A Transcription of Tim Keller's "Friendship"

Transcription:

We are looking some more at this subject wisdom in the book of Proverbs. In the bible wisdom is certainly not less than being moral and good but it’s much more. It’s being so in touch with reality that you know what is the right thing to do in the vast majority of the situations that the moral rules don’t apply to. The vast majority of your choices, your decisions, you’re going have a whole lot of different choices in front of you and in most cases no matter what your understanding of morality is, no matter what your moral standards are there will be many many many options that are all moral, they are all allowable morally but which one is the wise one? Wisdom is the ability to know what the right thing is to do in the situations that the moral rules don’t address! Now the theme today is a cruel one in the book of proverbs. Proverbs says you’re not going to be a wise person, you will not lead a wise life unless you are great at choosing, forging and keeping terrific friendships. You will not make it in life unless you are really good at choosing, forging and keeping terrific friendship. And if we are going to take a look at these verses on proverbs we can understand them and learn from them under these four headings. We are going to learn the uniqueness friendship, we are going to learn how we discover a friend, then thirdly how we forge a friend and last of all where we get the power for friendship. The unique necessity of friendship, the discovery of friendship, the forging and building of a friendship and how you get the power to do that. First let’s take a look at uniqueness of friendship. Take a look at the first two verses on the page, especially the second one. There is a friendship who sticks closer than a brother. Now you know what that is saying? A friend can be better than a sibling and you got to realize this is being said in a culture that was much more family oriented than ours. Far more family oriented than ours. But why would that be? Why would the friend be better than the sibling? But look at verse 17, the first verse, a friend loves at all times, but a sibling is for adversity. Now here’s what this is trying to say. Your sibling, people you are related to by blood, your family there are going to be there for you in adversity because they care, there’s loyalty, there’s memory, they are going to be there for you, but they may not like you. You know, they may not want to go out for a drink with you, you’re not the person they want to hang out with, you see. A friend is someone whose chosen you. And the word sticks, and a friend who sticks closer than a brother, is a hebrew word that is often translated in the old testament “cleave”. And it means commitment out of a passionate love. A friend is better in many ways than a sibling. And this is trying to say something that the bible says, especially the book of proverbs and that is, there is a unique necessity to friendship. Friendship brings something into your life that family can’t bring, that romance can’t bring, that neighbors can’t bring, that no nothing else can bring and you got to remember that because every culture will be putting friendship on the back seat and yet it is irreplaceable. That’s the first point. Why? Well, a liberal individualistic culture like ours, always puts erotic love, romantic love, sexual love first. Take a look at our culture. Do we have all these glossy magazines, you know, plastered across the front of these glossy magazines, “whose best friend with who?” No. No it’s who’s sleeping with who? Why would you care if who’s best friend with who, sleeping I want to know, right? I mean you want to know. Maybe I want to know. In this stack let’s put all the CD songs about romantic love and then over here let’s put all the songs about friendship. Or you know interesting, just quick example, the one blockbuster trilogy, one blockbuster set of movies that’s ever been made, not about romance, not about family, but about friendship is the Lord of the Rings. The beauty of friendship is the main theme of it. However, if you’ve read the book you’ll know, the romantic stuff is in the appendices. It’s in the appendices. But of course for hollywood, we had to pull that out of the appendices and we had to stick it center, we had Aragorn and Arwen love affair had to be right in the center, it wasn’t in the book, why? You see, our culture isn’t turned on by friendship! It’s not the most important thing, to Tolkien that was what the book was about! In a liberal individualistic culture, romance is the most important relationship. In a traditional conservative culture, family see, father, mother, sibling, brother, sister, that’s the most important. In a socialistic communitarian culture, it’s the civic relationships, it’s your relationship with your neighbors but every culture will always put friendship into the second, into the back seat. Why? Because friendship is not biological, or sociological necessity. It’s the only love that is absolutely deliberate, it will not push itself upon you. C.S. Lewis on his famous essay on friendship says, “friendship is the least instinctive and organic biological, the least necessary of all our loves. It has the least commerce with our physical system. There’s nothing throaty about it. Nothing that quickens the pulse or turns you red and pale.” And what this