“It Made Me”

When is the last time you heard a sermon on friendship?
If you sat through a full year of services at a typical church, you would likely hear careful teaching on marriage, parenting, dating, and even politics. Friendship, however, is almost never the subject. Announce a series on sex or cultural engagement and the room fills. Lecture on friendship and you may find yourself speaking mostly to empty chairs.
This neglect is not new. In 1960 C.S. Lewis observed the same pattern in The Four Loves. Of the four classical loves—affection, friendship, romantic love, and charity—friendship (phileo) receives the least attention in the modern world. The ancients treated it as one of life’s main courses. We treat it as something that merely fills the cracks between work, family, and romance.
Yet Lewis insisted that friendship is, in one sense, the most fully human of the loves. It is the least instinctive and the least necessary for survival. You can live without friends. You cannot, in the same way, live without parental affection or the possibility of romantic love. Friendship arises only when free persons discover that they care about the same truth, the same beauty, or the same burden. Friends do not primarily look at one another; they look forward together at something they both love.
For Christians this is more than a pleasant human experience. Our friendships are not finally the product of our own good taste or social skill. Christ Himself is the secret Master of the Ceremonies. He chooses us for one another so that, in one another, we might see more of His beauty. In that shared sight, friendship becomes a faint but real anticipation of heaven—where the multitude of the blessed increases, rather than diminishes, the joy each one has in God.
Friendship, long neglected, remains one of the richest gifts God gives His people. It is time we rediscovered it.