The Dangers and Delights of Pursuing Authentic Friendships

Kelly Needham: We have so much to cover that I’m just going to jump into this, because I want to do some Q&A at the end with you. I think this is a really important topic. We don’t talk about it very much, at least not how to do it well, and that’s probably why you’re here. 

I want to just point out that at the bottom of the screen, you can just go on your web browser on your phone to that website, Slido.com. You’ll see a little place to enter a code at the top. It should just have that little hashtag symbol. Just type in “friendship” and you can submit questions anonymously there. You can also watch questions coming in, and if you see a question come in that you’re like, “Yes, I want that answer too,” you can like it. Then we can tell and sort through those and see which ones maybe are most prominent.

Alright, I’m going to pray for us, and then we’re just going to jump in. I hope you have something to take notes with; get that out here.

Father, thank You for this opportunity to come and talk about something that we all deeply need help with. We need friends. We will not make it through this life without good friends. So, Lord, will You help? Will You give us clarity? Will You meet us? Will You show us what it looks like with a gospel-centered foundation to build deep and meaningful friendships? I pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

There are two things that I think unite all of us in friendship. If we could survey the room in our experience in friendship, based on our age, our life stage, and a thousand other factors, it would be a wildly different spread of our experiences. But I think there are two things that unite us here. 

We all want deep, meaningful friendships. We know we need it, we’re hungry for it, and we want it.

The second thing that unites us is that we’ve all found friendship to be lacking. We’ve all been there. Whether you have the best friends in the world and you still feel lonely, or you’re in a context at church where you feel like no one is showing up for you. We want deep and meaningful friendships, but we have found friendship to be lacking.

The world has noticed, too. In doing research for my book Friendish, I found two things culturally that were being affirmed. We now have more friends than ever, and we’re lonelier than ever. So, something’s broken with the friendship thing! We have more people around us, we’re more connected than any other generation in the world, and we are lonelier than any other generation in the world. Why? What is the problem?

You can read a ton of books on this, and I read many of them—a lot of Christian and secular books, saying, “Here’s why friends aren’t meeting the need.” Maybe it’s ways we practice friendship—there are theories out there across the board. But I want to give you my conclusion after a lot of research, a lot of sitting in the Bible of why friendship failing us? Why do we have more friends than we ever have had, and we’re lonelier than we’ve ever been?

I think the primary reason why our friendships aren’t satisfying us is because they weren’t meant to, and we think they can. We think that friendship can provide us with things that God has said only He can provide for us. So we keep looking to our friends for things that only Jesus has said He can be for us, and it breaks. We are trained culturally to do that. Every sitcom, movie, book, thing that has been set before you as far as what a model for friendship is, is looking to people for things only God can give, because the world does not know God. Our main relational needs are meant to be satisfied in Him.

• Only God can provide us the stability we long for.
• Only God can provide the constant sense of companionship we long for.
• Only God can provide the meaning and significance we long for. 

He alone can give that to us, but our culture has told us to look to each other.

In the past it was looking to marriage for that, but in this newer generation it’s looking to friends for that. Just like marriage, it will also fail, because it is not the fountain of living waters. Only Jesus is. 

So I think the primary reason our friendships aren’t working is we are putting things on men that only God can provide, and it won’t hold up. We’re trying to use a cup, a cracked cup, as a source of water to quench our thirst, when God says, “I’m the fountain.” 

In Jeremiah 2:13, if you’re familiar with that verse, He says, “You have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and you have gone out to find cisterns that are broken and cannot hold water.” We do that in our friendships all the time. I have struggled with that all the time.

Now, is it wrong to want that? Is it wrong to want stability, to have someone be a constant companion in your life? Is it wrong to want to matter to somebody, to have significance and meaning in a relationship? No! I don’t think so, because when God looks at the people in Jeremiah 2 and He says that—“You’ve forsaken me, the fountain of living waters”—He doesn’t say to them, “Stop being thirsty! Stop it! Stop longing for things so much, people!” He doesn’t say that. He has no problem with our thirst. He has no problem with the deep needs and aches in our hearts. 

His problem is we’re going to the wrong place to be satisfied. The thirst is not the problem. The longing that you have is not the problem. The problem is we’re taking it to the wrong place. We’re taking it to a group of people who cannot be that for us. We cannot be that for others; they cannot be that for us. Friendship is not the problem; the problem is what we’re expecting out of it.

What I want to do today is talk about three ways we misuse friendship, three ways we tend to look to friendship for things that only God can give. Three misuses; misuses of friendship that will actually produce a lot of problems and can be very dangerous to us. Then we’re going to look at how the gospel, our access to the fountain of living waters, transforms how we practice friendship. That’s where we’re going.

We have to start with the problems. We have to lay a good foundation; clear away what is bad, right? Build a good foundation, and build something good. So, three ways that we practice friendship that are misuse. 

Misuse number one: when friendship replaces Jesus; when we look to friendship as a replacement for Jesus. I just said this: He is the fountain of living waters. He alone is meant to be the source of the deep ache we have for relational connectedness. We were made for relationship, but primarily made for relationship with Him. He alone can satisfy the deep ache in our hearts. 

That’s why the New Testament is full of verses that will say things like, “This is eternal life, that they know You, God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent.” Eternal life is to know someone, to know God. The language of the New Testament is full of things that are telling us, “Salvation is not just that your sins are paid for; salvation is your sins are paid for so that you can go to a person and be in communion and fellowship with Him.” That is a means to a greater end, a connection with God. You were made for deep relationship. 

