Dharius Daniels - How SOBER Are Your Friends?

Listen to me; I know that if you are watching this, you have friends. I don’t know how many you have, or how you define friendship, but whether you call them friends or not, whether you’ve got few or many, you’ve got friends. I want to ask you another question, and that’s what I want to discuss in this video. The question is: are your friends sober? Stay tuned so we can talk about it. Friends, how many of us have them? You probably have to be around 45—no, I’m not 45, but at least 40 and over to know what I mean. But yo, I think this is one of the most important aspects. When I look back over my life, I realize this is probably one of the greatest contributors to my development and well-being. When I look throughout Scripture, I feel like this is one of the most underemphasized concepts in all of the Bible. It’s the weirdest thing because most of us spend our lives engaging with and interacting with people we would call friends. I’m inclined to say this; at least this is my experience. This might not be yours—let’s argue about it in the comments. I don’t mind a good argument as long as it is respectful; it’s okay to disagree. But I believe relational richness is one of the highest forms of riches. I believe spiritual richness is the highest form of wealth; if you are spiritually poor, that’s the worst kind of poverty. When your spirituality isn’t the most important thing in your life, it affects everything else that is important. When you are spiritually poor, nothing else is as rich as it could be. Got me? So, spiritual richness is the most crucial; emotional richness is the second most important. This is why I think people need to have emotional goals. I think I need to do a video on that. What do you think? Put it in the comments if you want me to do a video on emotional goals. It’s weird because I just conducted a training not long ago with my mentoring and coaching group called Daniels Day, and we created what’s called a «Finish Strong Plan.» We kind of mapped out a strategy to be intentional about advancing in a few key areas during the last quarter of the year or whatever, and one of the goals I made them put on the goal sheet was emotional goals. People have financial goals, they have all sorts of goals, but they don’t have emotional goals. I think you should have goals for your emotions. How do you want to feel? What is the dominant emotion that you want to feel? Because how you are emotionally, generally speaking, is how you are. But then there’s relational richness, which I consider to be one of the highest forms of wealth—it’s in the top three. This is the value added to your life based on the relationships that you have. The treasure is in earthen vessels. So, your relational richness affects your emotional richness and your spiritual richness. Relationships, man, are super important, and I think a lot of conversations, specifically in churches, focus on romantic relationships. It’s the weirdest thing to me because most of the time, we’re just talking about marriage, and it seems like most of the people aren’t married. In church settings, most people in society aren’t married, so in some regard, some of the dynamics we see in society are reflected in the church, right? People are taking longer to get married, and because of divorce rates, the majority of people aren’t married. So anyway, that’s another conversation—put it in the comments if you want me to talk about that. But the point I’m making is there’s a lot of emphasis on romantic relationships, while the Bible speaks more about platonic relationships. In fact, the famous scripture about not being unequally yoked applies to romantic relationships, but when you read it, guys, Paul wasn’t even talking about romantic relationships; he was talking about platonic relationships. The Bible discusses platonic relationships far more than romantic ones, and this doesn’t mean romantic relationships aren’t important—some of you may put in the comments that the first relationship was Adam and Eve. My God! Alright, you win. The point I’m making is that the Bible talks about relationships, and specifically in the Old Testament, it talks a lot about the concept of friendship. You really see a concentrated discussion of friendship in the Book of Proverbs. So if you want proof, if you want to fact-check me on some of this, look in Proverbs, and you’ll find more conversations explicitly about friendship in that book than in any other. So the question is this: why is God talking so much about it? He doesn’t emphasize something that’s not important. If God is emphasizing it, that means it’s important. Just because I’m not aware of the significance of a thing or how important a thing is doesn’t mean it’s not important. I think sometimes we aren’t experiencing God’s best in our lives because we are unaware of what’s important. Think about that! I recently started a series at our church called «God Didn’t Say That.» I’ve actually been waiting to do this and have been researching and preparing for this for a while.