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This book about Christian friendship helps us to love our friends as Jesus loves us.
"Greater love has no one than this: that he lay down his life for his friends". (John 15:13)
Our culture idolises 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.
Introduction
chapter 1: No Greater Love
chapter 2: Nontraditional Family
chapter 3: My Very Heart
chapter 4: Comrades in Arms
chapter 5: The Inner Ring
chapter 6: Bodybuilding
chapter 7: Your Unexplored Self
chapter 8: Brothers and Sisters
chapter 9: Loving Neighbors
chapter 10: Life Together
Acknowledgments
Notes
| Contributors | Rebecca McLaughlin |
|---|---|
| ISBN | 9780802428929 |
| Format | Paperback |
| First published | September 2023 |
| Dimensions | 140mm x 216mm x 10mm |
| Weight | 0.22 kg |
| Language | English |
| Pages | 176 |
| Publisher | Moody Books |
In a time of such profound loneliness and isolation it's hard to think of a more urgent book than this one. The health of our churches and strength of our witness are both bound up with our understanding of the beauty and importance of the kind of friendship Jesus is inviting us into. This is the most significant book I've read in many years.
Friendship is a dying art. In an age in which any strong emotion toward another person is interpreted as romantic or sexual, Rebecca offers Christians a much-needed corrective. Not only can we love one another deeply and genuinely, we must. Where else will the world witness the pricelessness of a friend who sticks closer than a brother, if not in the church? Imagine what a light in the darkness we would be if we committed to love one another and to love our neighbors as only those unbound from the fear of relational loss can do. No Greater Love gives us an excellent place to start the work of reclaiming the essential art of Christian friendship. I absolutely loved this book.
I haven't read a book on friendship in a decade, and this felt so fresh. Whether you are single or married, young or old, male or female, this is the book you need to read this year. Rebecca demonstrates that friendship is a lost art and the missing element in most churches. Its absence robs every other part of our lives. This is a delightful, important, and (crucially) biblical book.
