Dennis Tuuri

# Song of Songs 5:16 — Marriage, Part Seven

Text for today is Song of Songs chapter 5 verse 16. Song of Solomon, Song of Songs chapter 5:16. Please stand.

“His mouth is most sweet and he is altogether desirable. This is my beloved and this is my friend. O daughters of Jerusalem.”

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for this wonderful book that talks to us about lots of things but certainly including the marriage of a man and a woman. And we bless you, Lord God, that after that marriage, this declaration is made: that the beloved, the spouse, is also the wife’s friend.

We pray that you would bless us now as we look at your word with an understanding of friendship from your perspective. We thank you for receiving us into heavenly worship today and for giving us a heavenly perspective upon our world. Now help us to bring that perspective, Lord God, by the power of your Spirit into our own lives, that our friendliness might increase and that particularly in the context of our marriages, friendship might abound and that you would be glorified through all of this.

In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

So our subject today is friendship and marriage, and this is the seventh in a series on marriage. The text before us posits this: we only understand friendship in the context of marriage if we understand a little bit about the flow of the book that we just read it from, the Song of Songs. So what we’re going to do is just look for a couple of minutes at the overall message of the Song of Songs and where this text fits into it in context.

And then on page two of the handout today, I’m actually going to use an acronym that Mark and Grace Driscoll use in their book called *Real Marriage*, as a way to kind of give an overview of what they think. And I think they’re pretty good categories for categorizing some of the scriptures as it relates to how we can be friends. What’s a friend? And there’s a description of it on page two.

Page three is an attempt to answer those of you that haven’t actually asked us, but sort of put what we’ve been doing for the last month collecting pledge sheets from members of the congregation that wish to participate so that you could pledge to give benevolence offerings either in the context of some of the particular ministries here at RCC, but also at the same time mission funds. So you know, I’m not going to go over this, but this is an overview sheet that we’ve used lots of times when I’ve preached on this topic. It kind of puts the idea of offerings and specifically pledging to make particular offerings in context.

You know, just because people are abusing a thing doesn’t mean the thing is necessarily a bad thing. And even though the idea of pledging, so-called faith pledging, is done in a lot of kind of weird ways—kind of “trust God and make up things” and it’s sort of like magic—that doesn’t mean that the idea of committing to give a particular sum of money is bad. In fact, we know, and you’ll see this in my outline, that from Paul’s epistles to the Corinthians, that’s just what happened. They committed a particular amount of money to give to the starving saints at Jerusalem, the church in Jerusalem. He encouraged them to follow through with that. He was going to come and collect it.

So we know that the basic idea of offerings, of course, is good. Malachi says, “You rob in both tithes and offerings.” And we know that it’s okay—at least certainly not commanded—and you don’t have to participate in this, but it’s a biblical principle, an action that Paul engaged in to encourage churches to make: that they are to actually predict a particular amount of money they would collect and follow through.

You know, in a way I put this here just because this offering season will come to an end as of the end of the month. So we want all the pledge sheets turned in by the end of October, and that’s two weeks out from today. But I also put it here because really it’s an extension of friendship. We’re going to talk about friendship in a very one-on-one sense within marriage, but that sermon will have great application to friendship generally in our congregation and to singles and other people. It’ll have lots of application in those directions too.

And I think it’s not wrong to think globally of our friends, right? So I’ve got a friend in Poland. I’ve got several of them, but I’ve got a friend, Boo, and he’s doing all this work with friends that he’s formed relationships with in Eastern Europe. And we’re in the midst now—please pray for us—Gary Vandervine, Jack Phelps, and I of putting together a plan to work that and how to fund those things for American churches.

