In yesterday’s article, “Jesus Taught Us to Be Loving But Not Naïve,” I do not think that I adequately explained what I meant. I also think that I left myself open to people reading into what I wrote things other than what I said.
A genuine friend, while they may not share our Christian beliefs and values, will respect them. They will not encourage us to think, speak, or act in ways that conflict with these beliefs and values. They will not try to dissuade us from holding and practicing these beliefs and values. Christian beliefs and values can be divided into primary beliefs and values and secondary ones. Primary beliefs and values are our core beliefs and values.
Among core Christian beliefs and values is that Jesus is Lord. A lord is someone who has authority, power, and influence over us. Capitalizing Lord means that Jesus for his followers AND the rest of the world is not just any old lord. He is numero uno. He is the preeminent Person in our lives, second to no one, including ourselves. Jesus in his teaching emphasized loving others, showing them compassion, kindness, forgiveness, generosity, and so on. Jesus taught us not only to love our neighbors as ourselves but also to love our enemies and do good to them and to love our fellow Jesus followers. A genuine friend would not urge us to ignore these core beliefs and values and to think, speak, and act in ways that contradict them. They would respect these boundaries.
Jesus did not teach his disciples to withdraw from the world but to be in it but not of it. Being not of it means that we will have beliefs and values that differ from a society’ principal culture and its main subcultures. For example, the principal culture in the United States places such an emphasis on self that we hear people saying that they have no responsibility for anyone’s well-being other than their own. This judgment of what is important in life is not a Christian one. It is contrary to what Jesus taught and practiced.
Each of us is influenced to varying degrees by our society’s principal culture. As Jesus followers we need to be aware of the extent that society’s principal culture and any of its main subcultures influence us, and how that influence impacts us as a Jesus follower.
For Jesus followers friendships and relationships can be divided into three categories—those which reinforce and strengthen our core beliefs and values; those in which our core beliefs and values are respected, and those which weaken and erode our core beliefs and values. Ideally we would want a balance of friendships and relationships in the first two categories. However, we may find ourselves in a friendship or relationship in the third category.
We may not initially recognize that a particular friendship or relationship is having a debilitating effect on us. When we do come to this realization, we will want to draw to the attention of our friend or the person with whom we are in a relationship that they are not respect our spiritual boundaries. If they continue to disregard these boundaries or actively press us to abandon our core beliefs and values, then we need to assess the extent that they are having a negative effect on us.
I am not suggesting that we reject them outright or ghost them, but we do need to consider their long-term effects on our spiritual life and take positive steps to counter these effects. If they persist in dismissing our core beliefs and values, deride us for holding and practicing them, and aggressively attack them, we may need to break off the friendship or relationship in a loving way consistent with Jesus’ teaching and example. If they resort to physical violence or psychological and emotional abuse and we determine the existence of credible threat to our lives, we may choose to break off the friendship or relationship more abruptly.
Some friendships and relationships that weaken and erode our core beliefs and values are more insidious than others. It may take a while for us to recognize that is what is happening. A friendship or relationship may be harmful to us spiritually but not in an immediately perceptible fashion.
For this reason, it is good to have friends and spiritual guides with whom we share what is going on in our friendships and relationships and who may spot problem areas which we may be overlooking. We all have blind spots, areas in which we do not exercise good judgment or recognize and understand the difference between one thing and another.
It is good to listen to those who care about us when they discern that something may be off in a friendship or relationship, when they sense that something is not quite right.
It is also good to recognize any tendency in ourselves to stubbornly insist upon doing what we want to do regardless of what other people may say. From what I have observed over the years is that a lot of people get themselves in all kinds of trouble that way. Being headstrong is not always a bad thing, but it can blind us to things that are harmful to us.
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