Podcast: How Men Can Combat the Friendship Famine (Drew Hunter)

July 14, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Why Male Friendships Are Declining, and What to Do About It

In this podcast Drew Hunter addresses the friendship famine, what true friendship is, and why men in particular might struggle to have deep and meaningful friendships. He gives practical insight for how to make and keep real friendships and how this can best serve your spiritual life and the life of the church.

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Made for Friendship

Made for Friendship

Drew Hunter

Exploring a biblical vision of true friendship, this book demonstrates the universal need for friendship, what true friendship really looks like, and how to cultivate deeper relationships.

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:50 - Factors Contributing to the Male Friendship Famine

Matt Tully
Drew Hunter serves as the teaching pastor at Zionsville Fellowship in Zionsville, Indiana, and is the author of a number of books, including Made for Friendship: The Relationship That Halves Our Sorrows and Doubles Our Joys from Crossway. Drew, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Drew Hunter
Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
It’s almost a cliche these days to say that many men struggle sometimes with forming deep, meaningful friendships. I’ve heard it said that although men often have lots of casual and maybe shallow friendships, nevertheless, many of us are actually quite lonely inside, and we don’t feel the connections that we even wish we did have. I wonder if you have any experience with this in your own life as a pastor and as a guy? Do you resonate with that? How common do you think that those feelings of loneliness and maybe isolation can be among men?

Drew Hunter
It seems to be quite pervasive, especially now. There’s a number of statistics that have come out over the past generation that have shown the decline in friendships in general, and friendships among men would be a significant part of that as well. Different studies show different statistics, but in general, there has been a steep decline in the past twenty to thirty years, especially among men. Where maybe thirty years ago the average man had three close friends, now he has one close friend, and something like half of all men would say no one really knows them well at all, or something like, “My relationships aren’t meaningful in life.” So, there’s a real famine in male friendship today—friendship in general, but especially among men as well—that wasn’t necessarily there generations ago. It’s across Western culture, it’s in America, and it’s recent that it’s gotten this significant.

Matt Tully
I want to get to some of the reasons why men can struggle to form these deep friendships that you’re talking about in this book that you’ve written. But before we get into the reasons, I think sometimes as guys we can be pretty good at distracting ourselves from these negative feelings—feelings of loneliness or isolation—and we can even not recognize or understand how we’re feeling about some of these things. We might not even feel our need for friends as much as we actually could or should. So what do you make of that? What’s behind our struggle as guys to sometimes even put words to our need for friends?

Drew Hunter
That’s a really good question and a really insightful observation. There are probably a number of factors that have come into that, especially for men today in a Western context. So, one of those factors is—and this affects even the reason why men struggle to have friendships, but it’s even why we we fail to even recognize and articulate the need—is that our understanding of what it means to be a man and what true masculinity is has changed over the past generations and in the last couple of centuries in America in the West. For instance, there’s a book by a man named Richard Godbeer who talked about friendships among men in America in the early founding era (around 1800ish). He talked about their awareness of their feelings, of their loneliness, of their longing for friendship. They were able to express appreciation for their friendship. One man writes to another who moved away and said, “I had no idea how much I would miss you and how much you were such a central part of my happiness in life. I miss you.” All these ways of talking.

Matt Tully
You read some of those and some of it is just the way that they spoke or the way that they wrote, at least in that day, but there can be these overflowing expressions of affection for other men that today might strike us as a little bit odd.

Drew Hunter
Right. Two of the factors that have happened would be, one, we have sexualized relationships and love. For a man to say affectionate, affirmations of love to another man can be quickly misinterpreted as sexual, and so men avoid that and then even avoid thinking and feeling that, thinking it’s even wrong to feel those things if they want to avoid coming across that way. The other factor is we really just changed our view of masculinity. Nancy Pearcey has done a lot of writing on this, just talking about the book she’s written, The Toxic War on Masculinity. And there are other people who have noted that over time even just the influence of Darwin and survival of the fittest has shaped the way that men understand themselves as macho and aggressive and competitive. And then certain characteristics that used to be true of men and women, even if they were largely down the spectrum toward feminine, like vulnerability, affection, inner thought with feelings, able to express affirmation with people—those kinds of things—have been so pushed into the feminine category that men don’t think it belongs with them. And so there are certain ways that even just living as a man make us think. It reinforces this mindset and way of living that we’re less in touch with our feelings; we’re less in touch with our loves and our longings; we’re even less aware of how much we love other men in a real, non-erotic way. And so that keeps us from feeling like or even thinking about our feelings, and we don’t have the context to express those, and we don’t have examples of other men who are doing that. So, all of that keeps us from even being self-aware of what’s even going on inside of us and what normal should be anymore.