means of course, if it was about erotic love you wouldn’t exist, it wasn’t for family love you wouldn’t have been reared, if it’s not for neighbor love, you couldn’t even survive, crime and oppression and that sort of thing. And therefore in a busy culture like ours, in an incredibly busy culture like ours, where we are working long hours, traveling, all the other loves, all the other relationships, push themselves upon you, oh yeah they will. You’ll still, you still got to deal with your family, you still got to have civic relationships, you got to have vocational networking to have a job. You still have got to still want to have a romance but friendship, which takes incredibly deliberate amount of intentionally spent time, overtime, we’ll always get squeezed out. And yet the book of proverbs says, you won’t have it without friends, friendship love brings something into your life that is unique, I mean you’re talking about a family oriented traditional culture that says that a friend in many ways, in many ways is better than a sibling, brings things in your life that a sibling can’t. The book of proverbs continually says, fools perish either for lack of friends, or for poorly chosen friends. See, we walk around in our culture saying, “I am who I choose to be”, you are not who you choose to be, I’ll tell you who you are. In the early stages of your life you are what your family made you. And then the rest of your life, you are what your friends make you. It’s your community that forms you, it’s your community that shapes you, in the early days, it’s who your family was that shaped you and now who your friends are. And the book of proverbs says, that you perish for a lack of, or wrong friends. Point one.

Alright then what do we do? How do we get friends? Alright point two, we learn about the discovery of friends. What do you mean by the discovery of friends. Go to the second proverb just briefly. A man of many companions may come to ruins but a friend sticks closer than a brother. Notice, it’s not a contrast between two equal groups of people. Companions, acquaintances, associates, associations, you can have many, one friend and this is getting across the idea that true friends aren’t that many, you can’t have many. They are relatively rare. Compared to your other relationships, relatively rare. And, let’s go two-thirds of the way down, here’s the reason why, two-thirds way down the page, chapter 27 verse 9, where it says perfume and incense bring joy to the heart, and the pleasantness of one’s friend springs from earnest counsel. The pleasantness of one’s friend, this word pleasantness is a word for sweetness, it’s a word that always had to do with honey. Sweetness. This is saying, that real friendship is like sweet food, delectably sweet food. Here’s why that’s pretty interesting. One of the things that suprised me and of course what do I know about cooking anyway but all the commentators pointed out that when the book of proverbs was written, nobody had sugar yet. Nobody had sugar yet. People didn’t know how to sweeten food. You know today, you can make almost any food sweet it all depends on what you want to do, you create sweeten food but back then you had to discover sweeten food. There were certain food that were naturally sweet and that was it. What’s that point us to? Just this. Friendship requires a foundation, an affinity, a common love, a common vision that can’t be created that can only be discovered. Now one minute I’m going to turn around and say that the foundation isn’t enough, you have to build on the foundation but the foundation, there’s an affinity that must be discovered, it cannot be created. The two essays I looked at in getting ready for the sermon were Ralph Walder Emerson’s famous essay on friendship which you can find on the internet and C.S. Lewis’ famous essay on friendship which is in his book The Four Loves and they both talk about this. Ralph Walder Emerson says this, friendship does not ask “do you love me? so much as “do you see the same truth?”” Are you passionate about the same thing. Now C.S. Lewis puts it like this, “the typical expression of opening friendship would be something like, “what you too?” I thought I was the only one. That’s the beginning of friendship. You too! I thought I was the only one. So though we can have erotic love and friendship in the same person, in some ways there’s something less likely like a friendship than a love affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love. Friends hardly ever talk about their friendship. Lovers are face to face absorbed on one another, friends are side by side, shoulder to shoulder on common interests, you see what the point is there? What makes a friend is not, “oh do you want to be my friend? But, you too? You think that’s important too? You love that too?” And that creates a friend and that’s the reason why it’s a unique, it brings something unique in your life. And Lewis goes on to really make it very very plain. He says “this is why those pathetic people who simply want friends can’t never make any. The very condition for having friends is that you would want something else besides friends. If someone asks you, “do you see the same truth?” And your honest answer is, “I really don’t care about that, I just want you to be my friend.” Then no friendship can arise. There would be nothing for the friendship to be about! Those who