ secrets, and therefore, you should not share your secrets with them, and that’s what you do with friends. That’s the difference. If any image of God is hungry, you feed them, but you don’t necessarily share your secrets with them. Love for all people does not require that of you, but that’s what friends do with friends. They let them in to their lives. They expose themselves. They let themselves be truly known, and that’s why it would be foolish to do so with those who have a pattern of carelessly sharing peoples’ secrets.

 

So as we look at friends in Proverbs today, that’s how it’s generally using the term and how I’m going to use it. There are looser uses of the term today that aren’t necessarily wrong, but they are insufficient. Many people have thousands of Facebook “friends”, but they aren’t letting them into their lives at the level Proverbs has in mind. So sometimes today we’ll distinguish our “best friends”, and that’s more of what Proverbs is talking about when it talks of friends. Jonathan Holmes, author of The Company We Keep, a helpful book on friendship that our Citygroups discussed a couple years ago, suggests that most people can have 1-5 friends like this in their life at any given time. Proverbs 18:24 says, “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother”. You may have many “companions”, many Facebook friends, but there is a friend, like, one friend, that sticks closer than a brother. That’s the kind of friendship we’re talking about.

 

You must love everyone, but you can probably only have 1-5 friends at a time in the sense Proverbs is using the term, 1-5 people you let all the way in. So you must choose your friends wisely. This exclusive nature of friendship is one feature of it that makes it more difficult in 2025 Philadelphia. In C.S. Lewis’ excellent essay on friendship in The Four Loves, he writes, “That outlook which values the collective above the individual necessarily disparages friendship; it is a relation between men at their highest level of individuality. It withdraws men from collective ‘togetherness’ as surely as solitude itself could do; and more dangerously, for it withdraws them by twos and threes. Some forms of democratic sentiment are naturally hostile to it because it is selective and an affair of the few. To say, ‘These are my friends’ implies ‘Those are not’.” Ironically, an emphasis on community and equality can be destructive of the deepest kind of community available between humans: Friendship, because as soon as you start thinking about choosing a friend, you feel a bit guilty about it. You think, “Well what about that simple babbler? Don’t they need a friend too? I’m not perfect myself, after all. How can I choose this friend and not that one?” So you try to be friends with everyone, and in the end find that you are friends with no one. Your intentions were admirable, but without the guidance of wisdom, they ended up working against your desired outcome.

 

On the less admirable side of intentions, the form of democratic sentiment that is hostile to friendship can also just be a fruit of envy. To quote Lewis again, “There is the attitude of the majority towards all circles of close Friends. Every name they give such a circle is more or less derogatory [think of how we demonize friend groups as ‘cliques’ today]…Of course this is the voice of Envy.” Say you notice a group of close friends laughing and enjoying themselves, taking a trip together, even meeting to study the Bible and pray together, and you realize you aren’t in that circle of friends. Often times you may find that’s no trouble to you at all; you can rejoice with those that rejoice. But there may be times when the next thing you feel is envy; I know I have. You didn’t choose to feel that way, but if you do start feeling that way, you will have a choice about what to do with that feeling. Will you try to come up with all kinds of reasons why they ought to have invited you, why they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing, and even start scheming to prevent them from doing so in the future, or will you fight the envy and choose to rejoice with those who rejoice? Envy is one of those muscles you want to kill, not strengthen, primarily of course because it displeases our heavenly Father, but also because it will sap your joy and be counterproductive to you forming real friendships. How deep do you think your friendship will be with someone who you kinda manipulated into being your friend?

 

So one element of choosing your friends wisely is getting over the mental hurdle that you must choose your friends, you won’t be able to have many of them because you are a finite human, and that means you will not choose to be this kind of friend with most people you meet. And, on the flipside, it means most people you meet will not choose to be this kind of friend with you, and that’s totally fine. To quote Lewis again, “I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine”. No doubt that’s hard, especially when you really want to be friends with someone, and it is clear that they simply have not chosen to be friends with you. It’s normal that that would hurt, but don’t turn that hurt into the other person’s fault. And don’t waste your life trying to get people to be friends with you who clearly don’t want to be friends with you. Don’t resent them; rejoice with them, and then go choose friends who are also choosing you as a friend.