Matt Tully
That’s a great transition to some of the other reasons why we are prevented from and what the obstacles are that we can sometimes face as men to developing what you call true friendship with other men. You just referenced one of those that I thought was really interesting and one that I had on my list, and it’s the fact that so often we don’t have good models of other men in our lives, especially when we’re young and looking to older men (maybe of the previous generation), of what that deep, sincere, intimate friendship might have looked like. How big a factor is that when you think about the landscape with men and friendship today?

Drew Hunter
I imagine that’s a huge factor. So much of what we think is normal in life and what we’ve set before us as ambitions and goals for what we pursue in life and how we construe the good life that we’re actually after is shaped by people that we admire and respect. And so if you’re a man and you didn’t grow up in a home with a dad, or with a dad who prioritized other friendships, and you saw him and you knew his friends and you saw that this brings him such joy, then you are not going to have that vision as closely as you could have in life. And then as you look around, if so many other of your peers didn’t have that or aren’t doing that either, that’s going to affect you. And then, of course, we grow up in a culture that has not prioritized community. It prioritizes many other things that remove relationships from our lives and deprioritize them. And then that keeps us from seeing other models and other men. And a few of those factors would be that in the past couple generations—there’s a bit of reaction every generation, so we’re reacting a bit to this—but in a previous generation, and this was the generation my dad grew up in, careers called men to climb the corporate ladder, which meant moving your family across the country and then moving again. And as people uproot themselves, they’re prioritizing career advancement over community and deep relationships. And then as a culture does this, then there’s really subtle ways that this shapes our experience. So, city planners create streets without sidewalks for walking. So, now you have your home and you have a back deck rather than a front porch, and everything’s communicating and normalizing that you just have your own life, you have your job, and you don’t overlap with one another. And so our lives are disintegrated from one another, and our social spheres don’t overlap. And so you look around and who’s doing this well? There are so many factors against us, and we don’t have good models, and so even if we want to do it, we’re behind in the game.

Matt Tully
Another thing that you highlight in the book a little bit is just the way that so often we can be afraid that if we were to truly pursue a deep friendship, that entails some level of vulnerability, some level of opening up, sharing our thoughts and our feelings. And that can just be a very scary thing to do. I think we feel like we could be judged, we could be mocked. I was thinking one of the maybe most common characteristics of male friendship, at least in the broader popular imagination, is this idea of mocking and sarcasm, joking with each other. How much of that do you think is appropriate and maybe just kind of part of the makeup of, broadly, what a male friendship looks like? And how much of that is really symptomatic of the problem that we have when it comes to how we think about friendship?

Drew Hunter
I think there may be an appropriate place for the friendly, making fun, joking around friends. But it’s a small place, and it must be outweighed by clear, evident expressions of affirmation, love, encouragement, and acceptance, especially connected to what you said at the beginning about men not being vulnerable and open with one another about their true selves. If you do not feel safe with someone to share something that might be a weakness or something that is exposing of your own life, you’re not going to do it. You are not going to repeatedly open yourself up to someone if they ignore what you’re doing, they get uncomfortable with what you’re saying, or they make fun of you, or they dismiss it. Or you’ll find out very quickly, and men do, before they even open themselves up, you can get a read because you listen to men make fun of other kinds of men for certain behaviors or certain things in life. And you realize, I know exactly what would happen if I admit that I struggle with this or if I share this. The guy’s gonna make fun of me. Or if he doesn’t, I know what he’s really thinking, because I’ve already heard it. I’ve heard him mock this person or make fun of this person. And so we then have these environments of male friendship where we just don’t feel safe with each other to go any deeper than the superficial, and so we just say things to get the laugh, and then that is just going to limit the depth that you can have in a real friendship. In 1 John, John says, “If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all unrighteousness.” So, that’s a vision of real relationship and friendship of walking in the light, which is not perfect obedience; it’s actually honesty with even failure. It’s coming out of the darkness into the light. And he says if you walk in the light and bring yourself in open honesty, there are two results. There’s real friendship, and there’s felt forgiveness. And so to have real friendship, you have to be able to expose your darkness to one another. But if we have a culture of making fun of each other for anything that can be perceived as weakness or darkness, then we’ll just keep that bottled up. We won’t grow, we won’t be deep with each other, and that’s what we have. That’s what many friendships do have.

