The Bible is filled with practical wisdom and on Truth for Life weekend we are beginning

a series of topical studies drawn from the Book of Proverbs. The series is titled

Wise Words. We're starting with a close look at genuine friendship. What qualities

should we look for in a true friend and cultivate in ourselves?

Alistair Begg is teaching from Proverbs 18.

Tonight just briefly I want to think with you about the nature and importance of friendship.

Friendship is of course I think vitally important to everybody who lives. Somebody who says

that they have no interest in friendship is a poor soul and probably has something wrong

with him. A friend is a person says the Oxford English Dictionary and we should trust

a person joined by intimacy and affection to another. The fact of the matter is that in the book

of Proverbs you will find a tremendous concern in friendship. My purpose this evening is simply to

deal with it on three fronts. First of all to notice a couple of characteristics of true friendship

and then secondly to see how those characteristics are ultimately embodied in Jesus and finally to ask

us to ask ourselves whether we are enjoying this kind of friendship. Now again we don't have to

try too hard to realize that people are greatly in need of friendship. In the old days before the

internet there were people who were ham radio operators. You may even have been one. I always

was intrigued by those people. They had gigantic areas down at the bottom of their garden and usually

a little shed and if you drop by on your bicycle late in the evening you could hear them shouting out

into the night. Hello, hello, anybody out there? Anybody out there? And apparently they stayed

up deep in the night hoping that somebody somewhere in the hemisphere would actually come back and say

hello, I'm an anchorage and I'm reading you loud and clear. But of course now with the internet

apparently everybody's doing it. And I don't think I've ever been in one of these chat rooms. I've

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