Spiritual Discipline - Friendships

We may not think of friendships as related to pop-culture, but it is the environment in which we experience much of the world around us. There seem to be two extremes: staying as far away from the world as possible, having all our friends in the same church or group, and not even meeting people who believe differently, or being so friendly with and so much a part of the world around us that no one even knows we are a Christian, let alone whether that means anything or not. We can be sure neither of these extremes is God’s will. Where should we be? It must vary from person to person, environment to environment, and even from stage to stage of our lives, because we already saw that God called some people in the Bible further out of the world, and some higher into it. So, like everything else, it requires passionate, personal, intense, listening prayer.

What did Jesus do? Honestly, it’s scary to contemplate. Jesus left the holy places where He’d lived, along with all His holy friends and Family, and went to a place He knew was filthy and polluted in the extreme. He knew much of the language was not suited to discussing the things of God, and that He’d have to live in a body degraded by thousands of years of sin. He knew He’d have to eat some of His own creatures. But He didn’t shrink from it.

When He got here, He first spent many years training Himself to live close to God on a second by second basis and to know the Bible from cover to cover, then threw Himself into the deep end. He made friends with dishonest tax collectors, prostitutes, and greedy men. He hung out with gluttons and drunkards and street people. He chose as His inner circle some illiterate fishers and a political terrorist called a zealot, a tax collector and a guy with sticky fingers. He didn’t even seem to mind when the spiritual people accused Him of being just like the broken people He singled out for His affection. Whenever He had any idea that His own faith might falter, or even before that, He withdrew alone and prayed some more until He got His perspective straight and His faith strengthened. He also depended (sometimes with disappointing results) on the spiritual support of a few of His closest friends who He knew loved God as He did.

Then, and this is the scariest part, He went open-eyed to His death, leaving His pure, heavenly message and mission in the hands of these same faulty folks and whoever they might be able to convince to join them. Yikes! That would be you and me, by the way. And His friends changed the face of the earth forever.

Questions to ask: How much time and energy do I invest making sure my faith is on solid ground? Who are my friends? Why? What do my friends think about my faith? Are they influenced by it, or just irritated by it? If they see it as a negative thing, how have I encouraged that? Is there something I can do to change it? Whom do I depend on for spiritual support? Is my prayer life strong enough to support me when they fail?