Build Godly Friendships
Three key takeaways
Nobody is formed alone. God shapes people through relationships. Even David, prepared among the sheep, was further shaped by a friend who stood beside him, and the same is true for you.
Real friendship is covenant love, not convenience. The Hebrew word hesed describes a loyal love that goes beyond duty, and it echoes the way God loves. Friendship of this kind is faithful in hard times and honest when honesty hurts.
The greater Friend has already stood in your place. Jesus is the greater Jonathan and the greater David, and he welcomes you to his table as you are. Because you have been welcomed, you are called to welcome others and to go out together.
Crowded, yet alone
London is one of the most crowded cities on earth. Millions of people stand shoulder to shoulder on the tube, in queues and on buses, and most of them never exchange a word. It is one of the great paradoxes of the city: so full of people, and yet so many are lonely. Proximity is easy. Partnership is rare.
This matters because relationships shape you, probably more than you realise. You come to talk like the people you live around, and the people you choose to spend time with help determine the person you become. No one becomes who God has made them to be without others alongside them. Faith is a journey of formation, and formation happens in community.
The story of David and Jonathan shows this clearly. Behind the giant slayer and future king stood a friend who gave up his own crown to stand by him. That story points beyond itself to a greater king, who has bound himself to you in friendship and pulls up a chair for you at his table.
Standing side by side
To understand the difference Jonathan makes, consider the situation. In 1 Samuel 15, God rejects Saul as king, and in chapter 16 he sends Samuel to Bethlehem to anoint a shepherd boy named David. For David, this is the beginning of a calling. For Jonathan, Saul’s oldest son and the next in line, it is costly. God’s choice of David cost him the throne.
You would expect a relationship like that to be full of tension, jealousy and bitterness. Instead, Jonathan and David stand together. Why?
C. S. Lewis offers a helpful picture. Lovers, he observed, stand face to face, absorbed in each other. Friends stand side by side, absorbed in something they share. They look forward together at something beyond themselves. That is what Jonathan and David did. A prince who should have been a rival and a shepherd who would become a king stood side by side, looking towards the purposes of God.
The New Testament uses the same language. Paul thanks the Philippians for their partnership in the gospel, and urges them to strive side by side for the faith of the gospel (Philippians 1:27). The word for partnership carries the idea of shared participation and a common stake in one another. It is closer to being a shareholder in a family business than an employee on a wage. A shareholder cares about the bottom line, about what happens and how people are. In the same way, a church is a family in which each person has a stake in the others, standing side by side for the sake of the king and the kingdom of God.
Giving up the crown
First Samuel 18:1 says that the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David. Jonathan made a covenant with David and gave him his robe and his shield. He laid down his privileges because he saw what God was doing in David’s life, and he stepped aside gladly.
The Old Testament scholar Dale Ralph Davis observes how remarkable this is: Jonathan’s security lay in God’s purposes, not in his position. He anticipates John the Baptist, who said of Jesus, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Jonathan’s trust in God was already evident in 1 Samuel 14:6, before the two men ever met. Their hearts were knit together in trust in God. In natural terms, Jonathan had no reason to give any of it up. Only trust in God’s purposes makes sense of it.
This is Romans 12:10 in action: “Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honour.” It is also deeply countercultural. London rewards self-promotion in careers, housing, schools and even ministry. Jonathan handing over his robe runs in the opposite direction. It raises a searching question: whose success are you willing to celebrate ahead of your own? Part of trusting God’s purposes is rejoicing in what God is doing in other people’s lives, even more than in your own.
Loyal and truthful when it costs
The murderous jealousy you might expect in this story does appear, but in Saul, not Jonathan. Saul’s rage puts Jonathan in an impossible position. He honours David and what God is doing, yet he is also the king’s son. Spears are thrown at him and arrows are fired for holding that tension.
At the end of their friendship, Jonathan asks David not to cut off his steadfast love from his house for ever. When a new king takes the crown, the normal practice is to remove the previous royal family. Jonathan appeals to David’s love using the word hesed. It means loyal, covenant love that goes beyond what duty requires. It is the word God uses of himself, which is why it matters so much. The love people show one another is meant to echo the love God shows them.
Tim Keller observed that the friendship described in Proverbs is marked by constancy and candour. Proverbs 17:17 says, “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.” Hard times often reveal who your friends are. Yet true friends also tell the truth, because “faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Proverbs 27:6). When a friend says something difficult, it shows they care enough to say it. Jonathan was both. He stayed loyal to David even against his own father, and he told David the truth about the danger he was in.
Galatians 6:2 says, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” It prompts honest questions. Do you know the burdens of the people alongside you? Are you carrying them with them?