 

Ok, once you clear that mental hurdle, how do you choose friends wisely? We already saw one way on the negative side: Don’t choose someone who is flippant in their handling of other peoples’ information. Proverbs 13:20 provides the positive before warning us about the negative as well: “Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm” (Prov 13:20). How do you choose your friends wisely? No surprises from Proverbs here: Choose wise friends! Don’t go looking for perfect friends; there aren’t any of them on earth, and you aren’t one of them either. But you can look for friends among those who are walking the path of wisdom. And why choose those friends? Because whoever walks with the wise becomes wise. God created us as communal beings, and so it is natural that we are influenced by the people with whom we spend the most of our time, those with whom we walk. And the same is true on the flipside: The companion of fools will tend to become more foolish, and will suffer the fate of fools: Harm.

 

So if you want to walk the path of wisdom God has laid out, the path that leads to life and joy, choose friends who are walking that path themselves. Joining a church, then, is one wise step toward deeper friendships. When you join a church with meaningful membership, you at least know that every other member of the church has made themselves publicly accountable to walk the path of wisdom. They’ve said before God and the church, “yes, I’m committed to that path,” and the members of that church, under the leadership of their pastors, have affirmed, “yes, this person is committed to that path.” In Lewis’ essay he talks about how all friendships begin with some context, some shared interest or activity, even if it’s something as simple as stamp collection. So 30 people who like collecting stamps get together, and 2 or 3 of them find that it becomes something more: Friendship. So 98 people are members of this church, and within it we’ve seen many friendships of 2 or 3 or more form. Citygroups, our smaller gatherings that meet in peoples’ homes throughout the city during the week, are another context within our church in which friendship can grow.

 

And, remember the flipside: You don’t just want to find people walking the path of wisdom and choose them as your friends; you want to be walking the path of wisdom yourself. Lewis points out that if you simply “want friends” you will never have any. He writes, “The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends…Those who are going nowhere have no fellow-travellers.” So one of the best steps you can take toward cultivating wise friendships is to dive all in on walking the path of wisdom yourself. Attend the gatherings of your church, attend the Sunday seminars and the prayer services, study your Bible, pray, read wise books, listen to wise podcasts, do wise works, and then look around and see, “Who else seems to be into these things?” Those are the people to whom to say, “Hey, do you want to get dinner after the next prayer service?” “Hey, I’m going to the Psalm sing at Olney Baptist on April 13. Want to come with me?” Build the friendship on those sorts of things with people who are walking the path of wisdom, and it will tend to grow a wise friendship.

 

On the flipside, while there is one path of wisdom, there are many paths of folly. So Proverbs warns us not only against choosing a simple babbler as a friend, but against a few others that may appear to be attractive friends at first, but will make a foolish choice for a friend. Proverbs 22:24-25 mentions a man given to anger—who wouldn’t rather be friends with the bully than be bullied by the bully? But a man given to anger is likely to get angry at you at some point, and get you into quarrels that as we saw last week, are better avoided. Proverbs 24:1 warns us against being with evil men. Sin is attractive, and there can be an allure to being friends with those who don’t feel the need to “live according to the rules”. Later in Proverbs 24 we get a similar warning in verses 21-22: “My son, fear the LORD and the king, and do not join with those who do otherwise, for disaster will arise suddenly from them, and who knows the ruin that will come from them both?” What’s one of the most common ways people bond? By grumbling about those in authority over them. It’s attractive, but it’s foolish, because there is a real God who has established real authorities, and he will execute judgment on those who persist in rebelling against him. So choose your friends wisely by choosing wise friends. And then, once you choose a friend who has also chosen you, cultivate the friendship by exchanging wise counsel.

 

Exchange wise counsel

 

I’ve already alluded to one way friendships help us walk the path of wisdom: As you walk with the wise, you become wise. We could call that the power of example, or of community norms—what’s normal to the people with whom you walk will tend to become normal to you. But another important way in which wisdom is transmitted is through speech. So Proverbs 27:9 says, “Oil and perfume make the heart glad, and the sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel.”

