Transcript

 

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Welcome to Peculiar People, a podcast where we talk about what it means to be a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ in the days in which we find ourselves. We enter this conversation based upon Peter’s exhortation that we are peculiar people and we should show forth the praises of the One who has brought us from darkness into the marvelous light. We do that with a variety of conversations with brothers and sisters about how they are seeking to glorify God in a variety of settings. And I am blessed and excited today to talk to a brother beloved, Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile, who is the pastor of the Anacostia River Church. Just a personal note, I spent my first phase of life in Anacostia, Southeast Washington, DC. until seven years old. I probably live somewhere between six and eight blocks up from his church in a high-rise building from the school where they meet. And so, I’m delighted that he is there as Pastor.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
He is a faithful brother, a biblical brother. I have high regard for him. He returned back to my beloved Southeast DC from pastoring in the Cayman Islands. And so, he has a level of spirituality that many of us have not achieved. And we give God honor for that. He has blogged and written many places, certainly preached the Word of God in many conference settings and many congregational settings. As of late, I’m very excited because he is involved and on the Board of Directors of The Crete Collective, which is an opportunity for Christians to give focus to church planting in financially challenged communities and other areas where particularly, probably for the last generation, at least 25 years, has been a three-year ramp-up model to church plant sustainability, it’s not really viable in some of our more challenging areas, particularly economically challenging areas. And so, I’m excited about that new work that he is in.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
But I want to talk to him today about something that perhaps is maybe off the radar, and that is friendship. I’m honored to have him talk about something. I’m going to flesh out some things I’ve heard him say sometimes. But first, before we dig in, brother, I just wanted to welcome you to Peculiar People. It is a joy to have you here. How are you today?

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Oh brother, I’m better than I deserve. Lord is good and good to me. I love the life He’s given me and the people that He’s put in it, including yourself, man. And it’s an honor to be on the podcast. I love the name of the podcast, Peculiar People, and may the Lord make us more and more peculiar in this fallen world, brother.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
So, I’ve heard you say something several times, and I’m going to say two things before I quote your statement. I know there’s a lot of debate and division and things going on in Bible-believing Protestant about a lot of issues, but somehow, this issue totally does not seem to be on the radar. And it’s around the issues of relationships and our interaction as brothers and sisters in Christ. But I want to speak of this, specifically use the term friendship. Proverbs 17 in 17 says that “A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.” So the first thing is, at least for the last eight to nine years, I’ll just use 2012 as a marker, I think Bible-believing Protestantism in the US has had a strong characteristic of lovelessness, whether it is manifested in things like indifference, or insensitivity, or sins against one another, like slander or mischaracterization. I think that has characterized, sadly, Bible-believing Protestantism in the US and a lot of different sectors.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
And then secondly, in my role in my denominational family here, I get to consult with pastors, and there’s a lot of isolation and loneliness, in general, can be in pastoral ministry, and then certainly, the last year of a pandemic has just complicated those things. And those two elements have had me for a good while just saying the relational element of Bible-believing Christianity in the US quenches and grieves the Spirit. And if we desire things like revival, renewal, regeneration, sanctification, all those things, all those things are works of the Holy Spirit. And regardless of the precision or imprecision of some of our brothers and sisters, the relational breakdown and secular culture anthropology, you talk about dysfunctional families, the dysfunctionality within Bible-believing Protestant grieves and quenches the Spirit so it leaves us in a powerless position.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
And all that’s an intro to the fact that you have said, “I’ve been in several formal and casual settings,” where you said something to the effect like, “We are lazy about friendship. We don’t put the effort into friendship.” And so, I just want to take those little seeds of statements I’ve heard you say repeatedly and magnify it to this broader conversation of unloving division in the Body of Christ and then subsequently, the last year pandemic and the accompanying isolation and loneliness that involves all that stuff. So, it all interjects some questions. But I just want to just dig at this whole thing, biblically, Christianly, how are you thinking about relationships and friendships. And I probably would start with just … because the people are so funny now, the way they try to trap you and stuff. You have to really clarify everything you say nowadays.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
So, how do you describe a friend? And I’m saying that in the sense of, I think we have a lot of Christian relationships that are utilitarian engagements. And I think a utilitarian engagement is not the same as friendship. I’m doing something for you, you’re doing something for me. Because you can see when the goods of the relationship or the resources of the relationship aren’t flowing, the relationship isn’t happening. So maybe just acquaintances or colleagues and friendships? How do you distinguish friendship? And maybe we can work into a discussion from there.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Based on love, and for the mutual edification and holiness of the people involved. So by intentional covenant, I have in mind like the friendship of David and Jonathan, right? I have in mind this friendship and mentorship between Paul and Timothy. Even though you don’t get the covenant language there, it’s clear that they are committed to each other in a very explicit way. And it’s predicated on love, right?