That’s what our souls are all aching for, but a lot of times we refuse to go to Jesus with those things. We don’t believe He can satisfy us. We can’t see Him with our eyeballs, we can’t hear Him with our ears; so how in the world could He be real enough to us to meet that deep ache and longing? He can if we will go to Him in faith, but a lot of us refuse to, and take those deep aches and longings in our hearts and aim them at our friends. It will produce all manner of idolatry, codependency, neediness, conflict, bitterness, strife, and envy, because those friends cannot do that for us. We cannot do that for others. 

That’s the first way we misuse friendship; we take things in our hearts that only Jesus can satisfy and we look at a friend and demand that of them—not with our words, but with our actions. When we misuse friendship that way it becomes dangerous to us. It is a misuse of the good gift of friendship. That’s the first thing that we need to cast aside.

Misuse number two is when friendship is motivated by selfishness. Now, this is very connected to the first point, because if you are refusing to go to Jesus to get those deep needs met, you’re refusing to go to the fountain of living waters, then you will be thirsty. Thirsty people are needy people and demanding people.

If you imagine the way that I might interact around a table if I have not eaten for three days versus I just, like you, had a nice, wonderful lunch that we didn’t prepare. I don’t know where you ate lunch, but once you’re full you show up to a table of food differently than somebody who has not had access to food for three days. You come in hungry or thirsty; you come in needy. “I need to eat. I’m interested in taking only, because I am depleted.”

So if we don’t go to Christ to get our soul’s needs met, then we come to each other thirsty and needy—with legitimate needs, but that our friends can’t satisfy. So we begin to be driven in friendship by what we need. My motivation in friendship becomes, “I need something, and I am driven by that,” and that’s a problem.

What’s interesting here is that our action in friendship, the activity of the things that we’re doing in friendship, is very rarely selfish-looking. It usually looks very generous. We’re not necessarily needing transformation in how we act toward one another, but what’s motivating us underneath is oftentimes very “me, me, me, me, me,” what I need.

Let me give you an example. My husband is a musician. We used to tour and travel a lot. That was a hard season, because I didn’t have a lot of time to connect with friends. It was lonely. I also felt unimportant because I was kind of his sidekick and folded all the T-shirts for him and got the Sharpies out so he could sign things. I just was really struggling. So there were times when we would be at different venues and locations where really important, cool people were in the room. It was a festival, and other Christians artists who I grew up listening to are in the room. I’m like, “Ooh, this is cool.”

Who am I most naturally inclined to go greet and be generous with my attention to? Is it the caterer over here? No. It’s like, “Oh, the Newsboys are over here. I’m going to go say hi to this person.” I tend to aim my generous actions in befriending somebody who can give me something that I want. “I want to be important. I want to sit where the cool people are sitting.” 

I want to be generous, but I’m motivated by a need for meaning that I have. I’m struggling in my life right now. I feel like I’m displaced on the road with my husband, and there are people that I could look to to get that for. I’m going to get it by being very generous, but I’m motivated by my self-centered desires.

We do this a lot when we walk into church. We walk in asking the question, “Who’s going to say hi to me? Who’s going to greet me? Why has no one reached out to me?” Because we’re not going to the fountain of living waters, we’re thirsty and needy, so we come in motivated in how we operate towards one another driven primarily by, “What do I need? What do I want out of friendship?”

If you really look at what Jesus teaches us about how to care for other people, He calls us to be the friend to others that we wish we had ourselves. He says, “Treat others how you want to be treated.” What we actually should be doing on a Sunday morning or at a gathering, a birthday party, a baby shower—all those places we walk into with all our insecurities; we all have them . . . What we really should be doing is walking in going, “How would I want to be treated right now? What do I wish would happen when I walked through these doors? 

God has actually called me to be that to somebody else today: to walk into this space and greet somebody else, befriend somebody else; not to take something from them, but to give something to them. I can’t do that if I’m not satisfied at the fountain of living waters. I can’t. I’m too thirsty myself. 

So we start with misuse one, we can’t let friendship replace Jesus, and we can’t let friendship be driven by our self-desires and selfish needs. It is a misuse, and it will break. Friendship can’t hold up when both people are totally driven by their own needs. It will fall apart. Even if our activity is very nice-looking, what’s driving us? That’s what we need to ask.

The third misuse we’re going to talk about is this: when friendship begins to mimic marriage. We have always been attracted to the idea of one other person we can count on. “Just give me that one other person who’s my person.”

Now, by and large we’ve looked to marriage for that. It’s why we’ve been so attracted to a spouse—who’s that one out there? That’s why we watch all the chick-flicks, and we love it, because it feels so assuring to think about having one other human being who we are committed to and “I know they’ll be there for me.” It feels stable and secure.

Now, if you’re married in the room, you know that it doesn’t take that long being married to see that marriage can’t actually do that for you. You can be very lonely in marriage and very dissatisfied, even though you have that one other person. 

What I’m seeing now, culturally, is a shift from looking to this one other person in marriage to looking to that in a best friend. We tend to then start moving down the line. “If marriage can’t satisfy me that way, maybe I can find one other friend who’s the friend above all friends. We have this unique relationship, and we can be there for one another in a unique way. We can make a pact together, join our lives together.” It feels very attractive.

There is a new manifestation of friendship showing up culturally, this kind of “best friendship” versus just normal friendship, that mimics the institution of marriage. It’s exclusive, it’s binding, there are things showing up in it like jealousy. Jealousy should never show up in friendship.

