Form Wise Friendships

Sermon Transcript

How many friends do you have? There are many ways to think about that. For example, you might have well over 1000 Facebook friends. But if you were to look through your Facebook friends list, are you certain you’d remember who everyone is, or how you’re connected to them? Many of these friends won’t be there for you when the rain starts to pour; when your job’s a joke, you’re broke, and your love life is DOA… Similarly, I can look out right now and honestly and confidently say that there are many of you in this room that I consider to be friends, but any one of us only needs one, or maybe two, hands to count our “ride or die” friends. We only have the capacity for so many truly close friends.

We all know being a Facebook friend doesn’t equate to being a real friend. But the mere existence of social media points to the longing we all share for deep, meaningful relationships. We all want and need true friends. This is innate to how God created us! The desire for friendship – true companionship – is innate to who we are as humans. Our Triune God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – has eternally existed as three distinct persons, yet one God. God has eternally existed in perfect companionship within the Trinity. And God created us, as humans, in his own image, to be like him. God made us, among other things, to share rich, meaningful relationships with others. When God created all things, and everything was good, the first and only thing that was not good is that Adam was without a companion, so God created another person to complement him. While that certainly has something to say about God’s intention for marriage, it’s also so much broader – we were created to be in relationship with others, to enjoy friendship.

The desire and longing for true friends is something Proverbs takes as a given; it’s assumed. But what’s not a given, and what the author focuses his attention on, is the kind of friends we’ll seek and how we develop those friendships with others. A good summary for Proverbs’ teaching on friendship can be found in Proverbs 13:20, where we read, “Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.” When something goes wrong, or you’re faced with a difficult decision, the close friends you surround yourself with matter deeply. Over two decades of pastoral ministry, I’ve seen it go both ways – your closest friends are significant factors in making or breaking your marriage, your career, and even your walk with the Lord. Whether you walk with the wise or are a companion of fools is vital and urgent.

If you’re going to be wise, your closest friends need to be wise. If you surround yourself with fools, it’s not going to go well. That’s where we get our big idea for this morning: Form Wise Friendships. Form wise friendships. As we unpack this, we’re going to see essentially three ways, according to Proverbs, that we form wise friendships:
Choose wise friends
Exchange wise counsel
Stick together
The first piece of guidance from Solomon is to choose your friends wisely.
1. Choose Wise Friends
(Proverbs 13:20, 20:19, 22:24-25, 24:1-2, 24:21-22, 25:19, 29:24)
Forming wise friendships starts with choosing friends. That’s the beauty of friendships – you get to choose them! This is different than some other relationships, which are beautiful in their own right – we don’t choose our family and, in some sense, we don’t choose our church family. While we decide what church to join, it opens us up to a diversity of relationships that we probably wouldn’t choose, left to ourselves.

But friendships are something we choose. While we ought to love everyone, even our enemies, friends are those you choose to entrust yourself to, to open up to, and to draw them in to do the same. CS Lewis has famously written that the beginning of friendship is when one person says to another, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” There’s a mutuality in friendship – common interests, enjoyment of one another’s company.

But one of the main things Proverbs teaches us is that we need to discriminate when choosing friends – it’s far more than just getting along, there are wise and unwise ways to go about it. It’s not like little kids who can be indiscriminate and just play with whoever’s at the playground that day. My daughter, Joelle, just about wherever we go, will just walk up to another kid she’s never met and say, “Will you be my best friend?” Then for the next hour or two they’re having a blast together. When they see each other again, if they ever do, they pick back up wherever they left off. It’s not so simple for the rest of us.

Recall with me Proverbs 13:20, where we read, “Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.” Proverbs assumes our pursuit of friendship, but focuses our attention on the kind of person we seek friendship with. In fact, the weight of these proverbs is on who not to form friendships with. The rest of Proverbs gives us plenty to consider about what it means to be wise, and encourages us to walk with people who exemplify wisdom. But on the topic of friendship, the focus is on the second half of Proverbs 13:20 – “the companion of fools will suffer harm.” Similarly, in 1 Corinthians 15:33, we read, “Bad company corrupts good character” (NIV). The company we keep matters, and if we form friendships with fools, it’s not going to go well with us. So to encourage wise friendships, Proverbs focuses our attention on the kinds of people we shouldn’t form friendships with.

