Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: “How to Be Biblically Friendly”
**Reformation Covenant Church | Pastor Dennis Tuuri**

Our sermon text is Proverbs 18:24. The topic is how to be biblically friendly. Proverbs 18:24. “A man that hath friends must show himself friendly. And there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.” Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for your word. We pray now you would illuminate our understanding. May your Holy Spirit open our all too often deaf ears. Open our hearts that you might convict us, Lord God, and open our hearts also so we might hope in you and the resurrection of our Savior, that we might move in resurrection power this day and onto the rest of our lives, being better friends according to your scriptures. In Jesus’ name we pray and for the sake of his kingdom. Amen.

May you be seated, and the younger children may continue waiting. So you had to wait a little longer to be seated today. You had to wait a little longer to hear the sermon scripture. I didn’t plan it that way. God did, though—kind of changing the order of worship a bit. So we ended up standing a little longer than we’re used to, and it’s a good thing to wait.

One of the first things you’ve got to learn in order to become an adult is how to wait patiently. And Advent is about waiting. We sing, “Oh, come, O come, Emmanuel.” Why do we sing that? Didn’t he already come two thousand years ago? So what are we doing? Were we just remembering historically what it was like for Israel for four thousand years? Yeah, that’s part of what we’re doing, isn’t it? But part of it, too, is we desire an advent, a coming and appearance of the Lord Jesus Christ in our culture.

Our hearts groan under the burden of a godless nation, a world that has essentially turned its back on the great developments and progress of Christian culture. And so we also pray, “Oh, come Jesus, and make your advent known to our culture and our world today.” We also, of course, pray for the final advent of our Lord, the consummation of all things. And we also, hopefully most importantly, at Advent season, desire a coming of the Lord Jesus Christ anew to our own hearts and to our own families and to ourselves.

And so we celebrate this season. I’m on the internet now. There’s a group called the Knox Ring, a group of reformed guys across the country, and I’m getting messages from all the time. All this stuff goes out to everybody, and there’s a lot of hot discussion these last couple of months about whether or not you should celebrate Christmas. And here we are with a Christmas tree right in the service. I remember years ago I had a Jehovah’s Witness boss.

He was a nice guy, by the way, and he took me home and he saw our Christmas tree in the living room window. He says, “Oh, I see you have a pagan symbol.” They think these are real bad deals, and they can be. But one of the nice things about Christmas is it ties us to the historical advent of the Lord Jesus Christ. It ties us to the history of the scriptures that celebrates a historical act, an event, a birth.

And we don’t know for sure it was December 25th. There’s lots of good reasons to say that it was, by the way—at least that it was in that season, December 22nd, 23rd, 24th. We don’t know that. But we do take this time to celebrate the advent, the incarnation of the Lord, not his creation. It’s why we sing the Gloria Patri: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,” the Trinity. Jesus doesn’t have a beginning. He’s eternally begotten of the Father. And so we celebrate these historical events, and that’s good and important to us, and we celebrate in the context of our lives. And we celebrate it hopefully, as I said, seeking an advent of the Lord Jesus in our own lives.

The tree is a reminder that we’re kind of growing up. The tree is essentially a picture to us of the tree of life—Jesus—and then “the righteous men that are planted by the river, whose tree whose fruit come in due season, whose limbs and branches don’t wither and fade.” We’re engrafted into the tree of life, into the Lord Jesus, into his humanity. And so we grow up. And it’s important for us to remember that most of us are little seedlings, and the church is probably still a seedling church.

I was having a discussion with someone the other day about how it seems like a lot of the scriptures are unclear about so many things. And I think, well, you know, I think eventually it won’t be seen as unclear at all. I mean, to my three-year-old, my personal computer and the manuals that come along with it seem pretty unclear. Or take something simple—the construction of a model plane, for instance, even a simple one—it seems pretty unclear to her how you go about doing it, because she’s immature. I don’t think the scriptures are unclear at all. I think that we’re immature still as a church.

And I don’t mean just this church. I mean historically, the church has many, many years to grow before it grows up to the fullness and to demonstrating all the fruits of the Spirit. The stylized fruit of these glass balls on this tree are a reminder of the fruits of the Spirit in our lives.

Well, I’ve chosen to preach here. And you know, again, I didn’t really have a whole lot of choice. I guess I did have a choice about this, but we’re today at a place where we’re going to talk about friendship. You remember that several months ago, a month or two ago, I talked about Paul, beginning that long journey, being refreshed by friends at the beginning of it, being led off at a particular port and receiving the refreshment of friends. And I wanted to talk about friendship then. Didn’t get all the way done. Tried to shove it into the tail end of another sermon. I thought, let’s just do another sermon altogether and cover some of this stuff. So that’s what we’re going to do today: we’re going to talk and explain how, according to the scriptures, we can be friendly.