So I want to talk about that, because it’s such a common occurrence that I have felt in my heart, this expression of jealousy. But let’s talk about what jealousy is.

Jealousy is not envy. They are two different biblical terms. Envy is, “I want what you have.” We sometimes use these words interchangeably, but the Bible does not. So envy is, “You have a new car; I want a new car. You have this nice house; I want the house. You have a good friend; I want that friend.” That’s envy.

Jealousy is, “I am intolerant of rivals.”Jealousy is healthy in marriage. If my husband were here today and some woman walked up to him and asked him out on a date and I overheard that and leaned over and said, “Oh babe, you should totally go do that. Have a great time!” . . . Hopefully one of you would pull me aside and go, “Something’s wrong with your marriage!” Or hopefully you would pull aside the Revive Our Hearts team and be like, “Don’t ask this lady back again!” That’s not right, is it? My marriage should have a healthy jealousy. I should be intolerant of any other rival of my husband’s affections. That is normal and healthy. 

It’s why God says He’s a jealous God: He is intolerant of rivals in your heart. He says, “I’m first; no one else. I’m a jealous God.” That’s what He means by that. He’s intolerant of rivals. And marriage, because it is a covenant relationship that is a signpost to God’s relationship with us, is intended to have healthy jealousy—not because marriage satisfies any more than friendship; it doesn’t. But it is pointing to a truth that matters.

But in friendship, friendship should never have jealousy. It is inappropriate in friendship, because we don’t belong to each other. In marriage God says we belong to one another. Paul will say that in 1 Corinthians, right, that even our bodies belong to one another in marriage. In friendship it is not the same. 

I’m called to hold my friends with open hands. If my friend makes a new friend, I should be happy for her, not jealous. So when jealousy perks up—and it will—if you’re a human being . . . I’m just telling you, I don’t know one woman I have talked to that hasn’t had that feeling. “My friend made a new friend, and I feel jealous. I feel protective. I don’t want that. You’re mine.” We want to cling to that. That’s unhealthy in us, and it’s a sign we’re looking to them for something that only God can provide.

More and more there are articles online and cultural manifestations of friendship saying that jealousy is healthy and good and a sign that that’s your real BFF! “Celebrate; you’ve found your BFF!” But for the Christian, it is not appropriate for us to practice friendship that way. We do not belong to each other. Our friends belong to God and Him alone, and we are called to hold them with open hands.

When we let our friendships begin to mimic the marriage union—it’s exclusive, covenantal, full of jealousy—it is a misuse, and it will break, and it won’t hold up.

Those are the three misuses. When we don’t go to the fountain of living waters, it shows up. We idolize our friends. We replace Jesus. We’re driven by our own needs and selfishness. We tend to form these exclusive, binding, BFF relationships that mimic marriage, and they’re unhealthy.

God has called us, and called me in my life often, to repent of those things. “Daughter, you’re looking to that friend for something only I can give. Turn around and come to me. They’re a broken cistern. It doesn’t matter how great they are; they can’t be for you what you want them to be. As soon as you look to them for those things, you’re just using them to meet your own needs, and you can’t do the very thing I’ve called you to do in friendship, to be the friend to them that you wish you had.” 

So He calls me to repentance, to turn around, to aim all of my deep relational aches at Him and ask Him, “Jesus, meet my need there. Meet my need. Fill me up.” I have to build friendship with Him to do friendship with others rightly. I have to feel deep communion with Him, and as I do, as I lay that foundation, built by the blood of Jesus—Jesus’ blood gave me access to this deep friendship with God . . . As I do that and find in Him the fountain of living waters, I will find that I can actually now re-enter the field of friendship healthfully, practicing it in a new and different way.

That’s where we’re going to go next: how does the gospel transform friendship? How do we see the gospel redefine friendship for us, away from the cultural manifestations that we’re trained to live in and do this like, and into something new. Our friendships with one another should look so different from the world’s. The whole way we do it should be different. 

But sadly, most of the time it’s just the activities that have changed. We don’t go to the bars, we go to Bible study. But all the weird ways that we tend to have jealousy and strife with each other and bitterness in our hearts doesn’t change. The DNA of the relationship doesn’t get transformed, and it should. So we’re going to now move to: now that we have access to the fountain of living waters, now that we have that gospel bridge built for us, how is friendship redefined? I want to look at four ways friendship gets redefined in light of the gospel.

We see first that the gospel redefines the very essence of friendship, how we even understand it. When we tend to think of friendship, what we tend to think of is, “What do I need?” You would be very normal in feeling this way—seeing this breakout, signing up for it, wanting to come to it is mostly a manifestation of you feeling like, “I don’t have the deep friendships I need.” You do need deep and meaningful friendships, absolutely, but most likely when we think of friendship, we think of what we’re lacking, what I don’t have. We’re thinking about what we want. 

When I did research on this—what would the Bible have to say about the theology of friendship?—the only thing I can find there is Jesus regularly calling us to be generous. When Jesus thinks about what friendship is, what our relationship with one another is in those nonfamilial relationships, it’s, “What should you give?” Not, “What do you need?”

Think, for example of the parable of the Good Samaritan. The lawyer comes up to Jesus and asks Him questions: “What does it take to inherit eternal life?” 

“Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. You’ve answered rightly.”

And then he says, “Well, who is my neighbor? Who should I love that way?” He’s asking, “Who do I owe this love to?”

