Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Friends – What Good Are They? (Open Forum)

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

In our times, friendship is relatively ignored. Every other kind of love, every other kind of relationship is a hot topic. Everybody is writing about romance or family, while friendship is seen as uninteresting. And yet, friendship is absolutely vital. Do you understand how crucial it is to make, find, maintain, and develop friendships?  Let me just ask three questions: 1) why is friendship so neglected today? 2) why is it so vitally important and crucial? and 3) how can the resources of the Christian faith help us understand friendship and galvanize, energize and recover friendship? This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on April 27, 1997. Series: Redeemer Open Forums.  Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Welcome to Gospel in Life. This month, we've selected a special set of sermons and talks from across the years that Tim Keller preached at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. This month's messages highlight themes like rest, idolatry, and integrating our faith with our work, each one rooted in the truth that the gospel truly changes everything. One of the things I told my wife I've done, I did tonight that I've never done before, and she can't wait to find out what it was, in preparing for a talk, is I did a web search

today at four o'clock to test a theory. One of the things that I knew almost immediately, it's sort of intuitive, that when we do an open forum, we choose a theme that there's great interest in. So what are some of the ones we've done in the past? We've done sex, love, freedom, identity. And in every case, what we're doing is we're playing on the popularity of it. People say, yeah, yeah, I want to, what is that? I want to know about that.

But friendship, friendship is not all that interesting. Now how do I know that? Because not only do I immediately look, I have files, you know, I keep magazines, I keep articles, I keep clippings, I go to the library, I just, I like that. And as soon as I started looking for friendship, articles on friendship, you know, think of all the magazines you've seen recently that have had sort of special issues on sexuality, or on love, or on identity, or on freedom, or on, you know, is there truth, and is there morality? All the other things that we've done open forum topics on, think about them.

You can think of them. You can think of Time Magazine doing something on all of that, can't you? You can say, special issue, sexuality today, or is there any truth anymore, or why are we so immoral, or self-esteem and identity. But you're not going to see them do one on friendship. When I did my web search, I went to WebCrawler, by the way, if you want to know. I said, find a search engine. I typed in friendship, and it came up and it said 62 18. 6218. Oh, okay.

And that's kind of small, isn't it? So I said, well, so then I typed in family, which is another kind of relationship. Immediately it came up with 125 318. You can go check me out on this. And then I typed in sex. Immediately, the screen froze. It was on a Mac. A little bomb showed up.

And from what I can tell, the machine sort of collapsed under the anticipated weight of the multiple digits that would have shown up on there. It would have said, first 25 of 3,500,000, I mean, I don't know what it would have said, but it just collapsed with exhaustion, thinking about the possibility of giving me every website on the web now that had to do with sex. Now, I have a question. Why? Forty years ago, C.S. Lewis wrote a book called The Four Loves. And one of the things that some of you know if you come here very often, you know I quote C.S. Lewis so much that you say, now, C.S. Lewis is one of the twelve apostles, is that it? And I want you to know tonight I'm more desperate than ever to use

them. I have to use them. And I'll tell you why. I'm more desperate than ever to use them. I have to use them and I'll tell you why. I can hardly find anybody who's done any kind of sustained thought on this subject for years. In his book on the four loves, he starts off his chapter on friendship and he says he doesn't know of a single world class poem dedicated to love, to friendship since Im Memoriam by Alfred Lord Tennyson. He says that Cicero wrote a whole book on friendship and Aristotle and Plato, they all spent a great deal of time on in the ancient times but not anymore. Every other kind of love, every other kind of relationship is hot. Everybody's writing about it, everybody's

discussing it, everybody's doing all these things, it's hot. Why is this one neglected? Well now somebody, that's what I'm going to ask, I'm going to ask this question. Why is friendship so neglected? Why is it so uninteresting? Why is it relatively ignored? As opposed to the other kinds of relationships. And then secondly, why is it vital anyway? Because that's one of the points I'm going to make tonight. Frankly, if I do a talk at Open Forum on self-esteem, or sex, or something like that, I know you're

