Theology of Friendship | Kylen Perry

Porch, how are we doing? Are we doing okay tonight? It's great to see you. Special shout-out to Porch.Live and everybody who's tuning in online. We don't take it for granted that you would be here with us this evening. Listen. I've said this before, just talking to those of you online. We genuinely believe God can meet with anyone at anytime and in any place, and that includes you right where you are. We believe, man. God has something special for those of you here in the room, but he also has something special in store for you as well. Special shout-out to Porch.Live Midland, Dayton, and Indianapolis.

I'll never forget showing up to Texas A&M as a freshman. It was my first time moving to a new city, which brought a few new realities to me. I was showing up into an environment where I had more freedom than I had ever known before. No one knew me at all, which meant I could reinvent myself entirely, and because no one knew me at all, it meant I had no friends yet.

So, as I made my way to College Station, I see my brother, and I'm like, "Hey, man. I need to get plugged in. It's important for me to get my feet settled, begin to put roots down, and feel like I can spread myself around and meet other folks. So, how is it that I do this in a brand-new town?" He looked at me and said, "Well, there's this thing that happens at the student center where all of the organizations on campus gather together, and it's the perfect place to meet people."

I thought, "Perfect. That's exactly what I want. This is going to be a group of people, freshmen just like me who have no friends who are showing up. They're trying to find those they'll do life alongside and they can call their forever buddies into the future. So let's do it. This sounds perfect." So, I make my way to this event.

As I get to this open house, what I find awaiting me there at the front door is something the likes of which I did not expect. I found more than 800 student organizations, little communities of people who were all vying to bind themselves together. In the time sense, I think it's north of 1,000 at this point, which told me a few things about the human race.

As I considered the organizations there amongst that event, I saw the usual suspects. I saw your sororities, your fraternities, your business organizations, the engineering clubs, and all of these student government groups. I saw the usual suspects, and I also saw the not-so-usual suspects. I saw the undergraduate beekeepers society. I saw the live-action role-playing enthusiasts.

I even saw the happiness club, which I almost slipped an application in for, because that sounds like a good time. There was a wide variety of people all gathered together seeking after the same thing. You see, despite our varying differences (and some of us have some differences), what I noticed in that moment is everyone is looking for someone because everybody wants to be connected.

Author Sebastian Junger said, "Human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered intrinsic to human happiness and far outweigh extrinsic values such as beauty, money, and status." Which, interestingly, are kind of the crux of the young adult experience.

What he just said is more important than your appearance, your success, and your reputation… What's more important than any of that is your connection to other people. We need each other. You know it, I know it, and God knows it. It says so in Ecclesiastes, chapter 4.

"Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken."

So, the question is not…Do we need each other? The question, instead, is…How do we relate to each other? The reality of it is all of us, as we navigate life, are going to find ourselves in a variety of different relationships. Some of you right now are investing in deep friendships, those lifelong friends who you anticipate standing next to you on your wedding day.

Others of you are working on that wedding day. You're dating that romantic interest, you're spending considerate time, and you're trying to thoughtfully learn about them. The closest thing to a romantic relationship some of you have is the relationship to your job, so you're spending all of your time sitting in your office, grinding away for the "man."

All of us, regardless of what relationship we're engaged with, are engaging in some kind of relationship. The question then is…How do we relate to them all? That's what this series is about. That's what we wanted to unpack over the course of the next several weeks. We wanted to help you understand how it is that we, as human beings, are meant to connect to each other.

Tonight, we're cracking the lid on that relationship which has brought so many of you here into this room right now: friendship. That's what we're talking about this evening. In case you didn't see it, we're talking about friends. That's where we're going. I want to give you a theology of friendship. The way I want to do it is I want to walk through it in three different sections. I want to talk to you about why friendship matters, how friendship grows, and what friendship looks like.

So, why does friendship matter? C.S. Lewis said friendship is unnecessary. It's like philosophy and art. It has no survival value. Rather, it is one of those things that gives value to survival. I was doing some research because I was curious. What is the average first age when we find our very first friendship? When you do the research, what you see is that it's 3 to 4 years old, which ratifies everything C.S. just said.

