Morning. >> It’s good to be with you. I know I shouldn’t say this, but uh been rejoicing all week that Charlene has moved from a wheelchair to a walker to a single crutch. And we’re all hoping that soon the only crutch she’ll need will be her religion. I told you I shouldn’t have said that, but I couldn’t resist. Hey, thanks to those who uh tore down our our sanctuary decorations this week. They you’ve helped make January as drab and dreary as it’s always meant to be. And um all of us probably in our homes have disassembled our Christmas. And if you’re one of those who ever puts up a natural Christmas tree, you know that once it’s set up and it’s all cluttered up with decorations, it smells beautiful, it looks beautiful, uh for as long as we can manage. But if you put it up in early December, no matter how much sugar water you give it to drink, by New Year’s Day, the needles are brown and they’re falling off. You’re very much aware that it’s not a living thing anymore because to bring it into our home and to sever it, we severed it from its connection to life. So lastly, it’s significant because last week in John chapter 15, we looked at Jesus’ well-known metaphor where he declares himself the vine and his followers the branches. And apart from our connection to him, he says we we can bear no fruit. We have no life in us. And if we’re not drawing the sap from the vine, it’s just a matter of time before our needles start getting brown and falling off in our lives. So Jesus’ message to us is that we’re to remain in him, which also means he says to remain in his words, drawing from his nourishment. And the final verse we looked at last week says, “This is to my father’s glory that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.” Now, again, this week, our call to bear fruit, to be fruit bearing people is going to come at the end of our passage. But where last week Jesus spoke of uh our fruitbearing connection with him in an organic way as branches attached to the vine, this week he speaks of our connection to him in a relational way as his friends. Which is pretty stunning to think about because is there any other religion in the world which dares to make the relationship of the worshipped to the worshipper one of friendship? I think every other religion emphasizes distance. All the moves need to be done in the right way in order to approach the unapproachable. So there’s a series of actions that take place. There’s lighting a candle or wearing the right clothes or bowing down on a carpet or repeating a phrase, kissing a picture, uh placing a gift in front of an altar or a shrine. Of course, with Jesus, we do worship him as our King of Kings and our Lord of Lords. And it’s not at all inappropriate for us to bow down before him in prayer. But our worship of Jesus always retains a glow of friendship that no other religion ever gets close to. So we’re looking at nine verses this morning. And three times Jesus speaks of his followers as his friends. He’s teaching us about friendship and the paradigm Jesus uses for our relationship with him is the eternal relationship he has with his father. He repeatedly uses his relationship with his father as the paradigm for his disciples relationship with him. So in verse 9, he says, “As the father has loved me, so I have loved you.” Verse 10, “If you obey my commands, you’ll remain in my love. Just as I have obeyed my father’s commands and remain in his love.” Verse 15, “I have called you friends. For everything I I learned from my father, I’ve made known to you.” So Jesus speaks about his relationship with his father as the thing that motivates and directs his relationship with us. The closeness of Jesus with his father directs his closeness with us and helps us comprehend then why he would look at us and call us his friends. You know this this is mysterious but the trinity the relationship of the father and the son and the holy spirit to each other demonstrates that in eternity past long before our world was ever created there was relationship there was mutual love there was friendship and one of the first things that the trinity the triune god wished to pass on to his creatures is that same gift of relationship of mutual love and friendship because Adam the first created human had no deficiency ies no need except one. In a perfect garden, he had no sin to trouble his own soul. But God saw that it wasn’t good for him to be alone. So even a perfect Adam was lonely in a way that the triune God had never been lonely. So God rectified that by giving Adam someone to love and talk to and share and work with. So Adam made in the very image of God, made to be like God in that fashion, was incomplete without relationship. As the triune God’s always been in relationship, Adam needed to be in relationship as well. So that what that tells us is that we get lonely not because there’s something wrong with us. For humans who are made in the image of God, loneliness, it’s a feature. It’s not a bug. That’s something that’s uh that’s gone arry in our lives. Our loneliness presses us into relationship with others. It opens up the pores of our souls to start seeking out friendship and seek out love. Seek out love from other people. Now, some of you far more gregarious and outgoing, and others, like me, a little more self-contained, content to live inside our heads a