If Proverbs 18:24 says that a friend must show himself friendly, then we want to know how to do that, don’t we? And we don’t want to be informed by our view of friendship from what works—we’re not pragmatists—or from our culture. We’re not humanists, and we’re not pluralists. We don’t take all the wisdom of all the different religions and then somehow come up with what is a good thing for us. No, we want to look at the scriptures in terms of how we’re to do this, and it’s very important, I think, for a consideration of our Advent season as well. I think it does tie in.

Let me just say first, by the way, that what we’re dealing with in the voyage of Paul again is a historical event. This storm at sea that we’ve been following for the last few months, in which the original discussion of friendship fit into a historical event tied to history—and it’s important for us to be tied to a view of history, to a proper view of who we are. We’re not abstracted away from life. And if there’s one area in which that becomes painfully obvious again and again and again, it is the subject of friendships.

I was thinking on the way here in the car, I was thinking, you know, I don’t really have a whole lot of wisdom about maybe I do—but it seems like I don’t have a whole lot of wisdom about how to be a good friend or what it is like to experience good friendship. Now, I do have some of that. Please don’t get me wrong. Those of you who have been my friends for years, don’t take offense. But I think that for most people, or for a lot of people, maybe the most wisdom we have is in what it feels like when somebody doesn’t treat us as a friend, you know, and when they’re not exhibiting the biblical characteristics of friendship and love. We know how badly that hurts.

And in our day and age, when we live in the context of a world that is extremely isolated, we at this church are physically and geographically isolated as well as affected by the flow of our culture. Then I think a lot of us know pretty well how difficult it is to build binding and lasting friendships. That’s what we’re called to do. And if we want to pray at Advent season for the coming of the Lord in our lives and our culture, our culture will be changed, to a large extent, at least in one of the big factors in that change, is the exhibition of Christian friendship.

Jesus said that they’ll know you’re Christians by your love for one another. And I don’t mean to say that, you know, there are neutral people out there and they’ll see when we finally love each other. But I do say the exhibition of the character of the Lord Jesus Christ was a large part of who the Apostle Paul was, and who we should be as well. The Apostle Paul was an advent himself, okay? He went places, and there are some scholars who talk about the apostolic parousia—the coming of the apostle. And Paul wrote about that to various churches. “When I come, it’s going to be tough on you guys.” He said it was like the Lord Jesus coming. So the Apostle Paul is a parousia. He is a coming and advent of Jesus Christ.

We’ve talked about in the book of Acts the acts of Jesus Christ through his church. And I think that it is true to say that each of us has the tremendous gift to be able to be an advent—a small “a”—of the Lord Jesus Christ to each other, to the world. We carry with us, as members of the new race of the Lord Jesus Christ, his humanity, his redeemed humanity, and Jesus works through his people, not just person to person, but to the whole world. People are the way that God works with the creation. He’s put you and me—not man in some kind of abstract Greek concept—he’s put you and me and your kids, the body of Christ, to have dominion over the entire created order.

And the created order groans, waiting for our manifestation, waiting for us to be who we are. We come from this earth. We’re, as James B. Jordan said, we are the holy land. You want to know where the holy land is? Look at each other. Because we’re earth. We’re land that has been made holy and sanctified and set apart to God for his purpose. He’s brought us to life out of dust. We’re a plastic bag filled with dirt and blood. But God has brought that land forward and breathed his breath into us.

And he then looks to us to be the vice regents, people that exercise dominion in the context of the creation. We’re the way the creation expresses in verbal sounds praise to God, and we take the created order into us. We eat things from it, and we process it, and we use that energy to sing forth and to add forth praise to God. So you’re a very important person, and in terms of your history, you are an advent of the Lord Jesus Christ in the context of this world, and you’re an advent of the Lord Jesus Christ to one another.

And when you act in a friendly way—defined biblically, not humanistically—then you are a good advent of the Lord Jesus to one another. And you can have that great opportunity to minister grace with your tongue and your appearance and your thoughts.

Advent’s also a reminder, however, that when we don’t do that correctly, God, Jesus, will come as an advent to us at different times in history, and he will judge us and he will whip us real good. The book of Revelation starts with letters to churches, and he says, you know, “This is good, this is bad. Repent, or when I come, I’m going to remove your lampstand. I’m going to do things. I’m going to judge you.” And then most of the book of Revelation is a picture of God’s judgment on the church—the visible manifestation of the church of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament—and those who rejected him as he came. And it’s a picture of God’s advent to our church.

