What is the mark of a true friend?
Text: Proverbs 27:17
Hosts:
J. Kent Edwards
Vicki Hitzges
Nathan Norman
Narrator: Brian French
The CrossTalk Podcast is a production of CrossTalk Global, equipping biblical communicators, so every culture hears God’s voice. To find out more, or to support the work of this ministry please visit www.crosstalkglobal.org
Produced by Nathan James Norman/Untold Podcast Production
© 2026 CrossTalk Global
Brian: According to Psychology Today, solid friendships are important for two main reasons. First, they make life more enjoyable. We get to share life's beautiful moments with the people we love, enriching our everyday experiences. Second, our friends help us through difficult times. Having friends to support us through hard times can make unimaginably difficult situations seem more tolerable. It is true that good friends are reliable and dependable, providing support during difficult seasons of life. King Solomon said as much last week in Proverbs 18 and 19. But in Proverbs 27, Solomon goes further. In one of his best-known and most quoted proverbs, He shows that a genuine friend must be more than dependable. The friend we need is one who will do more than put their arm around us, more than try to cheer us up with a cup of tea or coffee when we are down. Here, Solomon tells us that the most helpful and valuable friends are the rare ones who, as our Spanish friends would say, do more than speak to us in flowers. They are people with the courage to say what needs to be said, like a good surgeon delivering the bad news about ourselves that we've been trying to ignore. If you're unsure whether you want a friend who speaks hard truths, listen in as Kent Edwards, Vicki Hitzges, and Nathan Norman try to understand what he meant by Proverbs chapter 27, verse 17: "As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." Welcome to Crosstalk, a Christian podcast whose goal is for us to encourage each other to not only increase our knowledge of the Bible, but to take the next step beyond information into transformation. Our goal is to bring the Bible to life into all our lives. I'm Brian French. Today, Dr. Kent Edwards, Vicki Hitzges, and Nathan Norman continue their discussion in the book of Proverbs. If you have a Bible handy, turn to Proverbs 27:17 as we join their discussion.
Kent: Nathan, Vicki, can you remember a time when you had to deliver bad or unwelcome news to someone know of a time when someone else did for you?
Nathan: I remember when I was a teenager, we had a whole group of friends in our neighborhood. There was a lot of us, and we just kind of, after school or on the weekends, just wandered around aimlessly in the woods or on the street or at the neighbor's house or whatever we did. And, uh, and I had developed just this habit of lying about things. Yeah, lying to make myself look good, trying to tell interesting stories, trying to get them to do what I wanted them to do. "No, let's play hockey. No, let's play basketball. Let's go in the pool. Let's go for a hike out in the woods." Stuff like that. And I would kind of lie to either make myself look good or to manipulate. And, At one point, I'd gotten so used to it, I said something. I don't even remember what it was. The lie is totally forgotten. But I remember my friend Ken said to me, "You need to stop doing that." And I'm like, "What?" "Lying all the time." He's like, "Why are you lying about this? You don't gain anything out of it. You don't want us to do anything. You don't look better and we all know you're doing it. You need to stop doing it." And it was really helpful because up to that point, I just thought everyone, you know, was following along and everything. And I didn't even realize, I was doing it so much, I didn't even realize I was doing it. I was doing it. And it was incredibly helpful for him to point that out. He could have been a little more gracious, but, you know, whatever. I still deeply appreciate that to this day.
Kent: I can remember a couple of times when someone gave me news that I didn't want to hear. Vicki, this may surprise you because your mother was a piano teacher, but I was required to take piano lessons by my parents. They bought this big old piano. In fact, it's still in the family. It's in our house today. And it always brings back some bad memories because I had this piano teacher and I worked and worked and trying to learn. And then finally I said to my teacher, I don't know, maybe it was just a few months of lessons, I think I'm ready to give up. And I'm waiting for her to say, no, no, no, you're going to bloom into something wonderful. And she said, Thank you.
Nathan: Oh, wow.
Kent: That was, yeah, that was not the answer I expected. It's the answer I needed to hear because music is certainly not my thing, but it was difficult news. I wonder if that's something like what Solomon was saying to young people in Proverbs 27:17. Remind us of what he said there, Vicki. He says, "As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." That proverb is difficult to understand as it is easy to understand, probably because we don't really understand much about iron. I didn't until I started to do some good research for this podcast. Because here Solomon is using the metaphor of iron to make his point about communication and relationships. By the way, fun fact about iron. Do you know that the first discovery of iron was found in meteorites?
Vicki: Really?
Kent: Yep. Extraterrestrial balls of rock that fell from the heavens. People saw those strange-looking balls, and inside them they discovered that meteorites were 91% iron, 8.5% nickel, and 0.5% cobalt. Hmm. Which is interesting because when you mix nickel with iron, it becomes stainless. And what was even more fascinating for me was learning that the Egyptians discovered this and they made jewelry out of that iron nickel way back in 3400 BC.
Nathan: Wow.
Kent: Isn't that incredible?
Vicki: Yeah. They made jewelry out of meteorites?
