Friendship helps to make life special. Friends know your past, hope for your future and accept you just the way you are in the present. While God chooses our families, we choose our friends (hopefully with God’s help). Categorically, there are friends for a reason, friends for a season and friends for a lifetime, and certainly, the numbers in each of those categories diminish from former to latter.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.” – C.S. Lewis
That sameness of thought, interest or personality can draw us near. Yet to have a good friend, you must be a good friend, and that takes time, effort and most importantly, heart. As time marches on, we all have friends who we would love to see more often, though regardless how much time passes in between visits, nothing changes. That love remains just as strong. No obstacle, including time or distance, could keep that friend away if a need presented itself.
One of the Bible’s first examples of friendship is between Jonathan, the son of King Saul, and David, whom King Saul looked upon as his chief rival. Even though King Saul sought to murder David, the love and friendship between David and Jonathan increased.
Now when he had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.
1 Samuel 18:1
That phrase reveals much, for love of self happens easily for prideful people. To treat another as well as we treat ourselves is quite a gift. Obviously, Jonathan loved his father in a different way than he loved his friend, David. Though Jonathan refused to betray David, he still chose to die on the battlefield in support of his misguided father. In the same manner, many of our family relationships remain close, as “blood is thicker than water.” On the other hand, sibling rivalry can be intense. Look at the lives of Esau and Jacob, the sons of Isaac, to see the intensity regardless of brotherly love. Friends do not need to fight over parental love or standing.
A friend loves at all times,
And a brother is born for adversity.
Proverbs 17:17
Yet our greatest example of friendship comes from Jesus. His life, deeds and words all exhibited the truest test of friendship.
13 Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. 14 You are My friends if you do whatever I command you. 15 No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you.
John 15:13-15
We are the friends of God. Additionally, we are His children, as well. Yet the words of our Lord remind us that to be willing to die for a friend involves more love than dying for a family member. When Jesus died for us, we were not His friends, but strangers to Him. Still, He loved us that much.
Everyone seems to be on the go almost non-stop. To take the time to be a true friend involves dying to self, putting off perceived needs for the benefit of others. Sometimes we build walls, not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break those walls down. Is there someone around you who wants and needs your encouragement? It could be as easy as a phone call or email, or as difficult as a cross-country journey, but God desires for us to reach out to the people He has brought into our lives. Reflect on the impact that friends have made in your life! If you want to know how to reach someone else, think of what others could do, or have done, to reach you! But as Christmas approaches, the time of year with the most suicides due to loneliness, make the time to reach out to someone, and be the kind of friend to someone else that Jesus is to you!
7 For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:7-8
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