 

It’s been a while, but earlier this year we looked at what the proverbs teach about decision-making, and we saw the importance of slowing down and seeking wise counsel when you face a decision. There are many sources of counsel you might seek when facing a decision: A parent, a doctor, a financial advisor, a lawyer, a pastor, but if you want to cultivate wise friendships, one place you must seek counsel is from your friends. That means bringing them into the decision-making process and really weighing what they say, rather than just reporting to them the result of a decision-making process you already went through without them. It’s another way you let friends into your life. And, on the flipside, one way you can be a good friend to others is if they actually do let you in and seek your counsel, give earnest counsel. The earnestness there seems to speak to the effort you exert to give the counsel. Don’t just give pat advice. Try to really get to know their situation and put yourself in their shoes until you start to feel some of what they’re feeling. Then give your counsel.

 

We could call that proactive counsel, counsel you seek and give before a decision is made to encourage a wise decision. Another type of wise counsel proverbs depicts friends exchanging is corrective counsel. So Proverbs 27:6, which we began looking at last week, says, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.” It’s better to be wounded by a friend than kissed by an enemy. Though a wound hurts, if it’s coming from a place of love, it can be used for your good. Though a kiss feels great, if it’s coming from a place of hatred, it can lure you to sleep while your enemy plots your downfall. Isn’t this how the world, the flesh, and the devil work on us? They pamper our flesh and our pride; it feels so nice, and yet all the while they are pulling us away from the path of life. Meanwhile, Jesus came saying things like, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matt 16:24). I’ve never had my body nailed to a cross, but it sounds painful. Those words hurt, but then Jesus added: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt 16:25). He’s wounding us, but wounding us as a friend.

 

And that’s what a real friend will do. Last week we talked about confrontation, and said that basically the more observable and serious a person’s sin is, the less of a relationship you must have with them to confront it. If you see a fellow church member robbing a store, you confront them, whether you’re friends with them or not. But what about those sins that are just as serious, but less observable? Pride, envy, fear of man, harshness, bitterness, discontentment, grumbling, unbelief. Pride can often appear as confidence, or even as self-deprecation. Envy can appear as understandable lamentation. Fear of man can appear as a peaceable, accommodating spirit. Harshness and bitterness can appear as advocacy for justice. Discontentment can appear as realism. Grumbling can appear as loving concern for improvement. Unbelief can appear as depression or anxiety. Now I can tell you these are all serious sins in scripture, but they’re hard to observe; sometimes we’re even blind to them in ourselves. To borrow the language of Hebrews 12, they “cling so closely” to us that, like a crumb in my beard, we don’t see them.

 

But unlike the crumb in my beard, it will be comparatively difficult for someone who barely knows me to see them as well. If they are charitable especially, they will see my pride as confidence, my fear of man as kindness, my harshness as a concern for justice, and so on. But if you’re blind to it, and most people who meet you are blind to it, who will help you see it? One of those 1-5 friends who you’ve let all the way in. When you’ve let yourself be truly known like that, when you’ve lowered the social defenses, the real you can come out, the you that’s still in the middle of your sanctification, and that means those friends may, by the power of the Spirit, start to see those things in you. And what would a wise friend do in such a situation? A wise friend would gently, lovingly point it out to you, so that you can see it, repent, and grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

 

What might that sound like? “Hey, I hope you know how much I love you. You’re one of my best friends and seeing God’s work in your life has spurred me on to greater love for Christ. I also feel the weight of your current work situation and have been praying for you. It feels like every time we talk about it, though, your bitterness toward your boss is increasing, not decreasing. I’ve been thinking about Proverbs 29:11, which says, ‘A fool gives full vent to his spirit, but a wise man quietly holds it back,’ and I’ve just wondered if you might be giving full vent to your spirit, rather than wisely holding it back, and that it’s cultivating resentment toward your boss rather than love. I know my heart is certainly capable of the same things and obviously I can’t see yours directly, but I wanted to raise it and see what you thought.”

 

Now even with that level of care and gentleness, those words wound a bit. Your friend is going through the ringer at work, and now instead of just affirming everything they’re doing, you’re suggesting to them they might not be responding in a godly way. And a real friend will listen patiently, sympathize with what is genuinely hard, and validate what is valid. It is often wise to start there, but a real friend will not just be a cheerleader to you indefinitely. Why? Because a real friend cares more about your soul than your feelings toward them! A real friend wants you to have abundant life in Jesus more than they want to preserve the comfort of the relationship, and sin gets in the way of that. So pastor Ray Ortlund writes, “There is a difference between hurting someone and harming someone. There is a difference between someone being loved and someone feeling loved. Jesus loved everyone well, and some people felt hurt. They were not harmed by him. They were loved by him. But they felt hurt. So they crucified him. If we don’t understand this, then every time we feel hurt we will look for someone else to blame and punish. We will make our emotional state someone else’s fault. We might spread that version of events to other people in slander. But the truth is, a friend will inevitably hurt you with words that are respectful, true, and blunt.”