Thabiti Anyabwile:
So, you read from Proverbs 17:17, which I think is a touchstone text there. It’s interesting. And I think you’re right about the state of American evangelicalism in terms of relationships. It is highly transactional, and often not, very relational. And I think in American evangelicalism, there exists this notion that you can love people and not be friends with them, or not even be friendly toward them, right? And I think that’s a category mistake, right? Because when we read Proverbs 17:17, it says “A friend,” what, “loves at all times.” So essential to the notion of friendship is the expression of love. And, of course, that love is not only a mark of friendship, it’s a mark of belonging to Christ.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
John 13, Jesus tells us very clearly, that the mark of our discipleship is our love for one another. And I think the notion of love, all the rich juices have just been sucked out of it. All the meat, the marrow, the bone of love is so vapid now, right? And so in consequential, in light of thing, that yeah, I think people throw the term around to describe almost anything and mean almost nothing. And so I think there’s a real crisis of friendship.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And the last part of that Proverbs 17:17, per definition, is that friendship is another word for solidarity. A friend loves at all times, a brother is made for adversity, right? So you know you have a friend when they show up when you’re in trouble, right? If you’re in trouble and they can’t ever be found, we instinctively question whether or not this is really a friend, that one. And so, there’s this idea of love, there’s this idea of solidarity, there’s this idea of mutual edification and holiness.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And so, we think of text in James, I believe it is, where we’re told that friendship with the world is enmity with God, James 4:4. But if we are friends with God, we’re not friends with the world. What’s being talked about there? Well, worldliness and holiness, right? And where our loves are expressed, our hearts will follow. And so we need people with whom we are in intentional covenant relationship for the promotion of mutual love, mutual edification, and mutual holiness, mutual sanctification.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And so when I think about friends, that’s what I think about. And for me, that’s a wavy concept. I’ve learned, I’ve been chastened not to use that loosely. And I’ve been chasing not to use the language of brother loosely, right? You put this in the context of social media. I’ve had some folks come at me and they always start with brother and then they say all these unbrotherly things. I’m like, “Don’t call me brother, man.” And then they want me to inform that they’re Christians, like, I don’t know you, I literally do not know you, and you have just shown up in my timeline with all kinds of vitriol, but you want me to address that in the language of brother and friendship and covenant relationship. That missed me with all that. Missed me with all that.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And so I do think that the notion of friendship is in pretty significant crisis. I’ll tell you the other thing that puts it in crisis, and it has to do with that part about adversity. And Dr. King said this in his lifetime, it wasn’t the loud, angry comments of our opponents that really rang in our ears. It was the silence of our friends. And I do think in a world now where almost everything is public, and almost everything is contentious, there is a deafening silence among professing friends who are private friends, but not public friends. And that won’t work always.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
That is tremendously hurtful. I think, full disclosure, I’m not as mature and suave and developed as Brother Thabiti. And so, I mean, there’s people now that I don’t have any enmity towards them, but I don’t trust them and invest in them either because I’ve seen times when you or others were, particularly you were subject of just totally unjustified and unrighteous attacks and your “brothers” just sit there because they’re scared of some other supposed brother, and I think there’s an adversity part draws around loyalty. And I hope this is from the Scripture, but I also know this from growing up in southeast, loyalty matters, especially when stuff breaks off.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Exactly right.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
It is hard to just stand in the middle when things are going down. And so I think that really matters. What are the levels of friendship, or categories? For example, I have no doubt saying that you and I are friends. And at the same time, I think there’s something different with you and Anthony and Lewis, your brothers on the porch. And so, I think Christians don’t talk about this at all so I just want to delve into a little bit of things. What even are like levels of friendship?

Thabiti Anyabwile:
The model that I have sometimes talked about here with the church is really the model that comes from our Lord’s own life. So when you think about His relational network, He’s got three that are very close, Peter, James and John, right? They go up on the Mount of Transfiguration with Him. They have times with Him that nobody else has access to or immediate witness of. And so I like to say to the folks here now, if Jesus had three friends that close, then there are a couple things that we need to know. Number one, everybody can’t be that close to you. So you guys who are perfectionist about friendships, Jesus didn’t even do that, right? God didn’t have that much bandwidth, right? And then the other thing that we should know is that does mean we should be investing intentionally in cultivating this with at least a couple of people.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
So on the other end of the spectrum, folks who feel lonely, sometimes I talk with them about, well, tell me about who you spend time with. And then they’ll tell me about their friends. And often I’ll ask them to just keep tell me about each friend, and they’ll have five or six. And I’ll say, “Well, you’re doing better than Jesus.” I get that you don’t have all the time you want with people or you had still times when you feel lonely, Jesus felt that too. It’s a very human experience. But if that’s the benchmark for our closest friendships, and you’ve got two or three, then you’re on par with Jesus. And if you got five or six, then you’re doing better than He was, right? And so, let that circle begin to measure your sense of contentment, even, with the number of friendships you have, and let it limit the notion of the number of closest friendships you’re going to have.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Then, of course, our Lord has 12 that are His apostles, right? So you get out to a wider band. He spent a lot of time with them, too, and walked with them, ate with them, talked with them, did all the ordinary things of life with them. It’s interesting as you read that, the Lord’s life, it’s not like they had a lot of relationship retreats, right? It’s not like they had a lot of special events that forged the relationship. It was just daily. Walking, talking, ministering, serving, observing each other.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And so, I suggest to them, that’s about the size of a small group, right? You should plug into a small group and really intentionally invest in the relationships in that small group until you got about a dozen or so that are a wider net of friends in that way. And of course, there’s a wide array, right, whether you measure it in terms of the 120 that are at the upper room, in Acts 1, or a looser number, a vaguer number of disciples that always seem to be in and around the Lord Jesus. And that’s about the size of your average church, right?