Matt Tully
I think it’s convicting for me to think about some of my friendships and just something as simple as doing an inventory of what I’ve said and the kinds of conversations that I’ve had over the last week or month, how much of them have been characterized by either shallow conversation or joking of different sorts versus, as you said, sincere affirmation and expressions of real affection or love or sharing real things? If 90 percent of our interaction with each other is in the former category, we’re not going to have deep friends, because you can’t build a deep friendship on that kind of thing.

Drew Hunter
Right.

Matt Tully
One of the other things that you highlight in the book is the way that when we think about being vulnerable with each other, that often takes the form of sharing our weaknesses, sharing even our sins with one another, asking for help or for prayer or for forgiveness. And yet you describe sin as “antisocial” in the book, how sin has this ability to curve us inward and on ourselves and isolate us. I wonder if you could speak a little bit more to just that universal struggle that we have with sin and how that can sometimes affect our friendships.

Drew Hunter
This, then, will be a reason why all of us struggle with friendship. Not just men or not just men today, but all of us have this tendency within us that is self-oriented. The New Testament refers to it as the flesh, this self-oriented drive in us where rather than being bent outward toward God and others in love, we are mainly turned inward, thinking about how to protect ourselves and get what we really want. Which are usually the wrong things because we have disordered loves. And so that means that when we’re in a relationship, we’re not mainly, or first, when our sin or our flesh is driving us, we’re not mainly thinking, How can I love this person and serve this person and sacrifice for this person? We’re mainly thinking, How can I have a good time? How can I enjoy this? We pick our friends, then, based sheerly on who makes me feel good, who does things that I like doing, and this self-oriented nature. And so that means some people will be driven to total isolation because they don’t like people and they just want to be by themselves. Other people will then pursue nearly superficial relationships with people that will just flatter them or affirm them and make them feel good about themselves, and then they won’t pursue the kind of life-giving relationships that require honesty, openness, sharing of weakness, self-sacrifice for one another. Really, Jesus is the model of the opposite. He even defined love in John 15 as laying your life down for your friends. And so there is an outward orientation of love that is the mark of the real good life where real friendship can be found. And we have within us a tendency that is against our own best desires for friendship.

14:55 - Making Time for Friendships

Matt Tully
Another maybe common objection or roadblock to developing true friendships with other men that I’ve heard men articulate before is the struggle with finding time. And you’ve kind of hit on this a little bit with our tendency to pursue a career, and life feels so busy these days that it can be hard to have the time necessary for really developing a good friendship. I know I’ve heard people say that the key to deep friendships is not quality time, but it’s quantity time. And that can just be really difficult in our culture today. So what would you say to that?

Drew Hunter
There’s a number of things that men can do to build this into their lives. And so part of it is if you just get a clear, beautiful, compelling vision for what friendship can look like in your life, then any man can get creative. So, even if I have some suggestions, which I do, we make time for what we value and prioritize. And so at one level, people say, “We’re so busy. We don’t have time for all sorts of things in life.” On the other hand, you look at statistics of how much time we’re spending on entertainment and Netflix and on YouTube, and it’s like, well, hold on a second. Are we really that busy? All our time is accounted for, but with what? And so we probably all have things we can rearrange and deprioritize in our life. If you cut out all mindless scrolling on your phone and movies and shows, you actually have a lot of time left. But aside from that, there are men who just have a lot of commitments with family, with work, and so forth. So, what do you do?

Matt Tully
Because one response on the entertainment side is, “Yeah, I do spend time watching movies occasionally or listening to a podcast, but that’s because I’ve spent all day at work engaging intellectually and interacting with people and cultivating relationships there. I’m also caring for my wife and my family, and so I can’t go out now and make a new friend in that last hour of my day. I’m exhausted.” Again, help us think through some of the strategies for, like you said, prioritizing friendship in the right way.