At 3 to 4 years old, you're not relying on the friends in your life to help you survive. You have your parents for that. Even if you did rely on your peers at that point, they wouldn't do much of any good for you. Why, then, at such an early age, are we pursuing friendship? Why does friendship matter? For this reason: life isn't meant to be endured; it's meant to be enjoyed.

Listen. Some of you are here tonight, and that's the truth God wanted to give to you. All you've been doing is enduring. You're just trying to get through the day. You're just trying to make it through the week, and God is saying, "Son, daughter, I have more for you than that." Friends help with this reality.

If you think about it, God doesn't primarily give you friends for your development because he has his church for that. God doesn't primarily give you friends for your accountability because he has community for that. He doesn't primarily give you friends for your godliness because he has his Word for that. Now, he uses friends for all of those things. Do not mistake what I'm saying. Friends absolutely help with everything I just described, but friends are not predominately nor primarily intended to those ends.

What reason, then, does God primarily intend for us to have friends in life? Joy. That just says something really awesome about God, that he would look upon us and say, "I not only care for you to exist and not only care for you to survive; I want you to thrive. I want you to enjoy everything I have, and I've given you some friends, some people, some peers you can enjoy as well." Proverbs 27:9 says, "Perfume and incense bring joy to the heart, and the pleasantness of a friend springs from their heartfelt advice."

God is so for you and for your satisfaction in life that he created a relationship that principally exists for your enjoyment, something Cambridge dictionary agrees with vehemently. It defines a friend as "a person who you know well and who you like a lot, but who is usually not a member of your family," which I think is a really funny addition. They can't be a part of your family according to Cambridge. We can agree to disagree on that and talk about it later.

What Cambridge is pointing to is that these are people who you like a lot, and remarkably, we agree with this. I was looking at a research study done by Pew Research Center in October of last year. They were assessing the state of friendship here in America. They polled those who agreed to having at least one close friend, which is 91 percent of people. The vast majority of people say, "I at least have one close friend."

As they were doing their poll, what they found was that 72 percent (so, three out of four people) of those who agreed to having a close friend said they were deeply satisfied with at least one of those friends. As I read that data, I was like, "Maybe I don't need to do this talk. It seems like friendships are great. Things are going well," until I kept doing research and found that in the lives of 18- to 34-year-olds, 30 percent of you (a third of this room) also attest to experiencing loneliness every day or at least several times a week.

That is deeply concerning when you consider the effects of loneliness in the life of a person. According to the CDC, loneliness has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, depression, anxiety, addiction, dementia, and even early death. One meta-analysis of 70 different studies found that the effects of loneliness on one's longevity in life had the same impact as severe obesity and smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Some of you here tonight are really lonely. Some of you here tonight are, in fact, here tonight because you're looking to cure and curb your loneliness. You're trying to find friends. I just want to speak to those of you here who would identify with everything I just described. First, we're really glad you're here. You're in the right spot. This is a great place to find friends.

I also know that some of you have been here before, and you have made the effort. You have extended a hand, and you've introduced yourself already, yet it doesn't seem like you can find any friends in this place, and that can be so very frustrating. To you I want to say: Do not lose hope. Would you come talk to us? Thirdly, the way you find friends is by being a friend. That's the greatest advice I could give to you. We have a lot more we want to talk about on the topic of friendship, but I just wanted to say that briefly.

So, what's my point with all this, the idea that many of us would say, "I'm deeply satisfied with my friends, and I'm so lonely at the same time"? What is the point? Why do I make all of this space to talk about this right now? I think it's helpful for us to set up the fact that many of us are living in what the Bible would describe as, essentially, an impossible situation, because friendship is the presence of meaningful connection, while loneliness is the absence of meaningful connection.