interested, that's why you came. And in a way, I'm going to try to tone it down and say, hey, this isn't such a big deal. But I'm not going to do that tonight. I can't do that tonight. I believe that it's my job to promote this, to say, do you understand the vital importance of this? Do you understand the cruciality of the skill set of making, finding, maintaining, developing friendship? So let's see, let me just ask three questions. Why is it so neglected today? What does that tell us about our time and about ourselves? Secondly, why is it so vitally important and crucial? And then last of all, how can the resources of the Christian faith help us understand

friendship and galvanize and energize and recover friendship? You might say, why the resources of the Christian faith? Because frankly, you've got to go back somewhere. You're going to have to go to Confucianism, or you have to go to Greek philosophy, you're going to have to go to the Bible, you're going to have to go to… you're going to have to go way back if you want to get serious treatment of friendship. And I only, I happen to know much more about the Bible than any of those other things. And therefore, so, why is it neglected?

Why is it so important? What can Christianity tell us and help us, how can it help us to really recover friendship? Now, why is it neglected? It kind of goes this way. Lewis in his book, and I've got them here because that's what I'm going to be quoting from his stuff tonight. Lewis in his book, The Four Loves, takes four Greek words, some of you may know, that there is no one Greek word for love. There's at least four, and he brings them out, storge, eros,

philos, and agape. And what he actually does here is he talks about at least four kinds of loves or four kinds of relationships. And the first kind of relationship he talks about is family relationship, which he calls affection. Family relationship. The love of a mother for a child or of children for their grandparents or uncles and aunts or even for your neighbors, for the places that you grew up, affection, storgay, family love, you see, loyalty, the sense of going way, way back together. Then secondly, he talks not about family love but erotic love and romantic love, which is another form of relationship.

And then another kind of relationship, which you might not think of as a love necessarily, but it's another kind of relationship, and that is your relationship to your neighbor. That is, your social relationships, in particular, to your people, to your ethnic group, to your culture, to your race, you see, to your nationality. And if you look, by the way, on the website, one of the things I can find out is all, those things are all hot. How do we relate to our neighbors civilly? How do we get along, you see? How are we supposed to get along between the cultures? What is my relationship to my people?

What does it mean to be this kind of person or that kind of person? See, that's your relationship with your neighbor. Family love, erotic love. But the one love that's neglected, he says, is friendship love. And here's the reason why. First reason is all the other loves are biologically and socially necessary. There's a necessity driving them. To give it to you this way, Lewis says this, friendship is

in a sense not derogatory at all, friendship is in a sense, I'm not using this term in a derogatory way at all, the least natural of all love. It is the least distinctive. It is the least organic or biological. It is the least necessary. It has the least commerce with our nerves. There's nothing throaty about it, nothing that quickens the pulse or turns you red and

pale. And he's right. Now think about this. There's something primordial to feel a solidarity with your race or your people. Something very basic and actually something necessary. You've got to have a people. And on the other hand, there's something very primordial about erotic love, about romantic love. We talk about sexual chemistry. Think about it. Chemistry. See the word? It's something that sort of drives us. There's a necessity about it. It happens.

You don't sit around and think about it. Gee, it would be nice to be sexually attracted to somebody. I'll try. Okay? These things are natural. And family is the same way. Family love, going way, way back, that deep affection, that's not something that you decide to do.

It happens. Have any of you noticed, for example, there's even though basically the idea of affection, the Greek word storige, even though that has to do primarily with family ties, you know, kinship ties, those sorts of things, it also happens to the familiar. For example, if you were part of this church eight years ago when it virtually started, when it was kind of small, even people that... You see people that are still there, still here, kind of small. Even people that, you see people that are still there, still here, haven't moved away from New York, they were with you

through all that. Even if you have never become very close friends, even if you don't know them very well, there's some kind of tie that begins to happen. There's a gladness when you see them. There's a tremendous deep comfort. It's not friendship, really. It's not erotic. It's not tribal. It's not the peoplehood. It's affection. And what Lewis points out, and what I'm trying to point out is every other kind of love except

friendship has some kind of biological or sociological engine driving it. They happen to you. But in friendship, you have to be a free moral agent. Friendship is absolutely deliberate. Friendship is intentional and it stays intentional. You don't fall into friendship. Nobody said, I fell into friendship. He fell in love, she said.

