Friendship: It's a Lot More Than Facebook Proverbs 27:5-10 Sermon 4 February 12th, 2012   Unless you’ve been living under a rock, then you know that social networking is the most popular online activity worldwide. Social networking accounted for nearly 1 in every 5 minutes spent online globally, ranking as the most engaging online activity worldwide. Social networking sites now reach 82% of the world’s Internet population, representing 1.2 billion users around the globe. The importance of Facebook in that cannot be overstated. Facebook reaches more than half (55%) of the world’s global audience and accounted for 1 in every 7 minutes spent online around the world.   Are you on Facebook? How many friends do you have? How many real friends do you have? I’m not talking about casual acquaintances. I’m talking about good friends, close friends, intimate friends. Most of us don’t have very many. The writer of Proverbs said it this way: “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity” (17:17). “There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (18:24). Have you ever had a friend who stuck closer than a brother (or sister)? I’ve had two or three in my lifetime. Such a friendship is a rare gift from God. It’s pure grace, not earned or deserved.   We’re working through the life app of friendship. Scripture has a lot to say about what it means to be a real friend. Each of us has known the pain of loneliness. For everyone who has wished for just one person with whom you could just be yourself, for everyone who’d like a friend who sticks closer than a brother, this talk is for you. Friends make life tolerable and enjoyable in a fallen world. Ever since Adam rebelled against God, alienation has been the norm in human experience. When we decided that we knew how to run our lives better than God did, we began to keep not only God at a distance, but other people. The result is that we find ourselves isolated and lonely. Friendships are the means of coping with that isolation.   Most people agree that one of the most distressing of all problems faced by frail humanity is that of loneliness. Thomas Wolfe said, “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.” Loneliness is something that afflicts everyone. Albert Einstein once commented, "It is strange to be known so universally, and yet to be so lonely." There are many people who can identify with that statement because loneliness is universal to human experience. Alienation is universal.   True friends are part of the cure. Friends are God’s gifts not only to make our lives a reflection of how He breaks down those barriers we construct, but to sweeten our existence and ease the pains that go with living in a world which has closed Him out.   Today we’re going to share some general insights about friendship from the pages of Scripture and then conclude with how to build friendship bridges.   Please turn to Proverbs 27:5-10 (p. 548). Though the book of Proverbs is a collection of individual maxims, it’s easy to see that in sections like this one a theme runs throughout.   1. How do you build good friendships? The simple answer is: Be a good friend. The essential basis of friendship is not who we know, but who we are. We tend to believe that friendship depends on meeting the right people, yet Scripture tells us that it depends on being the right person. That’s a critical matter in this period of time, when we live in a world that’s consumed with narcissism and selfishness. Friendship is sometimes thought of as something you engineer for your own comforts, much as you might use a thermostat or an electric blanket. Real friendship is not something that can be manipulated. Friends don’t seek out others for what they can get out of them.     A classified ad appeared in a rural New York newspaper: “Farmer, age 38, wishes to meet woman about 30 who owns tractor. Please enclose picture of the tractor.” I guess you’d call that a John Deere letter.   Of course, that raises a question. What exactly does it mean to be a good friend? If good friendships are not built on manipulating other people for what we can get from them, what are the characteristics of a good friend? The Bible has a great deal to say on the subject. The problem is putting it together in a way that reflects the complexity of friendships.   2. What are the signs of a good friend? To begin with, a good friend is demonstrates…   a. Faithfulness without gullibility. Good friends continue to be good friends through the good times and the bad. That’s a rare quality. “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity” (Prov. 17:17). “Most men will proclaim each his own goodness, but who can find a faithful man?” (20:6). Being able to count on someone in a pinch is one of the ways we divide our friends into close friends and mere acquaintances.   Yet, faithfulness tends to be a tedious word in our society. In his best selling book, Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah, said that individualism has won our hearts today. We honor the kingdom of self, and resent the claims others might try to lay on us. We lie to gain—not just financially, but even in our relationships. If I don’t think I’m getting anything out of a friendship, then it’s my duty to myself to move on. If a marriage isn’t working for me, there are no moral holds that bind me. I’m a free person. I have a right to my happiness, and the bonds of fidelity aren’t going to cramp my style.   Mark it down. Real friendship is costly. Faithfulness in our relationships, to each other, and even to God, requires a lot of us, and we’re not always ready to pay the price, especially if we’ve bought the lies of today’s world. And a world without faithful friends takes its toll on us.   One funeral director noted that funerals have changed a lot in the last few decades, “People don’t come to funerals anymore. Years ago you couldn’t have a service at the funeral home for someone who had died. There just wouldn’t be enough room for the family and the friends and the business associates who showed up. In fact, it was strange when somebody died alone, friendless, without someone to pay last respects.” But now, he says, “it happens all the time. We live for ourselves, and we die by ourselves.” Those are the habits of our poor hearts.   