Kent: They made jewelry out of the iron in meteorites. Huh. So when Solomon's talking about iron, This is a metal that's been around a while, and the average person would have had a basic understanding of where it came from and how. It turns out that as centuries passed, people discovered that iron could be found in dirt. And one of the ways they could discover that this ordinary dirt was actually dirt that had iron in it was by its color. Vicki, have you been in— you've been in the South. Have you seen different colors of soil?
Vicki: Oh, I sure have. We have red and black and brown. Yeah. All different kinds of colors.
Kent: Yeah. Which is indicative, actually, of the fact that there is iron mixed in with that dirt. Hmm. So in the early days, they didn't dig mines. They dug up soil wherever it was those kind of colors. And got iron from that. They would take that colored dirt and put it into a furnace, a furnace that was specifically created to produce intense heat. And as they did, they would add what's called a reducing agent, which— don't ask me to define it. All I know is that it was— a good example of that is charcoal. And when a reducing agent was put into that iron-enriched soil at high temperature, it helps separate the iron from the other materials. So the iron became loosened from the soil itself. Not only loosened, but it became a liquid. And when it became a liquid under that heat, a layer of impurities and waste would rise to the surface. Today we would call that dross. It is trash, it's garbage, it's not valuable at all. We need to get rid of it. And they did. They would scoop off those impurities and take the pure metal from the furnace. And then they would cool it in water and then beat it with a hammer. Beat it on an anvil to purify and strengthen the iron. So think about that. Iron comes out of tremendous heat. It is exposed to fire at its most intense. That separates it from the dross, and then it is hammered and then put into water to cool, and then hammered again and hammered again and hammered again. That process happens over and over again. And the more often that iron ore is heated, cooled, and hammered, the stronger and purer it becomes. That's interesting, isn't it? It has to go through that whole process before it can be transformed into a tool that is so useful for people. It would be used obviously for a plow, a sword, a spear, arrowhead, that kind of thing. But iron is useless unless it goes through that process of being exposed to great heat, having the dross removed, and being beaten and beaten with hot and cooled over and over again until it becomes pure and hard. Well, welcome to your geology lesson for today.
Vicki: Thank you.
Kent: Now you know what is useless information for those of us who don't create iron, but is critical for us who have relationships. Because think back at that proverb you read earlier in light of how iron was formed, Vicki. Remind us of what Solomon said in his metaphor.
Vicki: He says, "As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." Hmm.
Kent: As iron sharpens iron. What Solomon is saying here is using iron as a metaphor for an important yet uncomfortable relationship that each of us needs. We need a friend who is willing, when necessary, to put parts of our life into the furnace, to expose them for what they really are, so that the dross, what is wrong, what is weak, what is impure, can be removed. And that person, with their counsel, with their observation, with their maybe hard words, hammer us with that truth, the truth we need in order to correct our souls, but do not really want. We need someone who cares enough to confront us in ways that are uncomfortable and repeat that as often as necessary for the dross of our life to rise to the surface and to be removed. That's a powerful metaphor when we understand the metallurgy like the ancient world did, isn't it?
Nathan: It's powerful. It's scary.
Kent: It is. It burns, maybe one would say. We don't like to hear the truth of this popular, once popular proverb. But why? Why are we so reluctant to take on this important role of being iron to someone else to help their iron form? Why are we so reluctant to take on this important role with the people in our lives to speak truth where it may hurt?
Vicki: Well, we don't like to be hurt and we don't like to hurt other people. People don't usually take well to criticism.
Nathan: Yeah, I don't like to be criticized. And so we'll call it constructive criticism, and it still hurts. It's still hard. It's still difficult. So I don't want to dish it out to someone, and you could ruin the relationship. That potential is always there. This is a relationship that I enjoy, that I like, and now I have to have some hard conversations. You know, the person might just say— they might walk away, or they might become defensive and attack me with something.
Kent: Yeah. Yeah, the truth hurts. It burns, kind of like that fire in the furnace. And it takes heat to make the dross rise to the surface. It takes someone with strength and courage to hammer it. To force it into the shape that it needs to be. And it's scary when you do that. Has God ever used you as a redemptive life reshaping hammer for others?
Vicki: Yeah, I've told you this story before, but I had a friend who was just miserable. She was dating this guy and she was just so unhappy and she was sleeping with him and they weren't married. And I said to her, you know, that's wrong. And you're not going to be happy with yourself. You're not going to be happy in the relationship. You feel like you're compromising. You're doing something you know you shouldn't be doing. And to her great credit, she thanked me and stopped. That could have gone the other way.
Kent: Mm-hmm.
Vicki: Yeah.
Nathan: Along those lines, there was a man I had officiated his wedding. When I was extraordinarily young. And everything seemed to be going well. And then I found out that he and his wife had, if not legally separated, they had physically separated. He was living somewhere else. They had a few kids at home and he just said, "Oh, I think it's done and I can't do this." not the person that I should be. And I kind of raked them through the coals on that. I'm like, come on, man. Like, is there adultery involved?
Kent: No.
Nathan: Is there abuse involved on either of your parts?
Vicki: No.
