Wisdom and Friendship

So just before we dive in, and I’ll tell you where to go, we want to ask ourselves, okay, what is friendship? What is friendship? What are friends? I think today this is a word we throw out, or a show that we watch. We have a very sort of thin meaning of friendship, of what that means. You know, I had to look up—I have 590 friends on Facebook. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but I don’t care anyway. But maybe you’re on social media, you’re on Facebook.

Have a look, see what sort of friends you have, maybe have a wee look through them, see who they are, and ask, is this friendship? Are these people really my friends? Or maybe you’re not on that or whatever, but maybe you find yourself interacting with people all the time, every day, every week. You’re always talking to people, coming back and forward, or you’re emailing people or messaging people. You have lots of interactions with people. You wonder, okay, so are those my friends?

So I want us to think about what is friendship? What is true friendship? So we’re going to turn to the Proverbs and find out. And so the way we’re going to do it, we’re going to have three examples, kind of big ideas of what friendship is in the Proverbs and what it shouldn’t look like. So firstly, we see true friends don’t corrupt. Secondly, true friends build character. And thirdly, true friends stick close.

1 True friends don’t corrupt

So the first example, true friends don’t corrupt. True friends don’t corrupt.

So please turn to Proverbs 13 and verse 20. Proverbs 13, verse 20:

Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.

So through the Proverbs, God shows us, he guides us through really practical and complicated nuances of lots of different topics, and of friendship as well, the complications of relationships with others. ’Cause you see, friendship is one of God’s greatest earthly gifts. It really is one of God’s greatest earthly gifts that he gives us. But true friends are hard to find. You know, that’s sadly, again, like everything, that’s been corrupted by sin. We have been corrupted, others have been corrupted. It’s not quite as it should be, but it’s an amazing gift from God.

And what the Proverbs do is they show us kind of the pros and the cons. They show us all the ins and outs of friendship, the effect that friends have, again, good and bad. The company that we keep can either strengthen us or it can corrupt us. You know, we see it here. If we walk with the wise, well, then we’re influenced by that. We will become wise. But if we walk with fools, then we’re going to suffer harm. We’re going to become like them. We’re going to be foolish ourselves, and that’ll lead to harmful consequences. Wise friends will elevate us, but foolish friends will pull us down. Again, we’ll suffer harm.

The Bible warns us, again, throughout Scripture and here, like 1 Corinthians says, “do not be deceived, bad company corrupts good character,” or “bad company corrupts good morals.” So the Bible explicitly tells us this, it teaches us this, but it also gives us so many examples. There’s so many examples of this. You can even think of Eve and the serpent. He kind of came along, tried to befriend her, started to deceive her, and she was influenced. Samson and Delilah, she fluttered her eyelashes at him and flirted with him a little bit, and he was totally pulled away from walking with the Lord.

But even Solomon, who wrote many, if not most, of these proverbs, maybe even the one we’ve just read, Solomon was good at writing proverbs, he wasn’t always that good at living by them. We know he married a lot of foreign wives, which they were told not to do, wives from different nations who worshipped different gods. And they led him astray, or at least part of what led him astray, into idolatry, into false worship, into sin. You can even say Judas. Judas began associating with these corrupt leaders and their evil plans. But see, there was greed in his heart already. His heart was already corrupted. And that pulled him in even further and it led him to commit the greatest betrayal in human history.

But even in Acts, the Apostle Peter, we read about the Apostle Peter, they were in a town, they were witnessing, they were sharing the gospel with Gentiles, with non-Jews, and he was befriending them, he was eating with them. But when other Jews came, all of a sudden he stopped, he pulled away, he wouldn’t eat with them. He was kind of embarrassed to be seen with them. And he began to be influenced by the circumcision party, those Jews who kind of came to Christ, kind of Christianity, bought a little bit of it, but wanted to pull everyone back. And Peter was corrupted by that. Even Barnabas, it says, started to be influenced. But Paul had to rebuke Peter and Barnabas openly. He said that they’re wandering from the straight path of the gospel. So even the Apostle Peter was corrupted, he was influenced, and it started to lead him astray.

