THINK TOGETHER.
Who are your faithful friends?
READ TOGETHER
Proverbs 27:6. Faithful are the wounds of a friend.
Faithful friends are a gift from God. A faithful friend sticks with you no matter what. They will always love you, and support you, and encourage you. Do you have any faithful friends?
But Solomon says that a faithful friend will also wound you. Wound? That sure doesn’t sound good. What does that mean?
It means that a true friend will always tell you the truth, even if it hurts (wounds) you. A faithful friend won’t lie to you just to spare your feelings. They won’t only tell you what you want to here. Because a faithful friend wants you to grow and become all that God wants you to be, they will let you know when they think you are doing something wrong, or living in a wrong way. A faithful friend might say things like:
You shouldn’t be so mean to her.
You keep getting in trouble because you’re not listening.
The teacher’s not wrong, you did do what she said.
Of course the faithful friend isn’t trying to be mean or hurtful when they wound with the truth. The faithful friend is always trying to help. That’s why the Apostle Paul tells us to always speak the truth in love. That’s wisdom – when you can say things with both truth and love. It’s definitely not easy to do, and take lots of practice, but with Jesus living inside of us it is possible. Why? Because he IS truth and love. He always tells us the truth and he always loves us, and when we know that we have both the truth and the love that we need, we can confidently but gently wound our friends with the truths that might be hard for them to hear, but will be good for them in the long run.
Because of Jesus we have truth and love all the time.
With Jesus we can tell our friends the truth in love.
DO SOMETHING TOGETHER
Make posters of Ephesians 4:15 to hang in the house. Memorize it!
PRAY TOGETHER
Jesus, you are truth and love. Help me to speak the truth in love to my friends even when it might hurt them for a bit. Amen.
TLICfamily 