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Explore Scripture, its story, its people, and what it means for life today.
Friendship
Scripture treats friendship as a serious good, and describes it with unusual warmth.
Scripture treats friendship as a serious good and describes it with real warmth. It is also the relationship adults most often let quietly lapse.
What you’ll explore
- 01 David and Jonathan
- 02 “A friend loves at all times”
- 03 “Iron sharpens iron”
- 04 Friends who tell you the truth
- 05 Jesus calls his followers friends
- 06 Making friends as an adult
- 07 Keeping them over decades
David and Jonathan
Read 1 Samuel 18:1-4; 1 Samuel 20:16-17; 2 Samuel 1:26
Jonathan gives David his robe and armour — the possessions of the king’s son handed to his rival. He acts against his own interest repeatedly. David’s lament calls the friendship extraordinary, and Scripture records it without embarrassment.
“A friend loves at all times”
Read Proverbs 17:17; Proverbs 18:24
A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. The wisdom books rate constancy above quantity — the same verse warns about having many companions.
“Iron sharpens iron”
Read Proverbs 27:17; Proverbs 27:5-6
Sharpening involves friction; that is the metaphor. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, and better is open rebuke than hidden love. A friend who never says anything difficult to you is pleasant company and not much use.
Friends who tell you the truth
Read Proverbs 28:23; Galatians 2:11-14; Proverbs 29:5
Whoever rebukes a man will afterward find more favour than the flatterer. Paul confronts Peter publicly and they remain colleagues. Flattery is described as a net spread for the feet — it feels like friendship and functions as a trap.
Jesus calls his followers friends
No longer servants but friends, because he has made known to them what he received from the Father — the mark of the friendship is that he tells them things. He was also called a friend of tax collectors and sinners, as an insult. He appears to have taken it as a description.
Making friends as an adult
Read Romans 12:10, 13; Acts 2:46
Outdo one another in showing honour; practise hospitality; they broke bread in their homes. None of this is complicated and all of it requires somebody to go first. Adult friendship is mostly the accumulation of small invitations that nobody was obliged to make.
Keeping them over decades
Read Proverbs 27:10; 2 Timothy 1:16-17; 2 Timothy 4:11
Do not forsake your friend. Paul, at the end of his life, names Onesiphorus for searching him out and asks for Mark and Luke by name. Long friendship in Scripture is maintained deliberately, and it is the thing people are grateful for at the end.
Questions to sit with
- Who is allowed to say a hard thing to you?
- Which friendship have you let lapse by simply not calling?
- What small invitation could you make this week?
Every passage in this study
Go deeper
Where this connects
This study sits inside a larger story. Read the passages above in their own books, and follow the thread back through Scripture as a whole.