have nothing, can share nothing. Those who are going nowhere, can have no fellow travelers.” And that’s the reason why, first of all, friendship is got to be something that you discover. And by the way, this is the reason why Aelred of Rievaulx who’s a 12th century monk who wrote a whole book on friendship said that of all of the loves, we are not talking about parent child and brother, sister and husband, wife, or you know, for all the loves, this is the one he says that has the most, least intrigue. In other words, this is the least, icky love. This is the love in which you don’t constantly have as many hurt feelings and people upset and talking “what about our relationships?!” You see. It has to be discovered before it can be forged to the foundation. But! Let’s keep on going, in fact let me just say this to make sure it’s clear, real true friendship, cannot only be forged, it must be discovered, but now, it cannot only be discovered, it must be forged. The foundation is not enough, you’ve got to build. And the book of proverbs says there are four things you must do to create friend, a true friendship. Now you could read these four things as the four marks of a true friendship, sort of as an evaluative guide, or you could look at them as four building blocks for creating a friendship, that’s fine, either way. And here’s what these four are. The four marks of true friendship are constancy, carefulness, candor and council. Constancy, carefulness, candor and council. Now let’s spend a little time on them because they are so crucial. First of all, constancy. Now what do we mean by constancy, I guess let’s take a look at a, the first two verses one last time. A friend loves at all times, ah what does that mean, does that mean if your friends you spend all of your time together? No because don’t forget the third of the proverbs, too much of you and he will hate you. And you laughed when it was read. Of course, when it says what does it mean when it says friends love at all times, that means all kinds of time. Good times, bad times. Ordinary time. Routine. In other words, you can’t be a friend without availability. You cannot be a friend without availability. Constant availability. That’s part of what constancy means. But constancy doesn’t just mean availability, it also means being there when the chips are down. And that’s what verse 18:24, the second verse is really about, and look carefully, look what the contrast is. A man of many companions may come to ruin but there’s a friend who sticks closer than a brother. A friend will not let you go to ruin. Now this isn’t maybe, I hope...most people know and want to know you because you are useful to them. And before you get bent out of shape about that I want you to realize that most of the people you know, because they are useful to you. Most of the companions, your associates, most of the people you know, why do you know them? Why do you want to know them? Because they are useful to you! Some of them are useful for having a good time! Some of them are using for meeting other people! Some of them are useful for getting things done! But you see the people who only know you because the chips are down and you're starting to collapse and when it’s going to take a lot a lot of involvement and expenditure, to stay in a close relationships to you as your life is collapsing, that’s when your companions say call me if you need anything. But a friend is there, because a friend is deliberately has made you not a means to an end but an end in yourself. A friend goes to the mat, a friend say I will do whatever it takes from keep you from falling into ruin. I won’t let you get to the bottom, I won’t! I’ll be there even when it cost me something. Constancy. That’s a friend. Ok? A fair weather friend of course isn’t a friend. Secondly. Carefulness. Now the carefulness thing is pretty interesting and we have to ask ourselves couple of questions. Why does a man, deceive his neighbor and say, “I was only joking!” Why does a man loudly bless his neighbor in the morning and it will be taken as a curse. Here’s a man who is emotionally disconnected. I don’t know your innermost, your inner topography enough to know that this joke actually hurts you. I don’t know enough about how you, what kind of morning person you are or lack thereof to know what I can do in the morning. But most of all, look at the fourth one down, the fourth proverb down. Like one who takes a garment on a cold day, or like vinegar poured on soda is one who sings songs to a heavy heart. Now what is a singing song to a heavy heart? Singing to a, by the way the word song there means a song of joy. There’s a emotional disconnection. I could be happy when you are sad. If I could be happy when you are sad, you are not my friend. I’m not your friend. Or put it you like this. Charley Drew's mother in law has told, has a little saying Kathy and I, try not to tell other parents, Charley Drew’s mother in law says “here’s the essence of parenting, once you start to have children you realize for the rest of your life you’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.” For rest of your life your only as happy as your unhappiest child. Why? Because automatically whether you want to or not, you are emotionally connected, you are emotionally vulnerable, you can’t sing songs when their hearts heavy. It just can’t happen. But it’s automatic! Here’s what