But you know, it’s a matter of friendship if you think of it like the collection for Jerusalem. You know, the economy in Ukraine is really bad. These people have really little money. And so it’s an extension of friendship from Reformation Covenant and other churches in relatively prosperous America. And I know that’s changed a bit in the last four years, but relatively prosperous America. It’s an act of friendship to want to help the struggling churches in Ukraine or to help fund Boo as he goes around Eastern Europe to develop churches. And it’s a matter of friendship to help struggling families try to get Christian education for their kids if you can afford it, to help them in that way. It’s a matter of friendship to contribute to an alms fund or to the PRC fund that helps women not abort their babies. So you know, it’s an extension of financial friendship—these pledge sheets—that I would encourage you, even if it’s just fifty cents a month or a buck a month, to do something.

I think that symbolically it’s important for us, whatever degree we’re able, to commit to helping people in very specific ways. And so that’s what we’re trying to do, so that we can tell you know the people, for instance, in Ukraine, “Well, this next year…” or we can tell Gary and Jack, “RCC is going to do this much.” So I put that on here. It’s an overview. You can look at it. If you think it’s wrong, that’s okay. It’s the best I can do.

And then the coloring page today is an act of friendship. In one of his epistles, Paul talks about how he was able to be released for a season to go be with his friends and to be cared for. And so Paul identifies friendship with caring for someone, right? And we know that, but biblically that ties those things together. We’re friends to people that we actually care for in their distress. And so the coloring picture is meant to remind our young ones about friendship being caring.

So that’s what we’re going to do: Song of Songs structure, and then the acronym FRIENDS, and then we’ll close off the sermon.

All right. So very quickly, what I’ve given you on the front page of your handout today is an outline, and you know—surprise—it’s sevenfold chiastic. But it’s an outline that I did based off of David Dorsey’s work in his book *Literary Structures of the Old Testament*.

You know, so we got this verse we’re looking at, Song of Songs 5:16. It’s always good if you can kind of know where in the flow of a biblical book, where in the movement of the narrative of a biblical book you stand, right? I mean, the Bible has an arc to it, right? It begins in a garden and it ends in a garden city. And most books of the Bible, the same thing. You know, in Proverbs, it starts with a son receiving instruction and a lot of instruction about the right woman, wrong woman, and the need to listen to one’s parents.

And how does it end? Well, in chapter 31, it starts by saying that here’s King Lemuel, who learned things from his mother. So he’s done it. He did what Proverbs said he should do as a young man. He listened to his mom. And now he’s a wise king and he’s got great advice. And then of course the last part of Proverbs 31 is the description of what’s probably Lemuel’s wife—so a wonderful wife, right? So he’s done it. He’s married the right woman. He’s listening to his parents and particularly if you’re going to listen to your parents, start with your mom. If you listen to your mom, you’ll probably listen to your dad.

So by the end of the book, wisdom is a woman, and you know, kind of if you think of it as one character being moved along, he’s listened to women. He’s listened to wisdom speaking through the important women in his life and success and blessing is what happens. So there’s an arc there, right? He knows who to be friends with, and the end result of that is success and blessing.

Well, in the Song of Songs, there’s a structure to the whole thing as well. And this verse, chapter 5:16, follows from the very middle of the book. The book is about marriage. And at the very center of the book, as you can see on the outline I provided, at least I think at the center, is their actual wedding. So there’s a search before this section, a search after this section, but chapter 3:6 through 5:1 is all about their wedding day. At least that’s how I understand it.

So when she says, “My beloved is my friend,” this is this side of the wedding day. And so she’s saying it about her spouse. So “my spouse, my friend” is how she’s designating him. So that’s the overall structure.

Now, since we’re talking about marriage, I would point out as well—I’ve given you also the structure that I came up with for the wedding day itself. So the heart of the book is about marriage, so very useful for our topic of a series on marriage. And at the heart of the subject of marriage is the wedding day itself. But it has a movement to it as well. And so I’ve given you that at the bottom of that page one.

So the wedding day: she’s coming to the wedding in a procession. You’ve got her husband’s lengthy speech of admiration for her. Then he has a short speech of desire, and then we have the very middle of it. And then he has a short speech of desire in verse 8. He has another lengthy speech of admiration. And then you have the description of the union of the lovers. So it’s, you know, the consummation of the wedding, the marriage.