There are a few kinds of people Proverbs focuses on. But if we recognize these people as fools, those with bad character, why would Solomon need to warn us about them? I think if we’re honest, our deceitful hearts find something attractive about them. There are people who might initially seem like they’d be fun to be friends with, even if when we stop to think about it we see it’s clearly unwise.

Proverbs gives us at least 3 types of fools to avoid in friendship:
First, there’s The Gossip. In Proverbs 20:19, we read, “Whoever goes about slandering reveals secrets; therefore do not associate with a simple babbler.” While we might be drawn to be around someone who always has the inside scoop on others, remember that they’ll also have the inside scoop on you. This is not someone to confide in.
Second, there’s what I’ll call The Troublemaker. This sums up a number of proverbs. Even though our parents always warned us about the troublemakers, they did so because there’s something fun and exciting about being around these people: they’re tough, they instigate others, they rebel against authority. For example, Proverbs 22:24-25, “Make no friendship with a man given to anger, nor go with a wrathful man, 25 lest you learn his ways and entangle yourself in a snare” (cf., 24:1-2; 24:21-22; 29:24). There’s a rush being around people like this, especially when you’re younger. Look no further than the influence of guys like Andrew Tate. Troublemakers may seem fun to be around if you’re at a ballgame or out on a Saturday night. But eventually, you’ll become more like him and, when trouble comes, you’ll go down with him.
Lastly, there’s The Treacherous (Untrustworthy). When you see “treacherous” here, think untrustworthy. In Proverbs 25:19, we read, “Trusting in a treacherous man in time of trouble is like a bad tooth or a foot that slips.” You might wonder, who in their right mind would want to trust in someone who is untrustworthy? But it can be so easy sometimes to think that you’re the exception. This could be one of the people we mentioned a moment ago – the gossip or the troublemaker – or maybe it’s someone who seems to know how to get ahead, even if it involves using and discarding others along the way. Whatever it is that you think you have to gain by being around this person allows you to convince yourself that you’re the exception.

All these examples bring us back to the general principle we saw in Proverbs 13:20, “Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.” We’ve covered the negative – who not to choose as friends – but what about the positive? What does it mean to walk with the wise? At the heart of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. We see this in Proverbs 1:7, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction. At the heart of what Proverbs teaches us about wisdom is essentially godliness, or Christlikeness. The truly wise person is wise because their life is centered on the Lord. That would lead us to think that choosing friends wisely would involve forming friendships centered on the Lord.

A helpful principle for Christians is this: Your church community should be your primary community, and your church friends should be your primary friends. For a Christian, your church community should be your primary community, and your church friends should be your primary friends. There are a couple reasons I say this. First, if we’re called to walk with the wise, and the core of wisdom is that the Lord is at the center of a person’s life, look around right now and you’ll see a bunch of people where that’s true for them: Christians, growing in Christlikeness, loving what God loves and hating what God hates. This is especially true for covenant members of our church, where we, collectively, are affirming that this person fears the Lord. But second, to walk with the wise in a meaningful way typically means you’re walking with them. Proximity matters! While it doesn’t mean that our church friends are our only friends, we’ll see especially in the next couple points that we need wise friends who are here. Two of my oldest and closest friends are in Connecticut and Ohio, but I can’t walk with them the way I can walk with some of my brothers in this church. Even if you may only be in Philly for a year or two, who can you walk with while you’re here?

