What does it mean to be a friend? Any kid on the playground could give you some idea: A friend plays with you, shares Rice Krispies Treats when your mom keeps sending apples, keeps your secrets, and joins your projects. And, Rice Krispies Treats aside, that idea of friendship would be profoundly similar to the scriptural framing of this relationship as a source of good counsel, companionship, and unselfish aid.
I was eight years old when I first bestowed the honorable title of “best friend” on a new neighbor. My family had moved to his block from across town, and I’d started biking my new neighborhood daily, exploring and looking for other kids my age. I wanted a friend.
Finally, I met Earl. He lived a few doors down, and we had so much in common: Earl had an older sister who bossed him around. I had the same. He liked to go outside, ride his bike, and play two-hand touch football. So did I. And though he was slightly shorter than me, we were both in the third grade. Best friend boxes: officially checked.
In a matter of weeks, these superficial similarities coupled with a rapidly growing trust between us. We proved ourselves to each other, even when our interests diverged. Earl was happy for me if my team won its peewee football games, and I was equally excited for him when he got a new Nintendo cartridge. Maybe we couldn’t have articulated it, but we wanted the best for each other, and we understood that each friend’s victories were somehow shared. These days, three decades into friendship with Earl, I’d call it a desire for collective righteousness and well-being.
But these days, I don’t see that kind of friendship so often. As I’ve grown older, I’ve noticed a dearth of such relationships—and particularly newer friendships—in the lives of my peers, including fellow Christians. And I’m not the only one to notice; research shows our society is in a long-term “friendship recession.” We’re losing touch with old friends and failing to make new ones.
I don’t want to minimize the gravity of this shift. Yet thinking back to the start of my friendship with Earl, I’ve wondered: Are adult friendships really that much more difficult to establish? Or are we making it artificially difficult by having the wrong expectations of friendship itself? Perhaps our criteria have moved too far from what we would’ve said as kids and not close enough to what God tells us about friendship.
For a better and more biblical model of finding and becoming good friends, we could start with a story about King Solomon that offers a stark contrast to our supposedly sophisticated methods of forming friendships.
Just after an encounter in which the Lord endowed Solomon with unparalleled wisdom and discernment to rule (1 Kings 3:3–14), Solomon made several delegations of authority within his kingdom. He designated priests, secretaries, generals, governors of provinces, and household managers. He also appointed a man named Zabud, a priest, to an official governmental position that many translations simply title “friend” (1 Kings 4:1–5).
In this decision, Solomon gave the same weighty consideration to choosing a friend that he gave to selecting those to carry out important government business. He chose as his friend a man who could be expected to provide wise counsel and an understanding of righteousness, of what it means to live a godly life.
This is not the only biblical passage on friendship involving Solomon. In the Book of Proverbs, he speaks of friendship as a relationship of intentionality and even authority. Friendship in Proverbs doesn’t seem to happen by chance, like the organic childhood connection Earl and I had just from being the same age and in the same place.
Instead, Proverbs describes what a good friend does and advises deliberately choosing those with whom we keep company (12:26; 22:24). We are to make sure they are wise so as to eventually find ourselves wise (13:20). They are to offer earnest and pleasant counsel (27:9), as well as faithful wounds of correction (27:6). Good friends will stick with us even in hardship (18:24), and we must not forsake them in turn (27:10).
We no longer talk about choosing friends this way—but perhaps we should. Perhaps the days of relying on chance and surface-level commonalities to discover new friendships should be left to the playground. Perhaps we must be as diligent as Solomon in appointing friends and unselfishly becoming good friends ourselves. We can seek out friends rather than waiting for them to manifest through chance encounters.
That doesn’t mean we should reject the chance encounters or the way we built friendships as youth, founding them on some shared interest like Nintendo games or sports. But for Christians, our deepest adult friendships should have a stronger foundation than hobbies and happenstance. That foundation should be a shared commitment to Christ and the expanding influence of the kingdom of God and his righteousness in us.
God gives us grace to be sacrificially loving friends (John 15:12–13), to view others as beloved (1 John 4:7), to encourage others in love and good works (Heb. 10:24–25), to apply Jesus’s teaching that “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).
A friendship like this will need to be cultivated. We cannot rely on chance to produce needle-in-the-haystack encounters with people who share all our peripheral interests, then sulk because we don’t have enough deep friendships. Failing to deliberately seek out friendship with fellow Christians is an abdication of our responsibility to potential friends—and we simultaneously miss our own opportunities to be blessed by intentional friendship.
In my experience, the most transformative friendships are those in which my friends’ peripheral interests are dissimilar to mine yet we share committed faith in Jesus. Choosing friendship with people who are ethnically, economically, and/or culturally different from myself has been one of the greatest blessings in my Christian life. Forcing me into the discomfort of unfamiliarity, these friendships confront me with the handiwork of God in all his people. They remind me that biblical friendship is sometimes difficult, but that difficulty teaches me to love and be more like Christ.
Jesus sought us out and sacrificially befriended us (John 15:15). Undeterred by our differences, he chose us—and then he commanded us to “go and bear fruit” by “lov[ing] each other” (John 15:16–17). He compels us to imitate his choice to make friends and to make them on purpose, to ride around our neighborhoods looking for Earls with whom we have Christ in common.
Justin Hampton is the author of I’m Hungry and a graduate of Tuskegee University and Harvard Kennedy School. He has a background in real estate redevelopment, youth services, and education reform and currently operates as a business management consultant.