She fell in love. You can talk about that kind of thing. You never decide, in a way, to do something like that. But when it comes to friendship, it's very, very deliberate. And therefore, one of the main reasons why friendship is so neglected is, it has always been the one of all the loves that it's easiest to get through life without experiencing. Many, many, many of us think we've experienced what we haven't.

We've hardly experienced it because we don't have to. Because there's nothing pushing us to. And that's always been the case. However, today, look at your schedules. Look at your lives. Look at them. And you will see that time is squeezing out everything. And the things that you will tend to make time for are the things that impose themselves on you.

You've still got family. You gotta call home. You know? You gotta call home. You what? You just gotta call home. I mean... Stuff happens if you don't call home. Right? Sex. Romance, you see. There's drives to this sort of thing.

But not friendship. And when your life gets hectic, everything gets squeezed out, it's friendship that goes first. There's nothing pushing you. But I'll go one step further. There's something about our modern, Western, secular, and individualistic mindset that has made friendships, in particular, commitment extremely problematic.

Just about everybody in our day believes there's only two spots where you can find fulfillment. In all the old codependent books, I chose one of the most popular ones of all. One person wrote this, it was very popular, big bestseller in codependency, and this is very typical in those books. And I think a lot of this is sunken into our psyche. She says, stop looking for happiness in other people. Our source of happiness and well-being is not inside others, it's inside us. We must learn to center ourselves in ourselves. Now you know the two women in that really nice little Wendy Wasserstein piece.

One of them had chosen the one way, one had chosen the other way. One had said, I'm never going to be happy unless I basically find my happiness in somebody else. And she looks like she's on a collision course. She looks like she's driven. She doesn't come out very well in the play. It's hard to know, you know, it's hard to get into the mindset of the playwright, but she doesn't look very good.

On the other hand, Janie, who had made a commitment to not really do that, she'd made a commitment to not be codependency. She'd said, my source of happiness is not in other people. I'm not going to commit. I'm not going to give myself over. I'm not going to make those sacrifices. I'm never going to make those sacrifices. I'm going to decide what I want to do and I'm going to find happiness inside me."

And she's not very happy either. I don't know what the playwright was trying to get across. But from a Christian point of view, they are both wrong. And the problem is, getting into friendship because you desperately need people, because all your other relationships, family and romantic and everything else has fallen apart. Getting into friendship because you desperately need people, as we're going to see in a second, is not friendship at all.

On the other hand, not needing friends, not wanting friends, you see. Really what you've done is you've hurt your humanity because human beings need them. So to pull back or to just throw yourself in and say, this is my joy and my meaning, this is a problem that all we have in our Western society. Because the other ties have been weakened terribly. Because the family ties. Because in many cases, the marriage ties.

It's not marriage, but rather there's all sorts of sexual encounters. And even our relationship with our people. Those things have been removed in the interest of liberation and freedom in the West. And now we turn around and we find ourselves relationally hungry, but we're also told, you better not find your happiness in other people. You better find it in yourself. And so we go back and forth between either being codependent in our relationships or

being absolutely lonely and alienated. And as a result of this, friendship is neglected. We're afraid of it. We don't know what to do. Now one more thing. Oh, no, let's move right on. Pardon me. So the first thing is, it's very neglected for all these reasons.

One, because friendship is the least natural, it's always easy to be squeezed out. And because of our time problems and because of our individualism today, friendship is the least natural, it's always easy to be squeezed out. And because of our time problems and because of our individualism today, friendship is really becoming a lost skill. We're ambivalent toward it. Now, secondly, why is it so important then? Somebody says, well, maybe it is a problem. I mean, maybe friendship's, you know, why is it so important? Let me put it to you this way.