With all of this in mind, I want to share a few questions that would be helpful for each of us to ask ourselves:
Who are your close friends? Who are you entrusting yourself to, opening up to, and drawing in to do the same?
Are there any foolish friends you need to take a step back from? Perhaps there are friends from your past or work friends who aren’t walking with Christ and aren’t influencing you to walk with Christ either.
What would it look like for you to take a step toward forming wise friendships? There may be an internal or external focus here. Internally, how can you cultivate such a walk with Christ that you attract those seeking wise friendships? Or externally, what might be a next step in pursuing a wise friendship with someone in our church?
Related to this, and before we get into the final two points which focus on how rich, meaningful friendships are formed after they begin, I think it’s important to acknowledge something: Forming adult friendships is difficult and takes intentionality. The idea that we choose our friends is a beautiful thing, but it’s also what can make it so difficult. That can be a particularly stark reality when you’re transitioning from college life. Many of you don’t need to think back as far as I do about what it was like forming friendships in college. By nature of what college is, friendships can form quickly and easily. You’re surrounded by people who are the same age and the same life stage, sharing your whole lives together, living together, eating in the dining hall together, sharing so many life experiences at a particularly formative age. It’s no wonder that when we become close with a couple other people, it can go from just getting to know one another to rich, meaningful friendship in a matter of weeks. By the end of a semester, you’ve forged a bond that might last the rest of your life.
It’s so natural, then, to graduate, start your job, and join a church where you’re expecting to forge new friendships just like you had in college. But the reality is, most of us aren’t living with one another, we’re not working together, we’re not all in the same life stage, and we all have more demands on our lives than we did in college – increasingly so as people get married and have children. As adults, forming rich, meaningful friendships is more challenging, and it takes more time.
I say this at this point because it can be a significant source of discouragement – whether you’re fresh out of college or further along in life – to not have the friendships you long for. For many, choosing friends wisely may seem like the easy part, but forging rich, meaningful friendships can be discouraging when it doesn’t come as easy as it did in an earlier life stage. But here’s what I can say: it’s possible, and it’s worth it! It just takes a level of intentionality that wasn’t required in college or earlier stages of life.
A couple helpful principles might be consistency and courage. For consistency, it’s a matter of pressing in and showing up on a consistent basis. Community isn’t built in like it was in earlier stages of life. In a setting like Citylight, it takes pressing in – being present on Sundays, part of a Citygroup, serving alongside others, participating in Citylight Institute classes – all of these are opportunities to meet and get to know people, and the best way to get the most out of them is being consistent. But it also takes courage – you have to put yourself out there and engage with others. If you think you might get along with someone, invite them to grab coffee or go for a walk, have them over for dinner – if you really want to start forging something, go camping or take a beach day together down the shore. You can also visit citylightphilly.com/meetups or see the cards out at the welcome center by the coffee – if you play soccer, like to go for walks in the wissahickon, are into board games or visual art, are a mom, or over 50, there’s a group of others in our church who are like you – citylightphilly.com/meetups. Forging adult friendships takes effort in both consistency and courage, but it’s worth it.
2. Exchange Wise Counsel
(Proverbs 27:5-6, 27:9, 27:17)
With that said, the next way we form wise friendships: by exchanging wise counsel. Wise friendships aren’t just chosen, they’re formed. Choosing friends is just the beginning of that process, but friendships need to be forged over time. And exchanging wise counsel is how wise friends make their already wise friends even wiser. There are a few proverbs, all from chapter 27, that help us see the value of this. We’re going to look at them in the opposite order they appear in Proverbs so we can go from broad to more specific.
First, Proverbs 27:17, Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another. True friends make one another better. 20 years ago, when Shanell and I got married, the groomsmen’s gift that I chose for the men standing by my side was a small leatherman, basically a fancy pocket knife, with this verse inscribed on it. As I stood there to marry Shanell, those men standing by my side had sharpened me to be a better man than I would be without them. So much of that sharpening happens through encouragement and words of counsel, which leads us to Proverbs 27:9.
Proverbs 27:9, Oil and perfume make the heart glad, and the sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel. Friends counsel one another with sincerity and seriousness. The same day I was sitting down to start writing this sermon, a guy in my Citygroup shared about a dilemma he was facing in our guys’ group chat. Within an hour, before I even saw it, four guys had chimed in with gentle, earnest counsel to help him figure out what to do. That’s a picture of the sweet friendship this proverb is describing.