If you read the parable and see what Jesus says, the question He throws back at the man is not who’s your neighbor, but what kind of neighbor are you? He doesn’t answer the man’s question: “Here’s the five people you should love this way.” Instead, He says, “Are you a good neighbor? Are you a good friend?” (see Luke 10:25–37)

As I engaged the Scriptures and what they have to teach me about friendship, I found it consistently dealing with that in me—not what kind of friends do I have, but what kind of friend am I? That’s where Jesus starts with us in friendship. He sees friendship at its essence as an outward expression of generosity toward others, not an inward demand of others toward us. Biblically, friendship is primarily an outward expression of generosity toward someone else, not an inward demand of what they owe me.

Having access to Jesus, the fountain of living waters, is what transforms that. You have all you need in Christ, and because of that, you can now give generously in friendship and relationship to others.

The second way the gospel redefines friendship is it redefines our needs in friendship. Now, I don’t want you to mishear anything you’ve heard so far. It would be easy . . . People have told me this before, “So Kelly, you’re telling me I don’t need anything from friendship? I only need things from God? I shouldn’t need anything from anybody else and should only go to friendship giving and generous and never expect anything from anyone?”

No. I don’t actually believe that. I don’t think you can do life alone. I think you need people, and I think that’s a biblical concept. From day one in Genesis 2, “It is not good for man to be alone.” It is not good for you to be alone, and if you can make it through this life alone, that’s not a sign of health. That would be as if my kid came to me and said, “Mom, I’m not hungry anymore. I don’t need to eat anymore. I’m good. I don’t need breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Guess it’ll save you on your grocery bills. I’m good.” If my child said that to me, that would not be a sign of health to me. 

I would say, “You have lost your appetite. That is a symptom of something wrong in you. We’re going to go to a doctor.”

So if you feel like you can make it through life alone, without community . . . The Bible has told us, “No, you actually need people to make it through this life.” That’s not a sign of health in you. You do actually need people, and you actually need things from them. But again, culturally we’re trained to look for things from our friends that are things like stability, ultimate stability, and constant companionship, and significance and meaning. No friend can give us those things.

So in light of that, the gospel reshapes what we actually need from friendship. So I want to share a few things that we biblically in the New Testament we legitimately need other people for. These are legitimate needs you have of friends.

You need friends to share your joy with. You see this in Revelation. What more joyous thing can we think than being reunited with Jesus in the flesh? That’s not happening on an individual basis, is it? We are together. 

If I see a great movie, you know what my knee-jerk reaction is? To call a friend. “You have to go see this movie with me!” You go to a great restaurant: “You have to come with me!” Our joy is heightened when we share it with somebody. If you think of your favorite memories, they’re probably ones you shared with people. God has designed us to experience our joy most fully when together.

That’s true in our enjoyment of God. We need people near us to enjoy Him with. It increases our joy in Him. So on a really basic level, we just need people to enjoy life with. That is a right and good need.

But we also need people to battle with us. We see in the New Testament that we are fighting against our own flesh, our own sinful flesh, the patterns of the world that are against us, and Satan, who is also against us. This is a battle we cannot do alone. We see things like Hebrews 3:13, which says, “Encourage one another day after day, as long as it is called today, so you will not be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.” 

You will not make it through with a soft heart without people to encourage you. You need people to encourage you; you need people to confess your sins to. Confess your sins not just to God but to one another. You need a friend when you have stumbled in sin to call up and speak out loud, “Here is how I’ve failed, and I need you to remind me of the gospel.” You need another human being to tell you that is a legitimate need. You need people to fight this spiritual war with you; that is legitimate. You need that.

Sometimes we just need friends to carry us. I think of the paralytic on the mat who couldn’t get to Jesus. He had four friends who knew they weren’t the solution, they weren’t the Savior, “But we can sure carry you there.” 

I don’t know if you’ve had these seasons in your life where you’ve just been too weak to go to Him on your own, but I have. Whether it was just a season of depression or something really hard I’m facing that I don’t have any faith anymore. I have looked at friends and said, “I need you to believe for me, because I don’t have any energy left. I need you to carry me to Him, because I’m struggling. I need you to pray for me.” 

Sometimes we need that physically. I had several miscarriages early in our marriage, was on bedrest for one of them. My husband was out of town traveling, touring. I needed friends to come to my house and physically do things for me. You may have been there. We need it physically, emotionally, spiritually sometimes; people to come in and carry us, because we can’t do it alone.

We do actually need people to be there for us. We do need people we can count on. But here is what differs for us as believers from the world. The world would have us look to individual human beings. “You go find your BFF and you make a pact with them to never leave or forsake each other.” No individual can bear that weight. 

But what the Bible tells us to do is, “You go unite yourself to a local church, and you commit there, because you need those people to be there for you, and you need to be there for them.” We are called to look for that in a corporate body, not an individual. Church membership is a big deal, and I think that is the primary way we see these needs be met. We do need people to be there for us, but it’s going to show up corporately, not individually. It feels scarier to us, but it’s how God has told us to practice this.

Now, those are just a few things you legitimately need from friendship, and I want to just remind you right now: you are responsible to get your needs met. You are responsible to fight for these needs to be met. When you have a bad day, no one gets an alert on their phone that says, “Ding, ding! Kelly is really discouraged today and fighting to believe the truth. She needs you to reach out and text her.” That would be really nice; I would love that, because it’s really hard to reach out to people when you’re in a bad place. But if I have a legitimate need, it is my responsibility to reach out and fight for that to get met through the corporate group of people that I do life with.

I think my first daughter was eight months old and crawling around on the ground when I cut my hand open. I was at home, by myself, just because I was cocky with a kitchen knife. I was like, “Aw, I can cut toward myself. I know what I’m doing. It’s fine.” I sliced into my hand and immediately knew, “Oh, this is bad. This needs stitches. I’m home by myself, we just moved, I know three people in this town.”

