Friending: The Art of Friendship

I know last year we had a series called “friendship 101,” where we taught you what it really means to be a friend and what you need to do to be a friend. In this series, we’re talking about friends in a totally different way. The reason we’re talking about this now is because this will be one of the most important things you can learn at church or at school or in life. If you get friendships right, then you set yourself up for success in every single important area of your life. If you get them wrong, there will be more pain and destruction than you can imagine. Just imagine one of those two scenarios. See the amazing thing is, I can predict your level of success by looking at your friends and your parents can and you can probably also. I want to teach you all a maxim for life: SHOW ME YOUR FRIENDS AND I’LL SHOW YOU YOUR FUTURE. If you want to know what your future will look like, just look at your friends. Proverbs 13:20 says, “Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm.” Any success I have is the result of God using the right friends to influence me. The reason I work so hard at school was because my close friends encouraged me to work harder than anybody else. The reason I do the right thing even when it may hurt, because my friends tell me that it’s the right thing to do. The reason I go to church, because the right friends wouldn’t stop bothering me about Jesus, then I finally understood. And almost every single time I got into trouble, I was with the wrong friends. Just ask yourself, every single time you got into trouble, were you alone or were you with the wrong friends? That’s right. When you got into trouble last, you were probably with the wrong friends. When I was growing up I used to roll with these really bad cats and I remember one day I was at a supermarket with these guys to buy some soda and I went and got my soda and onto the line to pay and then walked out. I waited for them on the bench and then they start coming out. We were standing around and suddenly a big hand grabs me on the shoulder and my “friends” start running. The guy says to me: are you going to pay for that? And I think I peed in my pants that day, and I said in a small, cracking voice, “I did…” and I slowly put my hand into my moist pants pocket and slowly pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper and showed the guy. I stopped being those losers friends from that day forward… I want you to write a list, outside of your family and imagination, of your closest friends. [wait until music ends]. Like it or not, you’re the average of the five people whose names you wrote down. I’m talking about intelligence, finances, popularity, spirituality, etc. Like it or not, you become who you run with. Having said all that, let me define friendship for you. I’m going to give you the Facebook version of friendship first. It goes like this: A friend is someone you may or may not know well who accepts your friend request on Facebook. This person is born to like and comment on your posts to make you feel good about yourself. Proverbs 17:17 FBV It’s so funny, right? But that’s not what a real friend is. You know it and I know it. A facebook friend isn’t the same as a real friend. When I was going through some of the MOST toughest times of my life, there weren’t that many of my facebook friends with me. But I did have real friends that took time off from their jobs, and flew across the country, even though they had their own families to take care of, and came to take care of me. I had real friends who saw my struggles and helped me through them and coached me to a new level. Let me read to you what Proverbs 17:17 really says: A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity. Now that you know what a friend is. I’m going to teach you the art of real friendship. The first thing you need to know about real friends is this: if you want to be a good friend or if you want to know who is a good friend, then you need to BE PRESENT. Here’s what the writer of the Hebrews says about being present. Let’s go to Hebrews 10:24-25. ²⁴Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works. ²⁵ And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near (Hebrews 10:24-25 NLT). When you are present or when friends are present, then we tend to motivate each other, not to do bad things, but to do good things. Underline verse 24—motivate one another to acts of love and good works. Let me tell you what some of these acts of love are: thinking about each other’s feelings, trying to make the weaknesses in others smaller, keeping friends away from temptations. Acts of good works, I don’t think I need to explain that, but just in case, let me give you an example—it’s helping somebody who needs it, it’s being a good example, it’s going out of your way to do something that makes somebody else’s life better. You can’t do any of that unless you’re present in that person’s life. Unless they are present in yours. It means we need to put the ipods down and the iphones down when we eat with people! A lot of people ask me why I never pick up the phone. I say, “because I’m meeting with somebody and I don’t bring my phone to answer people when I’m meeting with somebody.” They told me that I was rude. I said nothing. The next day, I was having a meeting with this guy and he picks up his phone and starts talking making me wait, so I walk out with the other people in the meeting. He says to me that I was really rude. I said, “I’m sorry, we didn’t want you not to be able to hear what you had to say that was so important on the phone.” The second art lesson on friendship I want you to bear in mind is that in order to have real friends or to be a real friend we must GET OPEN. It means you have to share your life with somebody, not just put up a hundred ugly looking selfies online and putting in 140 characters of misspelled and misued words for people to “experience.” I have not once read a facebook post that shared anything worthwhile about somebody’s life, unless it was TMZ telling me about Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus, two people I really don’t care about personally… because I’m not friends with them! James says this about getting open in chapter 5:16: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed (James 5:16 NLT). EVERY FRIENDSHIP ENDS UP SOMEWHERE. FEW FRIENDSHIPS END UP SOMEWHERE ON PURPOSE. So, what kind of friend will I be? What kind of friendships will you have? Our memory verse for today is from Proverbs 20:6 which says, “Many will say they are loyal friends, but who can find one who is truly reliable?” What is reliable, you ask? ¹³ Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. ¹⁴ You are my friends if you do what I command. ¹⁵ I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you (John 15:13-15). Let’s pray.