Friends: Gift of God

Friends are a great resource.  They are helpers and supporters who walk beside us, who lift us up when we are down, and who can call us back on track when we have gone wayward. True friendship requires accountability, trust, and reciprocity.  In reality, friendship is a two-way street that obligates both parties to each other in love.

Scripture refers to this friendship as brotherly love and affection, not brotherly in a biological sense, but in a spiritual sense.  Jesus identifies sacrifice as the requisite for this, the highest degree of friendship (John 15:13).  The greatest gift of friendship is sacrifice.  Sacrifice is not limited in scope to martyrdom but encompasses a much broader reality.  The essence of this can be seen in people who give themselves to their friends.

This "giving of self" can be as simple as forfeiting a weekend to help move, as inexpensive as paying for dinner, or as challenging as calling someone out when they're making a mistake.  Brotherly love requires that we would care for one another with a deep affection and consideration that is most concerned with serving the other at the denial of self.

In truth, the joy and worth of friendship is that friends are born for and through adversity (Pro. 17:17), meaning that friends are the human agents God uses to express His love and care for us.  Moreover, friends fulfill the divine purposes of picking each other up and dusting off shoulders when we fall down (Ecc. 4:9-10).  This means that true friends will be there through the thick and thin.

Additionally, our choice of friends, the very people we walk through life with, affects us.  We take on the traits of our friends, good and bad.  This has long-lasting ramifications in our lives.  If we walk in the company of the wise and upright of heart we prove ourselves to be wise and upright too as the converse proves the oposite (Pro. 13:20).  As iron sharpens iron, this works itself out practically in the process of accountability, service, and regular Bible study (Pro. 27:17).

The Lord has given friends for a number of valuable reasons: for encouragement, for reproof, for care, for admonishment, and for accountability, et al.  God wants us to grow into the men and women that He has designed us to be.  He has divinely placed the perfect people in our lives in order to accomplish this purpose.  Take heart at the love that God has lavished upon us in the gift of friendship!