Friendships: Improve Them!

Friendships: Improve Them!                                by Capt. Kelly Durant

Proverbs 17:17

A friend loves at all times, And a brother is born for adversity. Proverbs 18:24

A man who has friends must himself be friendly, But there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

2. Here is verse that can change your life… John 15:13 (GNT)The greatest love you can have for your friends is to give your life for them.

Love for others has caused men in battle to jump on a grenade in order to give their lives to stop the killing of all of their friends right by them! Often vets are honored, and we must recognize the honor they deserve! Many soldiers and people throughout history have sacrificed their lives so that others would not be hurt or killed. This is absolute love! A true friend is one who loves all the way and he will do anything, even die for you! Would you do that for someone? Jesus did it for you and me!

In the past decades I have noticed that a majority of people in society do not have many friends, not even 1 or 2! This is a crisis in my opinion! In others words when you get a flat and need a ride while stuck on the side of the highway, who are you going to call? A large majority of people don’t have family nearby anymore either, so who will help?  Sometimes we as pastors are the only ones others call on for help and this should not be; everyone must cultivate friendships!  In this nation, and worldwide, there is a crisis of people not having a friend when they need one!

I observe that a few of you have a few friends, but a few more of you have only one or none though so let’s explore the dynamics of friendship. You need friends!  Proverbs 18:24 A man who has friends must himself be friendly, But there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. The first prerequisite to having friends is that you yourself must initiate it, cultivate it, promote it, and it means that you must be friendly!

3. Friends are people that you enjoy hanging out with, people with the same common interests, people with similar backgrounds, quite often they are around the same age as you, but not necessarily from the same race and country as yourself, however, these are common things but not always necessary. A friend can be anyone really! Look how diverse the disciples of Jesus were! But what more makes you and I be a friend to each other? It is in the sharing of our pains, the sharing of our deep sufferings, and also in sharing our blessings and joys with each other. 

When you are young, and start hanging with young friends you learn about life. You see life’s situations; you learn of divorced parents, you may see supportive parents. You may observe another one who has a father always drunk; you discover new things about people’s feelings, pains, and passions. Most young people are idealistic and accepting of one another for friendships despite their vast differences in backgrounds, but what happens as we age?

As we age we become hardened like dried out cement! (Castillo, who works with cement can relate to this, ha!) When we are young we are like the fresh cement, soft and drying, and people come by and leave their handprints and writing in it and then it dries out hard never to be changed. We all have seen sidewalks like this. So after certain unpleasant experiences, what happens to us? Most people get bitter and protective and stop having so called friends! Most people dry hard as a stone cold rock so they keep others out! Becoming like a rock and an island to their selves is not the way God intended for us to become! Sin has caused this!

4. Let’s explore how a friend should be. A friend is closer than a brother or sister, being loyal, they are there when you need them, and they sacrifice their time or material goods for you when needed. A friend is emotionally close to you so there is a connection that grows and remains over time. Most of all, a friend is a person you trust and have no fear of them harming you either by stealing from you, by revealing personal painful information, or speaking betraying words behind your back. A friend loves always and is concerned for your well-being!

The values, or glue that enables people to stick together, are inherently Christian, and these values are needed to support and maintain a relationship. These are the values of love, loyalty, trust, sacrifice, forgiveness, and of serving one another. However, all of us must be careful as even certain Christian friends may not be mature in the faith enough to practice these values!

Jesus says in John 15:14 “You are my friends if you do whatever I command you”. So is your friend living in agreement with what Jesus commanded? What was Jesus greatest commandment? To love God above all things and love your neighbor as yourself! A person you deserve as a friend must be loving and nice to all, not just nice for being interested in something! Jesus said we have no reward if we just love our own as the heathen do, implying that we must love everyone, even our enemies! We may not have a friendship with our enemies but we still show them an example of God’s love anyway.

Only love can motivate a person to sincerely connect to you or to another, producing loyalty and trustworthiness. Only Jesus transforms the character you and I have to remake us into friendly people. We kill our pride and selfishness learning to be like Jesus with noble sacrificial hearts for the salvation of all.

5. Let’s examine the quality of loyalty, or as some would define it as faithfulness.

God has always modeled to us His loyalty and faithfulness, and in particular we capture this through the forgiving loving and sacrificial actions of Jesus Christ. In the O.T. we find  Psalm 119:90

Your faithfulness endures to all generations; You established the earth, and it abides.

Here is also another thing involving faithfulness, we must remain faithful and forgive the offenses of our friends knowing how God forgives us.     2 Timothy 2:13 If we are faithless, He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself.

Within loyalty we find forgiveness and sacrifice. Soldiers from all countries if captured by the enemy will always remain loyal and never share any damaging info about their country.  This means that even under torture, they sacrifice their lives. This sacrificial loyal quality we also know about took place within the first Christians while dying as martyrs under the persecutions in Rome.

Remaining loyal until death is a faithful quality still happening in the world today with over an estimated 157,000 Christians being killed every year for their faith! Revelation 2:10 “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life”. Christians are being killed by extremists and the news media will not divulge these horrific acts! There are 2,400 media outlets in the U.S. controlled by only 6 corporations and they are not loyal to Christian values! To know truth, don’t trust the mainstream media that has an agenda diametrically opposed to Christ, but rather search in Christian resources and in other alternatives.