Drew Hunter
A couple things. One would be building rhythms into your schedule. We do that with things that we value. Most people who have some rhythm of working out or running or exercising in their life, they would probably admit if I didn’t block out time in my schedule, I wouldn’t get it done, and I would feel overwhelmed and like I didn’t have time for it. But then we force it to happen by putting that in our schedule. So, I’d say we prioritize work, family, and meals as a family, perhaps, if you have a family. If Bible reading is a priority, we make sure it happens. I’d say, okay, build friendship, and you can start small, but build it into your schedule. So, at work you’re eating lunch at some point. Block off every Monday, and you can either say I’m going to have lunch with this person every Monday, or you can say that on Mondays, I don’t know who it’s going to be, but every week I’m going to try to meet with someone. I’ll schedule that with someone from church or my neighborhood or my workplace, and I’m just going to build Mondays for that. Or you can open up an evening. My wife and I, for instance, in a lot of seasons of life, we’ll just pick one night a week for hospitality, and we’ll just say we’re inviting someone over. And when dinner works well, we’ll invite people over for dinner. We have several kids in our house right now, which makes it a little more chaotic, so right now our season is more like after the kids go to bed, have people over for drinks and dessert or something. And our kids are just at the age where they can be left alone with the older one supervising, so now we can go to someone else’s house and do this. So, building that into our life has really helped because we just have a day, Wednesday nights, that we both know is open for hospitality, and we both are excited for one of us to invite someone over. We don’t have to keep running it by each other. You don’t have to play the game of when do we have an evening? It’s a few weeks out. It’s like, no, it’s every Wednesday. So that’s an idea. Another thing would be inviting people into what you’re already doing. If you are working out regularly, why not do it with a friend? I have a friend I work out with regularly. We have a great friendship, and so much of that happens through being intentional together. We’re working out. If you’re having dinner, have people over for dinner. If you're watching the NBA and you have a friend who loves the playoffs and finals as well, invite them over for games. We’ve done that before. We’ve invited a neighbor over to watch All Creatures Great and Small together. We love that, we found out a neighbor did as well, and so we have her over whenever we watch that as a family. There are hobbies and sports and things we can do with other people. And then even aside from those kinds of things, two things come to mind that don’t take really any much time at all. One would be to reach out in small ways. Send a quick note. Give a quick call. Leave an encouraging voicemail. There was a study done a couple years ago (it was in The New York Times, I think) where they were trying to find out the impact of small touch points of communication between people and relationships and friendships. They asked, “What do you think is the impact if you send an encouraging note, like ‘Thinking of you,’ ‘Just saw this and it made me think of this memory. Hope you’re doing well’?” And they said, “I don’t really do that because I think it’ll be an annoyance to them, or they don’t have time, or they don’t care. Or if I send, it doesn’t make a difference.” And then they asked people, “How do you feel when someone sends you a note like that?” They said, “It made my day. This person has no idea how that email, that text, that phone call just to say they were thinking of me or just to encourage me meant to me.” What that shows is that we really, on our side of needing to extend it, need to rethink the impact of our encouragement on other people in very small ways that doesn’t take much time at all and that we can sprinkle through our day. So, that’s one small thing we can do. And then the other thing is just when we are with people, making the most of our time together in meaningful ways. Rather than sarcasm and superficial conversation, take it down a notch and encourage people and ask questions. I think being curious and asking questions is perhaps the best key to taking relationships deeper. And that doesn’t require more time; that requires a different mindset when you’re with people. That can be at work, that can be at church, and so forth. Just one other suggestion as far as addressing we don’t have time for this is if you’re a Christian and you’re going to church every Sunday, why not come ten minutes early and just stay for twenty minutes after? You’re already going. You have your Sunday reserved for this. We have a culture at our church where we’ve prioritized this: come early, linger longer. And people do. They get to know each other, they introduce each other to one another, they have intentional conversations then, and they set up times to get together during the week. So, when you have an event to go to, just show up early, linger longer, and use that time to ask good questions, get to know people, and be intentional. This really doesn’t take a whole lot more time in life. We’re busy, but those are a number of ways that we can just reframe how we think about life—prioritize friendship and go deeper.

