Friendship and Fellowship

Many talk about "community" and "koinonia." But what do these consist of, if not God-established, Christ-focused, Spirit-empowered friendships?

Friendship is one of the primary means of grace the Lord uses to keep church members growing in grace and bound to one another—like the sinews between muscles. Friendship helps church members to fight sin and spur one another on to love and good deeds. After all, friendship is a bond of mutual affection, trust, and commitment; and two individuals will most quickly influence one another within the context of such affection and trust.  Likewise, we’ll take greater care in encouraging those whom we love. That’s what friendship affords.

Our culture is not one that provides great encouragement for the nurture and development of deep, long-lasting, satisfying friendships. Such friendships take time and sacrifice, and the busy world of the early twenty-first century West, as a rule, is far more interested in receiving and possessing than sacrificing and giving.

For the Christian, true friends are those with whom one can share the deepest things of one’s life. They are people with whom one can be transparent and open.  They are people to whom one can "unburden [one’s] whole soul." And in the course of conversation about spiritual things the believer can find strength and encouragement for living the Christian life.   Spiritual conversation with friends is "one of the best helps to keep up religion in the soul.  It is, in a sense  a means of grace, one of the ways that God the Holy Spirit keeps Christians in fellowship with the Savior.

Friendship is a fragile treasure that can be easily lost or neglected in the unpredictable business of life if both people in the friendship do not give it the attention it needed. As the American preacher Haddon Robinson has recently noted, "Even strong friendships require watering or they shrivel up and blow away."

And so the author of the Book of Hebrews writes, "And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near." (Heb.10:24-25).  In writing this way, he is calling on them to look outside themselves and focus their attention on their brothers and sisters in Christ.

Because of everything Jesus has done, and because of everything that he is, Christians are to stir one another up to love and good works.   And notice that he says we are to “consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.”  He’s telling us, in other words, to think about it!

A Christian ought to plot, plan, conspire, contrive, and design how he might stir his brothers and sisters to good works—something he simply cannot do unless his life is tightly intertwined with theirs.
In this way, the genuinely committed Christian friend can fulfil what the writer of Proverbs had in mind when he observed,  “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.”

-- from the "9Marks" Ministry Newsletter