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[music] Speaking from the Arcadia Presbyterian Church in Arcadia, California, Dr. Bruce W. Thielman brings you a message, Four Steps to Friendship.

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[music] I want to focus our attention this morning on a continuation of the theme which you assigned me for the weekend, "Love One Another." Yesterday, we talked about the comradeship that Christ commands,

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and we talked about how we are expected to fly united. Today, I want to talk about the nature of friendship, and I want to talk about it in terms of a passage of scripture, 1 Samuel, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th chapters. Now, because those are lengthy chapters, I've selected certain verses from them

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and woven them together into the substance of our theme. So, you will probably have difficulty following the reading, but do your best, and we ought to come out somewhere together. From 1 Samuel, 17,

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"And as David returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, Abner took him and brought him before Saul with the head of the Philistine in his hand. And Saul said to him, 'Whose son are you, young man?' And David answered, 'I am the son of your servant Jesse the Bethlehemite.'"

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From 1 Samuel, 18, "When he had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan, the son of Saul, was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul." From 1 Samuel, 19,

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"And Saul spoke to Jonathan his son and to all his servants that they should kill David. But Jonathan, Saul's son, delighted much in David. And Jonathan told David, 'Saul, my father seeks to kill you. Therefore, take heed to yourself in the morning, stay in a secret place, and hide yourself.

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And I will go out and stand beside my father in the field where you are, and I will speak to my father about you, and if I learn anything, I will tell you.' And Jonathan spoke well of David to Saul his father and said to him, 'Let not the king sin against his servant David, because he has not sinned against you,

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and because his deeds have been of good service to you. For he took his life in his hand, and he slew the Philistine, and the Lord wrought a great victory for all Israel. You saw it and rejoiced.

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Why then will you sin against innocent blood by killing David without cause?' And Saul hearkened to the voice of Jonathan. Saul swore, 'As the Lord lives, he shall not be put to death.' And Jonathan called David, and Jonathan showed him all these things.

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And Jonathan brought David to Saul, and he was in his presence as before." And in the 20th chapter of 1 Samuel, beginning at the 11th verse, "And Jonathan said to David, 'Come, let us go out into the field.' So they both went out into the field.

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And Jonathan said to David, 'The Lord, the God of Israel, be witness. When I have sounded my father about this time tomorrow, or the third day, behold, if he is well disposed toward David, shall I not then send and disclose it to you? But should it please my father to do you harm, the Lord do so to Jonathan and more also,

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if I do not disclose it to you and send you away, that you may go in safety. May the Lord be with you, as he has been with my father. If I am still alive, show me the loyal love of the Lord, that I may not die. And do not cut off your loyalty from my house forever.

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The Lord cuts off every one of the enemies of David from the face of the earth. Let not the name of Jonathan be cut off from the house of David. And may the Lord take vengeance on David's enemies. And Jonathan made David swear again by his love for him, for he loved him as he loved his own soul.

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Then Jonathan said to him, 'Tomorrow is the new moon, and you will be missed, because your seat will be empty. And on the third day you will be greatly missed. Then go to the place where you hid yourself when the matter was in hand,

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and remain beside yonder stone heap. And I will shoot three arrows to the side of it, as though I shot at a target. And behold, I will send the lad, saying, 'Go, find the arrows.' Now if I say to the lad, 'Look, the arrows are on this side of you, take them,'

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then you are to come, for as the Lord lives, it is safe for you and there is no danger. But if I say to the youth, 'Look, the arrows are beyond you,' then go, for the Lord has sent you away. And as for the matter of which you and I have spoken, behold, the Lord is between you and me forever." And may God bless to us and to our understanding these readings from his word.

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Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Some years ago, some American G.I. stationed outside of London, England, decided on a Christmas Eve to go into the city for an evening worship service.

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As they entered the city, they chanced to pass the St. Anne's Orphanage, in front of which was a large sign which announced that the children in the orphanage were those who had lost their parents in the Nazi bombing blitz on London some years before. Our G.I.s decided that instead of going into the city to seek to be ministered to,

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they would go to the orphanage on this Christmas Eve to try to minister to the young people there. And this they did, with some success. But there was one little boy who did not enter in. One of our service personnel went over to him and said, "Young man, what do you want for Christmas?"

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And the little boy replied, "Sir, I want to be loved." Now that, in essence, is the cry of every man. "I want to be loved." I choose to translate that sentence this morning, "I want a friend."

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And when I equate the word "love" and the word "friendship," I'm not doing it romantically, I'm not doing it philosophically, I'm not doing it mystically, I'm doing it biblically. In the Bible, love and friendship are one and the same thing. Jesus says to his disciples, "By this will all men know that you are my disciples,

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when you have love one for the other." And then a moment later he says, "I do not call you servants. I call you friends." To be in friendship is to be in love. The question then arises, how do we enter into meaningful friendships?

