Marks Of A True Friend

By: Duane Kelderman

Scripture Reading: John 15:9-13

January 11th, 2009

I’d like to begin by asking you a personal question: Who is your closest friend? And a second question for those of you who identified someone: What makes that person your closest friend?

More than half of you did not come up with a definite answer to the first question. The fact is we live in a day when true friendship seems to be in decline. Experts say that 70% of American adults consider themselves to have many acquaintances, but too few, if any, friends. Facebook enables us to hook up with scores of other "friends" over the internet, but thousands of mouse clicks later, we still long for one close friend. One international student recently observed, "Americans are very friendly, but they don’t make good friends."

All this begs the question, what is a friend? How do friendships happen? Well, one of the central features of friendship is its voluntary nature. You can’t force a friendship. Friendship happens. You can’t predict it, you can’t buy it, you can’t sell it. Friendship is one of those surprise gifts that God gives to us.

Most of us can identify with how friendship develops. One day you meet someone, you get to know the person. You discover you have some common interests and you discover you like this person. You pursue some of these common interests, and the more you do together, the more you enjoy being with each other. Now a lot of friendships end right there. They’re significant, but they’re not particularly deep.

One of the things that often drives a friendship to a deeper level is a crisis. Something happens in your life and a friend is there for you (or the other way around). You are vulnerable in ways you’re not usually vulnerable; you show your true self to that person. And that person gives to you out of all proportion to what is required. A friendship really deepens when one of the persons gives self—sacrificially to the other. There’s a bond of love that never breaks after that. That may be what Jesus is talking about when he says, "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). The combination of these two things: laying down your life and doing that for a friend (that is, this is voluntary; this isn’t your parent or your spouse or your child; the only obligation is the obligation of love) . . . it’s the combination of those two things that makes friendship love the greatest love there is, according to Jesus.

One of my friends from the lake where we have a cottage is a guy named Dick. We have been casual acquaintances for almost 25 years. Many years ago, Dick came over to me one day and said, "Duane, I’ve got a big problem." He proceeded to tell me about his brother Ken, who was dying of AIDS. Dick said, "Duane, we’re getting close to the end, and we have so many difficult things to deal with. Ken was gay, and Dick was going back and forth between two worlds, the straight world of his family and this gay world of Ken’s deepest friends, two worlds that had never met before. Dick said, "Duane, we all have to work together. And Ken needs help. And you’re the only person I trust to lead all of us through this."

Well, that was one of the busiest seasons of my life and Dick knew that. I wasn’t Ken’s pastor, I wasn’t Dick’s pastor. This was not my professional responsibility. I was just Dick’s friend. I said yes, and did this as a friend. Here was a crisis where Dick became very vulnerable, and where there was an imbalance in giving and receiving. We’ve had a deep relationship ever since.

And the giving and receiving has now gone both ways. Ministers can’t talk about some things with very many people. But Dick is someone I totally trust. He’s got great judgment. He’s a plumber. But he’s one of the wiser, more thoughtful people I know. We have sort of a code. One calls the other up and says, "Hey, we gotta go to lunch."

And if one of us has an agenda, something we need to talk about, that person says, "I’m buying." The other one groans, "Oh boy, here we go." It’s the ritual of our friendship.

Now, as I said earlier, you can’t force friendships, especially deep ones. But we can, I believe, enlarge our capacity for friendship. And we can find 5 marks of a good friend given in the Bible. Hopefully if we can enlarge our capacity for friendship by working on these five things, we’ll increase the quality of our friendships.

First, true friends are trustworthy. I have in mind here particularly keeping a confidence. Proverbs 11:13: "A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy (person) keeps a secret." The focus of this first proverb is not the gossip. We’ll come to that in a minute. The focus here is on a person keeping a secret, a confidence. Remember what I said about Dick? I could trust him with anything. Do you have a friend that you can go to and share something personal and sensitive and have total confidence that it will go no further? Are you a person who can hear something in confidence, bring it down into the basement of your mind, and not even think of letting it out of that basement? That’s a quality of a true friend.

Second, true friends talk little about other people. Put more simply, true friends don’t gossip. Proverbs 16:28 says, "A perverse man stirs up dissension, and a gossip separates close friends" and 17:9 "He who covers over an offense promotes love, but whoever repeats the matter separates close friends."

What is a gossip? We usually think of gossiping as whispering something about someone else that isn’t true, that’s supposed to be a secret, and that’s damaging. Gossip may include these things, but it may not. A gossip is someone who just talks too much about other people, period. Webster defines a gossip as "a person who habitually reveals personal facts." Those facts may be true, they may be not protected by confidence, they may not even be vicious or damaging. But a gossip just likes to talk about other people.

Now, why do people gossip? I could obviously spend a whole message on that, but let me just suggest that gossip is a cheap stab at intimacy. It’s cheap intimacy: Talking about another person is the shaky glue of our relationship. I assume you’ll like me more if I can "wow" you with what I know about someone else. The problem is it doesn’t work that way. The proverb says it "separates close friends." How many times just talking too much about someone else leads to misunderstanding and leads to harming someone else?

But that’s the obvious separation of friends that gossip causes. There’s also a more subtle separation. If you are constantly talking to your "friends" about other people, do you really think your friends will trust you with anything deeply personal? Of course not.