All those horrific judgments should we prove unfaithful, should we prove those who do not act with a comprehension of the Lord Jesus Christ and the power of the Spirit. So Advent season is a reminder to us to be friends and be an advent to one another. And it’s a reminder to us that if we don’t act friendly, if we act unfriendly to each other, if we depart from our first love for the Lord Jesus and his people, then he’s going to come in Advent and bring judgment to us.

And so we have this historical event we celebrate, and I want to put it into the context of friendship. Let me just mention one other thing, though, in terms of this. Well, maybe I’ll wait till next week to talk about that. I’ll just mention it briefly here. Again, we’re talking about history, and you know, we celebrated Thanksgiving a week or so ago, and that’s a historical event. And at our family, we read a chapter out of William Bradford’s journal of Plymouth Plantation. Hobby Brooks said there was a neat account in there of the voyage of the pilgrims as they went from England to Holland. Now, they were fourteen days—just like the fourteen days Paul was aboard ship. They went a period of time without seeing sun, moon, or stars, just like Paul did upon his ship. They despaired of life, just as they did on Paul’s ship. And God brought them to safety through all that, just like he does to Paul. And we’ll talk more about that next week.

You know, when you read the accounts of the pilgrims, I don’t know about you, but with us, it has sort of more significance. If you read about the settling of India or the settling of, whatever, Australia, whatever it is, it isn’t quite the same thing. This is America. This is our history. And we read about the pilgrims, we sort of feel connected to that. My wife has an old journal of one of her great-distant relatives who came to America from Denmark or Sweden or some place. And you know, we keep copies of that. We want to give copies to each of the kids: “It’s a relative of yours who came over, and this is what he lived like, and somehow this is part of who you are. This is your heritage as a people.”

This is, you know, great-great-grand uncle or whatever it was, and you feel connected to that. And when we read the account of Paul, we should feel connected to that in the same way, and in fact in a stronger way, because ultimately we’re not Americans. Ultimately we’re not Oregonians or Tualatins. Ultimately we’re Christians. And what we celebrate historically at Advent is a real historical event.

There’s a German expression—”heilsgeschichte,” sacred history. And what that meant was myths—that the scriptures are full of these myths, and they’re not historically true, but they’re neat lessons for us to teach us about life. We don’t believe that. We believe it’s history, but it’s not some sort of abstract, removed history from us. It’s our history. And when we read the scriptures—the Old Testament, the New Testament—historical events, when we read of the advent of our Savior, that should be a big deal to us because it’s our history. It should be reading like “great-grand uncle who came over from Denmark” or like the pilgrims who came across the waters. You see?

So as you think about the historical events of the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ, and then the advents of the Apostle Paul, and then look at the way God manifested himself in the Old Testament over this next month and the prophecies of Christ coming—don’t just read about it as something over here. It’s your history, and think about it that way. God says that we’re making history. You know, in a hundred years or two hundred years, possibly. It’s hard to say, but I think that this church has been blessed by God to the extent that there will be people that maybe not formally write histories, but probably some people write histories of what happened here. God keeps a history all along, of course, and when we die and be with the Lord, we’re going to have a review of some of that stuff, maybe all of it.

We’re writing a history right here in the context of this church. And you are writing history, and it’s significant. And much of the history of this church will be determined by how well we act as friends to one another, because that will either bind us together as a people increasingly or drive us apart, splinter us up. So this topic of friends—well, I didn’t choose it for any of these reasons—is very significant to the Advent season, history, the making of history, our advent to one another, and Christ’s advent to us in judgment and evaluation.

And what I want to say today about friends and how to be friends, how to show yourself friendly biblically, is really, first, I want to make a brief caveat. But after that, I want to say three basic areas to help you remember what it means to be a friend biblically:

One—your attitude, where you think.
Two—your speech.
And then three—your countenance, or your face. Maybe you could think of that as your brain, your attitude, or your heart, if you want to look at it that way. Your tongue, your speech, and your ears, how you hear speech (I guess that would be associated with that), and your eyes or your countenance, your appearance to each other. So how you think, how you talk, and how you look and appear to one another.

And then at the end, I’m going to give you three very practical applications that you can do this week in terms of putting into effect how to act friendly in a biblical way.