To say you're living in both at the same time is to say that your experience is an oxymoron. Somehow you're alone, yet you're still together? It doesn't make any sense. So, we need to grasp hold of what, then, our misunderstanding of friendship is, because God wants more for us. The reason we can say, "I'm deeply connected, and I'm deeply alone" is we don't quite understand what God means by friendship when he begins to unpack it.

So, that's what I want us to walk through. I want us to grasp hold of what God says should be socially true of those who engage with the friends in their lives. Here's the thing. This idea of friendship, that maybe we got something wrong… We would honestly agree with this. Just think about the way you talk about friends in your life.

This is a word we just kind of throw around. We kind of lay it upon any and every person in our sphere of influence, so much so that we even have begun to qualify the types of friends in our lives. We have best friends, close friends, work friends, family friends, and friends we see every now and again, and that person is "just a friend."

I remember when I was in college, I was dating a girl. I met her family, and she introduced me as her good friend. That told me everything I needed to know in the moment. I knew immediately where we stood. Like, "I don't need to be your boyfriend, but can we at least get a 'We're very close friends, Mom and Dad'?" That would have been great, would have been extremely edifying.

The point still remains that we do this because we all know not every friendship contains the same depth of intimacy or commitment as another. While casual friends are inevitable and good and can even be joy-filled, my thing I want you to grasp tonight is I fear we have lost a deep level of intimacy and intentionality that God intends for you to have with the friends in your life.

The Bible even says we have a discrepancy with the types of friendships we experience. It says in Proverbs 18:24, "A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother." It's possible to have many companions, literally a whole company of friends, and still come to ruin.

Some of you get this. You've invested deeply into the friendships of your life, yet you've been betrayed by something someone did or slandered by something someone said. Some of you are so desperate, so desirous of that group of people that the cost to admission is moral compromise, not just one time, not just two times, but every single time.

Your many companions have brought you to ruin, yet the Bible is sitting here… God is sitting here and saying, "I have more for you. There's something better than that. There's a friend who sticks closer than a brother. There's a friend who's closer than even blood." How, then, do we build that kind of friendship? How do we grow that kind of friendship?

Well, the Hebrew word for friend in Proverbs 18:24 is the word 'ahab. When it says there's a friend who sticks closer than a brother, friend is the word 'ahab. What it means when it says it throughout the Old Testament is it's talking about love. The thing about 'ahab is it's a particular kind of love. It's a general sort of affection, yet what you know about 'ahab is it is always an invisible affection that becomes visible action.

Just to help you grasp this, when I was in college (not to just keep telling college stories), I thought I wanted to study accounting, which makes no sense knowing myself today. I don't know why I would choose to do that. I've always been horrible at math. It doesn't make any sense that I would ever sign up for that, but at the time it made perfect sense, because if you looked at the accounting program, it was really good; if you looked at their job placement, it was really great; and if you looked at the earning potential…Bing!

Like, "That sounds awesome. I would love to make the kind of money those people make." So I thought accounting was exactly what I wanted to do. The only thing is I hated it. I hated learning it. I hated studying for it. I hated testing for it. So, while the idea of accounting was something I loved, I had no 'ahab for it. It did not change the way I lived my life. True, deep, biblical friendship has 'ahab.

The reason we know that is we see it in the story of Jonathan and David in 1 Samuel, chapter 18. So, if you have a Bible, you can turn with me to 1 Samuel, chapter 18. This is where we're going to be over the course of the remainder of the evening. We're going to look at a bunch of different Scriptures. We'll have them up on the screens for you. We're going to look at chapters 18, 19, and 20, and we'll jump to 23 at one point. So, if you just put your finger there, we'll be able to track along with the rest of the message.

Everything we've done up to this point is setup, which freaks some of you out, because you're like, "Oh my gosh! I can't believe it. We've been into this thing for 18 minutes already and you're just now getting into the meat of your message?" Calm down. You're going to be okay. Your friends will still be here by the end of this thing, Lord willing.

