“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?
