No Greater Love
No Greater Love
Greater love has no one than this: that he lay down his life for his friends. -John 15:13
Our culture idolizes romance and the love of parents for their children. But Jesus said there was no greater love than sacrificial friendship love. What's more, He issued a command to His disciples that they live into this kind of love. Christian friendship isn't just a nice-to-have. It's vital. But it's also dangerous.
Friends can pull us up when we're knocked down, embrace us with their love, and spur us on to follow Jesus better. But friends can also grind us to the ground, exploit, or invite us into sin.
In No Greater Love, Rebecca McLaughlin walks us through the highs and lows of friendship love--a love that's been neglected and malnourished in our modern world. She draws especially on Jesus in the Gospels and on Paul to show how powerful and precious Christian friendship is and how we can walk through the hurt, loss, and disillusionment that comes from broken friendship trust. Beginning with the words of Jesus on the night he was betrayed and abandoned, she points us to His battle-tested love as the unending source of our best love for one another.
Male or female, single or married, joyful or lamenting, lonely or embraced, we all need friendship love. This book will help us give and receive it in a way that calls us back to Jesus's commandment: that we love each other just like He loves us.
Having read & enjoyed Vaughan Roberts' "True Friendship", I was keen for another book that delivered a framework and argument for the value of Christian friendship.
McLaughlin delivers a pastoral and personally vulnerable look into the importance of friendship, the ways it can build us up as individuals and strengthen marriages, but also how friendships can be dangerous if we let them become too important, or we don't have healthy boundaries.
A couple of things that I particularly enjoyed were Rebecca's acknowledgement that we can get caught in the question "why isn't X delivering what I need as a friend", rather than asking ourselves "how might I seek to care for the other as a healthy friend?".
Rebecca frames this book within the context of her own relationships (both those that have been healthy as well as an occasion where she had to do soul-searching after the end of a friendship where she had been too intense), and in her usual style, she loves to grab loads of contemorary(ish) illustrations from the modern world. In this case, if you're not a fan of Lord of the Rings, there are 10 or so references that may be lost to you!
All up, this is an encouraging book, helpful for any individual, or pastor who wants to think through how we build edifying and Christ-honouring relationships that build up the body of Christ.
(It's a 9 out of 10 book, but not quite a 5 out of 5....)