so amazing and scary about friendship. In friendship, you give the gift of emotional connection voluntarily. See here’s how you can tell whether you really let that person become your friend or that person’s really your friend, they can’t go about singing songs when you are heavy hearted. They can’t, go about their job when you are collapsing. But you see for a friend to do that, that’s amazing because that’s such a gift! It’s a voluntary gift. A friend is someone, that’s one of the reason why you can’t have too many because you just can’t survive too many friends in some ways. But a friend creates that emotional connection as a gift and as a result is unbelievably emotionally sensitive to you. Knows how you are feeling, and is therefore not using you but rather is committed to your emotional flourishing because he or she cannot flourish without your emotional flourishing as well. So first of all constancy. Secondly, incredible sensitivity, emotional connection, emotional vulnerability but third, and I say but third because you’ll see in a minute it’s a contrast, constancy, carefulness, but four thing you have to do for true friendship candor. Truth telling. Look here in the middle. “Better is open rebuke than hidden love, wounds of a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.” Now do you see what the metaphors are? They are deliberately vivid, they are deliberately paradoxical, friendly wounds, wounding kisses. Now the old king James says it this way, verse 6, “faithful are the wounds of a friend”, what is this? What are friendly wounds? And a answer is a friendly wound is a metaphor for words that your friend needs that are going to be painful for that friend to hear and yet they have to hear them. Now what if you are afraid to say, what really needs to be said? Then you are not a friend. Look at the parallelism. This is the way to understand Hebrew poetry. Look at verse five and six. The second clause of verse five talks about hidden love, now that is another metaphor what it’s trying to say is, this is a person who thinks you’re loving by hiding the truth. You say, “oh I love that person so much to confront, oh love that person too much to tell them the truth.” But look at what is parallel to verse six. Hiding, covering up the truth out of love in verse five is the same as the work of an enemy in verse six. It’s parallel to the second clause of verse six. It’s just as bad as Judas betraying with a kiss. Because why? Because if you say, “oh I love the person too much to tell them the truth”, what you really mean is I love myself too much to go through that. You’re not being a friend. Look at the very last verse on the page, 29:5, “whoever flatters his neighbors is spreading nets for his feet.” Now what does that mean? If you, instead of telling your friend what wrong with him or her, so that the person gets an accurate view of both their strength and weaknesses, if you don’t do that, you are setting them up for disastrous life as much as if you are putting him, their foot on a bear trap. Why? Because they are going to make their decisions on the basis of what they think they are, who they are, and they are going to be making one disastrous decision after another because they are out of touch with reality because of their so called friends. And by the way the richer, the more powerful you are, the more likely your friends are doing this to you. And they are not really your friends, go get some, go get some real friends. Now, by the way you notice how hard this is. Carefulness and candor. Candor is I’m telling the truth but carefulness is I’m so emotionally connected that the painful words that I’m going to tell you are going to create pain for me! This is the reason why it’s so hard to be a friend. You can either be careful and just shut up or you can either be candid and not really care. Either of those ways aren’t painful but to be a friend is constant pain because you have to be both careful and candid and constant. And last of all they fourth of the marks of a true friend, the fourth of the building blocks of a true friendship are counsil. And let’s go back to the verse I mentioned two-thirds the way down before, chapter 27 verse 9. “The pleasantness of one’s friend springs from his earnest counsel.” Now that word earnest counsel, the word earnest comes from the heart and the word counsel means secrets. It means to tell someone a secret. It means to confide in somebody. What is this talking about? Very recently, a friend of mine called me up, spent quite a long time talking and when he spoke to me, he was telling me he was more emotionally vulnerable than he’s ever been telling me about his own weaknesses, telling me secrets about himself that he’s never told me before. Being more vulnerable than never and yet at the very same time, at the very same moment, reading me the riot act about the ways in which my life need to change or I was going to be in a lot of trouble. And when you look, and when I started reflect on that, very probably life changing conversation. In light of what the bible says, here I suddenly realize how unique that is. A therapist does need to give you advice, but if the therapist or the pastor or anybody gets that self revealing every time you get the advice, that’s not right! But on the other hand, there’s a kind of person who just ventilates, just says “I want to tell you my feelings, I’m