Now, the first caveat is—and I mentioned this before—the first caveat is you don’t act friendly toward everybody. You know, everybody’s not your friend. There’s a discrimination of friendships. Friendship with the world is enmity with God. You don’t want to be friendly to, by the way. I’m defining the term biblical friendship. You don’t want to think the same way. You don’t want to talk to them the same way. You don’t want to appear the same way to those outside of the body of Christ, and particularly to those who are actually violently opposed to the church of Jesus Christ.

There’s a discrimination at the beginning of a talk about friendship. We must speak to a proper discrimination. And you know, there’s two difficulties, as there usually are, with discrimination or the lack thereof. If you have a lack of discrimination, then you act the same way toward everybody, and you violate God’s laws relative to how you interact with other people. You lose your distinctive if you don’t discriminate. If you just think somehow that everybody gets together and becomes friends and everybody just stays in their own little worldview as they interact as friends, you’re wrong.

Interaction with friends is an interaction of worldviews, really. And things are moving, usually in a relationship, toward one person or toward the other person, okay? So if you think that’s not going to happen and you can be friends with whoever you want to be friends with and not be affected, you’re just plain wrong. There’s covenantal links that happen through friendship.

On the other hand, if you think on the basis of that the only people we should be friends with are the people in the context of this church, you’re wrong too, because you’re not thinking broad enough. We have communion. We discuss our fellowship with the body of Christ around the earth and with the church triumphant in heaven as well as the church militant on earth. We are, as James B. Jordan really taught as well at family camp and elsewhere, ministers. And if the reformed, the conservative reformed churches know things about the sovereignty of God and about worship and this stuff that the rest of the visible church does not know—that the rest of the body of Christ does not know—it’s not to the end that they cut off friendships, pull within themselves. It’s to the end that they minister to the body of Christ those truths.

We went down to California years ago, several of us, and Rushdoony had just been over to England talking with some charismatics. And you know, we asked him, well, you know, he seemed to speak so highly of them. We said, “What should we learn from the charismatics?” And he said, “Nothing. But you should minister to them. You should want to be able to serve in the context of whatever they’re doing and help them and minister to them that way.” And he said the same thing about Roman Catholics.

He thinks it’s wrong to go out of your way to offend a Roman Catholic by talking about Mary first thing out of the shoot. If you have some gifting or knowledge that God has given to you, it’s so that you might be a priestly people and minister that, ultimately, to the whole world, and certainly to the body of Christ. That doesn’t mean you compromise. The flow goes that way. But it does mean that you have relationships in which you minister. We must have a proper sense of discrimination.

In terms of friendship, friendship involves loyalty. And if you’re going to be loyal to someone, there must be a linkage there in terms of a shared doctrinal base. If we have—and we do in this church—a sense of the correctness of reformational doctrine, our friendships should reflect that. And the friendships of our children should reflect that. We don’t want to see our children lost through a failure of discrimination relative to their friends.

Now, that’s going to be a real tendency. I mean, I think there’s two tendencies with our church. One is we don’t have enough relationships. There’s no ministry or service. And the other is that the kids want that so badly they end up doing that stuff and then losing their distinctives. It’s good to have relationships with people—Baptists, charismatics, even Arminians—but it’s good to the end that you minister to them, to bring them into a fuller, orbed vision of the orthodox faith.

Most people aren’t Arminians because they’ve chosen that in our culture. Most people aren’t Baptists because they studied the issue out. When you study the issue out, it doesn’t work—the Baptist view of the scriptures. They’re that way mostly because that’s the way they were taught. I mean, 80, 90% of the believing Christians in the Pacific Northwest are dispensationalists, not because they chose that, but because that’s what they grew up in the context of. So you want to have relationships, but you always want to make sure that friendship is serving the ends of the kingdom by ministering to them in terms of some basic understandings of the faith: the sovereignty of God, the law of God, a view of history.

We talked about this before. Don’t be unequally yoked. Implications of that in terms of your priestly consecration of everything. There’s no sacred-secular distinction. Your prophetic—your knowledge of things—darkness and light, your understanding of the world based upon the scriptures, all 66 books, not just the New Testament, okay? And in terms of rule, Bible, and Jesus: You cannot have covenantal linkage with someone who has a different view of authority and dominion. And that means that your friendships with those who are committed to a pessimistic eschatology are going to be somewhat more weakened than your friendships with those who have a full view of the flow of history, because it affects their view of dominion and what they do in the context of the family, the church, and the state and everything else.

You want to have those friendships, but you want to use them to the effect of bringing people to an understanding—hey, the scriptures say, you know, that this magnificent truth here that we’re talking about says that with the coming of Jesus, things are all turned over, that history flows in terms of that, not in terms of defeat. Well, anyway, you get the point.