So this puts right at the very center a very short speech of admiration that says this: “Thou art all fair, my love. There is no spot in thee.”

Now it’s interesting because of course we know that the purpose of the sanctifying effect in marriage is the removal of spots in the bride, right? That’s what it says in Ephesians, and that’s what he declares here on the wedding day—not, you know, at the fiftieth anniversary—he begins by stating what God is accomplishing and what he sees. Remember, we talked about how mountains and clouds can obscure them, do a lot of times, but he has seen in his wife what she is to be in God’s purpose, and he makes that declaration to her.

Now, a lot about the Song of Songs is a movement of the woman from insecurity to security. Daughters of Eve are insecure, okay? And so the movement of marriage—marriage is a production of security, not automatically, but if you go about it right. And so at the very heart of the Song of Songs is a declaration on the part of the husband to his wife of her beauty, of her spotlessness, of her acceptability.

At the center of the Song of Songs, at the center of our marriages, I think if I’m reading this text right, is a declaration to our wives particularly of their loveliness and their perfection that you see they have now in Christ, and you’ll see that more and more evident in their lives as they go along as they’re secured from anxiety.

So you know, it’s after that marriage that she says, “This is my spouse and my friend.” If you want your wife to see you as her friend, right, and if you’re mostly critical of her, what does this text tell us? No good. She gets to that declaration of knowing that he’s her friend, not because he insists on it. The Bible says, “I’m your friend. I’m your friend. I’m trying to help you. Dog gonna get with the program.” No, she gets it because at the very center of the book, the husband is telling his wife on her wedding day, “She is altogether lovely. She’s without spot.”

So if we want our wives to experience this, if we want our wives to see us as their friends, we act friendly toward them. And very specifically, the context for our text today is we do that by affirmations of their loveliness and completeness in Jesus Christ. Okay?

Now, if you stop listening or fall asleep now, I’m okay. You just do that. You know, marriage is about friendship. And you know, the responsibility is on the man. I’m told I’m too tough on men. Well, this text says the responsibility to get the wife to that place is upon the man to assure his wife and remove her insecurity by affirmations of who she is.

So I think the Bible tells us very clearly that our spouses are indeed our friends. I’ve got another verse and I can’t find it here, in Proverbs chapter 2, it describes marriage as the married part—marriage partner—is the companion of your youth. Companion of your youth. And that word companion really, the lexicons tell us it means close confidant, really tight friend. So again, in Proverbs chapter 2, the marriage partner is referred to as the friend, the dear friend, the close friend, the confidant, the strong close confidant of one’s youth—that’s when they got married.

So from the beginning of the marriage, I think Proverbs 2, like Song of Songs, tells us that marriage is about friendship, and actually Proverbs goes a little further and says your spouse should be a very close friend and close confidant and dear friend to you.

So marriage is very significant in the context of friendship. Friendship is significant in the context of marriage, and these characteristics we’re going to look at will describe it for us. But it’s in our day and age, friendship is countercultural, right?

So I used to be in the counterculture in the late ’60s in San Francisco. Well, if you want to be countercultural today, be a friend to your spouse, a real friend, a friend that can be relied upon. A friend that won’t just, you know, speak kind things, but will speak things of correction as well—speaking the truth in love to sanctify your spouse. That’s not the way the world works anymore, because the world today is about selfishness. The world today is about me achieving my goals and ambitions. The world today, even if you’re in a relationship, essentially reinforces selfishness, self-centeredness.

And even in the context of Christian counseling circles, you know, mates are told that the way they’re really going to be a good mate is to find themselves, develop everything that they are as an individual, and somehow this will magically help your marriage. Well, there’s some truth to that, but there’s also quite a bit of the world to that. In the world today, the Bible says, “Find yourself in your vocation, your calling from God, including in being a husband, including in being a wife.”