 

One of the best-known Proverbs on friendship that summarizes this well is Proverbs 27:17 – “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” That’s the goal of wise friendships: To sharpen one another, more than to coddle one another. Iron sharpens iron by being rubbed against iron and scraping off the imperfections. It’s a painful process. When you put two sinners into close proximity with one another, they will rub against one another. When you let the social guardrails down and really let someone in, your sin will typically come out against them, and their sin will often come out against you. But when there is loving confrontation, honest confession, and sincere forgiveness extended, God uses that to sharpen each of you more into the image of Christ. So cultivate wise friendships by giving and receiving wise counsel, even when it’s painful counsel. And finally, cultivate wise friendships by sticking together.

 

Stick together

 

Proverbs 17:17 says, “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.” A brother is born for adversity. Family relationships are there for us when we fall. My dad retired about ten years ago, and almost immediately after he retired, his brother’s health started to decline. I watched from a distance for the next 3-4 years as my dad basically switched from his full-time career to becoming my uncle’s full-time caretaker until my uncle eventually passed away. And I can just tell you that in the years before that, aside from holidays, they didn’t spend much time together. They weren’t friends, but they were brothers, and so in the day of my uncle’s adversity, my dad was there. It’s what brothers do. Now some of you are best friends with your brother or sister, and that’s awesome, but this proverb is pointing out that they are different relationships.

 

The church is more like a family than friends. I’ve mentioned that it’s an excellent context in which to form friendships, but once a church gets beyond 5 members, it’s already beyond its capacity for everyone to be friends with everyone. We should be there for one another in adversity, but a friend loves at all times. A friend is with you through good times and bad, because a friend is just with you a lot. In one of the proverbs already quoted we see that a friend even sticks closer than a brother: “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (Prov 18:24). Facebook friends are companions. Fellow church members are family. But this proverb is showing us that if all you have in your life are companions, even many of them, or even if all you have is family, that’s great, but something is still missing: A friend, even just one, who sticks closer than a brother. Again, often you will find that sort of friend within your church family, sometimes you find it with your sibling, if God grants you marriage you will often find it with your spouse, but it is wise to in some way cultivate friendships that stick together through all the ups and downs of your life, to the point where you have a reasonable confidence that whatever comes out of you today, at least this person will be there tomorrow.

 

It’s inevitable that friends will get into conflict and quarrels, but friends stick together through conflicts and quarrels. There’s a sense underneath it all that we’re sticking this out together; yes we’ll have the hard conversations, but no we aren’t going anywhere. Friends stick together through adversity in one another’s lives. What’s that look like? A brother in the church here was telling me recently about a period of seasonal depression this winter, and mentioned one friend in particular who almost every other day at least sent him a text message checking in. “How you doing?” “Here’s a way I’m praying for you”. “Here’s a verse that made me think of you”. The friend that sticks closer than a brother will err on the side of being too present, and let you tell them when you need space.

 

Friends will even want to stick together geographically. Proverbs 27:10 says, “Do not forsake your friend and your father’s friend, and do not go to your brother’s house in the day of your calamity. Better is a neighbor who is near than a brother who is far away.” The proverb is saying that when hardship hits your life, don’t leave town to go to your family; go to your friend who lives down the street, because better is a neighbor who is near than a brother who is far away. In the ancient world when it might take you days to travel to your brother far away, and in which you couldn’t get on FaceTime to talk to him, this was especially the case, but there is still an important truth to it today. Technology will never make you omnipresent; that’s what we call an incommunicable attribute of God, i.e., he doesn’t share it with you. To be human is to be embodied, localized, and limited, and therefore if you want to cultivate deep friendships, the closer you live to those with whom you want to have such friendships, the better.