good bit at the time. But it’d still be devastating, be miserable for any of us if we had no relationships, if we had no friends. Some of you have personalities and capacity. You can enjoy 500 friendships, and I might be content with five, but none of us can do without the kind of friendships that God provides for us. So, if you’re lonely, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. It just shows that God has put something in you. It’s like a homing device, a desire that God’s put in you that yearns for and magnetically attracts you to the contact of friendship. And church at its best is meant to be a very good place to find and to look for those kinds of friendships. So far so good in this passage. But where our passage gets a little more troubling is that friendship o with Jesus is bound up with our obedience. Jesus says, “You are my friends if you do what I command.” No human relationship, no human friendship is like that at all. We don’t ever expect our friends to do whatever we tell them to. That’s what marriage is for. As a bit of an aside, what I find delightful in CS Lewis’s Narnia books, some of the little throwaway lines and the little inside jokes that he inserts and I imagine must have left a real sly grin on his face as he wrote them. And in one of his books, the horse and his boy, two main characters, a boy named Corin and a girl named Arabus. And throughout their adventures, they don’t always get along very well. As Lewis ties up the story, in the final paragraph of the book, he writes, “Aravis also had many quarrels, I’m afraid, even fights with Core. But they always made it up again. So that years later, when they were grown up, they were so used to quarreling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.” Now certainly a spousal relationship carries more weight and responsibility and demands than any friendship relationship. Marriage involves going out of our way to please our spouse in a manner that we usually don’t feel called to do with people who are our friends. So it strikes us as odd then when Jesus makes the comment in verse 10, if you obey my commands, you’ll remain in my love. And in verse 14, you’re my friends if you do what I command. Don’t have any friendships, human friendships like that at all. One thing we need to be clear about our relationship with God uh the father with his son Jesus Christ is that unlike human friendships, it’s not a reciprocal relationship. Our relationship with God is never a 50-50 proposition. I had lunch this week with with Terry. He’s a pastor of a vineyard church. They worshiped in Knox Church here for in the afternoons a few years ago. And when Terry and I have lunch together, there’s always a reciprocal element to it. You know, I might buy lunch this time and I would expect him to buy the next and we might forget and get it mixed up occasionally. But all of our friendships usually have a kind of easy give and take reciprocity to them. But not with Jesus. We can’t turn around and say to Jesus that we’ll only be his friends if he does what we say. But he can certainly say that to us. In the Old Testament, both Abraham and Moses are referred to as friends of God. But it’s never the other way around. God is never called the friend of Abraham or the friend of Moses. In fact, Moses trembled before God. He pleaded before God. He obeyed. He wasn’t allowed to see the full glory of God. Though he’s called a friend of God, it’s not a reciprocal relationship. John 11, Jesus can refer to Lazarus as his friend, but Jesus is not called the friend of Lazarus. Neither God the Father nor Jesus is ever referred to in scripture as the friend of anyone. Language of friendship always flows downhill. It doesn’t flow uphill. So, commentator Don Carson writes, “This does not mean that either God or Jesus is an unfriend. If one measures friendship strictly on the basis of who loves most, then guilty sinners can find no better and truer friend than in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the Son whom he has sent. But mutual reciprocal friendship of the modern variety is not in view and cannot be in view without demeaning God. It does not demean our holy God for him to call us his friends. But it is demeaning if we think of our relationship or our friendship with God as reciprocal as with any other fellow human being. Think of it this way. In in God, we’ll never have a better friend. But in us, God could surely do a lot better. In our disproportionate, non-rescrocal friendship with Jesus, he has every right then to call us to obedience. He says, “If you obey my commands, you’ll remain in my love. You’re my friends if you do what I command.” And in human friendships, of course, demands are negotiated. Authority is mutual with Jesus. Authority is absolute. And his love and his friendship is graciously offered to us. So Jesus calls us friends not because we’re his equals, but because he chooses to draw us close to him while remaining our Lord the whole time. So in our passage, Jesus chooses us. He reveals himself to us. He lays down his life for us. He commands us. He sends us on our part. We receive, we trust, we obey, and we follow. So Jesus maintains this unbalanced grace-shaped friendship with his followers. In early 2021, when the world was stuck in pandemic mode, Lamorna Ash, young British writer, looking around for