So I wrap my hand up in a kitchen towel, and I’m like, “I can’t drive; what do I do?” I have a legitimate need. I cannot do this on my own. That gave me the courage to go get the need met. It took courage. I had to call somebody I’d met once at this new church we visited. She was the only person whose number I had. Out of the blue I say, “Hi, Jessica. I know we don’t know each other. I just cut my hand open. I’m by myself, and I need someone to come to my house and put my eight-month-old in the car and drive me to someone else’s house to watch that child, and then take her out, then get back in the car and drive me to the ER, and then sit with me in the ER and fill out forms and wait with me while I get my hand stitched up, then drive me home, help me pick up my daughter, put her back in the car, help bring her home, get her back into her crib or whatever. Can you do that?”

That was a huge ask for me to make of somebody I had met once! What gave me the courage to ask it? I knew I couldn’t do it on my own. I knew it was a legitimate need that I wasn’t making up. I had enough clarity to know, “I’m in a hard place, so I have to be bold here and call some people and say, ‘I have a need.’”

I know now that if these are legitimate needs the Bible has mapped out for me, that I need people to fight with me in the spiritual battle. I need people to carry me sometimes. I need people to be there for me when my life’s falling apart, through my church. If I have legitimate needs that God has told me other people need to meet, it gives me the courage to reach out and go to someone, even though it’s scary, and I might be rejected. It gives me courage to say, “I need someone to pray for me at least once a week. I’m really struggling. Maybe we could have a phone call once a week and you can just pray over me.” Sometimes I’ve called a friend and been like, “I don’t know what you’re doing right now, but I’m really discouraged and fighting this lie in my head.” I’ll give my friend the script. “I need you to tell me this! But I can’t believe it on my own right now. I need you to tell it to me.” 

It takes a lot of courage to make those kinds of phone calls and those ways to reach out. It takes courage when that person can’t do that for you to move on and ask somebody else. But if it’s a legitimate need, then it is my responsibility for me to fight for that to get met, because God has told me I can’t do it alone. If I’m wise, I won’t try to. I will fight for that in my friendships. It’s uncomfortable, but the gospel redefines these needs for us and then gives us courage and boldness to go into our communities and fight for them to be met.

The third way the gospel redefines friendship: the gospel redefines the enemy in friendship. What do I mean by that? 

To our culture, the enemy in friendship is anything that hinders the friendship. “Anything that gets in the way of this friendship I enjoy is the problem to be avoided.” If that’s a life-change for my friend, we have to do everything we can to make sure nothing gets in the way of this friendship. If it’s a new friend, get her out of here, because preserving this relationship with one another is primary.

We feel that temptation, don’t we? When things threaten to get in the way of a friendship that’s been really good in our life—they’re about to move, have a life change—it freaks us out and we want to preserve that. 

But that is not the enemy that God highlights for us. If the gospel’s true, if we have access to the fountain of living waters, if that is our greatest good, then for us, the enemy that we’re fighting is anything that separates us from God, not one another. We have eternity together. God has purchased for every believer and every friendship that exists between two believers unity and union forever. But for us, the enemy is anything that separates us from God—our sin, the lies that we tend to believe. These are things that show up in friendship if you’re doing life with people. We’re all broken, so our sin is going to manifest in friendship. When we see those things, that’s the enemy we’re called to battle together against.

Let me give you a few examples of how that’s looked in my life with friends. I got a text from a friend years ago, after we had spent some time together. It was in a really hard season for me. It was kind of that spiritual dry, depressive season where I was in a weird funk. It just felt like there was no way out.

She texted me as we were all headed home and said, “Hey, can we meet tomorrow morning to talk?” 

I immediately sniffed out, “Something’s wrong,” so I said, “Oh my, I’m so sorry; did I offend you? What happened?” 

She said, “Can we just talk tomorrow?” Which made it worse! Because I knew there was a problem, and she wasn’t going to text me about it, so I had to wait!

Twelve hours later, or however long it was, we met up at Chick-fil-A early in the morning. If you didn’t know, Chick-fil-A opens at 6:00 a.m., or at least they used to. We could do that before our kids woke up, so we got up really early in the morning and met.

My sweet friend, in kinder words than I could even describe here, essentially looked at me and said, “Hey, I know you’re in a really hard season, and you’ve been for a while. But you have seemed to lose the ability to even see what other people are going through.” There were few ways that weekend that I had been very insensitive to her and unkind to her, and I didn’t know it. I was in my own world so much that I had offended my friend. She cared about our friendship enough to say something and to call that out and say, “I just feel like you’re so obsessed with your own walk and your own life that you’ve lost the ability to care for others.”

She called out sin in my life. She fought an enemy for me. That took so much courage. If you were to ask her how her experience of that was, she was very nervous about the conversation. She debated with her husband about whether or not to even go there with me, because she knew I was in a hard season. But she did. I couldn’t thank her enough. It was liberating. It was hard to hear; it was a hard conversation. But she went to war against the real enemy. She saw sin showing up in my life, and she stepped into it on my behalf and didn’t leave. She didn’t drop that on me. She spoke that to me and stayed there and gave me a chance to process that and wrestle with that.

It hasn’t always been that kind of sin. Sometimes it’s just been blind spots in my life, rough edges that needed to be worn off. We all have those.