First of all, of all the loves, this is the most human. Now, I'll be very careful about this. Lewis in his book Four Loves makes a very, Lewis is big on animals. And by the way, right now, so am I. Bigger than I've ever been. I get along better with the pet I have now than I've ever gotten along with any pet in my life. And Lewis is right in saying, and this is from a Christian

point of view, it's very important not to see the physical as lower than the soul or spirit. Maybe in some philosophies the physical is kind of bad and the spiritual is good. That's never been true. In the Christian religion, it's not just your soul that's saved, but your body that's resurrected, you see. Jesus didn't just come spiritually out of the grave, he came bodily out of the grave. And so Lewis points this out, he says, nothing in us is worse or better for being shared with animals. When we blame a man for being a mere animal, we do not mean he displays animal characteristics, since we all do. Sex is something that animals do as well. Family affection is something animals have as well. Have you ever seen a kitten with their little babies and so forth? I mean,

in other words, family love is something that animals have. And sexual love is something that animals have. And species love is something that animals have. I mean, for some reason, cats tend to get along better with each other than they do with zebras. Who knows why? I mean, there's species love and all that. He says, when we call a blame a man for being a mere animal, we do not mean he displays animal characteristics. We all do. But rather, when we call somebody an animal, what we should mean is that he displays these on occasions where the specifically human was demanded. Or we call him a brute, when we mean that he commits cruelties impossible to real brutes because they are neither cruel nor clever enough. So first of all, I don't want you to think that

I'm saying friendship's a hire. However, friendship is the most humanizing. It's the most human. It's not driven by a biological necessity. It's not driven at all. And as a result, it really requires you to be the most human. It requires you to be the most free, moral agent. And therefore, it's extremely humanizing. I mean, that gets across... Have any of you seen probably the best of the old original Frankenstein movies with Boris Karloff. Not the first one, but the second one, The Bride of Frankenstein. Remember, with Elsa Lancaster as the bride?

It's really very scary and really very good, but there's this remarkable scene in it. It's right in the middle. I saw it some years ago and I was amazed. I had never remembered it. But the Frankenstein monster is on the run trying to get away from his pursuers and he comes to this cottage in the middle of the forest, remote, and there's a blind man in it. Any of you ever see this?

And he comes to the door, and the blind man, of course, can't see this horrible monstrosity in front of him, and he speaks to Frankenstein, the Frankenstein monster, excuse me, and the monster can't speak. And here's what the blind man says. He says, oh, are you afflicted like me? Are you too an afflicted person? We have something in common and therefore maybe we can be friends. And so he brings the monster in and sits down.

And it's very tight. He gets down on his knees. The blind man gets down on his knees and he says, I thank you, O Lord, that you have heard my endless prayers and you have sent me a friend to heal my terrible loneliness. And then you see a few scenes in which they're doing things together, they're eating together, they're doing chores together. There's one place where he's playing the violin for the Frankenstein monster. And it's really astonishing and about the only place in those old original movies which were really pretty clear, pretty true to the original narrative and the original characters, the only times you ever hear Boris Karloff say anything is right there.

The monster learns to say, food. The monster learns to say, good. Food, good. And the monster learns to say, friend. And then of course, it's only about five minutes long, then at one point some hunters come to the cottage and they come on in and they see the monster, which of course the blind man can't. They attack.

The monster attacks back and there's this terrible conflagration and in the end the whole cottage burns down, just about, looks like everybody, including the poor blind man, is killed. And the last thing you see is the monster groping out into the forest saying, Friend, friend. You know, and even a Frankenstein movie, if an old Frankenstein movie can almost make you cry, you're onto something. And here's what you're onto.

There's nothing more humanizing than friendship. God has worked through Tim Keller's teaching to help countless people discover Christ's redemptive love and grow in their faith as they learn how the gospel is the key to every aspect of life. This month, we're featuring a brand new book by author Matt Smethurst titled, Tim Keller on the Christian Life. In it, he distills biblical insights from Tim Keller's nearly 50 years of sermons, books, and conference messages, including each of the sermons we've highlighted on

the podcast this month. The book explores foundational theological themes from Tim Keller's work, like grace, idolatry, justice, prayer, suffering, and more. It's a resource that we hope will help you apply the gospel more richly to your everyday life. We'll send you a copy as our thanks for your gift to help Gospel in Life share the good news of Christ's love with people all over the world. Just visit gospelinlife.com slash give to request your copy.