Thabiti Anyabwile:
So, we should be thinking about our church family, not just as abstractly spiritual family, but we should be thinking about the fertile ground for the biblical friendship that we’ve been talking about. And so, we ought to be able to say, as you were just saying a moment ago with me and Lewis and Tony, I got a lot of friends in my church, right? And if you can’t find friends in your church, then you might not be in a church, right? I know there’s a school of thought among some pastors is like you can’t have friends in your church. All your friends need to be outside your church.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Yeah, I was going to ask you, dig into that, because I know some of the loneliest people are pastors and they are blessings that they’re not looking at right in the congregation. What are your thoughts on that line of thought?

Thabiti Anyabwile:
I would double click on what you’re saying right there. I will say if you take the approach that you can’t have friends inside your church family, and yet, that’s where you’re going to be spending all of your time, then chances are you have, number one, in your own mind, knowingly or unknowingly, professionalized the ministry. And in that very professional view of the ministry, you have, again, lopped off, you’ve chopped off the familial nature of the local church, right? And number two, you have certainly created something that will create more loneliness and more despondency, and fewer resources when the sheep start nipping and biting and kicking. So all of a sudden now, you’re dealing with conflict all alone because you convinced yourself that these aren’t people I can be friends with. Well, no, this is the first set of people you should be trying to be friends with because they’re your family. And God has placed you there.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
We take the 1st Corinthians 12 seriously where Paul says that God has placed each member in the body just as he chose. And He has put right next to you the members of the body who are meant to supply grace to you. And one of the graces that we should be receiving is friendship. Now, again, you can’t be friends with every member of the church. So that’s why I think that model of three and 12 into the church is really helpful. But I think a brother is choosing the path of unhealth if he thinks, well, I can’t be friends with these people. Either you’re not actually in a church or you’re thinking wrongly and detrimentally to yourself.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
No, I don’t think that line of thinking has any exegetical warrant at all. I grew up around church people and around ministers and stuff and as I got older, it was peculiar to hear that mindset. I’m thankful to have been in churches where that was not our pastor’s philosophy. I thank the Lord, my wife, the churches that I’ve served, I give my predecessors their space and stay out of their space, but my wife still goes on girl trips with women on every church we serve because the relationships were real and it wasn’t just, yeah, we’re okay while I’m here. No, no, it was just a wonderful thing. And I hope pastors will take heed to this word from two brothers encouraging you in that way. And I’ll tell you on a funny note, church folks are 100% less high-maintenance, quirky and interesting than pastors and preachers.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
That’s exactly right.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
The folk in your church give me some good praise of my Lord.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
That’s exactly right. Listen, so far, the grace is just being normal.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Yes.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
It’s good to be around some normal folk, man, and go to a day job and fight to read their Bibles and raising kids and grandkids and thinking about normal stuff, right? Pastors need a lot more normal in their life than we often get.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
That’s right, and also, just the multi-generational element of a congregation. I’m actually at a challenging point in my 50s that people don’t sometimes realize is older deacons, older brothers, older friends in Christian life and in the congregation, they begin to go on to glory and you have tons of students and mentee and people younger than you and all those kinds of things, but you begin to scrap for friends 20 years older and friends 25 years older. So, pastors, please, look in the gifts that the Lord has put in your congregation. Corinthians says, there’s one body and many members and all those members are for the betterment and the upbuilding of the whole. And yes, you are the shepherd, yes, you are the pastor, but you are part of that body and so please, allow the congregation to bless you in that way.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
That’s so good, man. Can I double click on that? Because you make the point about the intergenerational nature of it, right. And I have to say that as a pastor, some of my most comforting friends inside the local church have been older men and women who could have been my mothers or my fathers. They’re 20 years older than me, 25 years, or even 15 years older than me, who aren’t impressed with me. They love me. I know they love me. And they appreciate the Lord’s ministry through me, but they’re not impressed with me. And checked in on me and encouraged me. I think of when I was in the Cayman Islands, a sister named Bev and her husband Hugh and another sister actually close to them named Dawn, they would just sometimes just call, make an appointment and say, “Hey, I’m coming to check on you.”