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I would suggest that there are four steps to friendship, and that they are outlined for us in the Bible story of its most perfect friendship, the friendship of David and Jonathan. Their experience together, the recording of it that is, begins in the 17th and 18th chapters of 1 Samuel.

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There it is told of how David kills the Philistine giant Goliath, brings his head to King Saul, is introduced to Saul, and has a conversation with him. While this conversation is going on, Jonathan, Saul's son, hears and sees it all, and he finds himself strangely drawn to David.

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He wants to be David's friend, and so he goes to him and proposes that they enter into a covenant of friendship. Jonathan wants his relationship to David to be what Aristotle, hundreds of years later, was to describe friendship as always being. One soul living in two bodies.

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And wanting this, Jonathan doesn't hesitate to express this desire to David. Now, this seems hard and strange to us. We are not given to going up to people and saying to them, "I would like to be your friend. I would like to enter into friendship with you." We don't do that.

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And we don't do that, I think, for two different reasons. On the one hand, we don't do it because, well, when you assert that you want or need a friend, when you say what that little boy said, "Sir, I want to be loved, and by you," when you say that, you are making yourself vulnerable.

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You are asserting your need. And in our society, we like to appear always self-sufficient, as if we really don't need anyone. On the other hand, the reason we don't go to people with an open invitation to friendship is, we're scared to death they might say no.

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And we don't want to be rejected. On this, we're very much like the Frankenstein monster. A few months ago, one of the major television networks announced that it was going to present the true story of Frankenstein.

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And I made a plan to watch that because I was really anxious to see a dramatization of the Frankenstein story, which would be faithful to the tale as Mary Shelley originally told it. Well, unfortunately, what we saw was another very cheap shot. The story was not told as Mary Shelley wrote it.

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We have yet to see that story dramatically portrayed. For Mary Shelley sees the monster as a very pathetic and sympathetic creature, as one who did not want to be made, and after being made, found it impossible to enter into friendships because whenever he approached people,

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he was terrified that they would reject him because of his ugliness. The climax of the story comes when the monster goes to his creator, Dr. Frankenstein, and utters these words, and notice how different they are from the groans and grunts that we're used to hearing from Boris Karloff and others who have played the monster.

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The monster says this, "I swear to you, by the earth which I inhabit and by you that made me, that if you will make a friend for me, I will quit the neighborhood of men and dwell as it may chance in the most savage places. My evil passions will have fled, for I shall have met with sympathy.

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If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion, but the love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes. My vices are the children of my solitude. My virtues will arise when I live in communion with an equal.

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Oh, to feel the affections of a sensitive being!" Now, that's the cry that we all utter. We long for people to enter into our lives, to tangle heartstrings with them, to have the deep, loving relationships which will bring out of us the very best things that are in us.

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But, we're afraid that when we begin to reveal ourselves to others, they will say, "Eat, Gad, a monster!" and draw away. And so we don't enter into the act of invitation which Jonathan did. You see, he went to David and he said, "Look, I'm willing to risk myself with you.

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I'm willing to reveal to you my need of you. I'm willing to begin to express myself as I really am. Now, will you risk part of yourself with me? Will you reveal some of yourself to me?

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Can we enter into the dance of friendship together?" It takes courage to do that, but I submit that that's where meaningful friendship begins, with an act of invitation and with an act of vulnerability. Now, the second step to friendship is pointed out to us in the 19th chapter of 1 Samuel,

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where it is shown that David and Jonathan have a common purpose in their friendship. And it seems to me that deep friendships always have a common purpose which cements them and makes them into the beautiful things that they are. You must remember that Jonathan was the most popular personality in Israel

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until David's star came onto the scene. Jonathan was a military hero, had been especially victorious in two battles, the Battle of Geba and the Battle of Mikmash. He was the most popular personality of his day.

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But after David killed Goliath, then the chance of the people were in favor of David. When Jonathan, therefore, entered into friendship with David, he was doing that which he knew could have no other effect than to lift the fame of David and at the same time to lower his own prominence and prestige.

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Yet Jonathan did not hesitate to do this. Why? Because Jonathan had the same purpose that David did. Together, they loved their God and they loved their country. And this purpose is what united them, sealed their oneness.

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We often think of friendship as a kind of game, in which one individual makes a move and then the other individual makes a move, one acts and then the other reacts. Friendship is not a game.

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It is, in reality, two games that are played simultaneously. Both games going on at the same time, the same moment. We might better describe it as a dance in which each of the partners is moving in synchronization with the other partner.