I want us to look at the Bible's greatest example of true friendship. Next to Jesus' friendship to you and me, Jonathan and David have the best case for us to study. So, I want us to look at their friendship and learn for our own. It says this in 1 Samuel, chapter 18, picking it up in verse 1:

"As soon as he had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And Saul took him that day and would not let him return to his father's house. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul."

How do friendships grow? The deeper the conviction, the deeper the connection. It's easy to read this and just assume, "Jonathan and David. They're close. Okay. Move on. Turn the page. Let's keep going," yet what we need to understand is this is a very unlikely friendship. These guys are not from the same spheres of influence.

One of them was raised in royalty while the other was raised in poverty. One had white-collar parents; the other came from a blue-collar crowd. One of them only knew popularity while the other lived in obscurity. One of them learned within the palace's own walls while the other picked up his tools of the trade from the field around.

They were absolute opposites, yet what we see is this unlikely friendship had a really unbreakable bond. When the Hebrew says they were knit to one another, the word there literally means they were chained to one another. There was an unbreakable force that united the two of these guys to one another. Why is that? Why did that happen for these two? Because they had an abnormal affection and an uncommon commitment to the things of God.

They had an abnormal affection for the things of God. They loved God in a way that was abnormal to the rest of the world. When people would look at them, they would say, "Man! Just dictated by the evidence of your life, you love God like you wouldn't believe. That is crazy." They also had an uncommon commitment. They were uncommon in the way they would faithfully follow whatever it was God wanted them to do. They had an abnormal affection and an uncommon commitment to the things of God.

We see it in their origin stories. If you turn to 1 Samuel 14, we get the first real account of Jonathan's life, and what we see is everything I just described. He and his armor-bearer see the enemies of God, the Philistines, and they decide to climb some cliffs and lay siege to a garrison, which was stupid. That's a suicide mission. A garrison was a defensive military outpost that was established to protect conquered enemy territory. What we see from the story is as they make their way up, the garrison sees them. They're like, "Hey, guys. We see there are two of you. We're a select defensive fighting force."

"Yeah, we know, man. Can we come up?"

"For sure. All right. That sounds great."

It didn't make any sense whatsoever, yet Jonathan said, "If they call us up, then the Lord has given them into our hands. Let us go up then." So, he and his armor-bearer ascend, and it says he kills 20 Philistines and they lay siege to the garrison. With a little help from God, who throws in an earthquake, the entire Philistinian army panics. There's something like 30,000 to 600 between the Philistines and the Israelites, and the Israelites win.

David has a similarly insane story. In 1 Samuel, chapter 17, you see he goes up against a guy by the name of Goliath, the Philistinian champion. We won't get into all of the details of Goliath, but he was a big bad. David steps up when no one else would, and with but a sling and a stone, he drops him without even using his four other bullets. These two guys were willing to risk everything, including their very own lives, because they so believed in God.

They believed big in God, so they wanted to do whatever it took to live their lives in a way where that abnormal affection and uncommon commitment drove them not just forward but eventually together. That's what we see. What we learn is the bedrock of their belief in God became the bedrock of their bond to one another.

I love the way author Dr. Kent Hughes says it. He says, "…a Christian friendship exceeds anything that exists [in the world]—for such a friendship is founded on a supernatural mutuality of soul. The Holy Spirit makes your souls chorus the same cries. You assent to the same authority. You know the same God. You are going the same way. You long for the same things. You dream mutual dreams. You yearn for the same experiences of holiness and worship. […] You know when this happens, and it is wonderful."

I remember (another college story) in my junior year deciding to join a business organization. Admittedly, I did not join the organization because I was looking for friends; I joined the organization because I wanted to pad my résumé. I was arriving at the end of my college tenure, and I thought, "Okay. I need to begin to prepare myself to have some credibility as a candidate for future jobs. As I walk the stage and make my way out and step into the real world, I want to look the part, earn the role, and be okay."

So, I joined this organization with no intent to find friends, yet as I got into the organization, I met a group of guys. They, too, were there because they wanted to add to their résumé, but more so than that, they wanted to add to the family of God. As we sat together and got to know one another and shared stories of God's goodness in our lives… "Man, this is what God has done for me. Oh, he did the same thing for you? No way." We began to share ourselves with one another.