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Now I spent all my day with people coming to me for me to check on them, right, or chasing the sheep. But these were folks, and the first couple of times it happened, Kevin, I got to tell you, it brought me to tears. Just the older saints, praying for you, watching you. They don’t say a whole lot in the midst of a lot of squabbles and conflicts and foolishness, but they’re the Walter Cronkites of the congregation, right? They’re the ones when they speak, people listen, and they are folks who have a sense of what’s really important. And they’re balanced through that wisdom and their age. That’s a huge gift, man.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And I would say that not just to pastors, but if you’re listening and you’re a member of a church, maybe you’re a single sister, you’re 25 or 30 or 35 and you’re thinking about the things that single sisters think about and you’re wanting somebody to pray for you and wanting friendship, chances are you’re looking around at other 25, 30, 35-year-olds, I just want to encourage you, find that older woman in the church who’s 50 or 55 or 65 who seems to just be sitting on the pew by herself. She’s probably the one who prays the most in the church, right? She’s probably the one who’s had to pray through the most things. Be a blessing to her too. You offer friendship to her, not just receive it from her. And so, we can dry up a lot of the isolation that happens in our churches if we just be intergenerational family, and be intentional about cultivating friendships across generational lines.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Amen. Amen. And let me just interject, I always throw this in anytime I have opportunity. We’ve been in a cultural place where biblical norms such as Genesis 1:27, male and female, Biblical marriage, Genesis has been such a thing of attack in our culture sometimes that congregational life can sometimes not be the most friendship-facilitating place for single folk, regardless of their age. And so, if you are a small group leader, if you are a pastor, and you’re listening, I want to encourage you, make sure that the sweet joy and the sweet gravy of the fellowship in the congregation is abundantly available to all.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
And as we contend for things in our culture, let us also be tremendously mindful of the relational dynamics within our particular congregations. Now, I always ask people and I’ve been in different sizes of churches, different ethnicity, and sometimes we can say family values or family in a way that single people or divorced people can sometimes feel out of that equation. And so, things that we’re talking about here regarding relationship and friendships, certainly within the confines of the local body, must be something that is abundantly available to everyone that’s a member of that party.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Hey, you have grown up in North Carolina and you understand church life and that setting. You’ve been in many places as an adult, even been international, in the Caribbean. And so, I wanted to talk to you because you said repeatedly that we don’t put good effort or sufficient effort into relationships. What efforts do you observe lacking? And I’m not trying to slant it, but every congregational life I’ve been in, women seem to be getting their thing on with other sisters. So, I’m not trying to slant it towards men. But I do want to say, what relational efforts do you see lacking? And do you see it differently between men and women? Because I haven’t thought about it like you. But when I’m in congregational settings, women seem to be getting fellowship with one another in a way perhaps that men are not.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Good question. When you’ve heard me talk about this in different places and talk about effort and investment in friendships, that really comes from a question that I heard at least 15 years ago, over 15 years ago, probably closer to 20, when I was sitting under Mark Dever’s ministry at Capitol Hill Baptist, and it was an application question in a sermon and I remember precisely how he asked it. He says, “What will it take to make you relinquish your passive approach to friendship?” And I think, it was like an arrow straight into my chest, because that specific framing of the question, “What will it take to make you relinquish,” right?

Thabiti Anyabwile:
It means I’ve been holding on to something. “Your passive approach to friendship,” that this way of just letting it come to me if it comes and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, that I’ve been holding on to that posture. And it hit me. And it felt accurate to me. And that’s where that comes from, for me, is thinking, how are you going to actively invest? This is the other thing that I should say about myself in terms of why that hit me is I’m an off the charts introvert, right?

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Yeah, we were saying something early. I don’t want to out you as like one of them people that really didn’t mind the pandemic.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
For most of it, I did. At [inaudible 00:27:12], I was like, “Yo, I’m feeling this now.” But for the first nine months, I was like, “Yo, this is the way the world should be organized.” So, given my wiring and given that passivity, right, I would be one of those guys that just if it came, great if it did. And I think that’s probably true of most men, not necessarily that they’re introverts, but that passivity, right, that learned passivity, and a lot of, honestly, fragility.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
We are men. We are groomed and taught to present strong and not need anybody, but actually beneath that, and you have to drill too far beneath that, which is a ball of insecurity, which is a heap of uncertainty. And it is, I think, since the fall of Adam, a besetting sin for us to abdicate leadership and things of that sort.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And so, I think what I observe in all the churches I’ve had the privilege of pastoring is men can have a kind of camaraderie in social ways around sporting events, or outings, or things of that sort. We can even have a fellowship breakfast where we’re getting some eggs and bacon and things of that like. But the kind of Jonathan-David friendship, we let that come to us passively. Yet, that’s not what Jonathan and David did, right? They love each other and invest in each other, expressed solidarity to one another. The kind of friendship that we see in pages of the New Testament, between Jesus and His men, or, again, you think about Paul and Barnabas, or any number of the relationships we see in the New Testament. Those are not passive things.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Now, they’re not programed things either, right? They’re not things where you got to have 40 days of friendship thing, or 10 days of this or that, and nothing wrong with those things. Those things facilitate a lot of meaning of people, things of that sort. But it’s not programed. And one of the things that I’ve seen as I’ve been in different contexts and different churches is the more programed a local church’s ministry is, the more connected is the spiritual life of people to programs. So when I went to my first church, I began to learn the history of that church and ask people about how they were doing spiritually.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
There were two things that were really evident. Number one, most of the people in the church had never been asked a question, “How are you doing spiritually?” And they told me so, they were like deer in a headlight. And they said, “Hey, that’s a hard question. Nobody’s ever asked me that.” After about nine months, six months, they were used to me asking, they began to start … the wheels started turning, started getting out of the mud, started thinking those categories.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
But here’s the other thing that was really obvious to me is I would ask people how they were doing spiritually, when they began to answer that question, they would say, “When we were doing this study, or when the church was doing that thing, that’s when I was doing well spiritually.” And I asked, well, what happened between studies? Well, then there’ll be these valleys, right. And so people’s spiritual lives were tuned not to the cadence and the rhythm of the day, the watches and the seasons of the day, they were tuned to the special efforts that the church was launching.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And so, what people lose in that is a sense of daily fellowship with Christ and daily fellowship with each other. And for men in particular, it’s just really easy to fall into that hole of not having the daily, right, because we go to work, we do our things, we only have to talk to our friend once or twice a year anyway to feel like we’re connected, right? So, to miss that, we’re just deeper into that hole.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
At the church, we’re learning this to push guys together. So in our men’s fellowship, we have a fellowship meeting, once a quarter. Then we have what we call our triads, which are basically we put men in relationships of three and say, hey, you guys need to be meeting on a weekly or every other week, and just really building into each other, getting to know each other. We try to pay some attention to that intergenerational thing that we talked about a moment ago. And we try to encourage people to get to know people that aren’t like them, right?