One thing that was particularly sweet about this little exchange was the earnestness. I’m sure I’m not the only one who can find earnestness to be a little uncomfortable at times. One area I’m realizing I need to grow is resisting the temptation to lighten the mood or crack a joke when sincerity and seriousness are called for. In the exchange I mentioned, all four of the men who responded received the request for help with the seriousness it deserved. There were no jokes, wise cracks, or light-hearted comments. The sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel.
Lastly, Proverbs 27:5-6, Better is open rebuke than hidden love. 6 Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy. True friends are willing to say hard things to those they love. It’s genuine, other-focused love that gives you the courage to tell someone a hard truth that’s in their best interest, even if it might be costly on your part. We have to admit that if there’s something we need to say to a friend for their own growth in Christ, and we don’t say it, it’s because we love ourselves more than we love them. There really is no other reason than our own self-interest. According to this proverb, not saying something is like kisses from an enemy.
But there is a cost to these kinds of conversations. Going back to Proverbs 27:17, sharpening iron with iron involves friction and sparks. Or here in verse 6, you see that these rebukes are the wounds of a friend. There are times when a wound is necessary – just ask any surgeon. If a surgeon needs to cut me open to remove my appendix before it bursts, please do! Shout out to my friend for whom this just happened last week. He will happily tell you that it was not pleasant, but it was necessary, and he’s grateful for the surgery. When it’s necessary, a faithful friend will have the courage to wound someone they love.
But these wounds are not always necessary, or even helpful. That’s why it’s so important what friends you choose. Do they have the wisdom to know when they ought to lean in, and when they ought to let it go? Do they have the wisdom and knowledge of you to do it tactfully? Here’s a simple grid that can be helpful in discerning when a hard conversation is warranted:
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Whether or not to have a hard conversation with a friend depends both on 1) how clear it is, and 2) how serious it is.
If it’s both clear and serious, you should probably have the conversation. Pastor Matt covered this a bit last week, and the clearest example is your friend is in unrepentant sin. In Matthew 18:15-17, Jesus gives us a paradigm for what this might look like. Out of love for this friend, we must lean in and not delay; don’t let the funk get funkier.
If it’s neither clear nor serious, you probably don’t need to have the conversation, just let it go.
If it’s clear but not serious, or serious but not clear, you really need wisdom to know whether that’s a conversation you should have, and it may depend on how much trust you’ve built with the friend.
However, exchanging wise counsel involves both giving and receiving. How open are you to receiving a loving wound from a friend? It takes vulnerability. Do you have friends who know you well enough to know when you need this? Or, taking it one step further, do you have a close friend where you could say: “Tell me something that will be good for me, but might be hard to hear?”
We need to willingly seek our friends’ input on serious matters of wisdom. If you’re dating someone, do your close friends know them well, and have you asked them if this is a good and wise relationship for you? Are there any areas of your life that you consider off-limits to those closest to you – even your sexuality and your finances?
One of the most dangerous places is the echo chamber of our own mind, where we can rationalize just about anything. But one of the most powerful tools the Lord has given us to grow in wisdom are our close friends. “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another” (Prov. 27:17). We need the courage to love our close friends enough to share hard things, and we need the humility to vulnerably submit ourselves to our close friends in the same way, with nothing off limits.
Exchanging wise counsel is one of the means the Lord uses to help us forge rich, meaningful friendships. But another way we forge wise friendships is by enduring hardship together. Wise friends stick together.
3. Stick Together
(Proverbs 17:17, 18:24, 27:10)
In Proverbs 17:17, we read, “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.“ The times where true friends are most needed are also the times when rich, meaningful friendships are forged. A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. A true friend will stick with you through thick and thin. A great example that comes to mind for me is Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings. There were times when Frodo was going through a dark time and was unpleasant to be around, but there was Sam, right by his side, helping him and encouraging him. They endured significant hardship together, and Sam was the great friend that Frodo needed. Maybe you’ve experienced this – the friend that stays up late praying with you, walks closely with you during a period of depression, the friend who is there when your world is falling apart. Maybe you’ve been that friend.