And there’s so many more examples throughout Scripture. But maybe you know this yourself in your own life. If I’m being honest, I know when I was sharing my testimony with the youth fellowship the other day, when I went to high school, in my teenage years, I started to get caught up in sort of a bad crowd. You know, I had some Christian friends and thankfully even the minimal sort of influence they had still restrained me a bit, still rebuked me a bit.

But again, because of the inclination of my heart, a bit like Judas, because there’s already a bit of a corruption in us, it’s not all peer pressure. There was something in me that wanted to go along with this bad crowd, to do things I shouldn’t have done. Again, with a Christian upbringing. And then that bad crowd kind of introduced you to other people and a worse crowd and a worse crowd and before you knew it—and I talked about it with them—Psalm 1 talks about the downward spiral of sin, the company we keep, and it begins by listening to the advice, the ways of the wicked. By influencing us. And I was on that downward spiral. Thankfully, in God’s grace, I read that Psalm and I realised that I was in that, and I was able to turn from it and want to walk in his ways. So I know in my own life, and you may be the same, where you know the negative influence of the fool or sinful people.

So you see, it matters. Our relationships matter. Proverbs 12 says:

One who is righteous is a guide to his neighbor, but the way of the wicked leads them astray.

So we know it in our own lives, we see it in the teaching and the examples in the Bible, the real danger of negative influences. Again, friendships matter. The people we associate with can significantly impact us, can impact our faith.

So part of this is that we should, well then, we should discern who we are friends with, who we allow into our lives. I mean, we can’t keep everyone at arm’s length, but how close should we let certain people? Because Proverbs 12 says also:

The righteous choose their friends carefully.

Maybe this is very relevant for you, I don’t know if you’re moving to a new place or you’re moving job or university or school, you might be at a place where this is very relevant, where you find yourself with new people. You see, we often spend more time maybe choosing something to watch on Netflix or spend more time looking up reviews about what hoover to buy and making the decision there. We spend more time doing things like that than we do on deciding who our friends should be, choosing good friends, true friends that we want in our lives.

We’re to be wise, we’re to be careful who we spend time with. Again, clearly we know we want, in a sense, to befriend all people, we want to care for people, we want to love people. Nobody’s out there that’s perfect, we are all sinners. But we want to be wise in how close we let people—will they influence us, will they become a closer friend that will actually negatively affect me?

So there’s many different things, the Proverbs goes through a whole lot, I’ll not get you to turn to them all. But it warns us of different things to look out for in friends that will cause us harm. So one of them, Proverbs 22, says:

Do not make friends with a hot-tempered man. Do not associate with one who’s easily angered.

So even we see that patience, finding someone with patience, is a very good quality in a friend, not somebody that’s easily angered. Another one that’s quite funny actually, Proverbs 25. It says:

Let your foot be seldom in your neighbor’s house, lest he have his fill of you and hate you.

Hopefully your friends don’t hate you. That’s definitely not a good way to start a friendship. Of course, Solomon likes to be quite blunt to make a point, but even this is saying, you know, we want to respect their boundaries. We don’t want to overstay our welcome. We want to respect each other’s boundaries. Not ones that are going to overdo it, where you actually get fed up with them.

But there’s so many others, and one thing that keeps coming up again and again in the Proverbs in relation to friendship and warnings of what not to look for is gossip among friends. It’s gossip among friends. Proverbs 17:9 says:

Whoever covers an offense seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates close friends.

This has broken up more good friendships than you could count. Friendships that may have took years and years to build, trusted friends. It says a friend is one who covers an offence. We’re not talking about hiding some sort of sin or this clear pattern that needs to be called out. We’re just talking about, you’ve rubbed each other the wrong way a little bit, you’ve hurt each other, you’ve said something, you’ve offended them a little bit, maybe quite a bit. But basically, a good friend reconciles with you. They seek to forgive one another, they cover the sin, they move on. We’ll inevitably do that with each other.