What we found was as our love for God was expressed, our love for one another exploded. This is why it's really powerful when you share your testimony with another person. They're going to see in you a love for God, and they're going to see in themselves a love for God, and "Oh my gosh! This is the makings of something really special," and you're going to find friendship.

That was my experience with these guys. I found friends when I wasn't looking for friends, and they weren't just any kind of friend; they were best friends to me, the very friends who stood even at my own wedding. The reason I tell you that is to exhort the fact that there's great power and potency in sharing your personal relationship to God with someone else. When you have deep convictions, it'll lead to deep connections.

Now, let me be really clear. Am I saying you shouldn't befriend people of different religious backgrounds? No. Obviously, that's not what I'm saying, but I do want to sit here and briefly say it is important for you to know that you will descend to greater depths and ascend to greater heights and find a richer experience of friendship, because it will be true friendship, if you invest with believers. It's not either/or; it's both/and.

If you look at your sphere of influence, the circles you run in, and you don't see anybody else who loves God, then something is off and you're robbing yourself of the kind of joy God wants to give. So, this is a good place for you to say, "I'm going to get connected tonight. I'm going to figure out what it looks like to plug in. I do want to continue to walk within my spheres of influence and the circles I have, but I also want to step into the types of friendships God wants to give, because there's more of him in those spaces."

John says it like this in 1 John. He agrees with this point. He says, "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. […] No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us."

What perfects true love, true friendship? It's not going to be superficial similarities, that we have the same hobbies in common, like the same kinds of music, and love to travel together. It's not going to be superficial similarities, and it's not going to be a shared disdain for seclusion. "I'm so alone. You're so alone. Do you want to be alone together?" It will be neither of those things. What you need is deep substance, and substance is found in the Spirit. It's found in the person of Christ. So you come to him, and as you come to him, you'll find them. I promise.

So, here's what you need to know when you step into these kinds of relationships, when you find this sort of friendship. It looks so wildly different than the rest of the world might expect. What I want to do for the remainder of our time is I want to get really practical. If you're like, "Okay. I'm ready to learn. I want to know how this is supposed to impact my life," this is the moment, so pull out your pen, pop the top, and take some notes, because I want to tell you what friendship is supposed to look like. As we go, I'm going to give you four things.

1. A true friend is loyal. We see this in the story of David and Jonathan. If we jump back into chapter 18 and look at verses 3 and 4, it says, "Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul." Again, he loved him. He had an 'ahab for David as his own soul. "And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was on him and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt."

Literally, the guy gives him the clothes off his back. He looks at David and says, "I'm so for you that I'm going to give you my robe, which is a sign of my provision; I'm going to give you my armor, which is a sign of my protection. Where you go, I go. What you face, I face. What you deal with, I deal with. I'm yours. We're bound to one another. My loyalty lies with you."

Proverbs 18:24 says, "A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks [clings, grasps] closer than a brother." Loyal friends stick to you. They don't bail on you. Proverbs 17:17: "A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity." True friends don't run out when the going gets tough. It doesn't matter how inconveniencing or uncomfortable or overwhelming the situation may be. They hang in there. They don't come up with weak excuses whenever you ask for their help.

They don't choose to abandon you just because you become a momentary inconvenience. They don't forfeit the friendship just because y'all have fallen on tough times. This is not the way loyal friends operate. Loyal friends say, "Come hell or high water, I'm in it with you. I will charge the gates of hell alongside of you. I will race into whatever is ahead, whatever God intends, with you. In the heights and in the depths, I'm yours." That's what loyal friends say. They hang in there. They lean in. They don't run out. They don't give way when others would.

Earlier this year, I called one of my friends who runs an irrigation business. I was here in Dallas already. Winter weather was coming to my home in Houston. Brooke was there, and we needed to prepare the house. Things had happened earlier in that year where the weather had gotten bad and pipes had busted, so I was like, "Man, we need to turn the water off." So I called up my buddy. I was like, "Hey, man. Can you swing through and get our house prepared?" He was like, "Of course I can do that."