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And by glances of the eyes, expressions of the face, by words, by our movements, we keep in touch with each other so that there is harmony and beauty in what we're doing. Now, that can only happen when both partners are dancing to the same music. If they're listening to different music, different melodies,

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the results will be awkward, graceful. It's not beautiful at all. Now, that oneness of music is the oneness of purpose which unites two people in a meaningful friendship. This is the reason that I would argue that Christians enter into deeper friendships than other people do.

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I'm not saying that non-Christians cannot have meaningful friendships, but I am saying that, to my observation at least, Christians enter into deeper relationships. And there's a reason for that.

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And it's this reason of being caught up in the purposes of God. You see, the non-believer who sees life as a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, understands life to have at its center not love, but confusion. Not order, but disorder.

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Not a God who cares, but some dumb fate or blind chance that simply throws the process of life together like dice on a gaming table. Now, when you see life in such negative terms, it takes an awful lot of courage to risk anything, to bet anything on it.

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But when you are a Christian and understand that love is at the center of life, that it is God, the one who loves us, who has fashioned everything and made the world as it is, when you grasp the truth that God, the one who cares for us supremely, is the one who is calling us to friendship and to investment in one another,

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then you are more willing to run the risk. Then you are more willing to make the investment, which friendship is. When you know that we have the kind of God at the center of life who dances with joy in the desert when his children return to him,

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or who runs like a father to greet his prodigal son, as the character in the parable of Jesus does, when you understand that he is the kind of God who will leave 99 in order to go after the one, then you are willing to bet something on that kind of love. The Christian enters into deeper friendships precisely because he knows that it is all right to love.

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Well, you say to me, "Everyone knows that." I respond, "If everyone knows that, then how is it that so few people do it?" The Christian can enter into the kind of relationship which is risky because he understands that he moves in common purpose with God.

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And the Christian in God cannot finally lose. When Captain Scott led his faithful journey to the Antarctic, he had with him a young officer named Edward Wilson. Wilson wrote some beautiful letters to his wife which were collected and published after the tragic end of that expedition.

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And in one of his letters, Wilson writes these words, "I get an hour to myself as a rule before breakfast when I am quite alone. And then I sometimes pray, sometimes read your letters, and sometimes write to you. And I feel it is all communion with God."

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To pray or to read a letter from his beloved wife, and that's friendship at its purest, or to write a letter to his wife, he understands it all to be communion with God. When you see friendship in those terms, experiencing God in another, then friendship begins to authentically deepen.

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Now the third step in meaningful friendship is to enter into sacrificial service of your friend. And this is outlined for us in the 20th chapter of 1 Samuel. We have here the episode of the arrows. Saul is trying to kill David.

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Jonathan is trying to placate Saul so that he won't go after his friend. He arranges for David to hide behind a pile of rocks. And then he seeks to convert Saul to friendship with David again. He says to David, "I will give you a signal as to whether it is safe to come in or not.

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I will shoot some arrows. When the boy goes out after the arrows, if I say to the boy, 'Come closer, they are closer to me,' then you may come closer, David, for all is well. But if I say to the boy, 'The arrows are beyond you,'

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then you must go far beyond the borders of this country into safety, where you will be protected from the wrath of my Father." Now when Jonathan did this, he entered into quite a risk. If his father would have ever discovered it, he would have lost his life.

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And when David stayed as close as he did, trying to remain close to Jonathan yet also hiding lest there be imminent danger. When David did this, he was risking something also. Both of the friends were making sacrifices for the other.

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2,500 years ago, Gautama Buddha walked the mango groves of India. And at a place called Bihar, he was asked by one of his disciples what the five things necessary for life were. The things that most gave life happiness and joy.

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Buddha replied as follows. First, restraint. Second, proper discourse. Third, energy given to good thoughts.

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Fourth, the firm pursuit of those thoughts. And fifth, insight. But then he continued. "Above all of these things," Buddha said,

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"the seeker for happiness must learn to be a good friend." The disciple said to the master teacher, Buddha, "Well, what is friendship?" And Buddha replied,

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"Friendship is to have greater hope of the welfare of others than you do for the welfare of yourself." Now, I am not a Buddhist, but I do not hesitate to take truth wherever I find it.

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And I find here in many words what Jesus later summed most perfectly in a single sentence. He said, "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." That is the sacrificial serving of the other.

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I had a dinner table conversation once with Lowell Thomas. And during the course of that conversation, he told me about two people whom he knew, Harry Reid and Cal Myers,

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two miners in Las Vegas, New Mexico. They had gone down into a hundred-foot shaft and had there placed eleven charges of dynamite, with, of course, long fuses,

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long enough to give them plenty of time to escape. They ignited the fuses and began to run from the tunnel. Myers was considerably ahead of Reid. Now, for some reason, not known to this day,

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one of the charges exploded prematurely, sending hundreds of slivers of stone into the legs of Harry Reid and knocking him unconscious. Myers, at the same time, reached safety in the level above.

