What Sisterhood Is (and Isn’t)

This episode contains portions from the following programs:

"The Legacy You're Leaving"

"How to Fight for a Life of Friendship"

"Misuses of Friendship"

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Dannah Gresh: I had a dream last night. I was in a car after speaking at a women’s event. Mary Kassian was there, too! She’s one of my close friends—a pray-er, a prayer warrior, a memory maker! She and Nancy DeMoss and some of our other friends have created the best memories. Well, anyway, in the car (remember this is a dream), she and I were being interviewed about the event. When suddenly, we both were gripped with exhausted laughter—the kind that makes your soul feel connected to another one—because all the walls are down. Let me tell you, there was no hope for that poor interviewer. 

I woke up from the dream laughing. Hard. I woke my husband up! And I thought, I haven’t laughed like that in a good long while, and I need to.

You know, I felt like that dream was a bit of an assignment from God, to tend to my Christian friendships. So I texted Mary right away to tell her.

She texted back: “I’m at a conference today. We were told to write down the name of someone who is a good listener. I wrote down your name!” 

Wow, I needed that!

Today, I have an assignment for you. I'm not sure it’s from God . . . but how are you tending to your friendships?

I’m your host, Dannah Gresh. You’re listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

Today’s conversation has me reflecting on our friendship over the years, and there’s this sweet conversation that comes to mind. It was a recording day with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, Mary Kassian, Kim Wagner, and Holly Elliff. We got together to discuss Nancy and Mary’s workbook, True Woman 101. 

We’d all read chapter 8 on the “Power of Sisterhood,” and we were eager to discuss that material together. This was in the early days of the True Woman movement, and we couldn’t wait to get that message out to all of you.

Now, you might have an image in your mind of what our sisterhood looks like. Maybe you picture me and the girls sitting in a circle singing "Kumbaya" . . . yeah, not quite. 

You’re about to hear the truth. We laugh. We tease. We get honest about our issues. We’re living proof that substance and silliness can go hand in hand. And you know, I think I like it that way! 

Now let me point out, this kind of friendship isn’t just for women in vocational ministry; it’s for everyone! It’s for you! To give you a taste of what it sounds like, let’s listen to part of this conversation together.

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What I’m so grateful for is the sisterhood. Don’t you feel just so blessed that we have each other to walk it through with? I just have this sense right now that the women that are watching [in small groups] have had nacho parties and Chinese food and all this stuff they bought together while they look at this. They feel that sisterhood, too.

I know that as we’re in process this summer, I just felt like my marriage needed tended to, my family needed tended to. I emailed all of you and I said, “I’m taking some time off. I need some accountability. I need to back away from the work.”

And it doesn’t matter if your work is writing books or teaching AWANA or leading a mission’s trip. Sometimes a woman has a season where she has to sit back and there are needs . . . whether it’s her elderly parents or her high school children or a new baby being born. You all were so loving to just walk me through that in the sisterhood. And Nancy sent me a book, it was an email, but it was a book. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: I said, “Dannah, Dannah, dear Dannah . . .”

Dannah: It just called me to truth.

Nancy: But we’ve done that for each other.

Kim Wagner: I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve called Holly or Nancy just in tears and have said, “Speak truth to me right now. Speak truth.”

Mary Kassian: Remind me, remind me.

Nancy: By the way, we’re part of a group of women that exchange weekly email updates as to how we can pray for each other, just acknowledging that we need each other. Before we jump into the “leaving a legacy stuff” today, I just want us to maybe put a bow on some of what we’ve been talking, about some caveats, some reminders that this sisterhood group is a reminder that true womanhood doesn’t look the same.

Mary: Isn’t that the truth!

Nancy: And there’s no cookie cutter true woman here.

Holly Elliff: Because we’re all very different.

Dannah: Hugely different.

Mary: Even planning a meal. I mean, how hard is that?

Nancy: Okay, I gotta tell. My friends, if they come to dinner at my house, they’ve got to bring their own food, because I’ve got one friend who’s in this group, I won’t say who . . .

Dannah: We’re not telling names, please . . .

Nancy: . . . who is gluten intolerant. Okay, that’s a serious medical/physical thing.

Dannah: We don’t want to kill her.

Nancy: There’s one who doesn’t eat vegetables, anything that grows in the ground.

Dannah: And we won’t say who, Holly.

Holly: Only if it’s green. If it’s green, it’s evil. If it’s not green, I’m okay.

Nancy: But we have a friend who’s in this little group, sisterhood, who only eats vegetables.

Mary: Yes, no meat.

Nancy: And at any given time, the rest of us are on some kind of diet that prohibits . . .

Dannah: No, Mary and I will eat anything.

Mary: You and me, we’ll eat anything.

Dannah: We’re the sisters who will clean it all up.

Nancy: But the point being, there’s no cookie cutter true woman. Sometimes when we talk about biblical womanhood, true womanhood, there’s a sense you’re trying to press everybody into this little mold where everybody looks alike. And that’s not right.

Mary: Not so. I mean we couldn’t be any different. Nancy, you and collaborated to write this, and we could not be more different.