21:45 - Key Characteristics of True Friendship

Matt Tully
That emphasis on intentionality in some of the things that we’re already doing I think is so valuable. And that does underscore, though, that when you talk about friendship in this book, you’re talking about something a little bit distinct and maybe more defined. It’s a certain type of friendship that isn’t the same as just the shallow, casual kind of relationships that we so often gravitate towards. I think of the way that guys might have many friends, and then we might even gather together related to sports or other hobbies, like fishing activities, but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee there’s going to be a really deep, true friendship that develops there. Often, we’re just content to let it be on the surface. So, what would you say are some of the key marks or characteristics of a true friendship in how you’re defining it in this book?

Drew Hunter
One way to define friendship is to simply call it a close relationship of love, truth, and trust. I think in the book I define it something like it’s an affectionate bond forged as we journey together with truth and trust. And so that gets at some of the aspects of real friendship there. There’s a closeness to real friendship. There’s an affectionate bond with real friendship. I think of David and Jonathan. Jonathan loved David “as his own soul.” There’s actually a really curious statement in Deuteronomy where Moses is listing a number of relationships—brother, sister, dad, mother-in-law—and he mentions friend. But it doesn’t just say friend; it says “your friend who is as your own soul.” So, there’s a closeness that’s developed in real friendships. At one level, there’s something mysterious about the forming of this bond. You can’t just force it with two people. There is a compatibility that needs to be felt out over time. Even though you can, I think, be close with anyone, especially in Christ, there’s a bond that can forge more easily with people that have similarities. C. S. Lewis talked about how a friendship starts when two people say, “You too?” You realize you have something in common. But then it’s forged over time with experience and with deeper conversations, the things we’ve been talking about so far. Then, it’s marked by truth and trust. There has to be honesty. There has to be honesty in a few different ways. Honesty with revealing who you really are. Because if you are hiding who you really are, then they do not know the true you or the full you. They have a smaller or a distorted picture of who you are, which means they don’t really know you. And over time you realize that, which means to whatever degree you feel like they love you, you become aware subconsciously that they actually love the you that you’re projecting to them, and you then don’t even feel loved. And so there’s a distance there. So you have to be honest with yourself. First John 1: walking in the light results in real friendship. And then there also has to be honesty to be able to say hard things to one another when needed. That does not need to be all the time. I think if you enjoy rebuking people and you do it all the time, that’s a problem. But in proportion when needed, it’s important. It’s a sign of love. Proverbs says that open love is connected to rebuke. So, it pairs those together. If you rebuke someone, it says it’s a faithful wound, and it’s open love, rather than hidden love, which is you’re hiding your love by not rebuking and not giving a faithful wound to your friend. So, there are times when a friend needs to hear something corrective from you. And then the other piece of truth is if someone shares something with you, you need to be able to be keeping confidences. If someone does not believe that you will guard the truth and honor the confidentiality, they will not tell you. We all know this, right? I have people in my life that I was hoping to have a close relationship with, and it was very clear to me the way that they would share about other people with me made it obvious to me that if I share things with them, they’re going to share with other people what I’m telling them. I realized I cannot trust this person, which means I cannot be a close friend with this person. I could be friendly, I need to love them, but there’s no way I can share with them. So, we need to be the kind of person that makes it very clear that we’re trustworthy, we don’t gossip, we will guard and keep confidences, and so we can be truthful and we can be trustworthy. Those are key marks: love, truth, and trust built over time through mixed experiences with intentionality. That’s how real friendship is forged.

Matt Tully
Drew, how would you define the difference between a true friend and an accountability partner? That is another one of those terms that we throw around a lot in male discipleship and male spaces and that we talk about a lot.

Drew Hunter
I remember there was an article someone wrote a number of years ago, and it was right when the phenomena of accountability groups came up. These have not always been around, these things called accountability groups. He heard someone talk about them and he asked,
“What is this?” And then as they described it, he thought, I have friends. So, what that gets at is that accountability groups can be important and helpful for different struggles that men have and in different seasons. However, what accountability groups are at best is a slice of real friendship. They are doing for one another one piece of what should be part of real friendship between men. So it can be okay, I suppose. I don’t want to make a judgment on accountability groups altogether—to have a focused group or relationship where you’re particularly dialed in maybe for a season on a particular struggle or sin, and you need focused help on that. However, how much better would that be if you had that with someone who also knew you through and through and loved you, and you also knew about them and cared for them and knew their struggles? How much better if you also experienced not just a focused question and conversation about a struggle but all the joys of life together? Accountability should be a part of real friendship—walking in the light together, walking in honesty with one another. And so if there’s an accountability group or accounting partner, I think the best way to do that is to make it approximate real friendship as much as possible. Maybe approximate isn’t the best way to put it, but to move in the direction of a broader, more multifaceted friendship so it’s not one way asking questions, but it’s two way. There’s mutual encouragement and they’re sharing life together so that by the time an accountability group has developed over time, you realize what we have here is a really great friendship.