I had another friend have a similar moment with me. This time we weren’t at Chick-fil-A, we were at Panera Bread catching up. I thought everything was fine. She left to go to the bathroom, apparently—later I found out—to get the courage to tell me what she had to tell me. 

In a very sweet and short way—it was a longer conversation than this—she looked at me and said, “Hey, you’re in a season of writing,” and when I get in a research writing mode I’m a verbal processor, so I’d been doing a lot of that with her. I had not been a very good listener in some really key moments for her, and it had hurt her feelings. She had found herself not wanting to hang out with me anymore because I was just sermonizing her every time we got together. “Oh, that makes me think of this! Here’s thirty minutes of my thoughts on this deep thing I’ve been studying.” No one wants to hear that, but I couldn’t see it; it was a blind spot in my life. She loved me enough to go to war against that, and she spoke up about it. 

Again, it was hard to hear, but it gave me the eyes to see something I couldn’t see before. Now when I’m writing and studying for a project, she has given me the gift of awareness to go, “You know what? I’m going to be tempted to talk more than I need sometimes right now in this season. God, would You help me be a good listener? Would You help me?” It was such a gift that she gave me.

I could list so many other stories. They feel like these conflict, tension moments. They’re uncomfortable. But I think it’s a real, accurate manifestation of friendship for the Christian. This is what I mean by iron sharpening iron. Sparks are flying; it is not cozy and comfy. We are wearing off each other’s rough edges. We are helping each other see sin and go to battle for it together. When sin crops up in our friend’s life and it has a threat to separate them from God, we step into it, not away, and speak up about it, because the gospel has transformed what we see as the real enemy in our friendships.

Last one. How does the gospel redefine friendship for us? It redefines our mission in friendship. We remember what our Bible has told us: we have a job to do while we’re here. The New Testament calls us ambassadors for Christ. Jesus leaves this earth with this word: “Go and make disciples.” We see Paul say things to Timothy like, “No soldier gets entangled in civilian affairs, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him.” 

We have a job to do while we’re here, and it is not to just socialize with one another and build our best, favorite group of friends we ever had. That’s not why we’re here. There are people who don’t know Him, and when Jesus comes, that’s not good news for them right now. We are on mission together. We are called to link arms together for a bigger mission than just our own social circles. But it’s really easy for us as women to make it our aim to catch up with everybody we need to and to just socialize with one another till we have created the groups we want to create.

Now, we need friends. I’ve just told you that. You do need people in your life. But you need people enough to continue in mission together. It can be easy for us to stop being on mission, to just gather together in our little social groups. That’s not right for us. Because of our access to Jesus, our call right now is, go! Invite more in. If you’re longing for that day of just, “Can I just sit around the campfire with my friends forever?” that day is coming for you! Eternal, forever friendship has been purchased for us. 

So if God calls my friend to a different city, I can let her go with both grief in my heart because it’s sad but confidence that I have eternity with you. You stay on mission for Him, and I will too, and we’re going to fight for that for each other. We’re going to free one another to do that, to be obedient to our enlisting officer, to go where He tells us to go, knowing and comforting our hearts with, “We have eternity. I have eternity with you to catch up on what I missed. I don’t need to fight for that right now. We need to stay on mission together.” The gospel redefines our mission in friendship.

These are huge, heavy, hard things. Practicing friendship this way is really challenging, but I will tell you this: I have never, in letting the gospel redefine friendship like this for me, I have never experienced a sweeter version of it than I do now. It is sweet and free and joyful and deep. People who stay on mission together and keep first things first like this, it deepens your friendship. It makes them richer. 

If you study men in war, you will find that the deepest friendships are men who had to fight side by side in battle. There are men who went through World War II, whom I’ve quoted in my book, who have said things like, “I thank God every day for Hitler, because he gave me the best friends I ever knew.” What he means is, “I had an experience of being on mission together with people, and it was the richest experience of my life.” 

So if we will take courage from God, go to Him with our needs, and walk this out, it’s scary, but we will actually find friendship to deepen and grow richer and sweeter when we do this, not the other way around.

I want to pray really quickly, and then we’ll take some questions.

God, I’m just really thankful that You know we can’t do this alone and You haven’t left us in the dark about how to do this life together. God, all of us have been very poorly trained in how to practice friendship, and it takes so much courage to do it well. We won’t be able to without a deep and abiding friendship with You. So Father, would You help us? God, would You transform our view of friendship? God, would You help us know what it looks like to build depth with You so that we can do this? God, all of this is impossible without Your strength. So we come needy, as we’ve talked about in this conference, and we come to You for help. In Jesus’ name, amen.

I know that was a lot. I have your questions pulled up here, and I’m trying to honor my time. I have fifteen minutes left. As I look through these, I wanted to just mention too, if you have more questions or thoughts about how this looks, this is all covered in my book Friend-ish: Reclaiming Real Friendship in a Culture of Confusion. They had some in the bookstore. I also have a series of videos on my website tackling some other issues related to friendship that you can find—conversations about everything from mentorship to friendship and how it affects marriage and singleness, and cultural differences, all at KellyNeedham.com. You can go look under Friendship and find videos on that for free to dive into that a little bit more.

I’m going to start making my way through as many of these as I can, and we’ll do that until 4:30.

“When should you let go of a friendship and stop investing in the person when they’re not reciprocating?”

I’m so glad this is the first question, because I get it a lot. I find that we are all far too quick to end a friendship without conflict. There are legitimate problems in friendship; legitimate ways, maybe, people are hurting us are are not reciprocating. Our first solution is to back out—to either do the slow fade, if you know what I’m talking about. It gets hard and you just slowly kind of do this. You don’t make as many phone calls; you avoid them in the lobby; you can let it slowly fade. Or you can have a moment where you just make a decision and cut them off.

