James 24:7

This past Sunday I preached at North River on how critical friendship is to our growing toward wholeness in Christ.  If we are going to attain to the measure of the fullness of the stature of Jesus (Ephesians 4: 13), we are going to need the help of friends who are committed to that end themselves. 

No one bootstraps himself to wholeness.

However, part of our problem is that we have such a fuzzy understanding of what friendship is.  We use the word “friend” to describe I-know-him-when-I-see-him acquaintances and we use the word “friend” when we speak of one who knows us through and through.  The word “friend” gets applied to everyone from “those with whom I am friendly” to those who are our “second selves.” 

As Aristotle noted, even years before Jesus, the word friend is applied to those who give us pleasure (“My friend, Rex, always makes me laugh.”) and to those who are simply useful to us (“I have a friend, Rocco, who’s in the business.  He’ll hook you up.”)  While we need people around us whose company we enjoy and need people who are useful to us, we also need friends of a third order.  We need those who join us in the journey toward the good, toward wholeness, toward completeness in Christ.

Such people may not bring us worlds of pleasure and they may not know how to fix our cars, but they are ever-present to us joining us on that journey toward maturity in Christ.  These kinds of friends know how to “speak the truth in love” and evoke aspects of ourselves that we may not have even known existed. 

The church- the gathered community of disciples of Jesus- ought to be that kind of friendship.

Yet we have so many barriers…

We have our busy schedules.  I think of a woman who once said to my wife, “Gosh, I’d love to get to know you but I just don’t have time for anymore friends”.  At least she was honest… but then maybe silence is sometimes the better side of honesty.

We have the demands of life.  So much is required of us- even taken from us- in our daily work that we are more than happy to retreat into the cocoon of home and withdraw from the pressures of life.  

We are daily reminded through ads and entertainment that romance is the better part of relationship.  Being “transported” seems far more exciting than the daily requirements of friendship.   

Friendships which are primarily concerned with the journey toward wholeness in Christ take time and they require attention and the scarcest resources in our lives are precisely time and attention.

Is it any wonder that our world is filled with loneliness? 

Could the community we call “church” have any higher calling than to become a people marked by friendship?