Sunday----Proverbs on Friendship, Part 3 with Dr. Tim Keller

If anyone loudly blesses their neighbor early in the morning, it will be taken as a curse. (Proverbs 27:14)

SENSITIVITY.  A third mark of friendship is sensitivity and tact.  Why does someone show inappropriate heartiness when others are just waking up?  Why do they use humor inappropriately or speak lightheartedly to grieving people with a heavy heart? It is because they are emotionally disconnected and therefore clumsy.  They don't know the other person's inner topography well enough to know what hurts or helps, what inspires or bores,  what stimulates or irritates.

If I can be content when you are sad, I'm not your friend. Friends voluntarily tie their hearts to one another.  They put their happiness into their friends happiness, so they can't emotionally flourish unless their friends are flourishing too.  Jesus  tied his heart to us so that even in his suffering he know joy because of the salvation he was bringing to us (Hebrews 12:2; cf. Isaiah 53:11).  The friendship connection may not be as emotionally intense as that which comes in romance, nor always as enduring as family ties, all the more reason friendship is so valuable, because such a link is both deliberate and voluntary.

Are you putting in the effort to be a friend?

Prayer:  Lord, our sin causes you pain (Genesis 6:6)  and our broken hearts draw you to our side (Psalm 34:18)  You love us more tenderly and sensitively than a nursing mother does her child (Isaiah 49:15)  Let me be so moved by your love for me that it makes me highly sensitive to the needs of those around me.  Amen