Proverbs also gives a couple examples of the beauty of friendship even compared to our own families. In Proverbs 18:24, we read, “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” First, a man of many companions may come to ruin. These companions, as it’s used here, are not the ones who will love you at all times or are born for adversity. When things get particularly hard, these aren’t the people who will be around and endure the hardship with you. But, it says, there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. Any given person will only need one hand, maybe two, to count these kind of friends. The presence of these people in your life is so unique that it even surpasses the bond of a sibling. It could be that your actual brother or sister is also one of these friends for you, but that’s not a given. When adversity comes, we need this kind of friendship.

Proverbs 27:10 gives us another angle on this: “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.” I want to focus mainly on the end of this proverb: “Better is a neighbor who is near than a brother who is far away.” I mentioned this before, but I want to mention it again: proximity matters. This is particularly meaningful for many of us here, as we’re not from Philly – many of us are transplants and some of our families are pretty far away. We may have great relationships with our families, and maybe we have close friends from growing up or college that we’ve kept up with, but we need rich, meaningful friendships here. That can be particularly hard in an increasingly transient world, and particularly in a transient city like Philly. But we can’t underestimate the value of having a friend that sticks closer than a brother, who is also our neighbor.

These kinds of friendships are so valuable that it should factor deeply into decisions any of us might face related to uprooting for a job, or even to be closer to family. Over the past decade of being part of the staff here at Citylight, there are countless times when someone has moved away only to lament the loss of what they’d forged here in our church community. It’s not that the friendships ended, by any means, but whether it’s a couple hours away or across the country, the relationship isn’t the same. Proximity matters. At best, it involves starting that long, intentional path of forming adult friendships over again, or at worst there’s a chance that level of deep, meaningful friendship eludes you.

Here’s the thing: If you’re not currently in a season of adversity, it’s really easy to acknowledge you need close friends to walk with you through difficult times – that you need a Sam to your Frodo. But if you know the story, there’s a point when Frodo didn’t want Sam around. When adversity comes, there’s a strong temptation to isolate and withdraw. Why does this happen? What are the reasons why godly, otherwise sane people withdraw from their wise friends and isolate themselves when things get hard?

One key reason is that internal echo chamber. When we’re suffering or facing some kind of hardship, it can be really tempting to believe untrue things about God, ourselves, or others or rationalize ungodly thoughts and behaviors. Suffering can lead you to turn to whatever vices seem to promise immediate comfort, even if they’ll only lead you to ruin, and then hide from others out of shame. But a true friend sticks closer than a brother, and is born for adversity. Even if you’ve already started to believe untrue things or taken steps down a dark path, vulnerability before the Lord and your friends is the only way forward.

The other side of this is how we can be Sam to our friend’s Frodo. We will all have friends who will isolate and withdraw in the midst of adversity. What will it take for you to push through that out of love for your friend? It could be as simple as sending a text if your friend doesn’t show up to Citygroup. Or showing up when your friend experiences a tragedy. Perhaps it’s relying on God’s grace to continue to be a good, stable friend, even when your friend is making it difficult. If you’re walking with a friend through an extended season of suffering, it might involve finding ways to more deeply know your friend and love them in a way they feel loved. How can you be a friend that sticks closer than a brother?
Conclusion/Gospel
We live in a broken and fallen world. Sin alienates us from one another, leading us to value self-interest over the interests of others. While we long for rich, meaningful relationships, they can be hard to come by. We experience loneliness, or are grieving broken friendships, which are a couple of the most painful things we can experience. Maybe you’re new to the area and have struggled to form close friendships, or maybe the demands of your life make maintaining friendships particularly difficult. Or someone you’ve poured ourselves into breaks our trust or pulls away. These insights into forming wise friendships are all well and good, but right now you’re discouraged.

There is one friend who perfectly exemplifies every Proverb we’ve considered today. In John 15:12–17, Jesus says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 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 and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. 17 These things I command you, so that you will love one another.”

Jesus is the ultimate friend. If you are in Christ, he has chosen you and is the wise friend who makes you wiser. He is full of grace and truth, the Wonderful Counselor, wisdom personified. In 2 Timothy 4, the Apostle Paul writes that, as he was defending himself before Caesar, no one came to stand by him. But, he says in verse 17, “the Lord stood by me and strengthened me, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it.” The Lord will stand by you and strengthen you in whatever adversity you’re facing; he has promised that he will never leave you or forsake you (Heb. 13:5).

Let’s pray.