But if we want to corrupt a friendship, well, then we repeat it. We repeat it again and again, or maybe just once or twice, to others, to the person. We gossip about it. That affects so many friendships, how we talk to each other about each other.

So God knows—again, this is a good gift. Friendship is a good gift. He knows that it can do us so much good, but again, as we see in the Proverbs, God knows that friendships go wrong, that they can go wrong, and they do go wrong. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this. I’m sure you’ll know yourself. Maybe you yourself have been hurt in friendships. You’ve been there, you’ve felt the pain of that. Maybe you’re the innocent party, maybe you’re the guilty one, or maybe you’re as guilty as each other. But we know friendships do go wrong.

So we want to be careful and discerning on who our friends are, ones that will not influence us in a negative way. But especially with sinful friends that will corrupt us, that’s what we’re told. They can corrupt us and we will suffer harm, as Proverbs says. But true friends don’t corrupt. True friends don’t corrupt. And we’ll go on to see what true friends do.

2 True friends build character

So secondly, true friends build character. True friends build character.

So please turn to Proverbs 27, verse 17. Proverbs 27:17 says:

Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another. Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.

So we saw fools and sinful people, they corrupt foolish people. They make fools and create fools, but the opposite is true. The opposite is also true. We saw it with the last proverb as well. Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise. And here as well, as iron sharpens iron, as does one man sharpen another.

I used to love, well, I still do love fishing, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I went out fishing. But years ago I had a little fishing kit and I wasn’t always the best at looking after my gear. And I remember going out with a friend fishing somewhere and so I pulled out my little penknife I kept in it. It was the bluntest knife you’d ever seen, it had started to rust and everything. It was useless, I couldn’t cut the fishing line, it barely cut the thinnest of lines. And when we actually caught a fish, you know what it’s like yourself, gutting a fish with the blunt knife, it wasn’t working at all. It was kind of messy, it wasn’t nice.

So what I had to do, of course, when I eventually got home, was clean the knife. I had to try and get the rust off it, and I sharpened it, I used a sharpening stone and I sharpened the knife. So the next time I went out, I actually had a sharp knife that I could cut fishing line with and gut fish left, right and centre. It was a knife that was useful, it wasn’t blunt anymore. And that’s what this proverb is talking about. Saying, as iron sharpens iron, so does one friend sharpen another.

So this kind of metaphor helps us to see that a friend can sharpen the other just from their influence, from their counsel, just guidance, especially just by an example that you set. To be a godly friend, to set an example for your friends. You sharpen each other. You want to look for good character in your friend, you want to see what is good. Don’t just see the bad, but see the good. You want to build up on that, encourage good character. Stuff that’s praiseworthy, that’s commendable. Encourage those things.

So, Emmanuel, these proverbs, they tell us as much about how to choose good friends as they tell us about how we should be a true friend. It also tells us how we should be as a friend. This calls us to assess and encourage good character in our friends, but also assess and build up good character in ourselves. Again, we always want to be growing in godliness. We don’t want to be one of these negative examples of the friends here in the Proverbs. So good friends, they build one another up. We should influence each other. We encourage one another. True friends build character. They build character.

So of course that can be done by, again, influencing, encouraging, having a conversation, setting that example for the other person. But it’s also, the way we do this is by correction. It’s by correction. If you want to move up in the same chapter, in chapter 27, verses 5 and 6, it says:

Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.

So if we want true friends, if we want to be a true friend, Proverbs tells us that, well then, we don’t need yes-men all around us. We don’t want people to just tell us what, you know, we want to hear. It’s not just flattery and compliments all the time, but a true friend will speak openly, they’ll challenge us. Every one of us, we don’t need friends that flatter us, but friends that care about us enough to tell us the truth. And by doing that, what they’re doing, again, they’re sharpening us, they’re refining us.

