Gospel Friendships with Kristyn Getty
Do you long for deep gospel friendships? As members of the body of Christ, when we are friends, we are friends in Christ. We are united by his blood, which means that our connection goes deeper than any other possible bond. In this episode, Hunter talks with Kristyn Getty about the beauty of gospel friendships. Kristyn shares about her own friendship with Joni Eareckson Tada, and how we can grow in our friendships with one another through the myriad of means God has given us, such as worshiping together, praying together, and sitting under and studying God’s Word together. We hope this episode encourages you to press into your own friendships as you grow in love and godliness together!
Kristyn and her husband, Keith, are the founders of Getty Music. She is an award-winning hymn writer and the author of Sing! and a children's biography of Joni Eareckson Tada. Kristyn and Keith live in Nashville with their four children.
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
Tell us a little about your friendship with Joni Eareckson Tada. How did you become friends?
What have you learned from watching the way Joni lives? (Share some of her story here for those who aren't familiar with her.)
How has your friendship with Joni encouraged you to persevere when life is hard? How has it encouraged you to serve the Lord wherever he has you with whatever he's given you?
How has your shared love for theology and hymns brought you and Joni closer in friendship?
How would you encourage women to develop friendships around the Word? What have you found helpful as you've sought to develop relationships like this?
How have your gospel friends challenged and encouraged you to run hard after Jesus, even if you only know them at a distance?
How can we be the type of friend that challenges and encourages others to live for Jesus? How does knowing and loving Jesus and calling him our closest friend enable us to be better friends to others?
Who are some of your other "gospel friends" (dead or alive) who have encouraged you in your walk with the Lord? How have they done that?
NOTES & QUOTES
[Joni’s hope for the book] “I hope that it would help dissipate fears of suffering and to instill in them a confidence that God is worthy of their trust.”
“Joni is someone who has followed the Lord in these difficult circumstances so incredibly faithfully for so long. And I think the older you get and the longer you follow the Lord, when you find somebody who's further on the road than you, who has been so uniquely tested and yet still shines so brightly for the truth of the gospel, you listen more carefully to what they say.”
“The Christian walk continues to be the same basic things it was at beginning. You're fighting for them until the end. Some days are easier than others, but singing the truth, reading the truth, praying the truth—these things never grow old. There are always disciplines to be grown, and without them we are weak.”
“Joni, I think her suffering has taught her this deep-centered gratitude, which is like a force field against cynicism. It's just extraordinary.”
“Sometimes the biggest attack on our devotional life and our godliness is we put too many things in our calendar.”
“When we understand these things in the Scriptures, we understand them in the community of the people of God, of the church. We're not meant to run it alone.”
Insight #1
Throughout this conversation you’ll hear Hunter and Kristyn talk a lot about “gospel friendship.” So what does that term mean?
We see a beautiful definition of this kind of gospel friendship in John 15, where Jesus teaches his disciples about the importance of abiding in him—the vine—and where he describes the depths of his love for them. Jesus himself is the ultimate model of gospel friendship, a friendship that is embodied by genuine love and self-sacrifice (even to the point of death).
As members of the body of Christ, when we are friends, we are friends in Christ. We are united by his blood, which means that our connection goes deeper than any other possible bond. As members of the body of Christ, we can grow in our friendships with one another through the myriad of means that God has given us, such as worshiping together, praying together, and sitting under and studying God’s Word together.
Friend, if you are listening to this episode and are longing for this type of friendship, may we encourage you to take a step towards it? Maybe you can start by committing yourself to a local church body, where you can find those fellow members of the body of Christ with whom you already share so much in common. Maybe it’s reaching out to a woman you’ve had conversations with at church and asking her to study the Bible with you. Or maybe it’s just taking the time to ask intentional, spiritual questions to the friends who are already in your life to take the friendship to a deeper level.
Whatever that step is, we hope as you take it you find that there is so much beauty in friendships forged in Christ!
Insight #2
Hunter just touched on such an important—in fact the most important—aspect of this whole conversation: our friendship with Jesus. These rich gospel friendships that Hunter and Kristyn have been talking about…they can only be based on our own personal friendships with Christ himself.
And that friendship starts at the point of salvation, when we come to know God as friend, Lord, and Savior through Christ. Scripture tells us that all it takes to know Christ in this way is to believe (Rom. 10:9, John 3:16, John 14:6)—to believe that Jesus is Lord, that he died for the salvation of man and that God raised him from the dead to secure our eternal relationship and friendship with the Father!
When we come to know God in this way, we are invited into a lifelong friendship with the God of the universe. We see a tangible picture of what this friendship can look like all throughout Scripture. The book of Exodus says that Moses spoke to God “face-to-face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Ex. 33:11), James says that Abraham was called a “friend of God” (James 2:23), and in the book of Psalms, we see David and the other psalmists talk to the Lord like a friend—celebrating, grieving, crying out to, and leaning on God in all of the ups and downs of life.
Friend, this type of friendship with God is offered to you in Christ! May you treasure this friendship more than all others, and may you seek to grow in love and friendship with God every single day.
RESOURCES
Joni Eareckson Tada: The Girl Who Learned to Follow God in a Wheelchair by Kristyn Getty
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
How does knowing Jesus and calling him your closest friend enable you to be a better friend to others?
How have the friendships in your life encouraged you to persevere when life is hard?
How have you experienced your friendships grow around the Word of God?
How might you be the type of friend who challenges and encourages others to live for Jesus?
What might you do or implement based on what you learned in this week’s episode?
PAST CONVERSATIONS WITH KRISTYN AND JONI
IMPORTANT NOTE
Journeywomen interviews are intended to serve as a springboard for continued study in the context of your local church. While we carefully select guests each week, interviews do not imply Journeywomen's endorsement of all writings and positions of the interviewee or any other resources mentioned.
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