Let's be friends.

A good friend is the one who has the courage and cares enough to tell you when you have something stuck in your teeth, or need to blow your nose (for obvious-to-everyone-else-but-not-you reasons), or when your favourite dad joke really isn’t (and never was) funny (“You may want to retire that one from your repertoire.”)  We all need caring and courageous people in our lives.  They speak truthfully and lovingly.

That is the critical criteria:  lovingly.  This isn’t just about the manner in which someone speaks to us but also the motive.  There is no shortage of people who are more than eager to offer critiques about anything and everything.  Those can, in the right context, have some value.  They can also be soul-killers because the critique-er may simple enjoy being critical.

Friendship is an essential element to growing in faith.  Living by faith is neither simple nor easy.  A life of faith is fully integrated with relationships.  There is our relationship with God but that is meaningless unless that faith also expresses itself in the lives of others.  That is where things will be challenging.  The early church struggled with this.  One of the first letters written was by James and it addresses this exact issue.  Sometimes our greatest struggles are sourced in people who are supposed to be on the same team!

In the majority of theological definitions for “church” that I have read over the years, the emphasis has been on the institutional nature of the church or the people of God who make up the church.  They stress when the church began and the very special event we call “The Day of Pentecost.”  These are significant parts of defining the church, but a critical element about the Body of Christ is missing.  We can’t define the church without including, “love another.”  To put it another way, the church is a community of authentic, trusting, and loving friendships.

Jesus used this metric in His teaching to the disciples: “Love one another as I have loved you, . . . by this all people will know you are My disciples, if you love one another, . . . if you love Me you will keep my commandments . . .”  The details are listed for us in John 13-17.  The First Epistle of John (written by the same guy who wrote the Gospel of John) is equally explicit: “By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.”

How does this work?  How do we create the environment so this is the reality and not just a dream?

Let’s begin by reordering our thoughts about spiritual maturity.  Growing in faith is not like climbing the corporate ladder or accomplishing levels in a video game so we can “power up” to the next issue.  It is a process of being recreated, of metamorphosis from one state of being to another.  It happens in several dimensions of our lives at the same time.  Often it happens in areas where we thought we had “conquered” the issue at hand.  It is a continual, on-going process where truth-faith skills and life-faith skills are inseparably intertwined.  The more we learn of God and the nature of His created order, the more skilled we are at representing Him well - which in turn, helps us learn more of Who He is, which produces change in us, which . . . .well, you get the idea, I’m sure.

Paul acknowledges that all of us will grow in different ways at different paces at different times.  There is no singular “path” toward righteous living by faith in a righteous God.  We must, therefore, be patient with one another, be gracious toward others’ struggles, and accept with humility the truth that we, too, have those blind spots in which we struggle (Rom. 14:1).  Here is a great summary, in Paul’s own words:
 
Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.  And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony (Col. 3:12-14 ESV).

The common denominator in all of this is that we love one another.  Our gatherings and interactions should be safe places where we can be honest about our struggles, and where humility, forgiveness, and encouragement dominate our interactions.  

This is how we love one another.  This is how we become good friends.  We courageously care for each other.  Let’s be friends.