Spiritual Friendship

Our Father in heaven wants us to patiently endure until Jesus returns. The wonderful thing is, we don’t have to do this Christian walk alone. God has given us the Holy Spirit to help us, and he has also given us our church family to help us. One area of church that can help with this is Spiritual Friendships. This is just a fancy way of saying friendships that go deeper than small talk about the weather. The goal is to be asking questions of each other that help us to talk to each other about how our relationship with the Lord is going. God calls us to love one another and speak his word to each other.

Colossians 3:12-17 gives us a beautiful picture of how God wants us to live together as a church family. I would strongly encourage you to go have a read of this whole section but here is verse 16:

Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.

God’s word is meant to always be on our lips. The questions we tend to ask our church family members over morning tea or our friends when we catch up very rarely lead to opportunities for us to talk to each other about the Lord.

So here are 6 questions which you may find helpful for starting conversations about our spiritual lives with Christian brothers and sisters.

  1. How has our Father been encouraging or challenging you recently?
  2. What truth about Jesus is particularly precious to you at the moment?
  3. What do you think our Lord could be teaching you at the moment/through this situation?
  4. What would it look like to trust our Lord at the moment/in this situation?
  5. What has our Lord taught you about himself through his Word recently?
  6. How have you seen our Lord working recently?

Bonus question: shall we pray about that now?

This is a good opportunity to give thanks for a precious truth about Jesus, or you might like to commit a tricky situation to our Father and ask for help.

Why not choose one question to try asking your spouse, the person you read the Bible with, or your friend over coffee later this week. Remember, the goal is to deepen our friendships and give us opportunities to speak God’s word to each other. This doesn’t mean that you have to quote Scripture every five seconds but it would bring so much glory to God if we spoke His truths to each other in our everyday conversations as we seek to spur one another on in our relationship with the Lord and deepen our relationships with each other.