going to tell you my feelings.” But it’s not really counseling you. This is something that only a really close friend can do and you desperately need it. You’re never going to become the person you need to be, you can be without it. And there’s two aspects to this counsel. Here, it’s pleasant. It’s reassuring. But look down the third from the bottom. The third proverb from the bottom. “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” If you have a friendship in which there’s intimacy and there is sharing from the heart and there’s transparency and you're letting one another see to the bottom, and you’re talking about one another’s things but if the counsels always reassuring and sweet, or if it’s always challenging and clashing, there’s a emotional exploitation going on. Somebody is using someone or maybe you are both doing it for each other. But only if it goes back and forth, and you’re getting that kind of counsel, only if there’s that kind of transparency, only if there’s that kind of concern, only if there’s that kind of wisdom, only if there’s that kind of balance, will you have a real friend and will you be the person that you, will you become the person that you can be. So there is, look at the four; constancy, carefulness, candor and counsel or if you want to summarize them into two, a friend always let’s you in, never let’s you down. Transparent, always let’s you in, candor and counsel, but therefore never let’s you down. Constancy and carefulness. Always let’s you in, never let’s you down, if you find somebody who’s got that common affinity with you, the foundation and you use those building blocks, you’ve got a friend. Ok? Foundation plus blocks plus time and you’ve got one friend. Now we could end there and say, go and do likewise. But I want to tell you that we have a bigger problem perhaps than maybe some of you recognize and if you don’t recognize, let me help you along. If you read this page and actually I could triple it with statements of what real friends are like from the book of proverbs, if you read this page and you get a picture of the ideal friend, the ideal friend, a friend that always gives you the truth even though the friend is experience pain in doing so. A friend who is cleaves to you and is faithful to you so that you are never ruined. A friend who is a emotionally connected and gets into your shoes. When you read the description of a perfect friend, you’ll find that two things happen to you just like they happen to me as I was preparing. On the one hand, there’s a feeling of longing. And one of the reasons why there’s such a feeling of longing is because we live in a culture in which our friends are taken away from us faster than we can forge them. It’s called mobility. I mean not only do we have less time in which to stick forging friendship, friendship forging we have less time, our hours are longer but also they move away or you move away, they are taken away from us or we are taken away from them faster than we can free forge them. Forge new ones. So when you read about a perfect friend, there’s a longing that comes and the reason it comes is because we live in a culture in which we do not have all the friend our hearts need. We do not have all the friends our hearts need. But the second response to reading about this profile of true friendship of a true friend is not so, is different. I don’t just feel find it, filling me with longing and I also find the profile to be crushing. You know why it’s crushing? Because when you measure yourself according to this, you begin to realize something. Let us admit that one of the reason we do not have the friends that are hearts need is not because of our terrible mobile society but because we aren’t the friends we should be. The reason why we don’t have enough great friends is because we are not great friends! The reason why we don’t have people who are giving us this stuff is because we are not giving it, because it’s hard! It’s so hard! Look! A friend always let’s you in, never let’s you down. How easy is it for you to be transparent? Really open up, really let a person in? How easy is it for you to give the gift of emotional vulnerability and connection? It’s hard! We are afraid. And because we are not good at giving it, we are not getting it! Always let’s you in, never let’s you down. How are you at being there unconditionally for a person no matter what the cost. It’s hard. Where are we going to get the power to be the friends we need to be so that we can have the friends we need to have? And the answer is, the night before Jesus Christ died, he was if I can use this word of Jesus, He was desperately trying to across to his disciples the meaning what he was about to do. In John 14, 15, 16 and 17, he just desperately trying to explain to them what he was about to do. And one of the things he says in order to explain what He’s going to do when he dies is with the conception of friendship, in John 15 He says to the disciples, “tonight I no longer call you servants. A servant does not know the master’s business”, see letting in, “but tonight I call you friends. Now love one another as I love you. I am laying down my life for my friends.” Now when Jesus Christ said that suddenly the whole history of the world can be understood in terms of friendship. God was a friendship. The Christian God, the biblical God is a friendship, father, son, holy spirit, knowing