Nathan: So what are you doing here? Well, you know, I think she can do better with the kids without me. And, you know, I think she can do better than me. And I'm like, stop it, stop it. The best thing your kids can have is to have a father who loves their mother. That's the best gift you can give them. They don't need some other person who's better than you. "Oh, but my life is not together." Well, okay, your life is never going to be fully together. You got to get together as best as you can and go forward and be with your kids. "Well, let me think about—" No, just go. Would she accept you back? Absolutely. I still to this day don't have a clue what the deal was. The nice thing was about 9 months later, I found out they had a kid. Wow. And they had gone back and obviously reconciled and they had a few more kids after that. And this is now 15 years later, they're still— 15+ years later, they're still together. Wow. Still very much in love. And I was just shocked because frankly, I've had a lot of those kind of hard conversations with people and told them, "You got to do the right thing." And what happens? What you expect to happen. You're terrible. You're a hypocrite. You're not perfect. You're awful. Stay out of your business. Yeah, that's typically what happens. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Kent: But it is one case. Sometimes it's negative, Vicki, as you discovered. Sometimes it's positive, Nathan, as you discovered. My experience has been often that it can be more negative than positive. Many years ago in a church I was serving in, there was a young man who desperately wanted to become a pastor. He'd gone to Bible school and graduated, and he came out as a fresh graduate and was in my church and said, "I want you to help me to learn to be a better, to be a good preacher." And so of course, I loved that challenge. And so we met regularly, I think weekly if memory serves, for month after month after month at Vicki, you know, your father, Haddon Robinson, was all about finding the big idea of the passage. Right. And that's a skill. Like, it's not always easy to accomplish. And I worked with him with harder passages and then easier passages and then easier passages. And then finally, I literally went to cartoons and I found that 3-panel cartoons were a little bit too difficult. I picked a 1-panel cartoon and he could not find an idea no matter how no matter how hard he tried, and he really was trying. And I still remember the morning, went over breakfast, I looked at him and said, "You know, you work full-time as a Christian in the frozen food section of the grocery store. You have influence with people who work there and people who come in and out. That can be God's calling too on your life. I don't think God is calling you to this." How'd he take it? He was discouraged. Many years later, he applied and was granted a position as a pastor. And unsurprisingly, it did not go well. Right. And he lasted only a short time. You know, one of the reasons we don't like being iron helping to sharpen iron is because Sometimes it doesn't make us feel good. It can be discouraging almost when we see people listen and not respond. Sometimes they do, as you said, Nathan, but often they don't. And perhaps one of the reasons why, at least in my context, I have not seen church discipline practiced very much is because we're afraid of getting a negative response, even though Jesus tells us that we should do that in order to try and have a positive impact on people's life. Deco, our previous podcast on friendship, everyone needs community and genuine friendship. We all need people with godly character who can emulate what the Bible teaches and help us, remind us of what God's Word says when we need to. But we also need more than that. Solomon here is saying we also need friends who are willing to raise the temperature, who love us enough to hammer our souls with their tongues, at least enough to perform the moral surgery that we need to provide. As a physiotherapist can hurt us in order to heal us, As a surgeon can cut us in order to restore us, so we are to be friends of others and where appropriate, where necessary, come and not just sprinkle candies, but to tell people the hard truths maybe they need to hear. Friends, you follow the example said in scripture, like when the Old Testament prophets were willing to speak to people who needed to hear what they didn't want to hear. When John the Baptist called for repentance in the— when Jesus came onto the scene, and when Jesus called the Pharisees hypocrites in Matthew 23, that was prophetic, because the time for words will come to an end. That's why we read in Psalm 2 where the psalmist speaks to godless nations that refuse to bend the knee to God.
Vicki: It says in Psalms 2, "Ye will rule them with an iron scepter.
Kent: Ye will dash them to pieces like pottery." On that day, people will no longer have the option of being transformed into iron, but will be destroyed by the wrath and iron hammer of Christ. Look, friendships are as popular as ever, but shallower than ever. We can have thousands of Facebook friends, TikTok followers, and people who sit next to us on the pews. But which of them will have the courage to speak the truth we need to hear, even though we don't necessarily want to hear it? May God give us the godly friends we need, and may we be the godly friends other people need. To help others by having the courage to say what needs to be said. Because your best friend is an honest friend. Because as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
Brian: Genuine friendships require honesty. A true friend will speak to their friend with the hard honesty that makes their friend better. I trust that today's discussion of God's word has been helpful and serves as an encouragement to not just be hearers of the word, but doers. Together, let's bring God's word to life, to our lives this week. The Crosstalk Podcast is a production of Crosstalk Global, equipping biblical communicators so every culture hears God's voice. To find out more about this educational nonprofit organization, please visit www.crosstalkglobal.org. Crosstalk just finished successful trainings in Bucharest, Moldova, Southern California, and Kansas this season. We're getting ready for another training in Kenya this summer and Cuba and Nepal in the fall. Help us train the next generation of biblical communicators. All you have to do is click Donate in the show notes and make a donation of any size. You can also support this show by rating it on whatever platform you're listening to us. Be sure to join us next week as we continue to learn from God's wisdom in the book of Proverbs. You won't want to miss it.