A Time to Contemplate Friendship

Written by Brittany Osborne and Seth McDuffie

Amidst social isolation, one thing is for sure: we all miss our friends. The desire for connection and face-to-face interaction exists regardless of age, marital status, location, whether a person is typically drawn to introversion or extroversion, etc. We all long for the day we can once again gather without masks or six feet of separation. This is telling of the value of friendship. 

In the church, marriage is often the human relationship spoken of most frequently, and some would argue it is valued above other human relationships. Marriage is a beautiful, God-ordained, covenantal relationship necessary to life and human flourishing. It is an earthly reminder of the eternal reality that the Church is Christ’s bride and will be with him forever. However, while not all will marry this side of eternity, we all need friends. We feel the need for friendship now more than ever.

Friendships, along with all other relationships, are subordinate to our relationship with God. While the Bible does speak often on marriage and family, it also has plenty to offer regarding Christ-centered friendships. First, we have the privilege of being Christ’s friend. In John 15 Jesus says to his disciples, 

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (v.12-15)

What a friend we have in Jesus! He laid down his life for us. 

In turn, to love God and be Christ’s friend means we learn to lay down our lives for each other. Christ ordained friendship is selfless. While 1 Corinthians 13 is most often read at weddings, it is no less true of friendship. Friendships are a rich mark of Christ’s heart toward the church. We have the opportunity to move toward one another without legal obligation or a promise of faithfulness. Jesus moves towards us and invites us to live in pursuit of others without promise of reciprocation. If we were to focus our hope on the full reciprocation of other’s love towards us, then we would not be able to practice all the characteristics of love mentioned in 1 Corinthians 13. Christ models the perfect, selfless pursuit of friendship with his hope set on God. 

Within that same vein of thinking, friendships are invitational and ask others to go deeper in the pursuit of gospel-centered living. Friendships can never be entirely exclusive, blocking others from looking or joining in. There will always be relationships that are unique to the people involved. While these are incredibly valuable and beautiful, they cannot stay isolated. We need to keep the windows and doors of our hearts open to others so we can hear to whom God is leading us. This is not to say we have to be incredible friends with everyone or have a gigantic friend circle, but our hearts are meant to be hospitable. To shut off those entrances would be to self-isolate or create an inbred feedback loop amongst an exclusive crowd. It could also mean not allowing others to peer into our weakness or help expose sin in love. In reality we are often comfortable keeping our doors of hospitality just barely ajar so we won’t feel inconvenienced. Although Jesus had his own close friends who he intimately lived alongside, he did it for the purpose of going out. He eventually left his friends because there was a bigger work of invitation to be done. This is what makes the formation of friendship so precious; it can be found in many places so God’s heart can be shown to many people through his Spirit.

Friendship is meant to be a Spirit-filled activity. As the relational common denominator of humanity, it is a valuable tool to be used by God, which we get to share in and enjoy. Gospel-centered friendships can be one of the first and most effective signs of God’s love for the world. As Jesus said in John 17, “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” 

During this quarantine ask God where your heart is for friendships. Is your heart open to gospel-centered, sacrificial, and invitational friendships? Do you live your life with a hospitable heart, listening to where the Spirit may be leading? Who in this quarantine needs to be reached out to? He invites us into some of his greatest work in our friendships, because in his greatest work of love we see Jesus laying his life down for us, his friends. 

Asking New Questions: What is God Up To?

Written by Jonathan Bowell

Some people hate when a song gets stuck in their head. I rather enjoy it. I’ll sing it over and over again, trying my layman’s best for a harmony until my throat aches or my wife yells at me to leave her alone. What good are killer harmonies unless someone else hears them? Sticky songs become a sort of soundtrack for my day, as if I was a character in a movie.

I feel the same way about Bible verses. Sometimes a verse will get stuck in my head, or perhaps my heart, and give shape to everything else I think about. It happened recently with Psalm 111, which says in verses 2-4:

“Great are the works of the Lord,
    studied by all who delight in them.
Full of splendor and majesty is his work,
    And his righteousness endures forever.
He has caused his wondrous works to be remembered;
    The Lord is gracious and merciful.”

The Psalmist states that those who delight in God study his works. That is, when they read the Bible they don’t ask first and foremost, “What does this passage contribute to my broader theological framework?” or, “What does this passage tell me about how I am supposed to live?”  Rather, they ask, “What is God up to?”  And not only is that a helpful question to ask when reading scripture, but also when reading our lives. 

Paul Tripp says, “Human beings do not live based on the facts but based on their interpretation of the facts. You don’t actually respond to what’s going on around you, you respond to the sense you have made of what is going on around you – always carrying around an interpretative grid to make sense of your life.” What if our interpretative grid for this season of coronavirus and quarantine was the simple question asked with hopeful curiosity: “What is God up to?” Not because we think we can understand every detail of God’s plan or because we want to explain away our pain, but because God is working his grace into our lives and he wants us to sense it and sync up with it. That is what Psalm 111 is all about. This sort of “interpretative grid” allows us to look at churned up soil and, instead of seeing a destroyed earth, see the perfect conditions for growth beneath the surface. 

Allow me to apply this to our church plant. Just a few months ago, our church plant was beginning to gain momentum. We had just launched our third community group, welcomed in our second wave of new members, and were two weeks away from moving our Sunday gathering into a local elementary school when the chaos broke loose. It has taken time, but we have begun to ask, with hopeful curiosity, “What is God up to?” As a result, our vision is coming into focus on the three ways He is cultivating growth in our church.  

1.  A renewed focus on prayer. Through both an increase in needs and an increase in time, God is cultivating a spirit of prayer in our body. We may have less face-to-face conversations with our brothers and sisters and the people we are seeking to reach, but we can now have more face-to-face conversation with God on their behalf. He is making us into a truly praying church--something that, if it depended on my leadership, would not have happened otherwise.  

2.  A renewed appreciation for our friendships. It is easy in a church planting context to grow tired of the same old people you see every week and become burdened by all the work that goes into hosting a Sunday gathering.  But this season of physical distance is reminding us of the great blessing of being together, and our excitement is growing to create stronger rhythms of "life together". In fact, God is already strengthening our bonds through more prayer for one another and our weekly connection via social media. 

3.  A renewed commitment to micro-mission.  By "micro-mission" I mean those small acts of love for the people closest to us. Dreaming about how to bring Gospel transformation to the city is good, but it's important we remember it always starts "close to home.” As our centers of gravity have shifted, our people are intentionally reaching out to, serving, and building stronger relationships with neighbors, close friends, and their immediate family members. God is giving us opportunities to move towards those we normally take for granted. My intent in sharing these examples with you is not to promote cheap positive thinking. The pain is real and if we move too quickly past it we will miss the God who is at work in the midst of it. But there is more going on than meets the eye at first glance. God is up to something beneath the surface. “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.” May the lyrics of Psalm 111 be to you an interpretative magnifying glass through which you investigate your suffering for signs of grace. May they be a louder and stickier soundtrack than your doubts and fears.