Greg Laurie Daily Devotion - June 28, 2007
Thursday, June 28, 2007
True Friends
A man who has friends must himself be friendly, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.
—Proverbs 18:24
We cannot choose our coworkers necessarily. We cannot choose all the members of our family. But we can choose our friends.
Choose your friends carefully, and look for godly friends. Look for friends who love God, who will speak the truth to you, who will help to build you up, and who will be godly influences on you.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego, those three Hebrew teenagers we read about in the book of Daniel, appeared to be great friends. They supported one another. When everyone else turned against them and everyone else was worshiping a false god, these three stuck together as godly friends, even in the fiery furnace. We need friends like this.
So how do we find out which of our friends are true friends? Here is one way: wholeheartedly commit your life to Jesus Christ, and you will find out who your true friends are. Before I was a Christian, I thought I had a lot of friends. Then when I asked Christ to come into my life, I realized that I didn’t have any real friends. They all deserted me, because they did not want to follow the God that I had chosen to follow.
Here’s another way to determine who your friends are. They will be standing by you when a hardship or crisis comes. Jesus had a lot of fair-weather friends. They were there when He was doling out bread and fish. When He was healing and speaking His words of love and compassion, they were everywhere. But where were they when He was arrested and taken away? They were gone. A true friend will be loyal to the end.
For more relevant and biblical teaching from Pastor Greg Laurie, go to www.harvest.org.
Copyright © 2007 by Harvest Ministries. All rights reserved.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Bible text from the New King James Version is not to be reproduced in copies or otherwise by any means except as permitted in writing by Thomas Nelson, Inc., Attn: Bible Rights and Permissions,