So friendship is countercultural today because our culture is so radically becoming more and more anti-Christian, and the culture becomes more and more self-oriented. There’s a certain vacuousness to friendship today, right? Doug talked about the vacuousness of love in our culture, you know, how it’s just sort of become nothing without definition.

In a way, you can sort of see what that means: we’re a post-Christian culture. I mean, if you look at the Quran, not a whole lot of loving going on, okay? Not like in the Bible. And so the culture today, particularly in America, is post-Christian. It wants the virtues. It wants kind of love that it got from Christianity. It wants to help people, but it doesn’t see it anymore reflected or tied to the gospel. So it doesn’t have the substance. It’s just got sort of a vague feeling of wanting love.

“Love, love is all we need.” Well, it’s the same thing with friendship, right? If you’re on Facebook, you know, people are friends with literally thousands of other people, hundreds. Most people have at least a hundred friends on Facebook. I think you friend people all the time. And it seems innocuous enough, but you know, liturgies sort of determine what we think about things, what we do repetitively—like come to church, singing the songs we sing, reciting the Nicene Creed—this reinforces us, who we are.

Liturgy changes us. We like to think of ourselves as big heads sitting there in the pew and that’s it, but that’s not who we are. We’re people with bodies who do things, and it’s really weird I’m asking you just to sit there now, but liturgy affects us and it changes us. So you’re doing Facebook every day, and people you’ve got all these friend requests, and you friend them, you friend them, you friend them, and then you request friendships with other people, and somehow you think that you’ve got friendships going on with a couple hundred people. You don’t.

Now, it’s kind of good. I’m not putting the whole thing down. I mean, I kind of, you know, Jack Phelps’s daughter, Grace, posted a picture of the chicken she cooked in her crockpot last Sunday, I think, and I thought, “Well, that’s interesting. I get to see Grace’s chicken.” And do I want to? It’s interesting to me. It’s weird, isn’t it? Somebody a thousand miles away shows me what they cooked that day.

Well, I know Grace and I love her and I love her dad and her husband and stuff. He’s an elder at that church up there now. So it’s kind of interesting. But you know, it’s not like we’re close friends. We’re not the kind of friends we’ll describe here in a minute that the Bible talks about. We’re acquaintances. So I’m going to make a distinction between kind of a watered-down view of friendship that’s permeating our culture and what the Bible talks about in terms of your marriage. It’s not that all you’ve got to do is friend your spouse, but no, I think it has to be more than that.

And so we have to kind of understand the influence of our culture on us and what it does. Friendship’s really big in the Bible. You know, if you’re a Christian from one perspective, you know, we’ve said before that means you’re a fearer of God, you’re a believer in Jesus. But from another perspective, what a Christian is: a friend of God. You know, Abraham is kind of the father of the faithful, and in James chapter 2:23, we read: “The scriptures were fulfilled which says, ‘Abraham believed God. It was accounted to him for righteousness.’ And he was called the friend of God.”

So from one perspective, what we are in relationship with God is we’re a friend with God, right? And Jesus says he doesn’t call us servants anymore. He says to his disciples, he calls them friends. So the essence of our relationship with God from one perspective is friendship. It’s what it’s all about. So we ought to know something about what it means to be a friend, and we should work on our friendship not just with our spouses but with God. Are we really friends to God?

And as we look at this acronym today that Mark Driscoll came up with, we’ll talk about that. On the other hand, friendship with the world is what? It’s hatred toward God. So you have to get the friendship thing down. Yeah, be friendly to all people. It’s great to friend people, right? Friendly. But when we talk about being a friend in the sense of your spouse, a close friend—you know, in reality, you’re probably only going to have a couple, three people like that in your life overall.

You’re going to have a lot of acquaintances, a lot of sort of friends, people you’re friendly to, and see and have some stuff in common with. But to really work at a relationship, the kind of close friendship that’s described in the Bible, that takes time and energy and money. And probably, you know, one of the worst things we have going on is everybody anticipates they should have lots of friends. And as a result of that, I’ll bet you half of you out there right now wish you had friends. Wish you had more friends. And you think the guy in the pew next to you has more friends than you do.