The discrimination. Now then, the first area that we’re going to talk about the application of this principle of friendship is in your attitudes or your thoughts. I’ll do this real quickly because we covered much of this before. First, your attitudes or thoughts. Then we’ll go to the tongue, and then finally, the countenance. Scriptures say you got to show yourself friendly. How do you do that? Paul tells us that in 1 Corinthians—we’re real familiar with this. We won’t read the whole thing, but it talks about what love is. And if you’re to love as a brother, as 1 Peter tells us, then love is defined by the scriptures. And 1 Corinthians 13 tells us what that means.

And what that means is, I think, that if you look at all those characteristics in 1 Corinthians 13, the two essential ones are patience with people—not getting easily provoked, being long-suffering—and kindness, actively going out of your way to help others. So charity suffers long. It’s patient. It’s kind. Those are the two headers, I think, of the whole text in verse four.

Charity doesn’t envy because it’s patient with people and kind toward them. Charity vaunteth not itself. Patience implies a humiliation and a humbleness toward other people. It’s not puffed up. You get puffed up, prideful people—they become impatient people, okay? So it’s patience that’s being talked about here. Doesn’t behave itself unseemly, speaketh not her own, is not provoked, thinketh no evil. Okay, it’s easy to think evil of people. These are the things that are hard for us to do.

And I think—I won’t go over it now—but if you sum them up, it means being patient. How do you be a friend with somebody? You be patient with them, and you be kind to them.

1 Peter 3:8 tells us that there are several characteristics of how we are to act one toward the other. Now, the context of 1 Peter 3:8 is the patience that God requires of men toward rulers, men toward masters, and wives toward their husbands, okay? Submission, patience with people who use all three of those positions of authority improperly. And at the end of that, he sums it up in verse 8. Finally, in summation, he says: “Be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, and be courteous.”

And that word “courteous” is probably better translated “be humble-minded,” be humble with one another. And so 1 Peter tells us of these several characteristics. And I think that if we wanted to illustrate the kind of thought patterns—again, the kind of attitude we have toward people—it says, “Be of one mind. Have compassion one of another,” okay. Patience with each other is indicated both in compassion and to be pitiful. To be pitiful means to bear with their infirmities. To have compassion means to rejoice when they rejoice and to weep when they weep.

And to have patience as other people have things going on that are good, and patience as other people have things going on that are bad. We used the illustrations before of Job’s friends coming and they commiserate. They just sit there for a number of days before they start to talk to him. Friends go to friends when troubles happen, and by their very presence, provide compassion with them. And when friends have difficulties—we all have shortcomings. We’re all crummy examples of 1 Corinthians 13. All too often we’re little seedlings with not many demonstrations of the fruit of the Spirit. And we’ve got to be patient as God grows us up to a big tree—individually and then as the church over time. But we’re little seedlings. We’re going to have infirmities and difficulties, sins, shortcomings. And friends don’t cut friends off when difficulties come.

Friends are pitiful. That doesn’t mean they’re pitiful in the sense of how they act. It means they’re full of pity—one for another—with one another’s shortcomings. Again, they’re patient. They don’t take offense. They don’t stumble easily over another person’s difficulties.

So 1 Peter tells you: you’re going to have compassion, you’re going to have patience, love as brothers, be kind. In other words, okay? So your attitude and action is kind of filled up in the middle. There’s five things said in 1 Peter 3:8: one-mindedness, compassion, love as brothers, be pitiful, be humble-minded. And the first two kind of go together. They’re the buffer for the other three. And the other three can be boiled down to patience and kindness toward each other, which means having compassion, being pitiful, and loving as brothers. And the only way you’re going to do that, okay? And if you try to do it, you’re going to fail unless you have the first and last thing mentioned: to be humble-minded, to not think more of yourself than you ought to, to not be puffed up and self-vaunting. But again, 1 Corinthians 13 tells us that.

So to have a proper view of who you are in relationship to God—and that’s the one-mindedness that’s spoken of at the first portion of the verse, okay? We cannot do this without the mind of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit in submission to the Father. Reverend Jordan has taught us that sins against the Father are sins of impatience. And if we look at the patriarchal period: patience, patience, patience, patience—is what God is teaching men.