When I think about the people I trust, they are people who have little need to talk about other people, period.

A third mark of true friends is: they are honest. Proverbs 27:6 "Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses." It’s difficult to be honest with someone. It’s also the mark of a friend. And it’s easy to kiss someone, to flatter someone, that is. Enemies multiply kisses, the proverb says. And here the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That is, if you can just be honest, the relationship deepens and then you can be more honest, and the relationship deepens still more.

But the less honest you are, the weaker the relationship, the less honest you feel like you can be, because you feel that the relationship isn’t strong enough to bear it, and the weaker yet it becomes. Proverbs says, An honest answer is like a kiss on the lips.

Now, you gotta realize that honesty is a long term investment, not a short term investment. Proverbs 28:23 says, "He who rebukes a (person) will in the end gain more from him than he who has a flattering tongue." Flattery works for the short—term. But honesty and truth are building blocks for a deep and lasting friendship.

A fourth mark of a true friend: true friends are loyal. Proverbs 17:17 "A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity." A friend is someone who sticks with a person through thick and thin. Someone has said, "A friend is someone who walks in when every one else is walking out." How many times haven’t you heard someone say (or said yourself), "When the chips are down, you find out who your true friends are." We talk about "fair—weather friends."

Some of you have had a "friend" abandon you. And you know what the psalmist felt like when he wrote, "Lord you have taken my companion (and my loved ones) from me; the darkness is my closest friend." Proverbs 17:17 "A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity."

Are you loyal to people? Or do you cut your losses and get out when a relationship begins to cost you more than you’re getting back? What do you value more? your freedom and independence or relationships and people?

Those questions lead to the last mark. The fifth mark of a friend is self—sacrificial love. This brings us back to our text: "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13) Now this is a tricky one. At one level a friendship is not one—sided giving, as we’ve already talked about, one of the reasons friendship works is because there’s a balance in giving and receiving. We all sense when someone just sucks everything out of us. We want to run as far as we can from such a person. You know the difference between a friendship and a project, between someone you enjoy being with and someone you are with merely with out of a sense of duty to minister to that person, to give to that person. Almost by definition, a true friend is the former.

But, having said that, I want to add: it’s also true that friendships are deepened by self—giving. My wife Jeannette and I have three children. Today, they’re 32, 31, and 28. But when these kids were 6, 5, and 2, my wife Jeannette was seriously ill, and we had to spend two weeks in Mayo Clinic. We left our three kids, again 6, 5, and 2 years old, with Harry and Adria Lambers, our best friends in Toledo. Our kids promptly got chicken pox the day we left. By the time we got back, they were totally healed. To this day we say, "Chicken pox isn’t so bad. We can’t even remember what they looked like on our kids."

We were so grateful to Harry and Adria. They did this without complaining because they loved us and our kids and we loved them and their kids. And this just deepened our love for each other. There isn’t much we wouldn’t do for each other.

If you never give more than you get, you won’t have very close friends. If you give just a little more than you get, you will be amazed at what happens. "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." (John. 15:13)

All five of these marks of a true friend are really matters of personal, spiritual, Christ—like character. Friendship and community are built on character, personal, deep character. To put it another way, we deepen our capacity for friendship, for relationships, for community, as we become more Christ—like. When we become a Christian, we die and rise with Christ. We die to our old self—to old ways of living. In Colossians 3, Paul says we die to anger, rage, malice, lying, and sexual immorality. These are all things that destroy relationships. And we rise with Christ and put on compassion, kindness, humility, patience, forgiveness, and love. Notice how all those things are things that strengthen and deepen relationships.

Put yet another way, friendship, deep relationship, is at the heart of God’s purposes for us. God created us to love and be loved. And when Jesus Christ died on the cross to break the hold of sin on us, and rose from the dead to make us new people, God made the way for us to be the kind of people who are and who have great friends.

I close with some questions for you to ask yourself, corresponding to these five marks of a friend:

1. Am I a trustworthy person? Can I keep a confidence?

2. In conversation, do I talk most about things and life and ideas, or about other people?

3. How honest am I with my friends?

4. Am I loyal to people? Or do I cut my losses and get out when a relationship begins to cost me more than I’m getting back?

5. Do I value someone enough to personally sacrifice something for him or her?

Have I ever experienced the joy of deep giving in a friendship?

Again, these are not just issues in our character that involve some minor psychological adjustment. They really involve Christ’s transforming work in our lives.

Finally, two closing suggestions: first, take the time real soon to enjoy your friends. Second, take time to tell someone that he or she is your good friend. Write a note, make a phone call. (I did get on the phone and call Adria (the chicken pox lady) when I wrote this. It was nice to just tell each other that we loved each other.)

Life offers us few gifts more precious and satisfying than a good friend. Little else makes us resemble Christ more than being a good friend. May God make you such a friend.

About the Author

Duane Kelderman

Rev. Duane Kelderman is the Vice President for Administration and an Associate Professor of Preaching at Calvin Seminary in Grand Rapids. Before his current position he served as pastor in Christian Reformed congregations in Toledo, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Rev. Kelderman is married to Jeannette and has three children and two grandchildren. He was born and raised in Oskaloosa, Iowa and attended Calvin College and Calvin Seminary. He enjoys reading and carpentry.

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