By Chris WittsThursday 8 Dec 2022Morning Devotions with Chris WittsFaithReading Time: 1 minute
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Transcript:
One of the better-known quotes from the Hollywood movies comes way back from 19, actually talk about 1942. The movie Casablanca and Humphrey Bogart plays Rick and he says to Captain Renno in that final scene of the movie, they walk into the fog and he said, “Louis, I think I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”.
It’s one of those quotes that seems to stay in your mind. Louis. This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Well, that’s what I like to talk about this morning and tomorrow. Most of us realise, I think, the importance of friendship. So whether you’re young, old, male, female, married or single, I think we all at least like to have one friend with whom we can get along and be able to share life’s journey. It sort of makes life much nicer, doesn’t it?
But you know, the true friendship is becoming a very rare quality these days. A good friend is sometimes hard to find. It’s not easy to find someone in whom we can trust, even in the in the hard times, someone that will keep our confidence that we can share even the things that are deeply embedded in us or our secrets. We don’t want people to know,
but I’d like to just say here that God has made us to connect with people, and good friends can make life easy to bear.
In fact, there’s nothing more meaningful in life than to have a close friend, someone who will stand by you in the good times and the bad times. But experience has shown that genuine friendship is quite hard to find. It’s quite a rare thing to find a really genuine friend, the Greek philosopher Aristotle, it was reported as he lay dying, said, “Oh, my friends”, he said. “There is no friend now back in”. Of course, those days the Greeks valued friendship in a way that we know nothing about. But here it was a man like Aristotle. All the years of being a great person did not have one single friend at that time of his death.
Maybe this is mirrored in today’s life, where we’ve become very impersonal, superficial, and I’m wondering, too, whether we use that word friend to freely we might meet someone and suddenly they become our friend.
I think probably what the better word there is. Acquaintance.
A true friend is someone who does understand you and knows you very well. Not just an acquaintance, but as a friend. The Celtic Christians, they used to say you should have a soul friend and the soul friend was someone with whom you shared everything from the heart. So it’s a real pity that in our society we don’t encourage friendships to be on that deeper and a meaningful level. And if that happened, I think that more people would sense life was satisfying and enjoyable.
We come into the world alone and we leave the world alone when we died.
We live in this crowded city here of Sydney and people can be alone even with people all around. Loneliness has not much to do with whether there are people around you. It has to do with a sense of isolation that you feel when there’s no meaningful relationship with somebody else.
I think the hectic pace of life, our tendency, I guess to move People move from one place to another. We spend too much time, I think, in front of the TV computers and were reluctant to let our guard down. So the old saying is true: If you want to have a friend, be friendly yourself and there’s an idea. Of course it means doing things together. I’ve heard people say, “Well, he’s a good friend of mine”, But really, it’s only a one-way relationship is not trust.
There has to be an essential thing for friendship, to grow and develop.
Friends, of course, share much in common. Someone said. If you can count your true friends on the fingers of one hand, you are blessed. Maybe you’re one of the fortunate people that have a lot of friends. Well, the Bible has something to say really interesting about this, and it says in Proverbs 27 Verse 17, “just as iron sharpens iron, friends sharp in the minds of each other”.
And I read recently that people don’t know how much you know until they know how much you care. And that’s true. That’s a good friend, someone who is dependable, encouraging and giving you the support. And as the Bible says, it sharpens the minds of each other. So we thank God for friends, don’t we? Well, heavenly father, we know that sometimes we doubt the goodness of people.
But, Lord, we thank you for friends. We thank you for those who are with us. Those who pray for us, who support us. We thank you for them, Lord. In the name of Jesus our Saviour, Amen.