iGrowchallenge: Spiritual Friendships

“The gospel of Jesus Christ creates and calls us into spiritual friendships.”

-Aelred of Rievaulx, “Spiritual Friendship”

“The Creator arranged things so that we need each other.”

-Basil of Caesarea, 330AD

Friendships don’t just happen….they come out of what we love. This explains why some people don’t have many friends or if you are looking for friends and don’t find them. The very condition for friendships is that we should want something else besides friends. As the old saying goes: ‘those who are going nowhere can invite no fellow travelers’.  That is why in Christ there are possibilities for friendship that outside would never have been possible.  If we have experienced Grace we begin to love people we would never have thought about before. And we can build up friendships on a whole different foundation.”

-Tim Keller, sermon on Spiritual Friendship

Every week through the iGrowchallenge I am going to include various disciplines that can ground you in Grace and focus on Christ. This week I want to highlight the practice of Spiritual Friendship. Friendships, and especially friendships that focus on Christ, are essential elements of Christian community and they are some of the most powerful forces in our lives. They can lead us to incredible blessings or then can lead us into incredible deception and darkness.  

The Bible portrays that friendships are so powerful because we were created for friendship. We were created for relationship with God and with others. This is why Adam was created ‘not to be alone’.   We are not called to do life alone but to do things with God and with others and we can know this by the capacity of friends to hurt us….only something incredibly important and powerful has the ability to hurt us so much.

Chaim Potok’s the Chosen is a story of a friendship between two Jewish boys in Williamsburg in the 40s and at one point the father of one of the boys says to his son: “it is hard to be a friend.”  At first glance we might disagree with this statement. It is actually not that hard to be a friend. Many of us have hundreds, if not thousands, of friends on Facebook or hundreds of followers on Twitter or Instagram, and if you were asked you would probably say: “I have a lot of friends or I am a fairly good friend.”

Yet the curse of our age is false intimacy.  We may message friends all day long, comment on people’s Facebook posts or tweets, and interact with people all day long at school, or work, church, or the club, or other places. But just because we are friendly with a lot of people doesn’t mean we have a lot of friends, especially the kind of friends Jesus and Paul is talking about.  And when we talk about those kinds of friendships, then the father was right: “IT IS hard to be a friend.” Because the kind of friendships Jesus and Paul are describing involve sacrifice.

HOW TO CULTIVATE SPIRITUAL FRIENDSHIPS

1. Grow in your own faith. One of my mentors in college said: “don’t think too much about the kind of spouse you want, what you want them to look like or act like, but devote your time to working on being the kind of husband God wants you to be, and the rest will take care of itself.” This is good advice for dating and also for friendships in general. Sometimes we spend so much time pining away for relationships that we miss living and growing now. So work on being the kind of friend someone would be blessed by. And pray for a friend or many who can be a blessing to you as well.

2. Think about the kind of friend you need and want to be. This is connected with the first point, but it is good for us to think about the kind of friend we need to be. Here are two exercises that can help you in this process: 

-Friendship Inventory: Draw a lifeline (how old you are) and divide it into seven year segments. Put the initials of friends who have been important to you in each segment. What do you notice about your friendships? What kinds of friends do you tend to gather around? What does this tell about yourself? What kind of friends do you want to cultivate in the next parts of your life? Give your answers to God in prayer.

- Characteristics of a Spiritual Friend:  Draw two columns on a piece of paper. Title one: “Characteristics of a Spiritual friend” and on the other “Characteristics of Myself as a Friend”. Now fill the columns with your observations. What did you learn about yourself? What holds you back from being a ‘spiritual friend’ (time, commitment, emotional investment, etc..)

3. Don’t deny your need.  We are all created for relationship and we need good friends in our lives. Even Jesus needed friends around him. Though Jesus is God he chose to be bound by friends even though that trust and dependence ultimately led to betrayal and death.  And in the same way we are called to seek good friends. So if you are lonely that is not a sign of something wrong in your life it is a sign of something being right. You are feeling this God created urge for relationships. Sometimes we run relationships because we have been hurt, or we don’t want accountability, etc… but we are called to LET OURSELVES NEED PEOPLE, even though that hurts sometimes. The less that we want good friends is the less we want to be like Jesus.

4.  Do the work. As anyone with good friendships know, friendships take a lot of work. God gives us the raw material, but as any artist knows when you get the raw material that is just the STARTING POINT. You have a lot to do from there to craft it into something beautiful.  And that is the same with friendships. The word ‘koinonea’ which is the greek word for community, means TO SHARE. So to have good relationships we need to share. As we see in the scriptures, they wept, embraced, argued, laughed, struggled together through good and bad.  They shared their feelings and their lives. And you simply can’t have spiritual friends if you are not willing to do this and intentionally commit yourself to this kind of relationship.

5. Take a leap of faith. Some of us may have friends like this and some may not. And some may have Christian friends but you have never really taken the step to become ‘spiritual friends’; to talk about your faith together, pray together, and seek to support each other in your walks with Christ.   Yet if we want to develop these kind of friendships we need to take a leap of faith. It may involve gathering a few people to pray and study scripture together. It may mean encouraging your small group to share more intimately and be more vulnerable (which starts with you). It may just be asking someone that you are ‘friendly’ with to pray for you.  It just starts with a leap of faith, so pray about it and follow Gods leading.

6. Try out some ‘friendship disciplines’.

We can never be a perfect friend. We have limitations and flaws.  And we all have hectic lives, which can lead us from cultivating good friendships. So try these kinds of disciplines to be intentional about being a good friend and cultivating spiritual friendships:
- Pray for your friends regularly. Write these down in a prayer journal to see when God answers them. Ask for prayer requests and follow through on praying for those.
- Send an encouraging email or text occasionally to show you are thinking of them. 
- Gather a small group to read a book together or to do a Bible study.
- Take a retreat together.
- Other ideas?