I was at a meeting this week. A couple people said, just that they were talking about another person, “I got a lot of friends, but I don’t got any friends.” And then somebody else chimed in, “Yeah, we don’t have friends either.” And now I kind of thought both these folks have a lot of friends. But they were feeling relatively friendless. Maybe they were just joking. But I think a lot of us feel like, “Gosh, I wish I had more friends. Why don’t I have friends?” Well, it’s tough. And nobody really has that many friends the way I’m using the term.

We want to be careful who we have friends as. So let’s get to—oh, let’s see—did I miss anything on this handout? Application to everyone. Yeah, so we’re going to talk about marriage. If the marriage relationship is described in a couple of places in scripture as a friendship, then that means that should be part of our Christian approach toward marriage. And like everything else we’ve said at marriage, it doesn’t just happen. It’s got to be worked at.

I thought it just happened, you know, because Christine and I got married, and I thought, “Man, this is great. I got the friend I never had before. Let’s go outside and play basketball.” “I don’t want to.” “Come on, we’re going to play basketball now. I’m the husband.” And I’d make her go out there and play basketball with me because I had a friend now, right? First time. Sorry. That’s who I was. And my wife will tell you that not only did I do that, but Lana was little, babysitting in one of those walkers, you know, and she’d cry when we left the house.

So we put—I just rolled her up to the window so she could watch us playing out there. So she’s balling, right? We’re playing basketball because I thought friendship was just something, man, that comes with the deal, right? That comes with the package. No, you have to work on it. It’s not being selfish, right? The way I was being.

So friendship has to be worked at. So when I talk about this stuff today, and if it bleeds over to next week, that’s okay. But when we talk about this stuff, you’ve got to take it seriously. You’ve got to say, “Well, you know, this is what God wants me to be. If pastor’s right, and how good are we at doing this friendship thing in our marriage, right? How good am I at being this? What do I have to do to get better?”

So the word evaluates us and the word directs us toward application.

And I’ve got a thing here: “Harder on Men.” I think I don’t know—it does seem like some of this stuff is a little tougher on men than it is women. It seems like. And I don’t know. I probably shouldn’t even say that, but it seems like. Well, and I think it kind of is like the Fall, right? Or the Creation.

It wasn’t good that Adam was alone, but he was used to it for at least a little while, okay? I mean, God said it wasn’t good. He needed friendship, companionship, which by the way means if you think to yourself, “I don’t need my wife as a friend, or I don’t need my husband as a friend”—lie. You’re lying against, I think, the Creation account itself. You do need that. And when you try to get along without it, I think you twist not in a good way. You break bad, okay?

But so Adam was sort of used to being alone. Eve, when she comes along and is made, she’s never alone. She’s got the guy right there. She’s used to relationship, right? And I just think that’s kind of how it works generally. Guys are more outward-oriented. You know, they’re facing away. We’ve heard people talk about this. Women are kind of faced inward more.

I’ll talk a little bit later, but you know, men tend to want to be friends by playing together or working together. I think that a lot of times a number of women want to be friends by intimate conversations. My wife told me on the way here in the car today, “Talk to me.” So I’m getting too personal. My wife has probably left the room by now, but I think it’s a little tougher on guys here, okay?

So just be prepared for that. Wives, pray for your husbands. Husbands, man up, and let’s do this stuff.

Infrequent sex and adultery, friendship attenuation, and emotional adultery. So you know, the thing is, and we’ll talk about sex and marriage here in a sermon in the next few weeks, but you know, the Bible warns you not to give the devil an opportunity by not having regular physical relationships in the context of marriage. Now, it’s not whatever partner you know is responsible for that—they’re not responsible if you commit adultery.

But if you want to, you know, if you want to do more than determine responsibility and keep the thing from happening, then it would behoove you to have regular physical interaction, right? Okay. Well, it’s the same thing with friendship. You know, men and women need friends. And if you are not a good friend to your spouse, then that is going to tempt them to emotional adultery, friendship adultery, with people of the opposite sex.

