“A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” (Proverbs 18:24)

That, of course, is the kind of friend you want. Unfortunately, that kind of friend is sometimes hard to find.

In America, we have been accused by one social scientist of what he calls friendship inflation. He meant that we are good at making a lot of friends quickly and then dropping them very lightly. What is fascinating to me is that he wrote that before the advent of Facebook, where you can do both with the click of a button.

Yet the idea of friendship in Scripture is very different than the friendship inflation we experience in a culture saturated with social media.

The O.T. Book of Proverbs teaches us that to have a lot of shallow friendships will not necessarily prove to be of much help in life – that what you really want to cultivate are some close friends who will stick by you, no matter what.