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The Danger of Friendship

Sam Stringer

Aug 26, 2024

When they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and spoke to them,
saying, "All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make
disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you
always, even to the end of the age." Amen.
Matthew 28:17-20

I titled this devotional in an effort to garner your attention. Is friendship a good thing? Yes, I think it is. I
hope you have some people in your life you truly consider friends. Nevertheless, I want to write to you
today to address something that I struggled through immensely as a pastor for nearly fifteen years. I’ve
served as an associate pastor in Iowa, a senior pastor in three different churches in Illinois and one in
Pennsylvania. I am speaking from total experience here and I mean this in the best way possible: be
careful that friendships and relationships don’t rule your part in Christianity and church attendance. To be
more blunt, church is about manning the mission, not managing relationships. If you struggle
through this, as I did, you will begin to find yourself contorting who you are, allowing people to break
healthy boundaries you need to establish, and also avoiding accountability and hard conversations
because the friendship may have simply become too important. Parents of children can do this, too, being
more concerned about how their kids feel about them than whether those children are being prepared for
responsible adulthood.

I chose these verses from Matthew 28:17-20 because this is Jesus’ great commission to the church. He
speaks it with all authority. The charge is not “go and make friends and sing and listen to a sermon when
you can” but rather, “go…and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the
Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” My
wife had a saying she heard put on our personal checks years ago that read, “The good robs from the
best.” I know it’s hard to say this because it feels so stern and so callous at first, but your loyalty to your
friendships, even Christian friendships, may be impeding you from serving those people the ways that
God wants you to. It may be keeping you at times from giving others your attention when the balance of
the “house” is your primary concern. The good (your relationships) may rob from the best (obeying God)
and this can and will be tested many times over in our lives.

In retrospect, I have gone through some immense opposition with my family from many individuals in
nearly every church I have pastored over the years. Sometimes, it was the people we allowed in the most
who turned on us the hardest. When you let people in, you must be careful about how much you give
away. If others start to see you more as a friend than a pastor, or a fellow Christian, they may quickly
develop expectations or entitlements that can radically shift if things get shaky, leading at times to seeing
characters come out of folks that you didn’t think possible. This devotional is not entirely fun to write; it
might even be making you uncomfortable. As I look back at those different contexts, I recognize more and
more that there needed to be greater care given to focusing on the mission more than the relationships.
We don’t start out that way, but we may quickly find that this construct is imposed upon many groups, that
church is about keeping the group happy. It isn’t. Only Jesus should be the ultimate intended Recipient of
us bringing pleasure.

Your job and mine is to be servants to the King of Kings. We shouldn’t avoid friendships but we should
also be very careful that we never lose sight of why we’re here. Jesus died on the cross and rose again to
not only offer us life, but to call us to a passionate and purposeful existence by furthering His work in this
world. Broken friendships may leave us sitting there jaded and confused, but all too often the neglected
work of serving God just does not seem to bother us all that much. We need to be brave enough to set
boundaries with our relationships; we can be kind and gracious and compassionate so much as we can maintain our loyalty to our God, but that loyalty to Him must not be allowed to be eclipsed by loyalty to
others.

Be brave enough to go to church to worship God, not to maintain relationships with the other people. Our
collective calling is to go and make disciples, not to go and find some friends and build buildings and keep
the coffee hot. I know that this message is not for everyone, because a lot of folks simply don’t care about
the mission nearly as much as the friends that they’ve found. I will say this, though: I don’t want to go to
church constantly worrying about keeping people happy, or having people keep me happy; I hope you
don’t either. God’s glory is why He wants us to show up, be that in church or any part of any day. The
more time we waste on keeping people happy or fearing what they think of us, the more opportunities we
will lose in doing meaningful, eternal work for the Lord. Be brave and be blessed. Be loving to others but
be loyal to Jesus.

Sam Stringer

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by
permission. All rights reserved.
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