Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2627
Delivered by C. H. Spurge 0n
“Your own friend, and your father’s friend, forsake not.” Proverbs 27:10.
TRUE friends are very scarce. We have a great many acquaintances and, sometimes, we call them friends and so misuse the noble word, “friendship.” Perhaps, in some later day of adversity, when these so-called friends have looked out for their own interests and left us to do the best we can for ourselves, that word, friendship, may come back to us with sad and sorrowful associations. The friend in need is a friend, indeed, and such friends, I say again, are scarce. When you have found such a man and proved the sincerity of his friendship. When he has been faithful to your father and to you, grapple him to yourself with hooks of steel and never let him go! It may be that because he is a faithful friend, he will sometimes vex you and anger you. See how Solomon puts it in this very chapter—“Open rebuke is better than secret love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” It takes a great deal of friendship to be able to tell a man his faults. It is not friendship that flatters! It is small friendship that holds its tongue when it ought to speak. But it is true friendship that can speak at the right time and, if necessary, even speak so sharply as to cause a wound. If you are like many other foolish folk, you will be angry with the man who is so much your friend that he will tell you the truth. If you are unworthy of your friend, you will begin to grow weary of him when he is performing on your behalf the most heroic act of pure charity by warning you of your danger and reminding you of your imperfection! Solomon, in prospect of such a case, knowing that this is one of the greatest trials of friendship among such poor imperfect beings as we are, tells us not to forsake, for this reason—nor indeed, for any other reason—the man who has been to us and to our family a true friend. “Your own friend, and your father’s friend, forsake not.”
I do not think that I would waste your time if I were to give you a lecture upon friendship—its duties, its dangers, its rights and its privileges—but it is not my intention to do so. There is one Friend to whom these words of Solomon are especially applicable. There is a Friend who is the chief and highest of all friends and when I speak of Him, I feel that I am not spiritualizing the text in the least. He is a true and real Friend and these words are truly and really applicable to Him. And if ever the text is emphatic, it is so when it is applied to Him, for there was never such another Friend to us and to our fathers! There is no Friend to whom we ought to be so intensely attached as to Him. “Your own Friend, and your father’s Friend, forsake not.”
I want, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to speak upon this subject. First, here is a descriptive title which may be fitly applied to Christ by many of us. He is our own Friend, and also our father’s Friend. Secondly, here is suggestive advice concerning this Friend. “Forsake Him not.” And before I have done, I shall say a little upon a consequent resolution. I hope that we shall turn the text into a solemn resolve and say, “My own Friend, and my father’s Friend, I will not forsake.”
I. First, then, here is A DESCRIPTIVE TITLE for our blessed Lord and Master.
First, he is a Friend, the Friend of man. I know that Young calls him the “great Philanthropist.” I do not care to see that title—it is not good enough for Him—though truly the great Lover of man is Christ. Better still is the title which was given to Him when He was upon earth, “the Friend of sinners.”—
“Friend of sinners is His name.”
Their Friend—thinking of them with love when no other eye pitied them, and no other heart seemed to care for them. Their Friend, entering in most tender sympathy into the case of the lost, for “the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost.” Their Friend—giving them good and sound advice and wholesome counsel, for whoever listens to the Words of Christ shall find in His teaching and in His guidance the highest wisdom. Their Friend, however, giving far more than sympathy and mere words—giving a lifetime of holy service for the sake of those whose cause He had espoused and going further even than this—doing for them the utmost that a Friend can do, for what is there more than that a man should lay down his life for his friend? Friend of man and, therefore, born of man. Friend of sinners and, therefore, living among them and ministering to them. Friend of sinners and, therefore, taking their sin upon Himself and bearing it “in His own body on the tree,” so fulfilling Gabriel’s prophecy that He would come “to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness.”
Christ has done for us all that needed to be done! He has done much more than we ever could have asked Him to do, or expected Him to do. He has done more for us than we can understand, even now that He has done it, and more than you and I are likely everto understand even when our intellect shall have been developed and enlarged to the utmost degree before the eternal Throne of God, for even there I do not think we shall ever fully know how much we owe to the friendship of our best Friend! However self-denying and tender other friends may be, our Lord must always stand at the head of the list and we will not put a second there as worthy of any comparison with Him!