Relationships provide the background to many counseling situations. A relationship ending, conflict in relationships, disappointment from relationships, depression or isolation from missing relationships—relationship issues are unavoidable in a world shared with several billion people. Because of recent technological developments and the changing pace of modern society, many people’s social and relational muscles have significantly weakened. From the lone ranger to the overbearing friend, it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to discern healthy from unhealthy relationship dynamics, if they have any genuine friendships at all.
What does the Bible say about friendships? Many things. Friendships and relationships are a prominent theme in the Scriptures. Our God designed human experience to be lived within community and colored by life-giving, mutually beneficial relationships. Scripture presents friendships as non-familial relationships developed over time through shared experiences, concern for, and sacrificial service to one another. The heartbeat of biblical friendships is reflected in Jesus’s famous words in John 15:13: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”
This article will explore biblical reflections on friendships for pastors, church members, and counselors who desire to help their counselees pursue mutually beneficial, life-giving friendships.
Friendships in the Beginning
In the beginning, God created friends.
That is not quite what Genesis 1 says, but the idea of friendship appears in principle all the way back in the first days of creation. God’s act of creation can be divided thematically in two ways. Across the six days, God both forms and fills his creation. God forms the heavens and fills them with stars. He forms the skies and fills them with birds. He forms the oceans, lakes, and streams and fills them with fish. He forms the land and fills it with animals, bugs, and reptiles. Then, God makes man, giving him a commission to help in the process of “filling the earth” with other people who reflect his image (Genesis 1:28).
One chapter later, God reflects upon the isolated Adam and concludes, “it is not good that man should be alone” (Gen 2:18). Although originally referencing Adam’s need for a marital companion, this comment also speaks to the good of companionship and community for man as he fulfills the creation mandate within the world. And as man fulfills this mandate, more friends would come! God designed mankind to produce children, leading to families, communities, cities, and civilizations. Brotherhoods would form as men explored new lands and subdued new habitats. Bonds would grow between mothers who watched their children together—the first playdates among the human race. As man fulfilled his original calling, friends—young and old, big and small—would not be far behind.
Two applications for modern friendships can be made from the opening pages of Scripture. First, friendships are part of God’s original creation and therefore follow the principles and rules of creation. In friendships, we see the natural analogy, “what a person sows, that they also reap” (Gal 6:7; see also 2 Cor 9:6). Like a mature apple tree or cultivated landscape, the beauty and benefits of friendships take time to cultivate. They take quality time together. They require mutual investment. The richest and most enduring relationships require not days or “dates” but years through the various seasons of life.
This principle is instructive for the tenor of modern life. The transient nature and aggressive pace of man in a global economy and post-Industrial Revolution world is not conducive to relationships as originally designed. It is common for people to uproot their lives before their relationships can bear much fruit. Many people today focus on compatibility and instant connection, but no budding relationship can compare with a brotherhood or sisterhood that has formed over decades of shared experiences.
Second, human relationships are not ultimately an end in themselves but a pattern for the fellowship that man was created to have with God. In the garden, man had fellowship with his Creator, as seen in the expectant walk in the garden in the cool of the day (Gen 3:8). In this way, theologians have noted that there are signs in Genesis that man was created to have fellowship with God as the Father has fellowship with the Son, Jesus Christ (John 17:21; 1 John 1:1–4). Communion with God is the anchor of fellowship and relationships between Christians. It is also not mere spiritualism or pietism that acknowledges that man can find relational satisfaction in God even if he or she struggles to find friends and companions (see Psalm 118:6).
Friendships Gone Wrong
Friendships would be easier if it were not for Genesis 3 and the Fall. Sin has fundamentally reoriented the nature of human relationships. God’s ways bring peace and harmony among families, friends, and communities. Sin puts other image-bearers, often those closest to us, in the crosshairs of our sinful inclinations, lusts, and impulses. Sin brings estrangement, which results in isolation. Many broken relationships can be traced to a sin that was too big to overcome. Solomon knew this reality well, writing in Proverbs 16:28, “A whisperer separates close friends.”