A counselor tells of a young woman who came to him, depressed, listless and bored with her life. What could she do about it? They had several sessions together, but it didn’t seem like they were getting anywhere. Then one day, she came bouncing with exuberance into his office. She was late for her appointment, but that didn’t matter. She was so excited; she was ready to take on the whole world! It seems that her car had died on her that morning. She was going to call and cancel her appointment, but just then she had a visitor. Her pastor stopped by for something and offered to drive her down. He did have to make a stop along the way, though. There was someone in the hospital he had to see. But that was okay with her. In fact, while he was making his call, she visited some people too, people she’d known from the past, some elderly folks who were there in the hospital. They talked for a while, she said, and then she read a Psalm for them, and they had prayer together. It was so exciting! “I haven’t felt this good in years!” she said.   “That’s great!” the counselor told her. “Now we’re getting somewhere! Now we know what you can do to cope with your depression!” But her face fell. “You don’t expect me to do this sort of thing again, do you?”   At the same time, faithfulness does not mean gullibility when it comes to people. Trust is something that must be earned. It’s nearly always a mistake to personally choose to become an intimate friend of any particular individual. Friendship is so precious precisely because two friends always choose each other as friends. If only one person does the choosing, it seldom becomes a thoroughly satisfactory experience. Friendships happen when people seek to be a friend to someone, but not with the end in view of having that person return anything. If it happens, it happens. Nobody ever lost anything by simply choosing to be a good friend to another because that’s something we’re all commanded to do anyway.   At the end of the Revolutionary War, when American independence had been gained and the Treat of Paris signed, the officers in the Continental Army gathered for a farewell for General George Washington. A couple of dozen men were there who’d fought alongside Washington for the eight years of the war. They’d suffered hunger and cold with him. They’d seen their men go barefoot in the snow; had gone into battle when the odds were heavy against them. They’d gone through a great deal together and now they were parting. Washington went to each one in turn, embraced him, and wept on his shoulder. Battle-hardened veterans sobbed openly. George Washington knew what it meant to have many friends. In a letter written just about this time, he wrote: “Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.” Being faithful does not mean gullible. It’s wonderful to have loyal friends, but that never happens without being a loyal friend. Proverbs 27:10 tells us to be sure and perpetuate these, “Do not forsake your own friend or your father’s friend, nor go to your brother’s house in the day of your calamity; For better is a neighbor nearby than a brother far away.” To have longstanding friends, be one. By definition, this means limiting the number of people you put in that category we call “close friends.”   The Word of God consistently teaches that you can have many friends, but only a few close ones. For example, most translations of Proverbs 18:24 read, “A man of many friends comes to ruin; but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” So being a good friend means being faithful without being gullible. A second characteristic of a good friend is…   b. Honesty without insensitivity. Verse five of our text tells us, “Open rebuke is better than love carefully concealed.” In other words, if your friend is doing something self-destructive or destructive of others, it’s better to rebuke him openly than to conceal your love for him and keep quiet. Do him the favor of giving him your best counsel. The next verse puts it even more graphically, and from the point of view of the person being rebuked: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but deceitful are the kisses of an enemy” (27:6).   The “kisses of an enemy” refers to the worst ingredient in any friendship, flattery: “A man who flatters his neighbor spreads a net for his feet” (29:5). “He who rebukes a man will find more favor afterward than he who flatters with the tongue” (28:23). The key word there is “afterward.” If it becomes necessary to become painfully honest with a friend, that friend may not immediately receive your counsel with joy. Words can hurt, but, like a surgeon’s scalpel, they can also be the instruments of ultimate healing. Part of being a good friend is not being put off by the immediate reaction, and believing Proverbs 28:23. Afterward, you will find favor. In the short range, you may not.   One of the dark periods of King David’s life was his relationship with his son, Adonijah. This young man was David’s oldest surviving son in David’s latter years. In spite of the fact that David had decided to have Solomon succeed him on the throne, Adonijah decided that he wanted to be king. Adonijah began to do kinglike things. He made himself a special chariot in which to ride around Jerusalem. He began to tell people of his aspirations to the throne. He even secured the services of fifty men to run down the street in front of his chariot so that people would know he was coming. David’s tragic mistake, when he heard about this, was to do nothing. He did not ask Adonijah to come to see him to discuss the matter. He did not pay his son the compliment of rebuking him. 1 Kings 1:6 says, “His father did not rebuke him at any time, even by saying, ‘Why have you done so?’”  Honesty may be hard, but it’s hard for friendships to go very far without it.   