It was such a simple ask…that is, until Brooke sent me a picture, hours later, of this good friend of mine covered in mud and standing in a hole with plumbing parts all around him. Yet he never told me about it. As I stared at that photo, a picture, a literal image of a massive problem in my family's life, I also saw the sweet reality of a loyal friend who stood at the dead center of it. Do you have a friend like that? Are you a friend like that? We all need people who are loyal; not people who dodge the difficulty, but people who dive right into it.

2. A true friend is honest. If we jump to chapter 19, what you need to know between chapter 18 to 19 is King Saul begins to grow insidiously jealous of David, so much so that he wants to take David's life. It says this:

"And Saul spoke to Jonathan his son and to all his servants, that they should kill David. But Jonathan, Saul's son, delighted much in David. And Jonathan told David, 'Saul my father seeks to kill you. Therefore be on your guard in the morning. Stay in a secret place and hide yourself. And I will go out and stand beside my father in the field where you are, and I will speak to my father about you. And if I learn anything I will tell you.'"

Talk about some difficult news to relate to your friend. "Hey, man. This is kind of hard to explain. I'm not sure how to break it to you, but my father sort of wants you dead." That's a hard piece of news to deliver to a friend, yet Jonathan loves his friend so much he's willing to brave the difficult conversation.

Proverbs 27:6 says, "Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy." Proverbs 28:23: "Whoever rebukes a man will afterward find more favor than he who flatters with his tongue." You see, good friends don't conceal the truth to provide a false sense of security. That's not good friendship. That's not kind. No one likes to learn they have food in their teeth, but everyone hates to learn they've had food in their teeth for a long time. It is better to be honest and up front than to conceal the truth to preserve their feelings. It's better for you to be truthful with them.

Yet what we know is there's a way we should be truthful. Am I saying that because you should be honest, you should see it and you should say it, that you have to give it fast so they get it faster? No. The Bible is not saying that either. Proverbs 16:24 says, "Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones." Are your words sweet when you speak them? Do they taste like honey? Do people delight to hear from you and return for even more?

Proverbs 27:17 says, "Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another." There's a way to speak that sharpens one another, but there's also a way to speak that dulls one another. How do you sharpen a blade? When I heard this, I thought, "Okay." It sounds like the chef at the Japanese steak house who's working the knives against each other, getting them ready, yet when you study blacksmithing in the Iron Age… (I don't know if you do that. I did that for you, so don't worry. You can rest assured that I'm giving you accurate information.)

What you learn is that's not how they sharpened blades. You don't sharpen blades with other sharp blades; you sharpen blades with an iron file. The way you do it is you take a blade and carefully and skillfully work it across resistance until it grows sharper. You see, the process of giving feedback (if iron, in fact, sharpens iron) means it should be careful. It should be considerate. That's how we should speak. We should speak honestly with one another, yes, but we should sharpen with skill.

So, we pay attention not just to the words we say, but we pay attention to the way we say those words. Some of you need to know… You give some thought to the things you're going to say. You should give even more thought to the way you're going to say it. It also means we don't just speak whatever it is we need to share whenever we have the time. It also means we speak whatever we need to say whenever they have the time to process it. That's kindness. We want clarity, but we want kindness. We want to be truthful in our honesty, yet we want to be skillful in our delivery, because a true friend is honest.

3. A true friend is trustworthy. First Samuel 20:12-13 says, "And Jonathan said to David, 'The Lord, the God of Israel, be witness! When I have sounded out my father [when I have listened to him], about this time tomorrow, or the third day, behold, if he is well disposed toward David, shall I not then send and disclose it to you? But should it please my father to do you harm, the Lord do so to Jonathan and more also if I do not disclose it to you and send you away, that you may go in safety. May the Lord be with you, as he has been with my father.'"