Digging deeper into the diagnosis of many modern relationships, there is often an idolatrous “seesaw” effect. On the one hand, many people are simply asking too much of other finite, limited image-bearers. For millennials and Gen Z’ers lacking a greater familial network or community, they can find themselves demanding a significant other or a friend to cover up their insecurities and satisfy their desires for acceptance, security, and companionship. After running multiple relationships dry, the pain of disappointment leads to even greater scrutiny of friendships, producing greater loneliness and isolation.
On the other hand, in demanding so much of our friends, we end up dishonoring them. Classmates, church members, and acquaintances do not exist to fit nicely into a world of my own making. Rather, they have their own dignity and value as image-bearers. Their opinions and perspectives should be respected. Their desires should be acknowledged. The freedom of their agency should be honored. Their gifts, abilities, and presence should be received as natural gifts from God. The idolatrous “seesaw” effect results in asking too much of friends, a result of elevating the creature over the Creator, and asking too little, as we reduce friends and acquaintances to extras and minor characters within the grand narrative of our personal hero’s journey arc.
Restoring Expectations on Relationships
It is not wrong for people to have expectations concerning their relationships. It is a natural impulse resulting from God’s creation of man to want to live in a world filled with other men and women. The pain of rejection and broken relationships is real and deserves our sympathy. But natural expectations can quickly transcend into demands that strain relationships past their breaking point. How, then, can Christians restore realistic expectations for their relationships?
The answer to this question is found by returning to Jesus’s words in John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” First, Jesus’s words point us to the importance of genuine love. If sin is the corrosive cause of broken relationships, Christlike love is the remedy. If love fulfills the entire law (Galatians 5:14), then relationships defined by biblical love will not need to endure the various trials and tests that sin inflicts. Each person will honor one another in their thoughts, words, and actions. They will consider others more important than themselves (Philippians 2:2–3). They will bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:1–3). They will guard their relationships in their minds with what is true, honorable, and excellent (Philippians 4:8). They will not endure the tug-of-war of each person insisting upon their own ways (1 Corinthians 13:5). They will honor one another and the relationship (Romans 12:10). They will never suffer from their friends taking advantage of them, or scheming against them (Proverbs 3:29). When friends do sin against one another, Gospel medicine sits close at hand to bring reconciliation with God and man through the one and only mediator, Jesus Christ (1 Timothy 2:5).
Jesus summarizes these various commands and instructions in a personal example. Who is a good friend? One who lays down his life for others. In this way, Jesus is the gold standard of a “friend,” one who is willing to sacrifice for the relationship and the good of others, even if they are his enemies (Romans 5:8). The north star of biblical friendships then is to pursue mutually-beneficial relationships where each person is not striving for selfish gain but is committed to building one another up for the good of the other friend (Romans 15:2–3).
This approach to friendships is antithetical to the idolatrous “seesaw” effect. If I cannot handle the possibility that this relationship may not go the way that I want, then I am in no place to fulfill these biblical commands to lay down my life for my friends. Rather, I am asking—no demanding—that they lay down their lives for me. Counterintuitively, the best way to cultivate mutually life-giving relationships is to hold them with an open hand. The relationship is not ultimately about me, but about finding delight in the good of others, living out the biblical principle that “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).
This point is often seen in how friends respond to the news of a new life achievement. If someone announces that they are engaged or receiving a promotion, a true friend will rejoice with this news because they find joy in good things happening to their friend, even if it changes the relationship or is something they desire for themselves. Signs of bitterness, jealousy, or suspicion in a “glass half empty” sort of way are a greater reflection of unhealthy rather than healthy relational dynamics and expectations.
Conclusion
Relationships are great gifts from God. Like many good things within God’s creation, the good fruits of relationship take both natural and spiritual work. They take time, investment, and conscious effort to allow budding relationships to grow over months, years, and decades. They also require spiritual gardening, pulling the sinful weeds that undermine relationships and planting gospel seeds of love, forbearance, and charity.
It is often difficult for people to reflect on their own relational “muscles,” but ask yourself: what do my relational patterns and habits reveal about the type of “friend” I am? Do I have a history of healthy, mutually life-giving relationships? Or does my relationship history reflect a story of burned bridges and aggrieved acquaintances who could not endure the expectations I placed upon them? Would I want to be friends with a person like me? If not, where is God possibly calling me to grow more into the image of Christ—a Christian who does not ultimately look to their own interest, but lays down his life for his friends?