and loving one another. And therefore He made us in His image meaning we need friendship! You know back in Genesis 3? When it talks about how God came walking in the cool of the garden to talk to Adam and Eve. Walking with someone is the Hebrew metaphor for friendship, to walk with someone, to walk together through life. Is a metaphor for friendship and what that means is the God made us for friendship, made us for friendship with Him, made us for friendship for one another. But we turned from Him. And you know, when you betray a friend, what happens? Usually the friend turns on you. But Jesus Christ, this is what He is telling us what He did, He says “I am the ultimate friend”, “I am the ultimate friend who loves at all times.” “I am the one born for adversity.” “I am the ultimate friend who’s going to cleave to you at infinite cost of myself so that you will not be ruined.” And here’s how: “I am the ultimate friend whose wounds are the wounds of love.” Because instead of inflicting them I am going to take them. Do you know how they? The bible says “blessed are the wounds of a friend!” How much more blessed are they when they are not afflicted but received because Jesus Christ on the cross lost His friendship with God so that we could have friendship with God. Jesus Christ on the cross, experienced what we should have experienced so that He could basically say, what he did, He was the perfect friend! He let you in! How much more emotional connection do you want? Look at His arms! Nailed open for you, how much do open do you want Him to be? There’s the ultimate friend, He let’s you in and also He never let’s you down because in the garden of Gethsemane as He saw His best friends, falling asleep on Him, denying Him, betraying Him, the Father comes and says, “you are going to have to go to hell or you are going to lose your friends” and Jesus said, “I’ll go to hell.” There’s a friend who sticks closer than a brother so that we are not ruined. There’s a friend who goes to hell so that we are not ruined. Now if you know that, that liberates you to be the friend you need to be. If I know that Jesus Christ has let me all the way in, He trusts me and He loves me no matter what, then I could move out not being afraid of rejection! If I know Jesus Christ will never let me down then I could move out not being afraid of being let down because all my eggs are not in the human friendship basket. And when I’m liberated to be the great friend I ought to be, by the great friendship of Jesus Christ on the cross, then I’ll find myself paradoxically getting the great friends that I need to have and so will you. And one last thing, one very last thing. The gospel is not just the resource for friendship because of the friendship of Jesus Christ to us. Have you noticed how He said that on the one hand, you’ve got to have affinity with your friends, if you’re going to have the friends that grow together but you’ve also got to have constructive clash. As iron sharpens iron, so friend sharpens friend. And that’s why Ralph Waldo Emerson says the great paradox of the best friendships is this. He says “friendship requires that rare mean between likeness and unlikeness. It’s better to be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. There must be very two before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large formidable nature, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognized the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them.” Now here’s what he is saying, “you need friends who are deeply like you and really unlike you if you want to have friendships that are really going to make you into the great thing that you can be.” How are we going to get that? Don’t we tend to gravitate to friends who have the same passions? The same loves? The same affinities? Well then we are just going to be, we are just going to be taken to people who are like us. Yeah! But in the gospel, here’s what’s going on. Jesus Christ is breaking into the lives of all kinds of people, corporate and creative! Black and white! Street kid and valley girl. Down-town and up-town. And suddenly people who you never give the time of day to, if you experienced the grace of God through Jesus Christ, you find other people who otherwise are different in every other way, except the deepest passion of their life is to love Jesus Christ who saved them through an act of radical friendship. And when I find somebody who’s deepest affinity is my deepest affinity yet in almost every other ways unlike me, think of the potential. Think of the potential. Christian friendships are so radical and so exhilarating and so enriching and don’t be afraid, you say “oh my gosh, how do I know if I choose the right one? Just try and C.S. Lewis puts it like this; “We think we’ve chose our own friends but for Christian they are strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies is always at work.” “Christ who said to the disciples, “you have not chosen me I have chosen you”, can also say every group of Christians friends, “you have not chosen one another but I’ve chose you for one another.” At the feast of friendship, it is God who has spread the board, and it is God who has chosen the guests. It is He who sometimes does and always should preside, let us not reckon without our host.” Make Him the friend your heart desires and you will have all the friends your hearts need.