Jerry White is the Pacific Regional Director for the Navigators in the United States. He tells how one of his friends moved with her husband into a new neighborhood. Her next door neighbor welcomed her warmly and a friendship began to grow. After several months, the neighbor’s husband was assigned to a new job, which required many days of travel each month. In her loneliness, the neighbor began to lean on Jerry’s friend for support. She’d arrive early in the morning with two little children in tow and remain until lunch. She’d return home only to give her children a nap and then would show up again for several more hours.   After several weeks of this routine, the friend became frantic. She tried to do her housework and care for her children in spite of the constant presence of the neighbor and her rowdy children, but she dreaded hearing the early ring of the doorbell. Gentle hints received no response.   Finally, after much prayer and thought, the friend went to the frequent visitor’s home and said in a loving way, “You must build your own life. I know you are lonely, but staying with me every day is not the answer. You must deal with your situation and learn to live with it. I, too, need time alone in my home and with my own children. Our friendship is being ruined by too much time together.” The neighbor began to cry as she recognized her selfishness. After a good talk the women agreed to let their relationship return to a normal pattern.   So good friendships are marked by faithfulness without gullibility, and by honesty without insensitivity. Third, good friendships are marked by…   c. Acceptance without dependence. The balancing truth to the idea of being honest without being insensitive is that no friendship can stand a continual series of confrontations. The bedrock upon which all good friendships are built is that most of the faults of our friends we simply overlook. There are some things that cannot be overlooked, that’s true; but most faults have to be, just as we appreciate it when other people put up with our faults. Proverbs says, “The discretion of a man makes him slow to anger, and it is to his glory to overlook a transgression” (11:19). Trying to change a friend has its place, but not a high place. We have to love people without strings attached.   During the Korean War the phone rang one day in a fashionable home on the east coast of the United States. To her astonished delight, the woman who answered found herself speaking to her son. There had been long months of silence during his absence in Korea, and now she was both startled and delighted to hear that he was in San Diego, on his way home. After a few minutes of conversation, the son said, “Mom, I just wanted to let you know that I’m bringing a buddy home with me. He got hurt pretty bad, and he only has one eye, one arm, and one leg. I’d sure like him to live with us.” “Sure, son,” she replied. “He sounds like a brave man. We can find room for him for a while.” “Mom, you don’t understand. I want him to come live with us.” “Well, OK,” she relented. “We could try it for six months or so.” “No, Mom. I want him to stay always. He needs us. He’s only got one arm, one leg, and one eye. He’s really in bad shape.” His mother lost patience. “Son, you’re being pretty unrealistic about this. You’re being emotional because you’ve been in war. That boy will be a drag on you and a problem for all of us. Be reasonable.”   Suddenly, the phone clicked dead. The next day, the parents received a telegram from the Navy Department that crushed them. The night before, their son had leaped to his death from the twelfth floor of a San Diego hotel. A week later, they received the body and looked down with unspeakable sorrow on the dead body of their one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged son.   Friendships begin when people accept each other, with all their faults. You don’t have to be happy about another person’s faults to be accepting. You may even hope some day to earn the right to help your friend cope with certain things. But nobody likes to be around someone who makes them feel like they’re on probation.   A recognition of the principles of a good friendship provides a balance here. Accepting people and loving them as they are does not mean that you seek either to create a dependence on their part or your own. Proverbs 25:17 says, “Seldom set foot in your neighbor's house, lest he become weary of you and hate you.” Friendships do die of neglect, but many more are destroyed through being smothered to death.   Several years ago an extensive study was made of what makes good friendships. The conclusion was that good friendships have two components: (1) Friends earn the right to be close; and (2) friends don’t insist on being close. They give their friends room to breathe. Good friendships are made up of paradoxical elements: nearness that is earned and independence that is granted. Most of us pray for friends. We ought to pray for God to give us the strength and wisdom to be good friends to others. If we do that, we will find no shortage of good friends in our lives.   Of course, the ability to be a good friend and have good friends is made possible by the changes Jesus Christ makes when He takes up residence in the human heart. Friendship, in the end, is a spiritual issue. Jesus Christ can make you free of yourself enough to reach out in kindness to other people; and in His grace He can help you receive kindnesses from others as well.   