Friendship

As I mentioned in my most recent incoherent post, I've been reading Mark Dever's sermon on the book of Proverbs.  I really enjoy how he overviews the books of the Bible.  He breaks down the basic theme and then the structure of the book.  And somehow in all that work, he still manages to make some really good application.  I can make such a sweeping statement because last year I went through the New Testament with the help of his sermons, so I've had a bit of experience with his sermons in written form.  I knew that I would learn from his Old Testament sermons, and that right now was a good time for me to read some of them.

So, out came The Message of the Old Testament, and I turned to Proverbs:  Wisdom for the Ambitious.  The title struck me first.   Ambitious?  I must confess that I most often associate this word with greed or getting ahead.  But I won't do that anymore!  Dever talked about being ambitious for living righty before God, which is what Proverbs helps us learn how to do.

I'm not going to review the whole sermon here, but there is one part that stood out to me.  Dever  looks at 5 topics which run throughout Proverbs:  The Fool, The Sluggard, Family, Friendship, Words, Life and Death (those 2 are taken together as 1 topic).

When talking about friendship, Dever naturally makes the distinction between bad friends and good friends.  If you've ever read Proverbs, even only one time, you will know that the book is full of warnings about the company that we keep.

When he talked about good friends, however, he mentioned several things that characterize good friends:  they are sensible, selfless, forgive, tell the truth.  In his 3 sentences about being sensible, I felt convicted.  I'm not wallowing in it, or anything, but I saw myself in a way that I had not before.  Let me transcribe those sentences here:

Real friends are sensible.  In our friendships, therefore, we should not offer to do what we cannot do.  Instead, we should always consider the implications of anything before we make an offer (Proverbs 6:1-5; 17:18).

That might not strike you as something that would strike me, but it did!  I thought back to times when I, in the excitement of the moment or the perhaps zealous desire to help someone, had made an offer that ultimately I had no way of keeping.  It wasn't that I didn't WANT to do what I had offered, but that I really physically was not capable of doing it.  Or perhaps at the time I really wanted to do what I offered, but then when the time came, I realized that the consequences or the requirements were beyond me, and I did muddle through, but I really didn't do well in what I had promised.

At this moment I am thinking of a specific situation when I offered some help to a friend before talking to Thomas about it.  The situation would have involved him.  He wisely thought about the situation and told me that we would not be able to to do what I had offered.  I then had to go back to that friend and tell her so.  Thankfully she was very gracious and understanding.  But if I had kept the thought to myself and "followed Biblical channels", I could have saved myself a lot of embarrassment and proven myself a better friend.  I should have exercised more self-control (a characteristic of the wise person, according to Proverbs), and thought through my offer more carefully.

And there are many other situations of promises that I made that I later couldn't keep.  So now, this is something that I'm going to work on.  God has blessed me with many wonderful and faithful friends.  I want to be a better friend to them!  I want to be true to my word, and make promises that I can keep.  I don't want to be skimpy in my promises, but I want to be more self-controlled in making them.