Book Review: Iron Sharpens Iron

By Michael Haykin

Despite our country’s heritage of valuing mateship, Australians are surprisingly lonely. In 2018, the Guardian reported on a study about loneliness that revealed more than one in five respondents rarely or never feel close to people and don’t feel they have anyone they can turn to for help. And this was before COVID-19—research from last year suggests the pandemic has made those who were previously lonely even lonelier.

The loneliness that comes from lack of friendships has terrible effects on our health—mental illness, suicide, premature death, poor sleep, and high blood pressure are just a handful of the outcomes that have been linked to social isolation. But what about the effect on our spiritual lives? I suspect many believers are lacking in our holiness and Christian maturity for want of real friends. Loneliness is a health crisis and a spiritual crisis.

Michael Haykin explores the value of friendship for believers in his book Iron Sharpens Iron: Friendship and the Grace of God, released last year. There are many excellent Christian books on friendship (see a collection from Reformers Bookshop), but this one takes a unique historical approach. Haykin explores the friendships of the 18th-century pastors Andrew Fuller and John Ryland, drawing out wisdom for us in our relationships today. 

Spiritual Friendship

When Haykin talks about friendship, he’s not referring to your Facebook connections—that old cabinmate from school camp, the friend-of-a-friend you met at a party once, or the man you say hi to whenever you pass him at church (though you never stop for a proper conversation). As pleasant as it may be to know these people, they’re not who Haykin has in view.

Spiritual growth doesn’t come from just anything we slap the label “friendship” on. Rather, true friends are “those with whom one can share the deepest things of one’s life” (36). I love the description of friendship Haykin quotes from John Collet Ryland (the father of John Ryland):

Spiritual friendship is a pleasing attraction of the heart toward the beautiful and good qualities which we esteem, and the amiable image of God we admire in true Christians—which produces a mutual inclination between two or more persons to promote each other’s holiness and happiness. This spiritual friendship is the union of souls by means of vital holiness, which is the common cement or bond of their mutual and ardent affection. (133n3)

This “union of souls” is beautiful and precious—and costly. Not just for the sacrifices made to sustain and feed the relationship but in what will inevitably happen: they end. When Andrew Fuller died in 1815, Ryland preached his funeral sermon. He spoke out of deep grief: “Never will my loss be repaired upon earth!” (113–14). 

Yet in the heartbreak of losing a dear friend, there’s also deep comfort. Truly spiritual friendships, where both people love and trust Jesus and are devoted to helping each other do so more and more, will live on for eternity. Haykin describes the sermon preached at Ryland’s funeral by his friend Robert Hall Jr.:

Friendships in Christ have “an endless duration,” Hall went to emphasize, and when the heavens and this world are no more, they will “spring fresh from the ashes of the universe.” Such friendships that have piety and true religion for their basis “will ere long be transplanted, in order to adorn the paradise of God.” (125)

Value of Friendships

Throughout Iron Sharpens Iron, we come to grasp why friendship is so valuable, why we should consider it a means of God’s grace in our lives. 

In Fuller’s funeral sermon, Ryland spoke of one of the central blessings of their friendship—they were always willing to reprove one another for the sake of growing in holiness (122–23). This is a common theme throughout the book. True friends seek one another’s eternal good through encouragement to follow Jesus with everything they have.

Through the lives of Ryland and Fuller, we also see friendship as a powerful force propelling the glory of Christ through global missions. Both men, along with John Sutcliff, were good friends with William Carey. Fuller compared Carey’s move to India as a missionary as descending into a deep mine, and the group “pledged themselves to ‘hold the ropes’ for as long as Carey lived” (48).

How many more believers would boldly go to the ends of the earth to proclaim the gospel if they had close, solid, godly friends to “hold the ropes”? Perhaps if we can overcome the weaknesses of our modern age and develop flourishing spiritual friendships, they could be a surprising engine of revival in our churches, neighbourhoods, countries, and globe as we seek to “inflame [our friends’] hearts and strengthen their wills in God’s service” (82). 

As I read Iron Sharpens Iron, I was prompted to thank God for the friends he has given me. By his grace, I have people both nearby and on the other side of the world with whom I share a deep “union of hearts.” I count this among the greatest blessings God has given me.

At the same time, I was challenged to take my friendships more seriously as means of grace—to truly consider them spiritual friendships. Perhaps you’ll come away from the book with the same questions in your mind: Am I inviting friends to point out and speak into my sin, so as to eagerly grow in holiness? How am I spurring on my friends to love and follow God? Are my friendships merely making me more comfortable where I am, or are the strengthening me to spend myself for the cause of Christ, wherever he may lead me?