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Whether that’s generation, or whether that’s ethnicity, or whether that’s financial class, or what have you. Get some people in your group that got a different job, different work than you do. Build intentionally across difference, because that’s going to help us when the culture puts stress on the natural divisions between us. That’s going to help us hold this thing together when the world and the enemy attacks the unity of the church. And so, we try to encourage men to try and build in those ways.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
What is the relationship between friendship and adversity? And I guess I’ll give three examples. So yeah, I’m thinking, it seems that a man would have friends in a congregation that he could tell he got laid off and he’s struggling. And I know that doesn’t happen because sometimes as a pastor, I’m reached out to in a benevolent situation, when you’re six months behind on your utilities, or four months, I’m like, why didn’t you come in like one month? What happened in one month, two months, three? And so, there’s something there about that, as far as reaching out.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
And then secondly, the other thing might be friendship and the shame of sanctification or struggling with sin. I’ll just use infidelity as an example. I’ve been shocked at the times when there’s been infidelity and a person small group or a person’s triad are like, “Wow, we didn’t see this coming.” I mean, how do you not see that coming? I thought friendship is like, hey, like back in stage one, I was struggling with my eyes this week. I mean, where’s the interaction of friendship and shame, whether it’s regarding something that might be an embarrassment, like losing your job and being broke, or whether it might be something of spiritual significance, of struggling and sin?

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Yeah. Oh, that’s such a good question. Kevin, one of the enemies to the kind of friendship that would keep us in the midst of adversity, one of the enemies to that friendship is a wrong view toward privacy. And so part of why we have those situations, whether it’s a benevolent situation, because we’ve had that a number of times, too, we just aren’t saying to the church publicly, don’t wait till you’re about to get evicted.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Yes.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
We can’t help there, right? Come early, and let us walk with you, whether it’s that situation or whether it’s things coming to light in terms of sin issue. That often, people have a wrong view to privacy. And that can be shame. Or on the other side, that can be pride, right?