So you know, it’s, and I’m not talking about same-sex friendships here, but what I’m saying is, you know, another way to evaluate yourself: am I a closer friend to women other than my wife? Am I a closer friend to men other than my husband? Bad. I think that’s bad. You can argue with me during Q&A if you think I’m wrong, but I think that’s bad. And I think it can happen when we let our friendship within marriage attenuate.

We’re supposed to say, like the woman says, “My spouse, my beloved, my friend.” We’re supposed to look at our spouses as Proverbs 2 says, as our close confidant from our youth when we were married. So I think there are dangers as we get into this topic, and these are stronger inclinations than to us to work hard at friendship in the context of marriage.

I have a quote here from Spurgeon that Driscoll, I think, uses. I’m not sure, maybe it’s Keller. I don’t remember where I read it. But Charles Spurgeon—it’s just a lovely quote. You know, if you want to know, one of the first points we’re going to make is that marriage should be fruitful. It should produce greater effectiveness for the kingdom for both parties, okay? That’s the first thing Driscoll talks about.

And think of a guy who’s very fruitful for the kingdom. It’s Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Right—great effective guy. In 1871, he wrote his wife this letter: “My own dear one, none know how grateful I am to God for you, and all I have ever done for him, you have a large share in making me so happy. You have fitted me for service. Not an ounce of power has ever been lost to the good cause through you. I have served the Lord far more and never less for your sweet companionship. The Lord God Almighty bless you now and forever.”

You know, that’s the way that I feel. Do I say it very often to my wife? Probably not. But that kind of friendship empowering one another can be such a blessing and can have such great long-term fruitfulness as we see in the life of Spurgeon. You might not have known that about his—there’s a lot of other letters to his wife that have been published. But you know at the core of who that guy was: a wonderful friendship with his wife. She was his beloved and companion and friend, and he was to her as well.

And because of that, he’s effective for the kingdom.

So “fruitful” is the first characteristic that Driscoll—and actually it’s written by both Mark and Grace—and marriages should be fruitful. Now this just stems from what we know: everything should be right? I mean, what’s the purpose of life? To glorify God and enjoy him forever. So the purpose of friendship is to glorify God.

And so a friendship is supposed to be causing us to be more fruitful for the kingdom. This fruitfulness is interesting. It’s talked about in Psalm 128. You shall eat and—okay so 128, you know very familiar marriage family Psalm: “Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways.”

And what I’m saying is his ways include friendship with your spouse. “You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands. You shall be blessed and it shall be well with you. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house. Your children like olive trees.” So Psalm 128 says the result of walking in God’s ways is fruitfulness. The man will be fruitful in his labors. The wife will be fruitful in her work in the home—in this case with children. But the point is fruitfulness is the result of walking in God’s way.

And since the Bible tells us that this friendship relationship is to exist, it should exist first and foremost in the context of fruitfulness.

You know, there’s a sense in which life is kind of a war, right? So you’re going through the minefields, you’re trying to establish ground for King Jesus, particularly these days. So you know one of the common expressions—I think it’s French—is “How goes the war?” when you greet people.

Well, the scriptures say that what we need are good counselors for war. Proverbs 20:18: “Plans are established by counsel. By wise guidance, wage war.” Proverbs 24:5 and 6: “A wise man is full of strength, and a man of knowledge enhances his might. For by wise guidance, you can wage your war. In an abundance of counselors, there is victory.”

So if we’re going to be successful in the waging of war, we need confidants, counselors. And Proverbs 2 tells us that the close confidant, the really maybe best friend or one of best friends who brings us counsel is our spouse. And so spouses are important not just in terms of friendship, not just in terms of it being fun, but because it makes us effective for the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

And so that’s one way you can evaluate how effective you’re being. Has your wife helped you to grow in your relationship with Jesus Christ? Has your husband helped you to grow in your relationship with Christ? Do you have a friendship that’s creating between your relationship with your spouse that friendship and counsel that’s creating more fruitfulness in the context of the world?