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He turned around and he called back for his friend. No response. Without a moment's hesitation, Myers went back into the shaft.

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And, as he did, ten other charges were already ignited, ten fuses already running short, imminent explosion which would render the whole shaft into nothing but tumbled and broken rocks.

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He went into the midst of that, found his friend, threw his body over his shoulder, and carried him out of the tunnel, just getting out before the blast erupted.

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The owners of the mine immediately suggested that Cal Myers be given the Carnegie Medal for Courage. And Myers replied, "I don't want any medal. My friend Harry is alive."

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That's all that was needed, you see. And this kind of loving service, this kind of sacrifice, is at the very center of what meaningful friendship is. There's a gradation on that.

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There's an implication of that, which I think constitutes the fourth and last step in meaningful friendships, in building them, establishing, nourishing them.

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And I would call this fourth step trust. It's explained to us in the 20th chapter of 1 Samuel. And what I mean by trust is this. When two individuals have begun to become vulnerable

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with one another, have initiated friendship, have discovered a common purpose, and give themselves to God in the fulfillment of that purpose, and when they enter into such a depth of relationship

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that they are able to sacrifice for one another, it isn't long until they will come to the place where they will be so trusting of each other that they don't have to insist that the other always be with them.

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They're willing to let the other have other friendships, other associations. They don't desecrate their friend by seeking to dominate their friend. You will notice in the story how Jonathan is quite willing for David to go. If that's best for David,

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then Jonathan does not fear his entering into other friendships, his entering into other relationships, his entering into other comradeships. That does not threaten Jonathan,

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for he understands that the Lord will be between him and David forever. I saw a very pathetic demonstration of the opposite of this on our campus just a few months ago. A young freshman girl, terribly homesick, four days a week thinking about home.

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The last three days of the week she was all right because her parents would come up, driving hundreds of miles to be there, and would spend all of Friday and all of Saturday and all of Sunday with her. We soon discovered that what was happening was this.

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Because her parents would come on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the girl would work and do nothing but work on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, so she would be ready for their arrival. She had no opportunities to build friendships.

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She had no opportunities to get tangled up in all the involvements of dormitory and sorority and fraternity affairs. She was spending all of her time getting ready for this one relationship which she had known for the first 18 years of her life.

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I had to say to those parents, "Please love your daughter enough to stay home. Please love your girl enough to cut the ties. Give her the experience of meeting other people and trust her to begin new loves."

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Every minister has had the experience in marriage counseling encountering the boy or the girl, the husband or wife, who says, "He's not the man I married," or, "She's not the one I married." And in most instances, that's quite correct.

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You see, after the two were married, after the two entered into the deep friendship which marriage is, they had not yet progressed to the place of trust. And as a result, he wasn't allowed to go out with the boys anymore

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even though they'd been his friends for years. And she wasn't allowed to go out with the girls anymore even though they'd been her friends for years. And the activities that he used to do by himself or with others, they were cut off.

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And the same with her. They did everything as a couple. The only friends that they had were the friends in which they both liked the boy and they both liked the girl, and only couples, not the single people. Their lives so changed as individuals that they changed

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until they weren't the people that they had married. If their friendship and love was deep enough, they would have trusted one another to experience others, to enjoy others, to love and be loved by others.

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Trust is the most difficult and yet the most blessed dimension of meaningful friendship. I would sum what I would say of it, and all that I would say to you this morning, by referring to a children's story written by a man named Sheldon Silverstein.

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It's the story of a little boy and a tree. The boy would come into the woods to this tree and would play by the tree. And the tree loved the boy. The tree loved to have the boy take its leaves and make crowns as he marched through the woods.

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He loved to have the boy swing from his branches and eat the apples, which were his fruit, and to fall asleep at the end of the afternoon in his shade. This made the tree very happy. As the boy grew older, he would come to the tree with his girlfriend.

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Once he even carved in the side of the tree a heart, in which he put his name and the name of the girl he loved. But the boy and the girl still were in the shade and still sometimes played with the branches and even on occasion ate the apples.

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So the tree was happy. But then the boy didn't come to the tree very much anymore. One day he came and said he wanted to get his girl something nice and he needed to make some money. The tree said, "Well, why don't you take my apples and sell them in the city?

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And then with this money, you will be able to buy the gift." So the boy did. He took every apple that was on the tree and went off and didn't return for months and then years. But the tree was happy for its apples were being used by the boy that the tree loved.

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