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Yes.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And for men, the idea of privacy and the idea of self-reliance, those things get woven, I think, wrongly into the definition of what it means to be a man, right? So we wrongly think a man is independent self-made, not dependent upon others or attached to others, and his business is his own. And then we got cute little phrases like “No man’s an island unto himself.” Well, everything else we’re doing is putting him on an island by himself. And so, that’s part of the why or the how that happens is we begin to live on these islands of privacy and seclusion.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Our inner thought life is not known to anybody but us and God. Our lusts are not known to anybody but us and God, or maybe a few folks outside of the family of God, who we share those things with and we trust they’re not going to break that confidence, right? And so we start to build lives outside of the faith family. And we start to build identities outside of the faith family. And it’s not long before we live in a double life, right? And that gets exposed, whether it’s pornography, or marital unfaithfulness, or gambling, or just a whole bunch of things, right? And so I think we are groomed in the culture and in the church, to some extent, not to bring light onto ourselves, and to look like we have it together, and to look like we’re in control, when actually the more honest admission would be, “Guys, I’m messed up.” And say, “God, I don’t know what I’m doing.” Right.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
So, my dad left when I was 13. And my son’s 14 now. So everything I’m doing with him right now, I had no model for, right. I’m walking this through. He got exposed, through playing video games, he got exposed to pornography a little while back. And so, we’re processing that, adjusting controls on the video game, things of that sort. But that ain’t a conversation I had with dad. All that is new to me. And we try to motivate him in school. He’s having a wonderful school year this year. He seems to be motivated. He’s taking on such responsibility. But two years ago, [inaudible 00:36:41], I’m going to kill this kid. You ought to do your homework, boy. We covered the blows, man. And listeners, I’m joking, I’m joking.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
But I remember my wife and I agonizing, trying to lead him through that and shepherd his heart. And I remember going downstairs in my study one day and just sitting there and just flummoxed, and she came down. She wanted to talk some more. And I was talked out. And so I listened to her and she asked me a question. I just burst out crying. I said, “Man, I don’t know how to motivate him.” And you know what’s scary? He looks just like me at that age, right? And I know what was in my head. I don’t know how to get him out of that, right. So I wept and my wife said, “I had never seen you cry like that.” Well, why? Because, man, you hold that stuff in, we don’t let it out. We don’t do it with other men, certainly. We don’t do it with our wives. And so we just create mental health problems for ourselves. We bring physical health problems to ourselves, social health problems. We’ve got to find a way to get rid of that wrong notion of privacy, that wrong notion of self-reliance.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And again, we only need two or three like Jesus, right? Just two or three guys where we can say, fellas, I’m messed up. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to raise this boy. I don’t know how to raise this girl. My wife and I are arguing and I don’t know why. Or I know why and I don’t want to do anything about it. I’m tired. I’m exhausted. I want to quit. We got to get to places where we got a couple of guys in the family of faith who are intentionally covenanted together with us, with the love and holiness and solidarity and all the things we need.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And the last thing I’ll say, Kevin, is one of those things, too, that you can’t get it unless you do it, right? So, the people who say, “I want to read my Bible more.” Well, the only way to read your Bible more is to read your Bible more, right? You just got to sit yourself down, open it up, pray, press into it, press some more, press into it some more. You got to fight for it. And the same is true with friendship and this vulnerability and transparency. It’s not like it lands on your lap. So that passive approach won’t get you there. You got to let that passive approach go. And you just actually have to do it. You got to take a deep breath and say, fellas, I ain’t where I need to be. And let me tell you very specifically what I mean by that. So we got to also stop dealing with these vagaries, right?

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Yes, yes, yes.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And these euphemisms and saying things like, “I’m struggling with this sin.” No, you’re not struggling with it, you’re complying with it. You’re submitting-

Dr. Kevin Smith:
You’re in it. Right, yeah.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
That’s it, you’re in it. And so, we’ve got to stop using all these religious euphemisms and be really honest. It’s okay if it’s not Bible language. Tell the truth. Let your heart speak in that way and be really open with guys in that way.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Amen. Let me interject a homiletical point. If you are a pastor in the pulpit, or even if you’re a small group Bible teacher, it’s helpful to avoid illustrations where your eyes are showing your spiritual strength and your eyes are showing your spiritual victories, it can be very helpful in your preaching and teaching of the Word to show the whole or engage the whole of your spiritual walk. And I’m saying this assuming that you agree with Paul that we’ve not yet apprehended. They’re not listening to a perfect preacher in the pulpit. And also, that helps other disciple-makers and people in your congregation, that helps develop an atmosphere that really believes Biblical anthropology and really affirms that we are all growing in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
I’ll make my regular news on some appeal for consecutive exposition. Because if you walk consecutively to books and chapters in the Bible, you see the humanity of the people, and you get to engage those things. And again, don’t engage them away where be like me, or whatever, or any superficial way of just like, be like David, he was this. No. If you preach expositionally, you can unfold the wholeness of David, the ups and downs and mountains and the valleys of his walk, and especially in something like the Psalms, and it can be a real blessing to the fellowship in the relational dynamics within your congregation. But yeah, you said a lot of that tone pastors.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
I’ve had small groups. I’ve tried to do eight to 12 months with a small group of three to four guys. And I mean, it takes a month and a month and a half to just really get them to say, oh, okay, we could really say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you could really say whatever, whatever. I mean, I’m from southeast. I can say it better than you. I mean, yeah, yeah, this is just us for these eight to 12 months. And so just really that level of openness. I mean, I’m in my 50s and my kids are in their 20s. I say authenticity is a really big word with them. And so, if pastors, if other minister or pastor leaders in the congregation, if Sunday school or small group teachers, if any of these people have any air of whatever’s inauthenticity, it’s going to be hard to develop these types of legitimate relationships to facilitate sanctification.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Every believer just needs someone. The Bible says, “Confess our faults one to another.” I mean, when you get a friend, man, I think it’s organic. My family, we hate … I shouldn’t say that. My wife says, “Don’t say that.” We don’t like winter. She said to say you hate winter she thinks that’s disrespectful to the sovereignty of God who ordains the seasons. We don’t like winter. And we do Christmas in South Florida. So, I got a friend, sometimes I call him and say, “Man, you know what, down here on this beach in South Beach, ain’t it like really hardly, nobody does ugly.”