Now, what does God want for us? What does Jesus want? He wants us to experience and rejoice in the new creation. He wants us to leave zombie land where the walking dead inhabited the earth and to move into the New Testament, you know, this side of the cross when Jesus is raising the world back up in new creation life. That’s what he wants. He wants us to experience that.

And what he tells us is when we’re when we have a relationship with our spouse that’s marked by friendship, we experience that new creation life. The Bible talks a lot in the New Testament about the fruit of the Spirit. How does the Spirit do his work in our life? Well, one of the biggest ways he does it is through that person we’re seeing every day, our spouse that God has called us to oneness with and to be close confidant and friend with as well.

So the first indication of whether it’s really a biblical friendship is: does it add to your effectiveness for the kingdom? And if it doesn’t, we’ll work on it. You’re supposed to have a relationship with your spouse that creates fruitfulness for you and for your spouse.

I wanted to—there’s a quote here. Let’s see, to remind us what I said earlier about women in the context of marriage. I’m not sure where this quote comes from. Sorry, I’m using two books—Keller’s and Driscoll’s—but this person actually doesn’t make any difference because the quote comes from somebody else. All together, and I’m not sure who it is. She writes this:

“The inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”

That’s a nice image. That’s what friendship is in the context of marriage, or it should be. Both people should feel confident enough and secure enough in the love and commitment from their close friend that they can speak with freedom, knowing that their spouse will help them to understand what’s good in what they say and to blow the chaff away.

Security, having a deep sense of commitment to one another, produces fruitfulness for kingdom work. It puts us in the emotional, psychological, and spiritual state to hear correction, to hear ideas about how we can be more fruitful in life. I was trying to sort out whether I taught at King’s Academy this year or not. And my wife, you know, “Well, you’re good at teaching the Bible. It seems like that’s an important thing. The next generation’s real important. I think you ought to do it. I know you’re busy. Know there’s all kinds of things you could do.” She gave me good counsel and made me more effective for the kingdom. I think I’m just delighting to do it now that I’m finally back in the classroom. But I think it is an effectiveness for the kingdom, and that’s a result of her and I being close friends, her being my close confidant and counselor.

So fruitfulness.

Secondly, friendships are to be reciprocal. They have to go both ways, okay? Philippians 2 of course instructs us that really our basic Christian life is to be considering other people as more important than ourselves. And friendship of course does just that. Additionally, in Ecclesiastes 4:7–12 you’re familiar with this I suppose, but we read about a rich man and he says, “For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?” and “This is vanity, this is an unhappy business.” Solomon says. Then he goes on to say: “Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil. If they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up.”

Now the implication of that is that it’s a picture of friendship, two people, but it’s a reciprocal relationship, right? Because what he’s saying only works if both people are willing to help the other person up when they fall. If you don’t have a reciprocal friendship, it doesn’t work. It really does take two, baby. It takes two, right?

And it takes two to have a friendship. If you’ve got two people that aren’t interested in friendship, you have coldness in the relationship, and probably that becomes hatred over time because you’re not really working out what you got to work out. If you’ve got one person—one of the spouses—trying to be a friend and the other person not being a friend and being friendless to the other person, you know, there’s a sadness to that.

There’s a—in you—you don’t really achieve this building of yourselves up together as a couple. There’s a lack of fruitfulness to people’s work because essentially what you’ve got is frustration, sadness, and eventually oppression, because the person trying to be a friend and the other person not wanting to be a friend will roll that person over every time. They’ll get their way and they’ll try to coerce the other person.

So friendships have to be reciprocal. So, you know, I’m sure there are couples in this church right now where neither of you are trying to be friends. Stop that. Be friends. Turn toward each other. And there are other families in this church, other couples I know, where one person’s trying to be a friend and the other isn’t. Stop that. What you’re doing is destructive. It’s not just neutral. It’s destructive of the fruitfulness of your mate, okay?