That's gospelinlife.com slash give. Now here's Dr. Keller with the remainder of today's teaching. There's nothing that makes you more human. Now, here's Dr. Keller with the remainder of today's teaching. There's nothing that makes you more human. He became so human, he almost got over as being a monster. Now, the same thing happens. I see as when you grow up, all the other kinds of relations are thrust on you. When you're a kid, you've got to go to school. And see, in a sense, those are social relationships. And you've got to

deal with your cousins and kiss your uncles and aunts. They're all there. Friendship really takes a great deal of deliberation. So first of all, it's so incredibly, vitally important because it is the most humanizing. And it requires you to be the most free moral agent. Secondly, friendship is so... Now, I don't know how to put this and I've been groping for it. Of all the loves, friendship is the most...

It's the one that multiplies. It's the one that's sort of mysterious. It's like loads and fishes. It's like everyone... Jesus took the little loads and fishes and 5,000 were eaten. There's nothing like this. Unlike other kinds of relationships, friendship can almost be multiplied indefinitely. And you see, for example, a family relationship, basically, you only have, you can only develop a family relationship because of long-term actual events that make you into a family, and a family can only be a certain size.

And erotic, see erotic relationships basically, when you're falling in love, it's got to be fairly exclusive. But Lewis comes up and says something pretty remarkable in one of his most famous passages I think in this. And he says, he says, We all know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person, yet in some ways nothing is less like a friendship than a love affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love. Friends hardly even talk about their friendship. Lovers are normally face to face absorbed in each other, friends side by side absorbed in some common vision or goal. But above all, eros, while it lasts,

is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is very important. Charles Lamb says somewhere that if of three friends, A, B, and C, A should die, then B loses not only A, but A's part in C, and while C loses not only A, but A's part in B. By myself, I am not large enough to call the whole person into activity. I need other lights than my own to show up all his facets. Now that my friend Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald's reaction to one of his jokes. Far from having more of Ronald,

having him to myself, now that Charles is away, oh no, I have less of Ronald. Hence true friendship is the least jealous of all loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third and three by a fourth if the newcomers qualified to become a real friend. We'll talk about that in a second. They then can say as the blessed souls say in Dante, here comes one who can augment our loves. For in this love, to divide is to multiply. Of course, the scarcity of kindred souls sets limits to the enlargement of the circle.

But within those limits, we possess each friend not less, but more, as the number of those with whom we share him increases." And then he goes on, In this way friendship exhibits a glorious nearness by resemblance to heaven, where the very multitude of the blessed which no one can number increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul seeing him in her own way doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That's why

an old author notices that the angels in Isaiah's vision of Isaiah chapter 6 are actually crying holy, holy, holy to one another. The more we thus share the heavenly bread between us, the more we shall all have. Now, sorry to read that, a long and kind of involved quote, but the only reason I'm doing it is because there is a mysterious multiplication, there's a mysterious ability for friendship not to be divided. See, friendship, two people become good friends. If you get a third person who's a real friend, which I have to get to and define here in a second, who's a real friend, what ends up happening is you don't have

less of this first friend, you have more of the first friend. That's not true in erotic love, and it's not really even true in some ways in a family. But it is absolutely true, there's something absolutely mysterious, and therefore you see this mystery, this humanity, this power is so important. And by the way, one last thing before I, my last point, how does Christianity show us how to be friends? How does Christianity give us the power to be friends? One more thing, if you live in New York City, if you live in Manhattan, there is no place on the face of the earth where people are living less in families. No place. You know, in the mid-80s,

I haven't done much demographics since then, in the mid-80s I knew that 64% of all the people who lived south of 96th Street in Manhattan were living all by themselves. That means you've got an awful lot of single people and there's probably more than that. There's probably no place on the face of the earth where you have hundreds of thousands of people who are not living near their families. And you also have an incredibly mobile place, do you not, Manhattan? And what that means is, there's no place anywhere on the earth where it's more important to know how to make friends and how to make new friends, because you're always losing them.