28:18 - Friendship Is the Ultimate End of Our Existence

Matt Tully
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I love about this book, Drew, is that in addition to providing some of the analysis of our hearts and our attitudes towards friendship, providing some practical advice and help in terms of forming friendships in a way that that is going to be good for us long term, you also speak a little bit to some of the profound and deep theological connections that this idea of friendship has to our lives, to God’s redemption of us, to God’s word. And you write at one point in the book that “friendship is the ultimate end of our existence.” It’s a pretty profound claim, and I wonder if you could just unpack that a little bit for us.

Drew Hunter
Probably the best way to explain that without sounding like I’m just kind of making things up that are obviously not true—when I talk to some people about that phrase, they’re like, “That’s not true.” And I’m like, “Well, hold on, hold on. Let me explain this a little more.” So, the ultimate end of our existence is to commune with the Triune God. Ultimately, in the story of the Bible, where this is heading is to commune with the Triune God and his people, all who are united in Christ, this full friendship. And friendship is a key aspect of how the Bible talks about what communion with God looks like. There are a lot of images to refer to our relationship with God, but friendship is a significant one in the Bible. And so the ultimate end is to know God and to enjoy him relationally and openly and honestly and with joy, and that really is what friendship is. And so it’s to commune with God and then to commune with all of those who also commune with God together—to be in a rich, open, deep, joyful friendship with the friends of God. And so from the beginning to end of the Bible, it seems like this is what we are redeemed for and our eternal future. As Jonathan Edwards said, "Heaven is a world of love." And Jesus defined love in terms of sacrificial friendship. And when we look at the end of the Bible, we have a world of relationships and enjoyment together in a new creation that’s portrayed as a city filled with relational joy. So, that’s what I mean by it’s the ultimate end of our existence.

30:29 - A Biblical Theology of Friendship

Matt Tully
It’s impossible not to see in the New Testament, when we think about the church and God’s vision for the church, that this idea of fellowship with other believers and friendships with other believers is so central to God’s vision for his people. But going all the way back to Genesis, we also see this idea of relationship being core to God’s creation of humanity. And that’s one of the things I love about this book is you have a whole chapter in the book tracing the biblical theological theme of friendship throughout the whole Bible. Are there any other highlights from that work that you would call our attention to? We’ve hit on Revelation and where we’re going, and then we see in Genesis the idea that it wasn’t good that the man was alone. Any other high points when it comes to the Bible’s witness on this?

