You've Got a Friend in Me

Let’s play “Sing that Sitcom Theme Song with Me:”

              Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your naaaame… (Cheers)

               I’ll be there for you…(Friends)

               Thank you for bein’ a friend… (The Golden Girls)

Friendship. It’s a universal theme. We all desire friends that will stick with us. We value the people in our lives who know us well and choose to love us anyway. Most of our widespread depictions of friendship include laughter, shared adventures, holding one another up through hard times, and forgiveness after conflict.

As I read Scripture, though, there is something present in God’s definition friendship that is not widely acclaimed in today’s society. In fact, it is largely denounced. What is it? Correction.

I can almost hear you sucking in the air between your teeth. Correction? I am called to LOVE my friends, not judge them. To support them. To encourage them to be their authentic selves. Yes. By God’s definitions, not your own.

Love seeks what is best for a person; warning them that they are about to step off a cliff isn’t judgement, it’s a wake-up call to open their eyes to the reality and peril of their position. Support is to actually hold someone up, not to merely call it staying upright as they fall down. Encouragement to authenticity includes calling out the truth in our friends, not agreeing with the lies they believe about themselves so that we never face conflict.

Proverbs 27:17 describes this aspect of friendship this way: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” This process, however, requires both parties to be strong and solid. It requires a closeness that allows for repeated friction to be applied at the right time, consistently, and in the right direction so as to be a honing agent. Too brittle or small, and the iron rods will break. Too frequent or concussive of a striking together, and again, brokenness. Inconsistent and imprecise directionality of the honing, and rather than a sharpening, you will actually produce a dulling of both pieces.

The more I turn over this picture of friendship sharpening both parties, the more I see places where the broader church needs some refinement, and we as individual believers need some self-examination. The broader church sometimes fails to establish the close relationship necessary for this kind of sharpening, instead raining down corrective blows on people with no strength or solidness to withstand them – and often only willing for this to be a one-way interaction, not a mutual honing. We as individuals frequently default to applying correction emotionally and sporadically, without consulting the Holy Spirit before we speak. This results in broken relationships, more pronounced warping of what was meant to be straightened, and a dulling of the love between friends.

What then are we to do? How do we effectively sharpen one another? It is a process that inherently involves conflict, heat, sparks, and a chipping away. How do we do that in a way that brings about positive change rather than destruction?

I believe that the first step must be to submit our emotions, our desire to correct, our sense of justice and righteousness, to the Father. Before we speak to our friend, we must first speak to the One who IS justice and righteousness. We must rid ourselves of any selfish motivation or offense toward the one we are about to correct. I have found that often, this step alone results in Holy Spirit gently telling me that to convict someone of judgement and righteousness is His job, not mine. I then leave my friend in His capable hands and turn my own heart to asking the Spirit to help me love them whether I see the change in them that I desire or not. It is a hard reality that this can result in me loving them from afar, because it is necessary for me to not be brought into conflict that will dull my own blade.

Sometimes, however, the Father tells me that I’m the one who has the strength of relationship with that particular friend to apply the right words at the right time under His direction and with His heart toward redemption. In those times, when we hear the Spirit whisper that we must speak boldly to our friends, we MUST ask for His words. Throughout the New Testament, we have examples of what this looks like. Frequently we find the words, “Dear Friends,” and then the author goes on to call out sin and say “STOP IT”, to warn against a tendency toward sin and say “BEWARE YOUR DIRECTION”, or to come alongside someone who is weak and say “WALK WITH ME OUT OF THIS.”

That is friendship. Dear friendship. A strong love that has taken time to build relationships that will stand up to the sharpening. An abiding love that says, “I will be here for however long it takes to hone you to your God-given purposes.” A righteous love that doesn’t lie about the dullness – the blunt, purposeless, non-reflective-of-God’s-glory parts – in a friend’s life. A love that allows that friend to apply friction in return for the same reasons.
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Father, may we learn to be grateful that Jesus has called us HIS friends…and may we truly be friends to one another, so that the world will know that we are Yours by our love for one another.