We're going to be... We're going to become unhuman. We're going to become hard unless we know how to do this. Now, how do you do it? Okay, lastly, first of all, Christianity says so much about friendship. Here's why. First of all, quickly, Christianity tells us why friendship is so humanizing and why it's so powerful. In the book of Ecclesiastes, back in the Old Testament, there's a very sad little spot I just found this week. And it says, I saw a man and he had no son and no brother, yet his toil was endless. And he turned and he

looked at his wealth and he was not content with his wealth and he said, for whom am I toiling my life is meaningless. That's Ecclesiastes 4, verse 7 and 8. And you know what's so frightening about that? This is when it says, I saw a man without son or brother. The word brother means a friend. The word son means, here's a man who put personal achievement over developing relationships. And as a result, he's made partner, but he's got no friends. And he finds to his absolute horror that when you get to the end of life, if you've got

status and you've got position, you've got personal achievement, in other words, you've got your career. Now, we're not talking about women and men here, we're talking about people. You get your career. You know who you are. You've staked out your goals and you've reached it. And at the end of your life, if you've got personal achievement and no relationships, your life is meaningless.

But if at the end of your life you've got relationships and maybe not so much to show in the area of personal achievement, you've got a meaningful life. And he's absolutely amazed when he gets to the end of his life and he realizes that. Why is that? Christianity explains it. Christianity explains it in two ways. Christianity says, first of all, it's the nature of God. The Christian God is different than any other kind of God.

All the other religions believe in an impersonal God, like the Eastern religions, or Western religions believe in one God, at least one to start, in some cases. But Christianity says, from all eternity, there have always been one God in three persons. The Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. And do you know what that means? Some of you say, oh, I've always found that difficult. Maybe, and there's a lot of ways in which it's difficult, but I want you to hear this out.

This means that God is a friendship. This means, Christianity says in a way that no other religion does say or can say, that friendship was there at the foundation of existence. That before anything existed there was friendship, and therefore relationship is the meaning of existence. There's nothing you'd get but lower than this, you see? Friendship isn't something that comes and then goes.

It's not something that happens in the universe and then goes away. And you see, when God, in the Old Testament, in the book of Genesis, it says, God made Adam, and it says, Adam was lonely. Why was Adam lonely? Because he was like God. You see, Adam wasn't lonely because he was imperfect. Adam was lonely because he was perfect. Adam wasn't lonely because there was something wrong with him. Adam wasn't lonely because he was imperfect, Adam was lonely because he was perfect. Adam wasn't lonely because there was something wrong with him. Adam wasn't lonely because he was dysfunctional because he hadn't learned to find, you know, happiness inside himself. Adam was lonely because he was like God and God is a friendship.

You see, relationship, love, communication, intimacy is absolutely intrinsic to God. And if we're made in His image, then it's absolutely intrinsic to us. And therefore, the more you need friends, the more like God you are. And, Christianity will say, the less you need friends, the less like God you've made yourself to be. So Christianity sees friendship as absolutely critical, and not only because of the nature of God, because of the nature of human beings.

Do you believe that we are the result of, as the PBS special says, a glorious accident? If you believe we're a glorious accident, then how valuable can we be? We might feel valuable, but we aren't. But Lewis says in one of his sermons, he says, if Christianity is true, if God has made us and we're going to live forever, he says this. He says, there are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, they are mortal and their lives is to ours as the

life of a gnat. He says, you have to remember that every day we are living in a society of people and we must remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which if you saw it now you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are in some degree helping each other toward one of these other, one or the other of these destinations, see? Heaven or hell. It is with – now you say, oh, I don't know if I believe all that. Yeah, all right, I'm asking you to try it on. I'm just asking you to try it on. And if you try it on, here's what

he says, it is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities. It is with the awe and circumspection proper to them. It is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all plays, all politics. There are no ordinary people. And what he means is, do you believe that we're just glorious accidents or do you believe in eternity? Do you believe that we're just glorious accidents, or do you believe in eternity? Do you believe that we're made for eternity? In that case, there is nothing more important than investing in the person next to you. There's nothing more important than finding the seeds of beauty and of greatness in them,

and cultivating them and bringing them out, because that's going to last forever. See? It is with the awe and circumspection proper to that understanding which will lead you to make friendship-making and friendship-developing and friendship-maintaining nothing more important in your life. Friends literally will last Friends literally will last forever, but your bank account will not. It will rust. It will go away. Now, finally, what does Christianity tell us is the way we can be good friends? This way. Number one, friends have to be discovered rather than just made.