Dannah: Well, maybe a little bit.

Holly: But there’s such a distinctiveness there. I can remember vividly one of the first times that I was with Mary she said, “You and Nancy have had a long time relationship?”

I said, “Yes.”

And she said, “You are kind of different personalities.”

And I said, “My role in Nancy’s life is to get her off the couch. That’s what I do.”

Nancy: Holly, you make me sound really bad. It’s not like I sit on the couch watching TV. It’s away from my laptop.

Holly: She’s working.

Mary: And Dannah’s a horse lover?

Dannah: I am. I am so excited as my childhood dream was to be a missionary who was also a veterinarian. Full time. And now I have horses and llamas, and my husband just texted me a picture of our brand new baby chicken that just hatched moments ago.

Mary: Nancy, what would you do with a chicken?

Dannah: She would probably eat it.

Nancy: Grill it.

Dannah: I am going to name it.

Nancy: Okay, here’s something else we want to say about true womanhood. And we’ve said it, but I just think this is really important, and again, we’ll move into this chapter 8, but before we do . . . we cannot be true women that God calls us to be on our own.

Kim: No, no. I have a friend that said, I’m thankful for the True Woman Manifesto, and when you were encouraging women to sign this, I mean, she’s a biblical woman, she loves the Lord, she loves doing your studies and your books. But she said, “I will not sign this.”

Nancy: Because . . .

Kim: She said, “I can’t be this.

And I said, “None of us are this, but this is what we’re aiming for. This is what we’re asking God’s grace for. This is what we’re committed to. It’s an intentional calling on God to create in me the true woman You desire for me to be.”

Mary: And apart from the regeneration of the Holy Spirit, apart from a relationship with Jesus Christ, this is just foolishness. It’s foolishness.

Holly: And women will strive and they will try and try . . .

Mary: Get the checklist, right? I did this; I did this; I did this.

Nancy: It’s a firstborn’s way we do things.

Dannah: Don’t you love that the Word says, “Cease striving and know that I am God.”

Mary: But it’s not the message. Even as we talk about a counter-revolution, this is not a strive message that we’re going out into culture and saying, “This is what you need to be doing. Get this checklist right.” That’s not what we’re doing here. We’re presenting a message that really at its core is get your relationship with Jesus right.

Nancy: The vertical.

Holly: And what it is, is then knowing those truths. They are truths about biblical womanhood, how God designed us. But then going to God’s Word understanding that He provides grace for us to take every step that He calls us to.

Dannah: That’s Holly Elliff and Mary Kassian along with several other beloved members of the sisterhood. These women have my heart. It was a joy to walk with them then, but it’s even sweeter now—over a decade later. These are my sisters for life!

Now, the kind of friendship that lasts decades cannot be the fair weather kind. Scripture calls us to be rain or shine friends—sisters who rejoice with each other—and weep, too. 

A friend that I've done my fair share of weeping with is Erin Davis. She lost her mom this past year, and I lost my father-in-law. We were there for each other. Erin is wife to Jason, mom to four boys, editor at Moody publishers, and she’s passionate about helping you become a burden-bearing sister. Not just the friend who drops off a lasagna to check it off her to-do list. As wonderful as lasagna is, we need more than this, don’t we? 

Because sometimes suffering is long.

Erin invites you to press in deeper, to be the sister who walks with another all the way to the finish line, long after the lasagna is eaten. Let’s listen. 

Erin Davis: Grab your Bible if you haven't already, and turn yourself to the book of Galatians, chapter 6. As you're doing that, I'd like to volunteer to make myself the poster child for all who are experiencing long-suffering today. Long-suffering is as it sounds: it's just suffering that goes on for a long time. It's the trial that doesn't end after a day. It doesn't end after a week or a month. Maybe the trial doesn't end after a year or sometimes after decades. 

And one thing that often happens in the life of the longsufferer is that friends stop asking, “How are you?” They stop dropping by with a hot lasagna. Perhaps they even stop praying. 

I'm saying these things out of the outflow of my own life right now. Please do not feel sorry for me. And the last thing a long-sufferer wants is pity. 

But as we are now many years into my mom's brutal battle with Alzheimer's, I can tell you that a long-suffering friend is truly hard to find. 

I want us to consider through that lens Paul's words found in Galatians chapter 6, verse 2. Now, every text is a part of a context here, and the context here is resisting temptation. That matters. But in Galatians 6:2, Paul says, “Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” 

One of the reasons that we can know that we were made for people is that the burdens of life are simply too heavy to carry alone. 

We're supposed to distribute the weight across many shoulders. And by bearing life's burdens together, Paul said that we were pointing to the law of Christ. What did he mean there? Well, he was likely referencing that Jesus told us the second greatest commandment second only to loving God with everything we got, an outflow of that is that we love each other. We care for the needs of each other like they are our own needs. 

And we don't just hope someone helps carry the weight of what we are going through for a little while. But we want, we hope that someone will carry our needs all the way across the finish line. 

And Paul was saying that when you bear each other's burdens, you fulfill this great commandment that Jesus gave us to love others as we want to be loved. Now, of course, Jesus is the model for this and all things, right? 