I think there is an appropriate time for healthy boundaries. I have a whole appendix in the book about when to know it’s time to end a friendship. I think there are legitimate times for that, but I think they’re far fewer than we think. We are in the culture of “toxic friendship” language, and “break it off.”

What I see scripturally is, when there are problems in a friendship, we’re actually called to lean into them and speak the truth in love. We’re really bad at that as women. We don’t speak with a lot of clarity. We beat around the bush. What has been most helpful in my friendship is a courageous willingness to name the elephant in the room and speak up about it with really clear, concrete details that feel highly uncomfortable for us. 

So, for me that has looked this way: I had a friend who was very hurtful to me—legitimately, and she would say that too if she were standing here. We’ve talked about writing our story together. It was very hurtful, very harmful; some really bad things went on. 

My default was to be a fake friend, not a real friend. Because our husband’s lives were intertwined, I couldn’t just cut it off. So I just kind of put on a facade to make it work. Over time, that started to fall apart. So I had a moment where, instead of cutting out my friend, I had to sit down with her and have a similar conversation others had with me. I said, “Hey, I don’t feel safe with you, and here’s why. When this happened,” and I had to list some specifics. Then I said, “Those things have made me feel unsafe in our friendship, and I don’t feel a willingness in my heart to be vulnerable with you. I would love to see that change.” 

I had to give her specific, clear examples of what was happening and how I was experiencing it. That was really hard for her to hear, and it was several conversations of that.

We labored long in our friendship. There was so much water under the bridge in that friendship that we ended up doing four sessions of counseling together. That feels maybe crazy to do in a friendship, but I don’t think so. Jesus says in John 17 that the mark of His coming will be our unity. “This is how they will know that I have come.” I think us fighting for unity with one another, especially for other believers, is of the utmost importance. Before we just cut somebody out, we should be willing to go to them and say things like, “I’m trying to be a friend to you, but I have needs in my life, and I feel like those aren’t getting reciprocated.” Talk about it.

If your friend has blind spots like I did, bring them up with kindness and courage. Talk about it—not over text, in person if possible. Fight as hard as you can and as long as you can for unity and reconciliation before you cut the cord on that—partly because it glorifies God. Our unity is meant to be a manifestation that something’s different in our communities than the world’s. We’re not a disjointed, fractured community; we’re actually unified. That should be a statement of the gospel. 

So, there is a time for that, but I think it’s very rare. I think more often it’s a time to enter into some really healthy speaking-the-truth-in-love conflict that we like to avoid. We will honor Christ I think more by doing that.

“What do I do if it seems like you mostly attract people who take from you or need things from you?”

This is also a very normal question. Actually, we had this in the teen track. “What about the needy friend in my life who just has a high demand on me? How do I handle that?”

The same way that you handle your own neediness! We all have neediness, and what did we just talk about? We have to take those needs to Christ. When a friend comes to you with their neediness and you can just feel it—whether it’s very overt or subtle, it’s passive-aggressive, whatever it is—address it. 

“Hey, I can tell you’re coming to me for things that I can’t give you. I am not Jesus; I’m not the fountain of living waters. I can’t be the things for you you want me to be. What you want from me is only going to be found in Him.” Point them to the source. Don’t stiff-arm them, don’t cut them off. You don’t know what’s driving those needs in them. Point them to the real source, and offer to show them what that looks like. “Hey, if you don’t know what it looks like to do that, let’s talk together about how we go to Jesus.” 

Take other people’s needs and point them to the cross as you take your own needs and point them to the cross. We’re meant to do that with one another, to keep arm-in-arm, going back to the fountain of living waters, because we have the problem that Jeremiah’s generation had. We walk away from Him all the time to go to cisterns that are broken. As that’s happening, we keep pulling one another back, keep pulling one another back.

“How do we pursue intentional and deep friendships in a busy culture?”

I think that you first have to be committed to the belief that friendship matters, and you need it. I don’t have my kids in as many activities as they could be in because I believe I need deep and meaningful friendships. That’s a cost, right? The culture would have me be busy all the time, but I need space in my life to take that phone call from that friend whose life fell apart. I need space to go over to someone’s house and bring them a meal and have a conversation. But that space is only going to happen by way of saying no to some things.

It takes a lot of intentionality to build those friendships and to be available for them, so I think that starts with looking at your life. Why are you so busy? List out your week. What is taking space in my week, and what’s necessary? I’m told to love God and love others; those are my first two basic commands. If I don’t have time for either, something’s wrong.

I have to have time to build friendship with God, and then I have to have time to build relationships with others. So we have to be serious about that. Cut some things out, and then start being that friend to other people—not demanding they be it to us, but we start there. 

Invite somebody over. Invite a group of women that you don’t know. Go, “Hey, I’m just trying to build better friendships in my life. What are you doing this weekend? I thought we’d all just bring a potluck meal and talk. Bring your kids; let them play in the backyard.” If people say no, don’t take it personally, and invite more. 

It takes time and space and energy to do that, and it’s going to cost you something. You will not be keeping up the Joneses of the world, and that’s okay. This is going to sustain you through a life of following Jesus, and that’s worth it to me. My soul is on the line, I think. I need these relationships to keep me walking with Him.

“What do you do when you gently talk about tension, sin, and blind spots in a friend’s life and they don’t respond well?”