In the face of David's growing fear, as Saul continually pursued his life, we see Jonathan, his dear friend, interceding between the two of them. He continues to stand in the gap. Because he cares so much about David, in this passage, he looks at him and says, "My father is going to pursue you. I'm going to learn what it is he's thinking, and then I'm going to tell you. You can trust that I'm going to tell you, so much so that I'm willing to subject myself to God's judgment and the consequences thereof if I do not remain faithful to my oath. That's how trustworthy you can count me." Because a true friend is trustworthy.

We all need friends like this. We need someone we can open up to about the worst things happening in our lives. At the very beginning of that chapter, you see David is in a panic, and he's telling Jonathan, "Things are horrible. Your dad is seeking to take my life." Jonathan is such a trusted place of confidence that he can receive all David says, he can help him to process it in truth, and then he can send him out to engage it wisely.

Do you have a friend like that, someone who's trustworthy? We all need one. We need a friend who can hear the very worst parts of ourselves, who we can process with honestly, who we can wrestle with the difficulties of life alongside. I have a friend like this in Houston, Texas. When I first made my way to Houston, I was dealing with a bunch of circumstantial trouble. Things at my job were hard, things in my marriage were difficult, and I was wrestling for probably the first time in my life with some depression.

I was like, "Man, I just need to be able to process this stuff in a safe place." So I grabbed a friend I could begin to share these things with in a non-divisive way. As I began to process with him, what I found was he was deeply safe, but he was also honest. He would speak to me the things I needed to know, and then he would help me to correct course and resume well.

You need a friend like that. You need someone who's trustworthy. When you find them, you don't let them go. I've made my way here to Dallas. He's still in Houston, and we talk every single Friday. We hop on the phone, and we continue to process together, because he's someone safe whom I can confide in. Proverbs 13:20 tells us, "Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise…" So be careful who you pick. "…but the companion of fools will suffer harm."

You want to pick people that when you deposit confidential information, something that is needed for their safekeeping, they don't turn around and tell it to others. You want to be able to open up to someone and them not open it up to everybody else. That's not what you want. I don't want to tell you my news and then that becomes your news to share. That's not a good friend. That's not what you're supposed to do.

Now, let me be very clear. This is not a license to gossip against other people, and it's not a license to grumble against God either. A lot of Christians, in the spirit of processing, will sit behind closed doors and talk about other people and complain behind their backs. That is not what we're talking about right here. What we're talking about is creating an environment where you can, as Job described, offer words for the wind, receive proper correction, and then move forward in godliness. That's what you want.

Proverbs 12:26 says, "One who is righteous is a guide to his neighbor, but the way of the wicked leads them astray." We don't want to lead others astray, so we need to carefully consider what we're sharing with our friends. Here's a way that I do it. How do I consider what it is I'm sharing with the people in my life? If you want a really helpful filter to follow, I consider, "Is it true? If it is, then is it kind? And if it is, is it necessary?"

If whatever it is I or you need to share… If it fails one of those tests, do not share it. We want to speak things that are true and kind and necessary. Proverbs 11:13 says, "Whoever goes about slandering reveals secrets, but he who is trustworthy in spirit keeps a thing covered." Can you keep things covered or are you always talking about other people?

4. A true friend is self-sacrificing. In 1 Samuel 23 we read, "David saw that Saul had come out to seek his life." Are you catching the pattern? "David was in the wilderness of Ziph at Horesh. And Jonathan, Saul's son, rose and went to David at Horesh, and strengthened his hand in God. And he said to him, 'Do not fear, for the hand of Saul my father shall not find you. You shall be king over Israel, and I shall be next to you. Saul my father also knows this.'"

This is the last interaction we have recorded between Jonathan and David. The next time we see Jonathan, he's slain on the battlefield, and David grieves the loss of his friend. What's so interesting about this is this is the first open acknowledgment…not personal acknowledgment, but the first open acknowledgment…of Jonathan that his rightful claim to the throne of his father is not, in fact, his own; instead, it belongs to that of his friend.