And it’s producing anything but rejoicing, life together in the new creation in your marriage. Nothing worse than to be in a relationship that you know should be characterized by relationship and friendship and that not happening. Nothing worse than that for a person’s mental state, emotional state, spiritual state. It is sad, sad, sad in those situations. And it’s so easy to fix. All it takes is for both spouses to commit to one another.

Do it today. Do it this afternoon. Commit to each other. “I’m going to be your friend. I know I haven’t been a very good friend. I know I haven’t always been in your corner, and I know I’ve ignored sometimes. And you’ve done bad things that I should have helped to see weren’t helpful to you and actually ended up hurting your reputation, hurting your effectiveness for the kingdom.”

Reciprocalness is a big part of biblical friendship. And that is what I’d like you to commit to today.

You know, at the end of the day, friendship is characterized by commitment, okay? And then it’s characterized by intimacy of conversation and knowledge and a willingness to talk to each other. You know, men like to shoulder up and do tasks together and play basketball and stuff, and that’s friendship. Women tend to be more face-to-face, right?

So if guys are going to be friends, they’re doing work together. If women have other friends, they usually are getting together and talking with each other. And I know those are categories. I’m not saying those are eternal categories. Maybe it’s just our culture, and maybe it isn’t your culture, but that generally tends to be true.

And in a relationship, what I’m asking men to do is to commit to go beyond just working on tasks together. Don’t be business partners alone in a relationship. Don’t be problem solvers alone in your marriage. Turn to your wife and enter into face-to-face conversations. Get beyond facts, right, to things that you believe, positions you hold, and then get even deeper in sharing with each other feelings and ideas and commitments that are presuppositions to everything else you’re doing.

Knowledge of each other. Intimacy is as important in a friendship as commitment to it. I think somebody said, “Intimacy is ‘into me see’—intimacy, see into me. Know who I am.” Get to understand who I am.

If your job as a spouse is to bring good counsel to make your spouse effective for kingdom work and more fruitful, then intimacy is absolutely required to know who that person is and how you can best help them as their closest confidant and friend—commitment and intimacy.

Let’s stop there today. Let’s stop with a commitment. If you think that I’ve preached the word of God to you in terms of the need for friendship and you think that friendship is something that should characterize your relationship to your spouse and you ought to commit to being a better friend to your spouse because of what the word of God says and to increase the fruitfulness of your relationship and each of you individually for Christ.

When you come forward and put your money in the offering plate, you’re offering everything you have. And when you do that, commit then to tell your spouse, to talk to your spouse this afternoon, committing to him or her. And even if you don’t come forward, I’d ask that all of you make that commitment today: that our marriages in this church would be filled with commitment to be friends as well.

And you singles out there, your commitment is to become better friends with whoever your friends are. And if you don’t have friends that you can count on for close relationship, maybe you’re moving from family to friends. Seek that out and understand there’ll only be a couple, three people like that probably in your life.

God wants us in our marriages to have friendships, and the ultimate source of that is our friendship with him. He’s brought us together today to eat at this table as the king’s friends. And he wants us to be friendly to each other. And he wants particularly in our interior relationships of marriage to see friendship abound.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for the delightful thing that the Christian walk is. We thank you for love and for friendship. We thank you for calling us not to do really difficult, hard, uncomfortable things typically, but rather to simply enter into the joyous things that you’ve provided for us.

We thank you that joy and laughter in friendship is our strength, our encouragement for the future and for our work. I pray, Lord God, particularly for married couples today in this church, that you would bless them. That you would, in every one that hears this talk today, may they, Lord God, in their homes tonight at some point today, on this Lord’s day, when you’re visiting us—correct us in assuring us of the good news of the gospel of Jesus—that our response to the delightful knowledge that we’re your friends would be to be friends, close friends, with our spouses.

Bless us, Lord God, by your Holy Spirit to that end, in Jesus’ name we ask it.

Amen.