Friendship is hard. At least it is for me. Perhaps you can resonate with my experience. In high school and college, making friends seemed easy. I didn’t even have to try. No doubt it had much to do with how much free time we had on our hands. But when you are married with kids and a full-time job, friendship becomes difficult becuase honestly, there’s almost no time for it. Yet, if we are honest, we still long for deep friendships outside of our immediate family.
Rebecca McLaughlin’s latest book, No Greater Love: A Biblical View For Friendship (Moody, 2023), resonated with me as I struggle to make and keep close friendships. This is not your typical Christian book on friendship. For one, I fully expect any book, sermon, or article on Christian friendship to be pretty much all about David and Jonathan’s relationship with each other. There’s really none of that here. But second, and more importantly, McLaughlin begins with Jesus’s statement to his Apostles, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). She then builds the book out from there.
Early on she writes, “If Jesus is right that there is no greater love than to lay down our lives for our friends, we need to learn this love as if our life depends on it” (Kindle loc 173). I had never thought of friendship that way. The way we love our friends is a great deal more important than most of us comprehend. Later she says, “In modern Western culture, we are primed to think of friendship as a nice-to-have, while sexual and romantic love and parent-child love are vital to our thriving. But Jesus flips this script. Instead of telling His disciples that they must get married and have children, Jesus tells His followers that they must love each other, even to the point of death” (Kindle loc 321). Yet again, I had never thought of it in these terms before, but she is exactly right. Jesus himself never married and never became a parent, yet he considered his friends absolutely vital for his life and ministry.
To help you discern if this is a book you’d like to purchase and read, I’d like to briefly give a one or two sentence summary of each chapter:
- Chapter 1 — Friendship is much more important than we think.
- Chapter 2 — Your church family is the first place to develop true friendships.
- Chapter 3 — The world doesn’t think we can have deep, satisfying, intimate non-sexual love, but we can and we should.
- Chapter 4 — What brings friends close together is a shared mission, or as she writes, “marching into battle with each other, spurring one another on, having one another’s backs, and binding up each other’s wounds” (Kindle loc 724).
- Chapter 5 — To make true friends, stop asking, “Who will love me?” and instead ask, “Who can I love?”
- Chapter 6 — the Bible’s instruction on how we are to be a member of the body of Christ gives us a wonderful blueprint for friendship.
- Chapter 7 — Our close friendships will teach us surprising things about ourselves and help us to become better people in ways we never knew we could.
- Chapter 8 — Godly friendship between the sexes, or between the same sex for those who experience same-sex attraction, is indeed possible.
- Chapter 9 — How should Christians think about friendships with unbelievers?
- Chapter 10 — What does it look like when true Christian friends commit to one another the way Jesus describes?
If you are like me and cultivating friendships is something that is difficult for you, I would highly recommend this book. If we believe in the truth and relevance of Jesus’s words, then friendship is much more important than we realize. I believe this will now be the first book I turn to and give out on the topic of friendship. I’m thankful Rebecca McLaughlin thought through this and wrote it, and for how she clearly put her whole self into it.
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