Sins against the Son are primarily sins against the images of the Son, which are you and me, other Christians. It’s a failure to be kind one to the other. Patience and kindness speak of the Father and the Son. And you can’t do it without the Holy Spirit. And if you don’t do it, then you’re going to have a failed witness as a Christian. You’re going to be taking the name of Christian upon yourself vainly. If all you have is a bunch of doctrine and you do not figure out relationally how to work with people and how to love as brothers and how to show yourself friendly, then your witness to the world, which you’re required to do by the third commandment—not to take the Lord’s name in vain. It doesn’t mean swearing, ultimately. It may mean that, but it means don’t take the Lord’s name emptily.

When you go forth in the world tomorrow, is the fact that you’re a Christian? Does it change anything you do? And if it doesn’t, then you’re in violation of the third commandment. And that’s the great temptation to us today, isn’t it? We’re not out worshiping false gods on hills or something. But we are very greatly tempted, as we go into a secular world, to mute our Christian witness. And I’m saying that one of the ways we mute it is by failing to be proper friends biblically one to the other.

So all these things are linked up together: patience (the Father), kindness (in terms of man-to-man), and then entering into that full witness of loving each other so the world will know that we’re Christians by that love and having a good witness—patience and kindness wrapped up again and again in 1 Corinthians 13, 1 Peter 3:8, ton of other scriptures.

Let me just mention a couple, and we’ll do this very quickly. Philippians 2:1—if there be any consolation in Christ, write down that reference down. I’ll look at it later. Philippians 2 verse 1: “If any comfort of love, any fellowship of the spirit, if any bowels and mercies, fulfill ye my joy that you be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.” One mind, again. “Let nothing be done through strife or vain glory, but in lowliness of mind, let each esteem others better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.”

Be kind to one another. For I have no one like-minded, he goes on to say. Romans 12:10: be kindly affectioned one to another in the context of our attitudes and how we train our thought life and our emotional life. We’re to train it to be kindly affection. This is a command. He doesn’t say, “I hope, as a result of your growth in grace, that you’ll find yourselves kindly affectioned one to the other.” So that you can say, “Well, I haven’t found that yet.” It’s a command. Be kindly affectioned one to the other.

Change the way you feel. You can do it. Change the way you think. You can do it. You can put controls. Now, kids can’t do it. My three-year-old had to be taken out earlier because she can’t control herself yet. But that’s our point—is to bring her up to where she can control herself. And Christian, that’s your job: to train your emotions and your thoughts to where you can do this, to be kindly affectioned one to the other, with brotherly love—acts of kindness, deeds, participation in honor, preferring one another. That’s the same three things over and over, isn’t it? It’s the patience of being kindly affectionate, it’s the kindness of loving each other, one another, with brotherly love, and then it is the one-minded humility of honoring one another more than yourself, seeking somebody else’s good.

Romans 12:13: “Distributing to the necessity of saints, kindness given to hospitality. Bless them which persecute you. Bless and curse not.” See, pitiful. Bear up with their infirmities. Verse 15: “Rejoice with them that do rejoice and weep with them that weep.” Compassion, a participation in the lives by training our emotions and our thoughts, our attitudes, to be kindly affection toward our brother. “Be of the same mind one toward another.” You see, it’s repeated over and over again in Paul’s epistles—the same stuff. “Be of one mind with one another. Mind high things, condescend to low estate. Be not wise in your own conceit.” Same thing.

How do you do this? How are you kind to each other? How are you patient and compassionate? You do that by having the mind of Christ and being knit together with the mind of Christ, by having a humility instead of a pridefulness toward God, and then toward men. “Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men.” That’s kindness there again. “So again, there it’s patience and kindness. Don’t temp evil with evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.”

So you know, the attitude you’re supposed to have is essentially characterized by a patience and compassion and a forbearance that goes along with the patience, and then the second part: kindness and looking for ways to help one another.

Very quickly, we read that in the context of this—this isn’t just a one-time shot at his faithfulness. “A friend loveth at all times. A brother is born for adversity.” When we read that opening text—”A man hath friends must show himself friendly. And there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother”—in adversity, closer than a brother. Faithfulness overarches the whole concept of biblical friendship. Faithfulness in difficult times, in times when they sin, and in times when they need help from you, okay?

Faithfully being compassionate and tender-hearted in context of bearing up with infirmities, and faithfulness in trying to minister good things when you can to your neighbor. Now, that’s what the scriptures say over and over and over again: show compassion, rejoice with those that rejoice, weep with those that weep. Be careful. If you’re compassionate and patient with your neighbor, you’re going to be careful of what you tell them. “He that is void of wisdom despiseth his neighbor, but a man of understanding holdeth his speech.” You’ll be careful in the way you speak with one another if you have compassion for each other.