This isn't a friend who's jealous of his pal. He's not envious that he's getting ahead. He's not trying to hold him back so he can snake by. This is not the nature of a self-sacrificing friend. Instead, it's one that not only acknowledges what's happening but endorses it. He's like, "Man, you're the rightful king, so I'm going to do whatever I can to make way for you to sit where God wants you to sit."

It was his throne. He was set up to sit on it, to take over for his father, yet he so loves God and so loves his friend and so trusts the plans of redemption that he says, "Ah, man, I'm just a part of what God is doing in the world, so I will get out of the way if you sitting there means this thing moves forward."

Some of you Christians in the room have harbored bitterness, jealousy, comparison, and even hate toward your Christian brothers and sisters because God has, for whatever reason, put them on the throne. Listen. Your future and their future are not your own. It's no longer you who lives; it's Christ who lives in you, and he gets to do whatever the heck he wants to do. Jonathan gets it. It makes him self-sacrificing. Are you self-sacrificing?

Recently, I was listening to a podcast where a Navy SEAL was recounting a story of a young SEAL who served within his operation. It was a young man by the name of Michael Monsoor. Michael was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 2008, and this was said at his ceremony:

"On Saint Michael's Day, September 29, 2006, Michael Monsoor would make the ultimate sacrifice. Mike and two teammates had taken position on the outcropping of a rooftop when an insurgent grenade bounced off Mike's chest and landed on the roof. Mike had a clear chance to escape, but he realized that the other two SEALs [his friends] did not.

In that terrible moment, he had two options: to save himself or to save his friends. For Mike, this was no choice at all. He threw himself onto the grenade, and absorbed the blast with his body. One of the survivors puts it this way: 'Mikey looked death in the face that day and said, "You cannot take my brothers. I will go in their stead."'"

This is what true friendship looks like, and the reason we know it is because John 15:13 tells us, "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends." Jesus Christ is the epitome, the standard, the model of true friendship in that he has sacrificed himself for you and for me. Jesus knows why friendship matters.

All of us were enemies of God at one time, yet Jesus, the true love of God extended to us in friendship, moved toward those who did not deserve his friendship at all. He moved toward not people he found compatibility with but people he found enmity with, yet he said, "I love you still anyway. I have 'ahab. I have an invisible affection that leads to a visible action," an action that tells us how a friendship is built.

Friendship with God is built by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Jesus looked upon you, knowing full well you can't do it. It's not possible for you to be perfect, to fulfill the commandment, to uphold the law. You cannot become what God intended for you to become. All have sinned and fallen short of his glory, and the wages of that sin is death.

"But you know what? I can do it. I can do what all humanity cannot. I can be perfect in your place. I will not only build your friendship with God through my perfection; I will also build your friendship by laying my life aside and dying the death you deserve. So badly do I want for your friendship to my Father that not only will I lay my life down, but I will take my life up again. I will ascend to the Father and rise from the grave that any who look to me and say, 'That's my Lord; that's my King; that's my friend' might rise with me as well."

The beauty of the gospel is it tells us, as we look upon the life of Jesus, what friendship does look like, for by befriending us he has shown us how we ought to befriend each other. Do you know Jesus? There is no friend like him. Do you have friends? Do you look like him? He has given you a path to eternal joy. It's found in the one who sits above you and, remarkably, it's found in the ones who sit beside you. Let me pray for us.

Father, we love you. I'm so grateful, God, for this time, this chance to sit under your Word. God, I pray for my friends. There are some here tonight, God, who do not know you, who cannot experience true friendship with their peers until they embrace true friendship from Jesus. There are others here who are looking for a friend. They feel like, "Man, I've lost my friends. I can't find my friends. I've tried, but I don't know what to do next."

What those friends need to do is they need to join a church, and they need to get involved here. They may even need to serve with us on Tuesdays. Then, God, there are some people here who need to repent because they've been a bad friend. I pray, Jesus, that as we look to your example, we might find an example to follow. It is in Christ's name we pray, amen.