 

I shared some insight from C.S. Lewis earlier on how a misplaced kind of democratic sentiment can work against friendship. Another we might add is our increased connectivity and mobility. On the one hand, it seems nice that you can talk to your brother on FaceTime even when he’s on the other side of the globe, and it seems nice that you can move to a new place to live with relative ease whenever you want to. But do you see what these features of our society do to friendships? They make it harder for us to stick together. If you choose to move every five years to climb the career ladder, you may make more money, but don’t be surprised if you struggle to form deep friendships. If you move, but instead of getting to know people who live where you now live, you fill your relational needs with FaceTime and trips back to the previous place you lived, don’t be surprised if you get a few years in and feel like you just aren’t making friends in your new city.

 

What’s the solution? Never move, never use your phone, never travel to see old friends? No, I’m not saying that, but I do hope these proverbs help you consider how to do so wisely. It is wise to consider prioritizing proximity to friends when considering where to live over even things like the size of your house, the quality of the school district, or the crime rates. It shouldn’t be the only factor you weigh, but it is a wise factor to weigh. Again, think about people who live in impoverished nations who are nonetheless happy; why? It’s almost always because of the quality of their relationships. Mark McNutt is one of my best friends, and you know a big part of why? Because we lived together in college, and then when we moved to Philadelphia, he and Cait encouraged us to rent an apartment in the same cul-de-sac as them, and we did. Then when we moved down here to plant this church, we lived in the same house. Then when our families outgrew that house, we bought houses a block away from each other. If you’re single, I get why living alone is attractive, but don’t be surprised if you choose to do that and start to feel lonely. Consider cultivating wise friendships by choosing to live with those with whom you want to cultivate such friendships. Better is a neighbor who is near than a brother who is far away.

 

I rejoice with those of you who are rejoicing as you hear this description of friendship from proverbs because God has given you this sort of friend. But I realize this description of friendship is also likely to produce two reactions in most of us: Frustration, on the one hand, because we don’t feel like we have friendships like this in Philadelphia, and shame, on the other, because we feel like we fail to be this kind of friend to others.

 

A friend who is walking the path of wisdom, who if you walk with him, will also make you wise. A friend who really puts himself in your shoes, and gives you earnest counsel as one who truly sympathizes with you and knows what is best for you. A friend who only wounds you because he loves you, who always knows when and how best to do it. A friend who really sharpens you and helps you become all that God made you to be, instead of just leaving you how you are. A friend who sticks closer than a brother. A friend who is always near. Where do you find a friend like that? The Christians in the room already know the answer, don’t you? It’s the one who said to his disciples, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you…”

 

Jesus calls his disciples his friends. When Jesus came into your life, you were on the path of folly. But he literally put himself in our shoes when he became man, and now is able to sympathize with all your weakness, having gone through them himself. His word wounds us; it testifies that we are so sinful that we are utterly unable to save ourselves by resolving to do better. But then he was also willingly wounded for us. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends, but that’s the love Jesus had for us when he laid down his life on the cross, to bear all the shame for our sins, that it might be removed from us, and that we might go from the enemies of God to the friends of God. And though he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, he is not only near to us now; he is in us, by his Spirit, and promises to never leave us or forsake us. If you move, he will go with you. If your best friend moves away, he won’t. On your best days, he will be with you, and on your worst days, he will be with you. Whatever comes out of you today, he will be there tomorrow. And if you are here and are not yet a disciple of Jesus, his friendship is offered to you today. Turn from your sins, believe in him, and he will be an eternal friend to you.

 

Not only will he be a friend to you, but he will sharpen you to become a friend like him. Why are foolish friends attractive, after all? Because folly is attractive! But as you get to know Jesus as a friend and he becomes more attractive to you, so too do his people. “As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight” Psalm 16:3 says. Why do we hesitate to really let people all the way in? Isn’t it because we know deep down there is something wrong with us, and we are afraid if people discover it, they’ll be gone? But Jesus already has discovered it, went to the cross for it, and now sticks closer than a brother to fight it in us! Why not let his people in and give them the chance to be an instrument in his hands in your life? Why not take the initiative to seek wise counsel, get close enough to someone that your sin might come out, receive their faithful wounds, and rearrange your life to stick close to them, not knowing whether they’ll respond in kind? How many times have others been good friends to us when we’ve failed to be good friends to them? How many times has Jesus been a good friend to us when we’ve failed to be a good friend to him? Where would we be without his friendship? May you know his friendship today, and may you increasingly become that kind of friend to others.