If all you are is just acquaintances walking through life, you’ll say the first thing that comes off the top of your head because you don’t care what effect it has on your friend. “He that blesseth his friends with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him.” See, he’s not thinking. He’s not being compassionate and patient and thinking through what that brother is like and how the greeting should or should not come to him and what time it should or should not come.

“Discretion withdraw thy foot from thy neighbor’s house lest he be weary of thee and so hate thee.” See, thinking about him. And then on the so: patience along with compassion and bearing up with infirmities, and then the second part: kindness, as I said, showing brotherly love, helping and ministering to people.

The scriptures say that “withhold not good from them to whom it is due when it is in the power of thine hand to do it. Say not unto thy neighbor, Go and come again, and tomorrow I will give, when thou hast it by thee.” When you got the ability to help your friend out, your neighbor out, do it. Over and over and over and over, if it need be. And trust God that if he proves himself a biblical friend as well, he’ll help you over and over and over.

Faithfulness undergirds the whole thing: faithfulness in terms of compassion and bearing up with infirmities, faithfulness in terms of kindness. And if my belief is correct, that over and over in Paul’s epistles those are the two big statements—patience and kindness, and under patience I would lump compassion as a result of patience with people and bearing up with infirmities. So that’s attitude.

The attitude, though, ushers forth in tongue. And let’s go briefly, and a lot of most of this is going to be review for you, but let’s go briefly over some of the reviews of what the scriptures say in terms of the proper use of the tongue, because your attitude, you know, it’s what you say that will be a demonstration of who you are. And so the tongue is really a demonstration of the attitude. It’s an external indicator, if you want to look at it that way.

And if you find yourself sinning with your tongue relative to your neighbor a bunch, I’m not suggesting you don’t discipline your tongue. You do. But I’m saying probably you better get back of the tongue. Out of the heart are the issues of life. Out of the heart proceed the thoughts of men. Okay? What you say on your lips and what comes out of your tongue comes from inside. It’s way God made you physically. And it’s a reminder that the breath that you use to speak forth is right there next to the heart, the center of who you are.

And so if you find yourself sinning with your tongue against your neighbor, yeah, correct it. Yeah, be careful. Yeah. See, I’m just not going to close my mouth from now on. But do more than that, huh? Get down to the heart and to the breath and the interior of who you are, and change either your understanding of why the Bible says you should be kind to people over and over again, or change your understanding of how the scriptures say over and over again: “Be patient, compassionate, and long-suffering with folks,” okay?

So it works out. The tongue is kind of like money. You know, money is an external indicator. In our day and age, everything tells us that money is useless. It’s like Monopoly money. It’s even worse. It’s electronic blips. But it isn’t useless. It’s God’s method of evaluating your actions and telling you whether you really are greedy or gluttonous or not. You may think, “I don’t have any problem with that.” But if you find yourselves continually buying things and with more than you can afford, then it’s an indicator to you: yeah, you got to stop the flow of money. Yeah, that’s important to do. But beyond that, it’s an indicator of other things going on.

I’ve said over and over again—and I don’t know how many times I said it—and yet I keep hearing different accounts of what I say about this issue over and over: debt. Debt is an indicator, usually, of sin. I don’t think debt is sin. Debt is usually an indicator of sin. I guess in some cases, like mortgages, but primarily what I want people to think about in terms of debt—it’s an indicator that you failed to live within your means for whatever reason. You’ve been tricked by the world into thinking it’s a good investment, or not, or whatever it is. But it’s an indicator of something. Not always sin. I’m not saying always. An indicator of sin? It isn’t always. But it’s an indicator. And the tongue is the same thing. It’s an indicator of your attitude.

So we’ve gone past attitude, but don’t sin in your heart when you sin this week against your friends—either in your family or in this church, whoever it is. Think about what I said. Think about your attitude affecting your tongue, and get back to the attitude side to correct it, okay?

Scriptures tell us that “by the grace of one’s lips, the king shall be his friend.” Even the king, you know, President Clinton would be your friend if you use your tongue properly. Now, it’s, you know, exaggeration for effect, I think, but the point is: the grace of your tongue, of your lips, is exceedingly important in terms of your relationships with other people. Think before you speak. Simple old adage, which is very true.

Scriptures tell us that “ointment and perfume rejoice the heart. So doth the sweetness of a man’s friend by hearty counsel.” Okay, it’s Proverbs 27 verse 9. The sweetness of a man’s friend rejoices the heart by hearty counsel—by what you say, and by the very fact that you do have counsel and approach to people, but by what you say, the use of your tongue, you can bring great joy to people.