Dr. Kevin Smith:
And he’s going to say, “Yeah, man, I bet it’s just like Proverbs 7, ain’t it brother?” You got to have people you can just reach out to and not be, as you say, using spiritual language. Just speak of the struggles and friendship allows you to have … Remember, the Scripture says, “A brother is born for adversity.” Friendship allows you to have people to walk with you at struggling times. And we talked about spiritual issue. And the other things compared to the spiritual realities, these other things are superficial.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
No Christian brother who believes the Bible thinks you are defined by your bank account. So if you lose your job and you’re financially struggling, there’s no reason to not mention that to a friend. If you are single and you’re dating and the relationship breaks up, no friend, no brother thinks that that’s an impossibility in life. There’s no reason to hide those kinds of things. And if you’re discouraged by that, if you’re hurt by that, other brothers have been discouraged by that or hurt by that. And so we have to like just try to elevate our level of authenticity in our engagement with one another.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
That’s so good. From the pulpit to the pew. That’s so good, brother. As I listen to you talk about preachers in particular, it would be useful, I think, as a preacher to ask yourself, when’s the last time my congregation laughed at me? You know what I mean?

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Yes.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Where I told a story, not about your wife, but you tell a story about yourself in a sermon, or not humorous, you said something serious in a sermon about your limitation, when’s the last time my congregation mourned for me, concerned for me because I was being, as Kevin is saying, transparent. Paul says to Timothy, “Let your progress be evident to all.” It’s another one of those verses, I think, that’s full of grace, right, because it means you’re ain’t there yet. But we ought to be living transparently enough before the congregation that they can see us growing, so they can see our progress being made. And one simple way of doing that is preaching with the authenticity that you’re talking about. And that requires us not preaching the text like the text has no challenges for us. But stop using the word “you” so much. Talk about “we.” And start confessing more in our preaching in that way.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And then the other thing that strikes me, brother, is we’re talking about friendship and you’re talking about having friends that we admit things to, financial difficulty or whatever the case might be. That if something that happens in the heart of a friend, when they find out we’ve gone through something and didn’t tell them, it breaks the heart, doesn’t it?

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Yes.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Because those are people that love us, thought we knew that they loved us, thought we would give them the opportunity to be there for us. And when we don’t, we actually robbed them of grace too. Because when we express our need to people that we love and trust and we call friends, that actually communicates love to them. Love is not the outward wrapping of that package, right? The trouble or whatever is the outward wrapping. But in the box is this tacit admission that we love them enough to depend on them, to trust them, to extend ourselves to them, to open our hearts to them in that way. And that feels like love, that opportunity to respond and care for somebody. We’re not only expressing love, but we have felt ourselves to have been loved and invited into intimacies the way friends are.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And so when we withhold that, we actually ended a friendship. I mean, I know tons of people, myself included, who walked away from situation like that thinking, well, I thought we was boys. I thought we were friends. I thought we could trust each other with anything. What’s wrong with me that you would withhold that? Now, that wasn’t what we were thinking when we withheld it, right? That there was something wrong with them. In most cases, there might be some [inaudible 00:46:45] like, no, that dude can’t hold one, tell him nothing. Tell him nothing. So there might be a case like that. But ordinarily-

Dr. Kevin Smith:
That’s pride.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
… that’s pride and we’re injuring the friendship. I want to say it’s also a form of lovelessness. Because it’s such a proud love of self, and a protective love of self, that it really does feel like a lack of love to the friend who we’ve withheld ourselves from in that way.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Amen. Brother, you have been so gracious with your time. You have time to turn one more corner?

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Amen. I’m with you, brother.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Okay, I’m going to turn one more corner. “A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.” So we talked about shame or embarrassment, we talked about the struggle of sanctification. Also, adversity can come up between brothers. And so, I mean, either between us and our friendship, or one of us in the friendship is in the midst of adversity. And I think, for years, maybe just a decade, we’ve been obviously failing at that in Bible-believing Protestantism. The interplay between friendship in the midst of adversity. I don’t think friendship assumes that we are twins, that we are homogenous in thought, action and word. And yet, it seems that we need to do a better job of pursuing and nurturing friendships that can endure adversity, whether that’s adversity within the friendship, or a friend being in the midst of adversity.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
The previous example you just said, yeah, when someone is going through something and they don’t share something, you feel like, oh, I thought we were closer than that. And then another thing is when you’re going through something, and people you thought you were close with are like not there to stand with you. And I’m not talking about whatever people call it, second degree of separationism or third. I’m not talking about my friends are your … I’m just talking about when a friend, when someone who’s a friend is in the midst of conflict or adversity, where do you stand as a friend? And then if you all are friends, can your friendship endure disagreement? Speak to those issues, if you would.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Man, that’s so good. I think one of the things I want to say about situations like that is that that’s actually a time where we often need the whole covenant community, where we actually need the whole church. Because those become situations where we don’t have resources for resolving adversity in the friendship itself, in the two or three that are involved. Of course, my pattern for that would be Philippians 4, where Paul says, beginning in verse 2, “I entreat Euodia and I entreat Syntyche to agree in the Lord. Yes, I ask you also, true companion.” That’s a language of friendship, right?

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Yeah, yeah.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
“… true companion, help these women, who have labored side by side with me in the gospel together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life.” Now, what I think is really wonderful about this little paragraph here are the several affirmations that come from the covenant community that help us with our minds, man, when we are locked in conflict with our friends, right? So, let me just take off a couple of those. Right at the end, Paul says their names are written in the Book of Life. He’s affirming that they are Christians, right?