Why? Because friendship, as Lewis said a minute ago, is not so much... it's the one relationship that's not about itself. He said, lovers look at each other and say, how are we doing? But friends, what makes you a friend with somebody else is that you have a common vision, a common passion, common interests, common goals. There's things that you want to do together. Lovers look at each other like this, they stand face to face. Friends stand shoulder to shoulder and look at something else. And that's the reason why friendship, as he said, is the least jealous of all loves.

But what it does mean is you can't, to some degree, you have to discover friends rather than just make them. Someone comes along, and this is pardon me, the quote, someone comes along and, oh this is, pardon me, the quote. Someone comes along and he says basically if you want to know the language of friendship it goes like this. He says, he says, friendship arises out of mere acquaintanceship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insider interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure or burden. And therefore, friendship starts with this statement. What?

You too? I thought I was the only one. In our time, friendship arises in the same way. It may be a common religion, common studies, common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions, but one or two or three who share something more will be our friends. And therefore, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, the language of friends is not, do you love me, but do you see the same truth? And then, here's the most important thing.

That is why those pathetic people who simply want friends will never have any. The very condition of having friends is that we should want something else besides friends. Where the truthful answer to the question, do you see the same truth, would be, I see nothing and I don't care about the truth, I want a friend. No friendship can arise. Though affection may, there would be nothing for the friendship to be about. And friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing and those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travelers. So first of all there's got to be a common truth. If you want nothing but friends, if you're so needy and so desperate that you want nothing but friends you'll never have any friends.

But if you have passions, if you have yearnings, if you have goals, if you have things to do, you find other friends who have those same passions and goals and yearnings, and you become friends. So, first of all, friends actually have to be discovered rather than made. But then secondly, you do have to make friends. They not only discover they have to be maintained. And how you maintain is very simple. You have to let them all the way in, and then you have to never let them down. Friends let you in, friends don't let you down. The two things that the

Bible says over and over again, especially in the book of Proverbs, you have to be willing to do self-disclosure. You have to be willing to let people in on your secrets. Not too far, not too fast. But you have to be willing to let people in. And then secondly, you have to be there. There's nothing more important than constancy. Now somebody says, well you know, here's a question. How do you get freed up so that you can want friends but not want them too much? But on the other hand, have the emotional capital to make investments in them

because they're going to take sacrifices. And the answer is Jesus. And there's this wonderful passage in John chapter 15, which is probably the ultimate passage on friendship. And Jesus says this to his disciples, greater love is no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants because

a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends. For everything that I learned from my father, I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit. This is my command to you. I say, love one another. Don't you see, if you know someone like Jesus who has definitely let you all the way in, because he tells you the secret of the universe, he tells you that he's come to die for you, and he will never let you down. He says, I will never, never, never, never let you down. I will never forsake you. If you know a friend like that, you'll have the emotional capital to both disclose to other friends and put up with the problems of friendship, but not be so needy that you need friends so badly

you can't possibly have friends. This is the secret. It's the thing. It's the way to go. Look, in conclusion, why is friendship so important? Because of the nature of God and the nature of human beings. That's what Christianity helps you on. How in the world can we actually have real friendship if we need friends so badly? And the answer is you need to find the ultimate friend, the friend that sticks closer than anyone else, he says he's the one who laid his life down for you, so he let you all the way in. He made himself totally vulnerable, and he will never let you down, because when he was in the garden and all the weight of divine justice was coming down on him, it was more important that he have us than that he keep the universe.

He was willing to lose the universe. He was willing to lose everything for you. That's friendship. Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you'd like to see more people encouraged by the Gospel-centered teaching and resources of this ministry, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel Unlife monthly partner. Your partnership allows us to reach people all over the world with the life-giving power of Christ's love.

To learn more, just visit gospelunlife.com slash partner. That website again is gospelunlife.com slash partner. Today's sermon was recorded in 1997. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. you