How the Gospel Transforms Friendship

Roshanda: Hi, I'm Roshanda from Florida. I'm a Revive Our Hearts Monthly Partner. One reason I support the ministry is because I simply love the ministry. I hope you enjoy today's episode of Revive Our Hearts brought to you in part by the Monthly Partner team.

Dannah Gresh: Kelly Needham understands her need for authentic friendship. She knows: spiritual warfare and growth take place in the context of community.

Kelly Needham: 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.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast for Tuesday, February 7, 2023. I’m Dannah Gresh, and our host is the author of Adorned, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: As you know, friendship can be messy. Relationships in general can be messy. Today, Kelly Needham will help us see how the gospel transforms and redefines friendship.

Before we get to that, though, I wanted to take a moment and talk to any woman who’s in a position of leadership in your church. You might help lead a small group. You might lead the women’s ministry. You might be a pastor’s wife. If you have any leading responsibilities at all where you’re helping other women grow in their walk with Christ, can I ask you to do something? I want to challenge you to connect with a Revive Our Hearts Ambassador near you. 

You say, “What’s a Revive Our Hearts Ambassador?” Well, I’m so glad you asked! This ministry has an army of women sprinkled around the country and around the world. They’re volunteers who want to come alongside women just like you. They want to encourage you in your role and responsibility in your local church. They can also point you to resources from Revive Our Hearts that you can use in your ministry to others. To find out who’s the Revive Our Hearts Ambassador closest to you, just head to ReviveOurHearts.com/ambassadors.

Maybe you have a heart to encourage other leaders. God may be calling you to serve as an Ambassador with Revive Our Hearts. If that is you and you'd like to learn more, just go to ReviveOurHearts.com/ambassadors.

Have you ever thought about what sets apart Christian friendship from any other friendship in the world? Yesterday we heard part 1 of a breakout session from True Woman. In it, Kelly Needham told us some ways we can misuse friendship. If you missed it, feel free to get caught up at ReviveOurHearts.com. Today she turns the corner and shows us the difference the gospel makes in all our relationships. 

Here’s author, speaker, wife of Jimmy, and mom of five, Kelly Needham.

Kelly: We are going to look at four ways that 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 we think of, what do I need? is friendship redefined?

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 see 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.

Nancy: Kelly Needham has been helping us see how our relationship with Jesus affects all our friendships with others. She’ll be right back to pray in just a moment.

There’s a way you can hear more from Kelly on this subject. When she spoke in that breakout session from True Woman (the message you just heard) she also spent a little over fifteen minutes fielding questions from the women in attendance. We’re making that recording available to you as a bonus podcast episode at ReviveOurHearts.com. Also, there’s more information about how you can order a copy of Kelly’s book, Friend-ish. Go to ReviveOurHearts.com or the Revive Our Hearts app, and look for the links to both the bonus Q&A session and Kelly's book, Friend-ish.

Dannah: You know, Nancy, one of the qualities Kelly modeled for us in her personal examples we heard today, is the characteristic of humility. You’ve said many times that a heart of brokenness before the Lord and others is crucial if we’re ever going to experience personal revival. 

Nancy: Right. Our openness, our brokenness, our humility, our transparency has to go two ways: vertical and horizontal. One author I've read compares it to living with the “roof off” before God, and the “walls down” before others. It has to go both directions.

Dannah: Well, that theme is one you cover in a new booklet from Revive Our Hearts. Let me tell our listeners about it. 

It’s called Beauty in the Broken: How Humility Changes Everything. This month we’re focusing on humility in a special way. And we’ll send you a copy of Nancy’s booklet as our way of saying “thanks” for your donation of any amount to help support Revive Our Hearts. 

Your donations are something we don’t ever want to take for granted. Thank you so much for giving and helping spread the message of freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ to millions around the world. To make a donation and request your copy of Beauty in the Broken, just visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. 

Tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts, Nancy will help us explore that vital area of brokenness in greater detail. She’ll expand on that analogy of living with “roof off and walls down.” I hope you’ll join us for that. 

Now, let’s pray with Kelly Needham.

Kelly: 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.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is calling you to transform your friendships through freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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