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Yes.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And when we get in certain kinds of conflict with fellow Christians, the first thing we do is start doubting whether or not they’re Christians, right?

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Yes.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
It’s like [inaudible 00:50:37] he’s saying the word, right? And what does that do? Well, that opens the door for us to withdraw even further, and now to have what we think is spiritual justification, right? But in the covenant community, there’s this affirmation still of the fact that people are in the faith, and that’s how we’re going to deal with it. Well, the second thing that Paul says near the end of this is that these women labored side by side with him in the Gospel together with Clement, and the rest of my fellow workers.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Well, that language of fellow workers, I am working side by side, Paul uses that often in his letters to talk about his ministry team. And so what he’s saying is not only are they Christians, but they have been and are fruitful for the Gospel, for the work of ministry. And so to affirm people as having made deposits of grace in our lives, deposits of grace in the life of the Church, of being useful to God and the Gospel despite the conflict, remembering that usefulness, that needs, too, to be motivating us in this work of reconciliation and repairing of friendships.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And then the last thing that I’ll say here is when he says in verse 3, “Yes, I ask you also, true companion, help these women.” It really is clear, as we said a moment ago, that when our friendships hit adversity, where the adversity is between the friends, we need help, right? And we need help from other folks who understand friendship. Paul said, hey, true companion, you know what friendship is, right?

Thabiti Anyabwile:
You know how to come alongside people. You’ve done that for me, you’re true, you’re faithful, you’re loyal. Do that here with these brothers and sisters, too, right? Because the thing that they have lost, they’ve lost sight of how to be friends with each other right now. And I need people around them who have not lost sight of that and can help them straighten out their heads, and get on with the business of being friends.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And the last that’s said here, that accountability from the covenant community brings a loving pressure on the conflicting parties to basically pursue one thing. And he says it in verse 2, agree with each other. He says, basically, I’m asking you to help these two women agree. And it’s surprising, brother, how often we get into these conflicts and we forget that agreement is a choice, right? It’s an act of volition, it’s an act of will. We can choose to agree or we can choose to disagree.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
And it should be a preferred end.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
That’s precisely where he starts. He says, “Help them agree,” right? And sometimes we need the whole church to help us agree. This is what Jesus teaches in Matthew 18, in a different context, ain’t it?

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Yeah.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
A certain point, they can’t work it out one on one. Take two or three others with you, can’t work it out there, tell it to the whole church, while the whole church is trying to exhort us to turn and to walk in a manner in keeping with the Gospel of Christ, right? And so, I would say that when people find themselves locked up that way, go find that brother or sister who’s a true companion in the church, and say, “We need help. We’re stuck. Help us agree.” Right? And help us to affirm each other as brothers and sisters in the Lord and help us to affirm each other in terms of being useful to the work of Christ and the gospel, and help us learn again what it is to be companions, because we have lost the way we’ve lost sight of that. And so there, too, again, I know the church, for a lot of people, is a place of hurt, but it is the church that God uses to heal us of church hurt.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Amen.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
And so to stay in the church with the people of God, and to receive that help is I think … if I were leaving people with one strategy when they get stuck, that would be it.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Amen. Amen. We pray that this conversation of friendship has been a blessing and challenge you to consider some things spiritually and biblically. Certainly, I would encourage you that the self-preservation individualistic, Western autonomous, individualism approach of our society is certainly not the Biblical model. Whether you’re talking about the apostles being sent out together, Jesus and his disciples, the apex of the monarchy, so is David and his fighting men, David and his advisors, the subsequent kings to David, they didn’t make decisions, whether good or bad, they didn’t make those things in isolation. They had advisors, they had true prophets or false prophets, but they had advisors and engagements. Moses and Joshua, Moses and Aaron, Moses and Mary, there’s no isolationists in the Bible. And I just want to encourage you to consider the things that we’ve discussed.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
We believe in the Great Commission, the Great Commandment. We believe all the things that many Christians say they want for the church and want the church to be in our society. But all those things are empowered by the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ. And relational dysfunction, relational sin, lovelessness grieves and quenches the Holy Spirit, or in other words, causes Him to withdraw His operative powers from us and then we have a powerless church and that will not bring God glory.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Pastor Thabiti, I say Pastor T, homeboy from Anacostia, servant in the spot, we are so thankful for your presence on Peculiar People. Brother, I love you. I love the ministry. We pray God will use you in fruitful, fruitful, fruitful ways. We praise God for your blessed wife and the things that He is using her to do her writing ministry, her encouragement of other sisters. And so, it is a joy just to be able to spend time with you and talk about a matter that I know is important to you because, again, I’ve heard you mentioned it multiple times. And I pray that the Lord will give us some relationships that would honor him.

Dr. Kevin Smith:
Thank you for listening to Peculiar People. And until next time, we pray God’s richest blessings upon you.

Thabiti Anyabwile:
Amen. Amen.

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