Now look, that does not mean you have a licence to just mouth off with each other, to be hypercritical about everything, to just disagree with everything. It’s not just about a careless, you know, slagging match. That’s not what’s being called for here. What we’re thinking about, okay, is this actually factual? Is it actually true? But even if it is, we think, okay, yeah, but is it going to be actually helpful? Is it going to build up? Is it necessary that we talk about this? Is it necessary that I correct them here? Is it needed? And if it is, well then we do it in a way that is loving and compassionate, that’s fair. Proverbs tells us a good friend, a true friend, is making you better by confronting your sin.

It’s better than the kisses of one who’s against you. It says, “profuse are the kisses of an enemy.” This idea of just abundant but insincere, deceitful flattery of somebody who doesn’t really care about you. They may be full of compliments and it feels like kisses, but what’s better than, far better than that, especially for building us up, it says, “faithful are the wounds of a friend.” “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.”

Now this doesn’t mean actually wounding and hurting our friend by doing something sinful against us or betraying us. That’s not what it’s talking about. But a challenge that might sting a little bit, where they kind of touch an area where it hurts. But where it is needed. That even though it wounds, it stings a bit, it’s actually going to do you a lot of good. Because, look, sin will ruin us. Sin deceives us. We can be so self-deceived in our sinfulness. We need someone that can point the finger in the good way, in the right way, to put their finger on it, to challenge us. Because sin causes such harm. Again, it corrupts us, it leads us to ruin. And again, ultimately it pulls us away from Christ. It pulls us away from him.

And we saw it with Paul and Peter. Peter was wandering from the truth of the gospel and the most loving thing that Paul could do was rebuke him. Call him out on his sin, to bring him back. That’s what’s needed. And we need that. Each one of us needs that. And it’s another way that God sanctifies us and challenges us and convicts us and builds us up, is through good, faithful Christian friends that will lovingly challenge us.

You know, it used to be every time you turned on the television, there used to be another singing competition on. Now it’s like The Traitors, I’m a Celebrity, and game shows it seems, but it used to be every time you flicked over the channel there was another singing competition. And the thing that brought most people in to watch these things was these people that got up in front of this big panel of judges and millions of people, the whole nation watching, and they could not sing to save their life. They couldn’t sing at all, or whatever they were doing, a magic trick, it was terrible. It was atrocious. You saw that these people came on this show, they stood in a line for hours to sing, like, I don’t know what. Well, because nobody told them in all of their life, “You can’t sing. Don’t go onto that show, you’re going to embarrass yourself in front of millions of people.”

See, the most loving thing somebody could have done for them isn’t just, “Oh, that’s beautiful, you have a beautiful voice,” but, “No, sorry to tell you, but you can’t sing.” That would have been much more loving. See, so we need people to do the more loving thing. And tell us, you know, you can’t sing, or whatever it’s going to be. You know, when we’re singing our next hymn, don’t be telling the person beside you they can’t sing. As long as they’re not going on to be professional singers, that’s fine. They’re not singing for you anyway, they’re singing for the Lord, so there’s no reason to do that.

But you see what I’m getting at? See, we need friends to lovingly show us where we need corrected. And just in ordinary things, somebody that’ll tell us the truth. But especially when we’re in sin, especially in sin, we need friends to help us to see our blind spots, to see things that we can’t see, to speak with real honesty at times. So you see, Jesus even tells us to do this. Jesus’ words in Matthew 18. He says:

If a brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. Tell him his fault between you and him alone, and if he listens to you, then you’ve gained your brother.

It’s a good thing. But at the same time, again, it’s not a licence to just give your opinion, tell each other just something that you happen to disagree with, but actual sin. But at the same time, it is with gentleness and compassion. Galatians 6 says:

Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.

So even in their sin, you want to restore them. The goal is always to restore them, not to just call them out, not to just tell them you’re wrong and I’m right. But to restore them.

