Committed Friends

Life is full of change. We change schools, we change homes, and we can even change friends. It’s almost impossible to guess what life might look like in 5, 10, 25, or 50 years. Do you think you’ll still have the same friends for the rest of your life? Do you want to?

Friendship requires commitment, and staying friends with the same people for a long time can be hard. Just like any good relationship, friendship takes hard work, patience, and kindness. In the same way that we should treat our friends well, we want friends who treat us well, too. So that means committing seriously to friendships that we want to keep with people who encourage and support us, just like we do for them. As Proverbs 17:17 says, “a friend loves at all times.”

Does all this mean we have to stay friends with people we’ve always been friends with? No, and there’s nothing wrong with making new friends, even if it’s only for a short time. What’s more important than the length of friendship is the quality of friendship. Being a committed, loving friend is about more than a period of time. Instead, it’s about reliable, trustworthy, encouraging, and loving friends who can be, as Proverbs 18:24 says, “closer than a brother.”

Questions: 

1. What qualities do you think you should look for in friends? 
2. If you have friends who aren’t especially loving or encouraging, what steps can you take to try and turn things around? What sort of example could you set? 
3. Thinking back across all the devotions, who do you think is the perfect model to show what a loving friend looks like? Why?

Prayer:

Gracious God, thank you for the wisdom you have given me through your Word so that I might know what a good friend looks like. Please help me to make friendships that honour you, and I pray that I might be a good friend to those around me. Amen.