He took our greatest burden—sin. And He didn't just carry it for a little while. He didn't just carry it until He got tired of carrying it. He didn't just carry it until he could pawn it off on someone else. No, Jesus took our burdens. He bore our burdens, as Paul is commanding us to do here in Galatians 6. He bore the burden of sin until His final breath. He bore the burden until He could say, “It is finished.” All the way. 

Friendship is messy, because life is messy. And if we only want friends with sanitized lives that aren't messy, and they don't require anything of us, then we will never live the kind of interdependent lives that we were created for. There is such beauty in the mess. I don't know why I can't explain it. But by some supernatural reality, there is intimacy, covenant intimacy, in walking the hard road with a friend, especially when that road is long. 

I want you to take a moment right now. I'm going to do it too. I want you to ask the Holy Spirit to bring to mind a friend whose burden is long. Maybe she has a chronic illness. Maybe she has a spouse who has had an affair or is hard hearted. Maybe she has a prodigal child, and she's been praying for that child to come back to Jesus for a long time. Maybe she has cancer. Maybe she has MS. Maybe like me, she's a caregiver, I don't know. But let's take just a minute. Pray that God would bring her to mind. Maybe she's facing a very long goodbye. I don't know what it is. But right here on Grounded right where you are, let's take a minute to pray.

And Lord, I think about the Grounded sisterhood spread all over the world, in multiple time zones and multiple nations. I think about what could happen if each of us reached out to a long-suffering friend. 

So Lord, I pray that You would bring a specific name, a specific life to mind. I pray that we would want to obey and reach out to her. Thank You, Lord, in Your name, I pray, amen. 

The Holy Spirit doesn't answer to me. I can't put Him on a timeline, as much as sometimes I would like to. So, He may or may not have responded in that moment. Maybe it'll be tomorrow, when you're driving down the road, maybe it'll be in a couple of weeks, in church. Listen to that Shepherd’s voice as He drops the name of a friend into your heart. 

If you did think of a friend immediately, I would encourage you to just write her first name in the chat as a means of accountability. And then, I want to encourage you to bear her burden. 

And beyond that, I want to encourage you to keep bearing her burden all the way to the finish line. I gotta tell you, in the journey with terminal illness that I'm in with my mom, I don't even know what the finish line is. In some ways, the finish line is her death. She's now in hospice. And that moment is coming closer and closer to us. And that'll be the end of the disease we've been fighting all these years. But then there's a new burden to bear, the grief of the loss of my mom. And there haven't been many, they're few and far between. But I do know I have some friends that are going to walk that long road with me. I do know that's what they were made to do. And that I was made to let them carry it because I can't carry it alone. 

I'm not saying this is easy. It isn't. We have tugs and pulls on our own lives that can make it so hard for us to be attentive to a friend. Especially when something goes on for a long time. And in some sense, it's easy to write the card when the tragedy happens. It is easy to sit with her when the husband leaves. But when it goes on and on for a long time, that is not easy friendship. It won't be easy. But it will be Christ-like. And isn't that what we want our friendships to ultimately be?

Dannah: Yes Lord, that is what we want. That’s Erin Davis inviting you to embrace a life of sacrificial, Christ-exalting friendship. I love the vision she’s just given us for what that could look like.

So far, we’ve looked at what sisterhood is. It’s friendship with depth, lighthearted joy, and endurance. It’s a rain or shine, weeping or rejoicing kind of friendship that magnifies the sacrificial heart of Jesus. What a glorious gift!

But before we go today, we need to take a little look at what friendship isn’t. Because sometimes we’re tempted to elevate God’s gifts to a position they were never meant to occupy. As wonderful as friendship is, our sisters cannot be God to us.

Kelly Needham is a wife, mom, and Bible teacher, and she’s also the author of a book called Friend-ish: Reclaiming Real Friendship in a Culture of Confusion. She’s gonna help us put sisterhood in proper perspective. Let’s listen. 

Kelly Needham: 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 them 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.

Dannah: Kelly Needham on the ways we misuse friendship. You just heard her first point, but there are two still to come! If you’d like to listen to the rest of this convicting message, we’ll put a link in the transcript of today’s episode. You can find that at ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend. 

If you love cultivating meaningful relationships and connecting with like-minded sisters in Christ, then I’d love to tell you a little about the Revive Our Hearts Ambassador program. Ambassadors are a group of women who come alongside women’s ministry leaders to support, encourage, and equip them. If you’re a woman in ministry or a pastor’s wife, I know one of them would be overjoyed to connect with you. Visit ReviveOurHearts.com/ambassadors to search for an ambassador near you. 

And if you’re thinking, You know, I think I’d like to invest in women like that! First of all, that’s a wonderful desire. I hope you’ll explore that! Second of all, you can apply to become a Revive Our Hearts Ambassador at that same web address. We’d love to help you explore what that might look like for you! Again, that’s ReviveOurHearts.com/ambassadors. 

Next weekend, come back as we continue covering our March theme, life-on-life relationships. Up next, we’re talking about mentoring. You need the wisdom of older women—and younger women need you! I hope you’ll join us as we talk about that.

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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