Conclusion: If the closest thing that you have to real friendship is Facebook, then, my friend, you have a problem. It’s not easy to have strong friendships because it runs against the grain of American culture. Although we hunger for close relationships, we live in a way that makes it easier to keep things on a very superficial level. George Barna describes the inner tension we feel: "America is a nation in which the yearning for strong friendships far exceeds their existence. The majority of Americans feel that they do not have enough close friends. Among the reasons why we struggle with building and maintaining significant relationships are the high level of transience, which tears us away from those whom we have become friendly with; our inability, as a nation, to effectively communicate with each other; the fragmentation of our schedules, which makes sharing time together difficult; and the shifts in attitudes that make us less willing to make commitments to long-term relationships." Put it all together and this is what you have: We move too much, we don’t know how to talk to each other, we’re too busy, and we’re unwilling to commit ourselves to long-term relationships. No wonder we’re lonely. God never intended that His children live that way.   Can I share my dream for our church? My dream is that when people come into our church they won’t see a bunch of smiling plastic saints, they’ll see real people, and they will feel at home. My dream doesn’t have that much to do with buildings or budgets or staff or programs or numbers. Those things are just tools to help us reach people with God’s love. Those things are means to an end, not an end in themselves. My dream is to see our church be a clinic where broken people can come in and be mended. Where hurting people can come in and be healed. Where suffering people can come in and be comforted. My dream is to see our church be a lighthouse where people who’ve run aground on the rocks of sin can come in and find forgiveness and restoration through Jesus Christ.   Let me share two words that sum up what I want for this church: Caring Community. That’s very important. The church as a caring community, not just an organization, or a business…not just an institution. Instead it’s a community of believers who truly and deeply care for one another. That’s my dream. That this church will become a place where brothers and sisters will say, “Come on in. You’re welcome here. There’s a place for you here at Grace. We love you and will take you as you are.”   Yet, that won’t happen as long as we keep each other at arm’s length, play church. It won’t happen if we put up our deflector shields and wear masks so that no one can ever get close to us. In short, this church ought to be a place where broken people can come in and meet other broken people and together all of us broken people can get on the journey with Jesus Christ. As we journey together with Jesus, He can begin to put our lives back together again. That’s what the gospel is all about! Jesus Christ takes broken people and He makes them whole. May God give us that kind of church!   So how are you fixed for friends? It’s hard to be whole unless you’re willing to let a few people get close enough to you that they can help you become a better person. God wants us to be a caring community. He’s calling us as individuals to dare to open up to each other so that we can help each other get better—through the power of Jesus Christ. God never intended you to go through life all alone. He never intended that you would face your problems by yourself. There’s hardly a problem we couldn’t solve if we decided to face our problems together. There’s hardly a difficulty we couldn’t overcome if we decided to be honest with each other.   This is the hope of the church. That as Jesus works through you, He helps me. As Jesus works through me, He helps you. As Jesus works through each of us, He helps all of us as we help each other. Through that process the Lord Jesus helps us move beyond our brokenness into health and wholeness and holiness. In the end, as the Lord Jesus works through us to help each other, we individually are changed into His divine image.   That’s what the gospel is all about. That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “This is my commandment, that you love one another.” It’s one of the marks of the church—that we truly and deeply love each other. So where do we start? Let me suggest seven simple steps.   1. Take a Friendship Inventory of Your Life. Do you have any close friends right now? Are you letting people get close to you? Name your friends. Write them down one by one. Take an inventory and see where you stand.   2. Join an Adult Bible Fellowship or a small group. Does that sound trite and simple? It shouldn’t. Adult Bible Fellowships and small groups are a good place to begin. Join a class and begin to develop some relationships.   3. Find a ministry to serve in. There’s just something powerful about being part of a team, about serving together. Jesus had just three and a half years with His twelve disciples, yet amazingly the Lord didn’t spend that whole time teaching them. He sent them out together to work as a team.   4. Open Your Home to Others. Knock a hole in your cocoon. Start burrowing out instead of burrowing in. Nothing can quite take the place of inviting people into your own home. There is an intimacy about it that makes it easy to develop close friendships.   5. Make a Phone Call. This one isn’t hard at all. Perhaps you could begin by calling someone up this week and saying hello. Perhaps you could give them a word of encouragement. Let them know that your praying for them.   6. Write a Note to a Friend. Too shy to use the phone? Fine. Write a note. Most of us don’t get enough personal mail anyway. You could go a long way toward building a friendship just by jotting down a few words and using a stamp.   7. Hug somebody! If you absolutely don’t know what else to do, give a friend a hug. Sometimes a hug means more than a thousand words, a dozen letters or two dozen phone calls. A hug says “I care about you” in a very personal way. It might be the very thing that someone needs from you this week.   My point is simple and also very obvious. There is something you can do that will make a difference in your own life. There is something you can do that will make a difference in this church. No one has to stay lonely or feel cut off from everyone else. No one has to go through life alone. God designed us for community. He wants us to have and be real friends.