You know, we talk a lot, as Christians: we need to speak the truth in love. We always have to speak the truth in love. Some people overemphasise the love part and many others overemphasise the truth part and you forget about the love part altogether. As a believer, we want to be finding the most gentle and loving way to say something, especially if we’re challenging somebody. We don’t need to pander to each other a little bit, but how can I find the best way to say this? How can I be more patient? How can I be fair? But if this needs to be said, you know, God, help me to find the most gentle and compassionate way to say this, even if it is going to be a brutal truth.

So, you know, whatever way this looks like, in real terms, if you’re with a friend and they just keep putting down their husband, you know, mention it. Say something. Or if you’re with a friend and the banter gets a little bit vulgar, you kind of pull back from that a bit. Or you call it out and say, sorry, I’m not talking about things like that. Or again, if the gossiping starts, you don’t engage with it. Again, you maybe call it out completely, or you just sort of shut down about it. Probably the best thing, if you start talking about someone behind their back and complaining about somebody, and the person you’re talking to just doesn’t entertain it, you very quickly realise that and stop and change the subject. Whatever it is, all of those things are really, really healthy. That’s what makes godly friendships. Builds each one of us up in our character and Christlikeness.

So we need sharp friends. We need sharp friends. Because if we don’t have sharp friends, then we’re going to be like my fishing knife. We don’t want to be spiritually blunt and we don’t want to stay spiritually blunt, but we want to be sharpened. We want to build each other up. Because ultimately what we’re doing, we’re not just wanting to build each other’s, you know, just self-esteem or happiness or improve behaviour or habits in each other. Ultimately what we’re doing, a true friend points us to Christ. A true friend points us to Christ, that our focus and theirs—though we won’t be perfect together—but it’s about being closer to Christ and being more like him as we go.

3 True friends stick close

And lastly, true friends stick close. True friends stick close.

So please turn to Proverbs 17, and verse 17. Proverbs 17 and verse 17:

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

So what God is telling us through the Proverbs is that a true friend loves at all times. That it’s constant, that it’s unwavering, that it’s steadfast, it’s consistent. You know, how many of our friends or acquaintances or Facebook friends would be there for us when times get difficult? How many would actually be there for us when we’re going through the trials and tribulations of life? A true friend isn’t just there when things are fine or normal or joyful, but they stand with us through the good and the bad. They’re with us when times get hard.

You know, the mention here by the friend and the brother, or you could say a sister, both roles are meant to support us. You can have a friend that’s like a brother, a brother that’s like a friend, but both of them are meant to support us during the most challenging times of life. They help us to navigate through life’s adversities. I heard this story and I think the origin of it, there’s a few examples of it and there’s a song about it and all, but I think the origin of this little story comes from sort of the early 1900s in a really poor town in Nebraska in America.

And basically there’s this little boy who was ten, who lived out on a farm about a mile or two out of the town, but he brought his six-year-old brother who was crippled, who was paralysed, and this boy who was ten would carry him on his back the whole way into town, do things in the town, go around the shops, and then would carry him home again just to bring his brother with him. And one day, one of the adults, I think it was one of the shopkeepers, said, “Is he not heavy? Like, does he not get heavy?” And the wee boy famously replied, “He’s not heavy, he’s my brother. He’s not heavy, he’s my brother.” To him, that’s all there was to it. He’s my brother.

See, a brother is born for adversity. A sister is born for adversity. And so is a friend, a true friend. Do you know who my favourite character in the Bible is? Apart from Jesus, of course. My favourite character in the Bible is Jonathan. It’s Jonathan. Because when you read about David and Jonathan, you see, it says God knit Jonathan’s heart to David’s. Jonathan vowed his life, he vowed everything to David. You see, Jonathan, he didn’t seek his own pride or even the throne. He was the heir to the throne after Saul. He didn’t seek that for himself.

