I don’t need a friend as much as I need a prophet

My daughter is currently going through the hurricane of building young adult friendships that include the painful process of finding those who can be included in, as the movie "Meet the Parents" calls it, “the circle of trust” and discovering the many that can’t. She hates to hear me say she’ll be lucky to have enough real friends in her adult life to fill up the finger count on one hand and, in all reality, it will likely be less.

That’s a hard truth to accept especially given the fact that we mirror the image of our trinitarian God whose very nature is relational. This means we’re built for real friendships and it’s sad to note that, as Tim Keller said in a message, the vast majority of people today only associate with someone because they believe that person can help them in some way.

Given this, it’s no surprise that churches work overtime in their “connection” ministry to bring members together and there are worlds of good that are achieved in that area of a church. But that idea and priority of friendship have filtered upward to the pastorship, and with that have come some negative consequences.

What’s a prophet again?

I’m about the last person on the planet to describe the intricate and sometimes voodoo-like nature of friendships, but experience has taught me that 1. Tim Keller is spot on with his assessment of why most people associate with others, and 2. our desire to be liked and “friended” — at nearly all costs — is uber destructive and can end up ultimately hurting those with whom we interact.

This gets me back to the point of church leaders today prioritizing being friends with their members over being their prophet. And to be honest, while I’m all for having friends, when it comes to my personal holiness and walk with Christ, I need a prophet way more than I need a friend.

I’m betting right now that the way I’m referencing the word “prophet” is throwing some of you for a loop, so let me define what I mean. When Paul lists “prophecy” in the 1 Cor. 12 lists of spiritual gifts, the word prophéteia in that context means, “the gift of communicating and enforcing revealed truth” and is not referring to future, predictive revelation. Paul underlines this meaning a couple of chapters later when he says: “But one who prophesies speaks to men for edification and exhortation and consolation” (1 Cor. 14:3).

So, now that we’re on the same page with what a prophet is today, what exactly does Scripture say they are primarily supposed to do? Let me answer that in a negative fashion: not be accommodators, people pleasers, and “friends” in the way that our culture socially defines the term.

Prophets of God, whether they were given future revelation or simply told to preach already revealed truth, have always had the job of protecting God’s people, pointing out errors, and saying the hard things that need to be said. This means they were oftentimes disliked, dismissed, mistreated, and worse.

Naturally, this description makes us think of Jeremiah, Isaiah, and other Old Testament personalities, but the “walk” of the prophet has been this way up to the present day. As just one example, the great Jonathan Edwards was thrown out of his own church simply because he asked his members to follow the biblical example of examining themselves (1 Cor. 11:28-29) to validate a genuine faith before they took communion.     

Such risks are hard pills for pastors to swallow and so many find it easier to evade the inevitable confrontations that come with the prophet’s job by simply not saying or doing anything remotely “controversial”, which today equates to tackling spiritual error and sin. But in doing so, they fall right into the trap mentioned by Paul where unbelievers implicitly lead the pastor: “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths (1 Tim. 4:3-4).

The easiest way for pastors to not rock the boat from the pulpit is by avoiding biblical exposition. Going verse-by-verse always leads to difficult subjects and hard truths that collide with spiritual compromise and anti-biblical cultural beliefs. This is why the lack of biblical exposition is a hallmark of spiritually handicapped churches (including those that say they do exposition but always seem to skip over the tough verses).

Walking the fine line between friend and prophet

All this leads to the question of, can a pastor be both a prophet and a friend to their members? Of course, and as always, Christ serves as the perfect example.

It’s pretty amazing that the Son of God would call us His friends, but He has: “No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).

But Christ also emphasized His authority over His flock when He said, “You call Me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am” (John 13:13). You can’t get around the fact that Jesus had some pretty tough things to say to His sheep in His role as their Prophet, but His admonitions fell in line with being the right kind of friend described in Proverbs: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (27:6).

It may just be me, but what I find lacking in so much preaching today is the authority and directness that Christ manifests in His biographies, which His representatives are supposed to possess as well. Put another way, I don’t find myself “wounded” unless I sit under solid expositional teachers who, “reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction” (1 Tim. 4:2).

Like you, I can easily slip into sin, compromise in areas I shouldn’t, and forget my first love (Rev. 2:4). And that’s why, especially today, I need a prophet so much more than I need a ‘friend’.