Now, the tongue is used in several ways in the scriptures. There is, on the positive side of the tongue, that is important for us. On the positive side of the tongue, the tongue can usher forth hearty counsel, as the verse I just read speaks to. You can be an encouragement to people with your tongue. Of course, secondly, your tongue can be used in terms of friends, also, to bring wounds to them in a positive sense.

Proverbs 27:6—”Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.” And again, in Proverbs 28:23: “He that rebukes a man afterward shall find more favor than he that flatters with the tongue.” It is occasionally a proper use of the tongue, and the positive side, to usher forth words that wound and that are rebukes to a friend. That’s necessary sometimes. So please don’t take what I’ve said to say you should never correct one another.

But remember that the context for this: Proverbs 13 and 15:1 says something very important about the tongue. “A soft answer turns away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger.” Now, your purpose in going to a friend with words—either of encouragement or words of rebuke, or words that they may take as hurting them. Your purpose is to get them to hear that advice and, if it’s biblical, to move accordingly with it. And so the way you say that is extremely important.

And the scriptures say that softness is the way to approach a friend. That’s what I believe this says here. I know the immediate application is: somebody’s angry with you. Calm them down by being soft of tongue with them. But if there’s a potential—and there always is when you go to a friend with words of difficult things for them to hear—there’s always a potential their first reaction in the flesh is going to be to get angry and self-defensive.

And if you want to help them to avoid that, when you use those chosen words to encourage them to positive righteousness, you want to do it with a soft answer. So the tongue is useful. The tongue is an important tool by God to encourage our friends—either with hearty counsel, just by speaking to them. It’s a refreshment to men. And I won’t get into the exegesis of that first text, but that’s implied there. The hearty counsel doesn’t mean that it’s through our wisdom that we cheer up our friends. What it means is when you come along to your friend and speak to them—even long as there aren’t really stupid words—just the very point of you speaking to them brings refreshment to their hearts, like perfume, okay? Some sweet-smelling stuff, just by your very words to them.

And then of course the idea of counsel is there too. You want to have good words. So our tongues, to be a friend, you want to use your tongue to build people up, and you want to use your tongue to encourage people to further righteousness through words of correction. But only with a tone and a time in which it will minister grace to those people.

On the negative side, the scriptures give us an awful lot of things about the tongue by which we can hurt one another. The scriptures say over and over again that it is very devastating to people what we can do. For instance, in Proverbs 16:28—”A whisperer separates chief friends.” A whisperer separates chief friends. Proverbs 26:18-19: “As a mad man who casteth firebrands, arrows, and death, so is the man that deceiveth his neighbor and saith, Am not I in sport?” So the one that deceiveth his neighbor and treats his neighbor simply as a way to exercise humor is very devastating and destructive to him with the use of his tongue.

Additionally, the man who whispers, the scriptures say, separates chief friends. “He that coverth a transgression seeketh love, but he that repeateth a matter separateth many friends.” That’s Proverbs 17 verse 9. “A tale bearer revealeth secrets, but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter.” That’s Proverbs 11:13. Proverbs 25:9: “Debate thy cause with thy neighbor himself, and discover not a secret to another.”

Now, those verses are ones that I’ve used a lot the last six, seven years. And I say this not to my honor, but to my shame: probably that primarily I’ve been to those verses when people did these actions to me. That’s what I said, “You know, probably a lot of the wisdom we have is when people violate these things, and when people in the context of those you hold as dearest friends do these kinds of things: separate, tailbear, speak to somebody else about your problems instead of coming to you. When that happens, then you start going to the scriptures saying, God, doesn’t seem right to me. This really hurts.” You find all these verses that say, “Yeah, that’s a real bad thing for them to do.”

But what I’m suggesting is you get ahead of the curve and you put a curb on your own tongue, and I put a curb on my tongue, rather than worrying about what somebody else is doing to their tongue relative to me. God teaches us the wisdom of how to properly use our tongue and what is the improper use by hurting us. Now he didn’t cause people to do sin, but he certainly uses that in our development and our maturation. And so, you know, this is why does the scripture say this over and over and over and over?

Because we love to speak about private matters to those that really aren’t part of the situation. We get some new information, and we want to speak it right away. We want to whisper. We want to slander. That’s what we want to do in our sinful hearts. It is a strong tendency in men as well as women to do this. And the scriptures say over and over again: don’t do it. Don’t do it. You’ve heard me many times: don’t do it. Don’t do it. I’m telling you it again today: don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.

This is history being written. And when the books are—