But what you see is he believed in God. He put God’s will first. He put God first. And he made a covenant with David. And we see how he helped David, we see how he saved David multiple times. He was brave, he was selfless, he was sacrificial, and he was ferociously loyal. And even though he couldn’t always be with David, he was always for David. Right to the bitter end. You see, Jonathan was a true friend. Jonathan’s a great example of a true friend who stuck close.

So look, basically to be a true friend, a godly friend, a Christian friend, a biblical friend, it’s not rocket science. To say it this way, this is kind of like friendship for dummies. If you’re going to do friendship for dummies, this would kind of be it. True friends, biblical friends, just show up. They just show up. You can get all the other stuff kind of wrong and you need to grow in all these other areas, but if you do that, you’re halfway there. See, true friends stick with you. They’re with you when times are hard. They just show up for you. They’re by your side when you need it the most. See, that’s a true friend that sticks close.

And yet, there is one who is even better. And the last place I’ll get you to turn, you might not even need to turn there, is Proverbs 18:24. Proverbs 18:24, and it says:

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

Somebody even with many friends, many companions, and yet they can still come to ruin. Good friends aren’t found in quantity, they’re found in quality. But there is one who sticks closer than a brother. ’Cause even if we do all this well and we do this right and we become a true friend, we’ll still let each other down at times. We’ll still get it wrong. Even our closest friends, our most trusted friends can rub us the wrong way. Or even just in life, they move away, we don’t see them, they come and go with the seasons. But there is a truer friend. There is the truest friend.

You see, like we saw in John at the beginning of the service, it’s the greatest honour to be called a servant of God, the privilege it is to be called a servant of Christ. But in John 15, Jesus says to his disciples:

No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing. But I have called you friends.

Because we know, look, Jesus had so many followers, but he had seventy wider disciples at one point. Then he had the twelve. But even within the twelve, he had three. He had Peter, James, and John who were the closest to him. He didn’t have cliques. He loved them all equally, but you see just different layers of closeness. And yet even those friends, even those disciples, what we see is every one of them sinned. Every one of them spoke out of turn. Every one of them didn’t listen to him as they should have been. They all messed up. Let him down, and one of them even totally betrayed him. And even one of the three denied that he even knew him. And yet Jesus is the one who sticks closer than a brother. He is the one who sticks closer than a brother.

You know, and Paul talks about being on trial in 2 Timothy 4. That he goes on trial in front of the Romans. And what he says is:

At my first defense, no one came to stand by me, but all deserted me.

And he says, “but don’t let it be charged against them.” Why? ’Cause even though all deserted him, he says, “but the Lord stood by me and strengthened me.” When everyone else had left, he knew that Jesus in a very real way was with him, that he stood by him through it and even strengthened him.

So just to finish, God has given us a great gift of friendship. And the Proverbs has given us great wisdom on how to navigate that, what to look out for, to warn us against, God’s good design for a true friend. He wants us not to corrupt each other, but to build each other up, to build our character, to stick close. We can ultimately link arm in arm with each other and drawing us closer and closer to our Saviour and our Lord. But even as we do that as a church, we all know that each one of us has one mutual friend. He is the truest friend. He is the one that will never leave our side. He will never leave us. He will always stick closer than a brother.

And just as we’ll be singing in a minute, the hymn says, “Do your friends despise or forsake you? Take it to the Lord in prayer. In his arms, he’ll take and shield you. You’ll find a solace there.” The beginning of the hymn says, “What a friend we have in Jesus.” He is our truest friend. We’ll even come to see that soon as we come to the Lord’s table. Amen.

Let’s pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for the wisdom that is in the Proverbs. Lord, the wisdom that you give us to live by. Lord, we thank you for the gift of friendship. We ask, Lord, that you would help us, Lord, to care for one another as brothers and sisters. Those of us who call Jesus our friend. Lord, we thank you that we can call you a friend. Help us to be true friends, to build one another up, not to negatively influence each other, not to corrupt. Lord, to stick close, but Lord, ultimately to point each other more and more to Christ. Help us to be true friends that point to the truest friend. We ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.