6. Let’s examine the quality of connection, or as some would define it as an emotional attachment. What defines what this is better than “love”? Love is the strongest emotion that exists between humans and God even commands that we love each other and Him! (We love Him back, since He first loved us).

Matt 22: 37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 38 This is the first and great commandment. 39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. 

For me it is easy to get emotionally attached to people just because I do my best to love them! You and I can gain the power to love everyone if we wake up daily and ask God to give us His power through the Holy Spirit. You can even look at any person on the street and feel a great love for them, even for the rejected ones like a beggar, prostitute, or drunk. You can feel in your heart sympathy for their pain and hurt. You and I can suffer with them for the lack of the knowledge of Jesus that has led them into such a sad desperate sad state in life.

In every person you can find reason to feel for them for all the suffering they have had, either in their childhood, or adult life. This is why we must as a Corps, and amongst our friends, always take time just to talk and share, to get to know each other, to sympathize and empathize with each other. Technology has done us the favor of helping us connect through Facebook, Tweeter, and many others, but sometimes people communicate wrong or false things, and this ends up damaging the good emotions and connections that could have been made.

7. Let’s examine the quality of trust.  Trust is when a person knows all your secrets, your pain, your weaknesses, and all about your life yet they love and esteem, and honor you anyway! They would never be unfair to you, and never allow others to ridicule, take advantage of, or humiliate you.

Trust is what everyone wants and needs, but sadly, amongst friends and family, this gets violated too often! Today, sadly, hardly anyone trusts anyone!  And considering the violation of trust happening worldwide in the current governments, false churches, corrupt corporations, and the violating human rights, there is good reason to mistrust authorities and be suspicious!

A violation of your trust is a crime against you involving a lie disrespecting who you are as a person; it ultimately is an action of abuse against you. When people get abused they feel pain and to stop it they make their selves dead and cold inside. Matthew 24:12 “And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold”.  The world has become quite cold, but we are not of the world, we must stay warm for the Lord!

8. Be careful as we must not confuse the values within friendships and family, as some have done in today’s world. We all have friends but if, for example, a good friend were to come to my home seeking refuge from the law because he did a hit-n-run while intoxicated, my duty, no matter having loyalty and trust, would be to call the authorities, right?  If not, I am an accomplice aiding and abetting a fugitive! A friend is a friend only if they are not putting you at risk or in danger!

In the hood language of today a friend is one who does not “snitch” on you. Beware, this reveals a potential enemy! If you have a so-called friend that commits illegal and immoral actions and then they want you to show your trust by not snitching on them, you need to recognize they are not your friend at all! Exposure of criminal activity is supporting a friendship to the larger community. The only way for truth to dominate over evil is to do right despite the losses.

All organized crime, mafias, corrupt business men, crony governments, and anti-Christ religions, cults, all operate within the premise that their friends will never expose their illegal and immoral activities.  Never misplace your trust in this kind of a traitor as you may become the next fall guy for their cover-ups! Read books, read the news, people are sacrificed and even killed all the time for trying to expose corruption or for not covering up for their so called friends! A terrible reality: often enemies are disguised as friends!

9. Here’s a new concept related to friendships.  How do you understand this verse by Jesus?  Luke 16:9 “And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when it shall fail, they may receive you into the eternal tabernacles”.

Jesus wants you and I to be friends with those people who are of the world, not just friends with those of your faith! In churches so often when the pastors or the leaders have friends with those outside the church the people often get suspicious, jealous, or uncomfortable thinking they love the sinful things in the world by hanging with these non-churched people.

Here is the issue: It is the pastors (Captains) job to be friendly and to be a socialite like Jesus was and to hang out with the publicans and sinners seeking to love them into the kingdom of God! In all workplaces and families there will always be people that drink, swear, and not think like you, but if you exclude yourself from them (and I understand why you want to since many of them are trouble), you will never be showing them enough acceptance so that they will listen to you talk about Jesus one day when the opportunity is there.

Jesus when he travelled did not always have friends of his faith, he stayed with Nicodemus and other people of the world who received him into unexpected habitations. To obey Jesus you and I must make friends with those outside our Christian world. Will you do your best to do this? Tell me how you can do this.

10. The truth is this, Jesus is your and my best friend, but we also need to have friends on the earth as well!

John 15:15

No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I heard from my Father, I have made known unto you.

This verse implies that to be a friend as Jesus was to us, we must spend time with each other. A friend reveals truths and secrets, a friend transmits teachings and information along that will bring blessings in life, and especially sharing the faith of Jesus to gain eternal life! Do you follow the friendship example of Jesus? 

I want to challenge you with making the people here more your friends! Several of you have already, but when is the last time you had lunch with someone you do not know so well here? Or even paid them a friendly visit? And others outside your world of current friends, are you trying to win them to the Lord by being friendly?

And if you have ever done anything, or said anything that has violated the trust of a person here, today is the day to make it right. Go and ask them forgiveness! Ask God to change your heart so you get ideas how you can be a better friend to those around you, in the church, within your family, and within your community! Prayer…