Christian Friendship – How Friendship Feeds Our Faith
There are many benefits to cultivating a good Christian friendship, from making us smarter to making us better people to teaching us how to love. But there is one benefit of relationships that exceeds all others. As important as friendship is, it is not an end in itself. It cannot bring us perfect happiness in which we can rest and desire nothing else. Why not? Because even without fallen human nature, human relationships have limits that keep it from completely satisfying the human heart.
Even Christian Friendship Fails to Satisfy
Relationships are the highest of created goods. In other words, they have the highest potential to bring us happiness. They engage our full human nature, and they give us access to transcendent goods. Transcendent goods are goods that we can only fully enjoy in the context of relationship – things like love, justice, truth, and beauty. But that’s where the trouble comes in. The human heart isn’t satisfied with imperfections in relationships or in transcendent goods. Nobody wants a friend who is mostly faithful. Nobody wants to be loved most of the time. We’re not satisfied in a society that is almost just. But human relationships fall short. Mostly, they fall short because of sin and ignorance – because of human weakness due to Original Sin. But even without Original Sin our friendships would be limited because, well . . . Because we’re not God. Only God is the perfection of everything the human heart seeks.
That very realization can make the limitations in our friendships become a hunger for the divine. Christian friendship gives us a taste of what only God can offer us. Our friendships can build our desire to seek perfection in God.
Friendship Opens us to Love
But if it seems cynical to say that the failure of friendship to ultimately satisfy us is what leads us to love God, you will be happy to know that is only part of the story. The positive dimension of a good Christian relationships is that it trains us in selfless love. Friendship makes moving through the stages of relationship – trust, intimacy, commitment and love – easy and enjoyable. Friendship strengthens and exercises the heart. And so it prepares us for the heart’s main task – to have a relationship with God.
Christian Friendship and Faith Complete Each Other
In fact, to say that relationships are a means to the end of loving God isn’t to say that friendship is not a good that God intended for us. In fact, all relationships find their true fulfillment in a shared relationship with God. After all, God created us not only to have a relationship with Him, but also to live as members of His family. For the same reason, it could be said that friendship completes our relationship with God as well, since it puts it in the context that God has planned for us.
So to cultivate solid Christian friendships is an exercise of faith.
The Bottom Line
So here’s the bottom line. If you’d like great relationships and a strong faith life, you need to cooperate with grace by systematically building key spiritual virtues into your daily life. From the Abbey can help you do that! Learn your faith with our online courses. Live your faith with our online spirituality programs, including From Friendship to Faith, which will help you build key virtues of friendship and use them in all of your relationships. I invite you to explore the opportunity in the banner below to take your next step with us and continue growing in your faith!
Brought to you by Jeffrey S. Arrowood at From the Abbey, dedicated to helping you rediscover the JOY of learning and living your faith so you can grow in intimacy with God.