Genuine Friendship

Last night, I had a conversation with a friend of mine about the value of genuine friendship. We talked about how hard it is to come by, and how we diligently seek it out, and cling to it when it is found.

It strikes me as odd that such a friendship would be hard to find in the church, but is. There are so many people in the church who have an skewed idea of friendship. We have a tendency as humans to seek friendship out of selfishness. What I mean by that is that we seek out friendships to serve our own ends, whether it’s to cure our own loneliness, or for some use that is beneficial to us. But this isn’t genuine friendship.

Genuine friendship is born out of a desire for true fellowship. We were created to build relationships with the people around us, and when we seek to do that in a way that is glorifying to God and is out of a desire for a pure form of fellowship, it breeds this genuine friendship.

Another key ingredient to this rare friendship is love, and I think it’s safe to say that many of us have a very skewed sense of what love is. In 1 John 4:8, we see that Love is Christ. Love comes from Christ, and its only through Christ that we discover this love.

So, genuine friendship is born out of a desire for true, Godly fellowship, and bound with love discovered through Christ.

I think when we grasp these concepts and we find and make these friendships, it makes us stronger in the end. We have someone who’s there to help us in our daily walk, someone to help us up when we fall, and to cheer us on as we succeed. We also have someone there to help keep us accountable.

“As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.”

        -Proverbs 10:17

I want to be that kind of friend. I want to be someone who pursues true fellowship and loves with a love that can only come from Christ. Someone who my friends can rely upon, both for support and accountability.

I want to be a true friend.