In a transient city this is costly. Many people in London are arriving, leaving, changing jobs or moving flats, and it is tempting to look for whoever is convenient. The invitation is to look beyond convenience to covenant friendship, which means investing in people who might move away and being loyal at a cost. Are you willing to love people without a guaranteed return? That is what Jonathan did for David.
Strengthened in the wilderness
David became a fugitive, hunted and exhausted. At a place called Horesh, Jonathan came to him and strengthened his hand in God. He brought no new revelation. He reminded David of what God had already promised: “You shall be king over Israel, and I shall be next to you.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in Life Together that Christ in your own heart is weaker than Christ in the word of a brother. Under enough pressure, you may be unable to speak God’s promises over yourself. That is when you need someone else to speak them over you, and it is what true friends do.
This was their last meeting. Jonathan died in battle at Gilboa, and David was devastated. His lament includes the words, “Your love to me was extraordinary.” Losing a friend is a real grief, and it is right to mourn.
Scripture’s instruction to “encourage one another and build one another up” (1 Thessalonians 5:11) is no shallow pleasantry. It can be the difference between someone giving up and someone continuing in the purposes God has for their life. Hebrews 10:24-25 puts it this way: “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, but encouraging one another.”
A seat at the king’s table
Years later, David is king. The normal practice would be to wipe out the old dynasty and secure his reign. Instead, in 2 Samuel 9, David asks whether anyone is left of the house of Saul, so that he may show them kindness for Jonathan’s sake. The word is hesed again: a covenant promise kept to a friend long dead.
They find Mephibosheth, Jonathan’s son. He is lame in both feet and living in Lo-debar, a name that means “no pasture” or a place of nothing. He lost his father at five and had never been in any covenant with David. When summoned, he comes trembling, calls himself a dead dog and expects judgement. David says, “Do not fear.” He restores Jonathan’s land and gives Mephibosheth a permanent place at his table, where he eats “like one of the king’s sons.”
That is hesed, and it is what love really looks like. It is also your story. Like Mephibosheth, you are an outsider to the promises of God, lame and living in a place of nothing, even a rebel. Yet you are welcomed to the table that Jesus opens, not because of anything in you but because of a covenant made by another on your behalf (Romans 5:17, 19). Charles Spurgeon loved one detail in the account: Mephibosheth was still lame at David’s table. Grace does not wait for you to be fixed before it seats you. It meets you as you are.
Romans 15:7 says, “Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” This verse roots every “one another” in the welcome you have received. You welcome because you have been welcomed. And there are Lo-debars all around London, places of desolation and people who feel forgotten. David went looking, asking whether anyone was left to welcome. Is there someone in your life, among those you live or work around, who needs inviting to God’s table?
Sent out side by side
You are not only welcomed but sent, and never alone. Jesus sent his disciples out two by two, first the twelve and then the seventy-two, into every town and place he was about to visit. London can make you feel that you have to head down and manage alone. Jesus never intended it that way.
Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 says, “Two are better than one... For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow.” This is a proverb of Solomon, the son of David, passed on as a family inheritance. God’s people are called to covenant friendship with one another and to go into the city together, carrying the welcome they have received to the Lo-debars around them.
The faithful friend
David and Jonathan display a beautiful human faithfulness. Yet human friendship ends, and promises between people can be broken or cut short. Jonathan died.
Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends,” and, “I have called you friends.” He is the greater Jonathan, the prince who gave up everything, leaving the glory of heaven to live among people and to die to rescue them. He is the greater David, the king who keeps his covenant to the utmost, even to the very end. “If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself” (2 Timothy 2:13). And in Hebrews 13:5 he promises, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
Whatever your situation, he stands side by side with you. If you feel like Mephibosheth, coming from a place of nothing, the king is asking for you by name. He wants to place his robe around you and seat you at his table. And if you have followed him for a long time, the question becomes personal. Who is your Jonathan, strengthening your hand when you have come to the end of yourself? Whose Jonathan can you be, speaking God’s promises over their life again? Who is in Lo-debar, and who will go with you to invite them?
At redemption
Redemption is a church that understands itself as a family standing side by side, rather than a collection of individuals who happen to share a space. The story of David and Jonathan shapes how the church thinks about belonging: each person has a stake in the others, and love for one another flows from the welcome all have received in Christ.
That conviction shows up in the way people are encouraged to know one another’s burdens, to speak God’s promises into hard seasons and to celebrate what God is doing in other lives. It also shapes mission. Because Jesus sends his people out in twos, the church’s seed groups exist so that many small groups of people can go into the city together, serving London and carrying the welcome they have received to its Lo-debars.