Drew Hunter
Yeah, a couple. One, even just thinking about Genesis and asking the question, Why is it good that man’s not alone? And the Lord certainly provides Eve as a wife, but it seems like what he’s also doing is making a general statement that it’s not good that man’s alone. And then he creates a spouse for Adam, and then they multiply and fill the world with communal life. And then you ask, Why is it not good that man’s alone? It’s because we’re made in God’s image. Father, Son, and Spirit, who have always existed in the fullness of communal love together, self-giving love. And this God did not create us because he needs us, but he created us to overflow and create a world filled with communal love, which even explains why the destination where everything’s headed is fellowship with God and one another. And then along the way, as you’re moving through the Bible storyline, you see these little glimpses of people who are called a friend of God. You see Noah walking with God. Abraham’s called a friend of God. Moses is communing with God face to face as a man talks with a friend. But overall, even though you have these few key people, especially these covenant mediators who had a close relationship with God that could be referred to in terms of friendship, by and large, people did not know God or relate to him in terms of friendship, at least explicitly in the Bible. And then you have Jesus come and he says to his disciples, “No longer do I call you servants, but I call you friends.” So, as most commentators, like Don Carson and others would say, there’s a covenantal shift happening, a historical, redemptive shift happening right there. No longer is Jesus defining our relationship in terms of a servant with a master. Even though being a servant is a privilege—Paul calls himself a servant, and we’re servants—as far as Jesus is concerned, he is relating to us at a higher level in terms of friendship. And so of course the high point of the Bible is the death and resurrection of Jesus. And so Jesus, on the night before he died, told his disciples, “I call you my friends.” And he said, “Greater love has no one than this, that a man lay his life down for his friends.” And what I think is so amazing about that statement is Jesus is doing a number of things with it. Number one, he is defining the New Testament love ethic and what the relationship should be like, because he has just given them the new covenant love command. “A new command I give to you, love one another.” And then now he’s defining that in terms of sacrificial friendship, which means the relationship Christians have is not just to love one another in general but in particular as sacrificial friendship love. So, he defines that, and then he gives himself as an example, and he gives the cross as the epitome of it, as he even explains his love for us. So, he’s defining his love for us, he’s defining how we’re to understand the cross as an act of sacrificial friendship love, and then that’s what creates a true love for one another. As we’ve been loved in terms of friendship by Jesus, that creates in us a love for one another. And then you move to the New Testament, and you see it happening. And so you see through the book of Acts, the Christians are loving one another in such a way that Luke gives these little snapshots, like at the end of Acts 2 and in Acts 4, where he’s describing the local church and he’s using language that are stock phrases from the Greco-Roman culture and the writings that define friendship. And in those writings it’s this unattainable ideal that only a few people can have. And Luke’s just saying, “Hey, look what all the Christians are doing together. They have one soul and one mind. Oh, they’re just giving their things away for one another.” This is friendship language, and Luke’s saying it’s happening in the church. And the one anothering is friendship language and expressions of that. Then, of course, new creation, and we go from there. So, those are a few highlights along the way.

34:48 - Friendship Halves Our Sorrows and Doubles Our Joy

Matt Tully
And there’s so much more that you draw out in the chapter, and it really is one of those themes that I think is often neglected in our understanding of Scripture and of the story of redemption that God has wrought. Drew, maybe as a last question, you picked a J. C. Ryle quote as the inspiration for the subtitle of this book. I wonder if you could just read that quote for us and explain a little bit more why that was so compelling to you.

Drew Hunter
The quote is, “This world is full of sorrow because it’s full of sin. It is a dark place. It is a lonely place. It is a disappointing place. The brightest sunbeam in it is a friend. Friendship halves our troubles and doubles our joys.” In all my reading on friendship over the years, and still to this day, that’s my favorite quote. The idea of friendship halving our sorrows or troubles and doubling our joys isn’t completely original to J. C. Ryle. We don’t know the origin. It’s rolled through the centuries, but he captures it in this quote, and I love it for its honesty and its realism but also its hope. So, it’s honest and realistic because we all know this world is hard. Our life is filled with sin and sorrow, and we’re lonely and we’re disappointed, and it’s dark for a myriad of reasons that we all are well aware of in the unique way that we experience it as a human being. And then J. C. Ryle says something that I believe is thoroughly biblical, that God gives us a bright sunbeam in the darkness,—the brightest of sunbeams—and that brightest of sunbeams is a friend. And I think for that to be true, which it is, it means the friend is ultimately the Lord Jesus. God himself comes to us as the truest friend, and he gives us another friend reflecting his image and friendship for us. And that brings joy in the midst of sorrow such in such a way that you can say that friendship halves our troubles and doubles our joy. Everything we go through—the burdens—are cut in half or more as a friend comes along and bears those with us, knows what we’re going through, loves us through it, speaks sanity to our minds, bears those burdens with us. And then it also doubles our joys. When I think about my life and I think about all my greatest moments of joy, they have the people I love there with me. And if you remove those people, I would not be as happy. Those would not be the peaks of my life. And so sharing joys multiplies them. So, I love that for its realism. I love it for its hope. And that has rung true for me in the best seasons of life and makes me grateful for the friends God’s given me.

Matt Tully
Thank you so much, Drew, and thank you for this book, which also is characterized by a realism and an incredible hope as we think about the blessing that God wants to bestow on us as his children and as his friends as we then mirror his friendship with us in our relationships with others. Thank you so much.

Drew Hunter
Thank you.

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