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Nurturing friendships in a cellphone world: Friendship with Christ and friendship with others

Lynne Baab • Friday January 11 2019

Nurturing friendships in a cellphone world: Friendship with Christ and friendship with others

What difference does it make for human friendships that we are invited to be friends with Christ? (I wrote last week about Jesus’ invitation to us to be his friends.)

First and foremost, if our human friendships mirror the intimacy between the three persons of the Trinity, as well as reflecting the friendship between Jesus and humans, then we aren’t inventing friendship. Instead we are entering into something that is already happening and something that was patterned into us at creation because of the fact that we are made in God’s image.

Yes, the world is broken. Yes, the image of God in human beings is blurred by sin. But even though those things are true, as we grow in maturity as human beings, we grow in our ability to love and care for others. We were made for relationships; being relational was etched into us when we were made.

Second, we can expect that a relationship with God through Jesus Christ will help us grow in our ability to nurture human friendships. God’s business is relationships. Love is the hallmark of God’s personality and priorities. As we draw near to that God, the Holy Spirit will help us to grow in love, which will spill over to all our relationships.

We don’t have to strain to have human friendships. God will help us forgive, share, reach out and show compassion and kindness. We can draw near to God and expect that, over time, our ability to live in communal love with others will grow because of God’s Spirit at work within us.

The relationality of the Trinity isn’t just something we are called upon to emulate; instead, it is actually something we are gathered into. Like the shepherd gathering the lost sheep, Jesus comes to find us, comes looking for us so that he might gather us into the embrace of the divine love. When we love others, we are resting in the embrace of that love. We don’t have to generate the love. It is already there.

When we grow in friendship with Christ, when we allow ourselves to be Jesus’ friends and allow ourselves to receive his love, we will find it easier to pass that love on to others. We love because God first loved us (see 1 John 4:19).

So many conflicts between friends grow out of insecurity and pride. The more we know deep inside that we are loved, the more we rest in the embrace of the God who loves us, the more secure we will feel and the less we will need to bolster our pride. As we receive love from God, we will feel increasingly peaceful and harmonious internally, and that peace and harmony will spill over into relationships with others.

(Next week: Who is my Neighbor? Illustration by Dave Baab. If you’d like to receive an email when I post on this blog, sign up under “subscribe” in the right hand column. This post is excerpted from my book, Friending: Real Relationships in a Virtual World.)

I am still trying to promote my latest book, Nurturing Hope: Christians Pastoral Care in the Twenty-First Century. Here's a review on amazon.com that really gets what I was trying to do in the book. The author of the review, Darren Cronshaw, has written a wonderful book about the missional church, Sentness: Six Postures of Missional Christians, and he really understands the links between pastoral care and mission. If you know anyone involved in either mission or pastoral care (or the overlap between the two), please let them know about my book.



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