”Will you be my friend?”
Everyone wants to have friends. From the new girl in preschool with pony tails, to the university student sitting in a crowded lecture theatre, to the office worker in his cubicle hearing his colleagues going off to lunch together – everyone wants to have friends.
What is a friend? Interestingly, this is actually a question that the classical philosophers struggled over. One dictionary defines friend as "a person you know well and regard with liking, affection and loyalty." But it’s probably much more than that – you’d also want to include that you are known and liked by the other person! And in the end, it’s probably one of those things that you just know.
Wanting a friend is very natural, because as God’s creatures, we are built for personal relationships. God is three persons, eternally in relationship with one another. And so it’s no surprise that beings created in the image of God have at their very core a powerful longing, a hunger for relationships. One form of torture is to deny someone personal relationships, to lock them away in solitary confinement for days, or weeks, or months on end. And friendships are a particular form of close personal relationships.
2. Friends with God
And so it’s astounding that in the Bible, God actually calls Abraham his friend (Isaiah 41:8, James 2:23)! But he wasn’t the only one who has this privilege – when Jesus comes he is known as a friend of tax collectors and sinners (Matt 11:19). When Jesus addresses the paralytic who came through the roof, he says, ‘Friend, your sins are forgiven.’ (Luke 5:20). But most significantly, in John 15 Jesus says,
13 Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.John 15:13-15 (NIV)
The Bible holds out to us the wonderful promise of friendship with God. Not just being on the right side with God, not just having been forgiven by him – but a friend.
And in the Bible friendship with God has consequences. It means not being friends with those things that are opposed to God. In James 4 James says,
4 You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5 Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely?James 4:4-5 (NIV)
If you truly are a friend of God, you cannot be a friend of the world. God is jealous, his spirit ‘envies intensely’, he will not share his friendship.
3. Other friendships
But what about other friendships? Throughout the New Testament the apostles do refer to people as their friends. In Romans 16 Paul mentions no less than 27 people in the Roman church by name. But he singles out Epenetus, Stachys and Persis and calls them his ‘dear friends’ (Rom 16:5, 9, 12).
When like minded people come together in one place, and when those people are other person centred and full of forgiveness, it’s no surprise that the church is fertile ground for friendships.
But the Bible doesn’t primarily use the language of friendship to describe realtionships at church. It primarily uses the language of family: we are brothers and sisters. And as you know brothers and sisters may be close, or they may not. But they are family.
Friends are like beautiful wildflowers that we chance upon as we make our way along a fire trail. They are nice to come across, but we won’t always find them. They are a joy to discover, but we aren’t on the firetrail to look for wildflowers. And friends are like that. It is nice to have a friendship. But friendships can’t be forced, can’t be expected, and they shouldn’t be pursued.
However sometimes friendships are pursued. We leave the firetrail, we leave the path set before us, to pursue those rare flowers of friendship. And I’m sure you know of people whom you grew up with at church who are no longer among us because of the idolatry of friendship. And there are still others who still attend church, but their Christianity is a weak and ineffectual one becasue of the idolatry of friendship.
And again in the church there are also those who are disillusioned and unhappy – because they expected to find friendship in a church, but they have not. This could be because they have not learnt to treasure the new family of God they have joined as a brother, as a sister. Or instead of boldly extending sacrificial, other-person centred love, people offer a counterfeit that is self protective and self directed.
We must gently move people away from idolatry of friendship. We have to encourage people to love one another. We need to show people the treasure that is our brotherly-sisterly relationship. And perhaps, in the fertile ground of our churches, friendships will naturally flourish.
[ PS: what do you think are the signs of idolatry of friendship? ]
Categories: Church life
That was a very interesting blog that you posted. I haven\’t ever really thought about the idolatry of friendship before.
I would think a sign of it would be someone who goes out of their way to conform rather than setting themselves apart as holy.