I think there’s a way to talk about it poorly; that could be addressed. I have a whole process in my book of how to do this well. Sometimes that’s why people don’t respond well. We don’t say anything to them, and then we lob something big on them and then leave because we’re uncomfortable. I wouldn't take that well, and you wouldn’t either. 

So the first question I would ask is, “How have I presented this, and I have been kind and patient?” We’re called to speak truth in love. Think about what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13 about love. Love is patient, kind, doesn’t hold a record of wrongs. So as we bring these things to people, we have a willingness to longsuffer with them.

I’ll sometimes end those conversations saying things like this: “Hey, I’m sure this was really overwhelming to hear. If you need a day or two to think about it, maybe do some processing on your own, can we talk again in a couple days? Maybe you have questions; maybe you have issues with me. I’d love to hear them.” 

Be graceful in that way to give them time to process what you just said, because it’s overwhelming when someone points out a blind spot in you. Defenses go up in all of us. That’s normal. Give them grace to process, come back, and if they don’t want to, you can’t control that. 

That’s why Paul says, “As far as it is among your power, be at peace with all men.” You don’t have control over somebody else, but your job is to fight for that yourself and have an open posture toward people, to say, “As soon as you want to revisit this, I’m here.” Jesus alone will stabilize us to make those kinds of decisions and do those things.

“Thoughts on building intergenerational friendships . . .” 

Please build intergenerational friendships, and also know that will be really hard, because you have less in common naturally. That’s why we all gravitate to one another. That’s why it’s like, “Who’s in my season of life?” We already have built-in connection points. Building intergenerational friendships requires something else to build the friendship on, but in Christ we have the strong gravitational center of Him. But it does mean we’ll have to be a lot more curious about what that other person is going through to learn how to build a friendship with them. That would be my biggest tip for that, if you want to do that well. Be curious.

For example, I had a lady who lived next to me for a few years who was in her eighties and was needing a lot of government assistance in a lot of ways—totally different life than mine. We built a friendship, but it required me being curious. “Tell me what your life is like. What kind of appointments are you going to?” 

I learned about who was providing care for her dentures, and I learned about her different prescriptions. She didn’t have a car, and we drove places together, and I learned that she loved to be in the grocery store for far longer than me. (laughter) But I learned that that was because when I was home, little people were running around my house; when she was home she was totally alone and lonely.

I would ask her questions. “Ma’am, why do you love going up and down every aisle?” She said, “I just love seeing the people, and I love being around people.” So curiosity gave me an understanding of her life situation, which was very different from mine. We could start to build a friendship. 

But you have to be curious about the other person. That goes both ways. That’s going to aid us in building those relationships, and it’s actually going to sweeten our life, because people in your own life season give you a lot of reasons and excuses for stuff. Other moms, for me, are like, “Yes, it’s hard,” but sometimes a single person in my life can call things out that a married person can’t, because they see it more clearly. We need each other, but it does take more work, and we should be willing to do that.

See how deep this whole thing is? There are so many questions that I’m not going to be able to get to. Let me answer one more, and then I will stick around here for a little bit if you have something else pressing.

“It’s easy to have a possessive relationship with some of our friends. What can we put in place to avoid thinking that our friends belong to us?”

It’s very, very easy. I think that it’s easy because it’s modeled culturally for us. That’s one thing to remember. This is what you’ve been trained to think about friendship, if you are just getting your input from movies and sitcoms and things like that. That’s what’s been modeled to you, so don’t give yourself too hard of a time if that’s your way of thinking. You’ve kind of been brainwashed with that.

But bring that way of thinking to Jesus, first of all, and talk honestly with Him about it. That’s what my prayers have sounded like as a friend has made a new friend and I feel that clingy thing in me. I’m like, “No! Jesus, I don’t want that friendship to change! I finally made a friend and I moved just two years ago.” I’m honest with Him about those things. 

That’s part of the way we go back to the fountain of living waters, is we take all that mess in our hearts and we don’t try to figure it out ourselves, we just take it to Him in its mess. “God, all I want to do is just cling to this. Will You help me? You say You’re the fountain of living waters. You say that my needs can be met in You, but it doesn’t feel like it, because You can’t talk back to me on the phone like this friend can.” That’s how my prayers sound. I’m just talking to Him about that.

As I do, that’s what frees me to let go of my friend, talking to God. You can’t just let go and have no other stabilizing source.

Jesus talked about that in the New Testament. You can’t clear out the one demon and make the house clean; seven more will come in if it’s not filled. So we can’t just hold our friends with open hands without clinging to something else. What we’re called to do is cling to Christ. That primarily for me has looked like talking very clearly and honestly with God about everything in my heart, and being willing to spend time on my knees talking to Him about it. As I do that, it’s freed me to let my friends go.

I’ve had to ask help from Him. “Lord, please help me! Would You help me hold my friend with open hands and care about her more than I care about myself? I can’t do that if You don’t give me the strength to do that, but I want to honor You and I want to walk this out. So will You help me with that?”

Okay, that’s all the time that I have. Let me just pray for you, close you out, and then send you off to our dinner break before our last session.

God, this is a complex topic with so many other things we could chase. But for each woman in this room who maybe has issues coming to mind, relationships and friendships coming to mind that are unhealthy, ways that transformation is needed, would you show each person what next steps look like? Just next steps for these next few days or next week. 

Give them the daily bread they need to walk this out. Jesus, You can do that for them. Would You be the Good Shepherd and guide each woman in the room? Help us to build deep and meaningful friendships that look different from the world and shine the light on Your true coming and Your glory. In Jesus’ name, amen.