a new writing project and she learned that a comedy duo from her university years had simultaneously converted to Christianity and both men now wanted to become Anglican priests. And that intrigued her, the idea of religious conversion. of that time. She says, “I I was no Christian, no theologian, no philosopher. At 26, I knew that miracles and religious experiences were not real, that prayers did not do a thing, that churches were as useless and beautiful as dinosaur bones, that the end of life was synonymous with finality, to imagine otherwise was a hopeful and misplaced illusion. By 26, I’d inherited all these unquestioned assumptions about Christianity that had operated as a single homogeneous block aligned with all kinds of malignant social positions. Most of all, that it was endemically misogynistic and homophobic, permanently stained by its status as a colonial handmaidaden and a breeding ground for pedophiles. So, she did not come to any any kind of search for Christianity very warmly. She began ex um exploring Christianity. She says it wasn’t out of any sense that she felt of spiritual deficiency or want. Her life though was not without such sinkholes. She just needed a writing project. So she spent about a year interviewing those comedians turned priests in training and she saw firsthand how their faith was accelerating. The article she wrote on them turned into a longer period of time about three years where she began examining Christianity from all kinds of angles. On the evangelical side, she participated in a Christianity explored Bible course. Said she enjoyed studying the Gospel of Mark, but not without a critical eye. She comments from the lectern. The presenter described sin as a far worse problem than climate change. The more time I spent at Christianity explored, the more it felt like the outside world was make was not making it through the walls in any meaningful way. She spent time on a on a YWAM youth with a mission base. She interviewed scores of people along the way. She started attending Quaker meetings. Her grandmother had been a Quaker once. And at those meetings, her and a few others, many of them atheists, just sat in a silent circle for an hour and never a word was spoken. The idea of discovering the inner light wasn’t working for her. She says she longed for someone who might describe the light to her and then maybe she would see it through them, but no one ever did. Now, she liked the Quaker services cuz many of the others she had attended had seemed abrasive. All of this laying on of hands and the zeal of pastors and the unchecked overflow of emotion during services. At least she says the Quaker meetings, no one was trying to save her. No one was asking to pray for her. So, her journey continued. She booked three extended monastic type Catholic retreats. She spent considerable time with Christians or lapsed Christians who had deconstructed their original faith and were attempting some kind of re-engagement with God or with churches. And in the end, she came away with a new perspective on Christianity. She says, “It’s to our detriment to be naive or dismissive of faith, to consider any religion, homogeneous structure that can be rationalized out of existence. The desire to question the boundaries of the universe, to seek out some vertical access by which to orient ourselves is a deeply human emotion.” So she says she now regularly attends a church, but she certainly retains her skepticism. He says, ‘I believe that the God of the religion, which is my heritage, might have come to earth as a man 2,000 years ago to walk alongside us and to help us with our terrible pain because I can’t think of a more beautiful story for how a god might behave. My belief is not founded on certainty. I don’t want to persuade anyone else of it. My desire for a more certain faith doesn’t mean I’ll ever get there. So, her journey is captured in the book which is well written. It’s quite poignant. Her journey, I think, is very uh sincere, but what frequently comes across in it is her aversion to any kind of rules, to any kind of authority or being told what to do. So, she doesn’t like much of the New Testament, particularly the writings of the Apostle Paul, because she sees those as very rules-based, repeatedly bristles at the thought that Christianity would dare to challenge her on what she believes about abortion, or as a self-described polyamorous. uh she doesn’t want any kind of Christianity that would interfere with her own sexual behavior or with what she believes about sexual identities. Seems that her approach to God must be on her own terms. In fact, she says that and the book ends in something of a stalemate. So the central Christian doctrines of sin and temptation and guilt and repentance and obedience, they seldom seem relevant to her and she does talk about them. Usually she puts a negative spin on it. So there are large areas of her life that God would at at least not yet be allowed to touch. She’s made a peace with a version of Christianity. She’s found some people to worship with and a church that she’s okay to attend, but her individualism and her skepticism remain very important to her. It’s as if God has allowed to go so far in her life, but no further. But Jesus says in our passage that friendship with him just doesn’t work that way. We can’t seal off areas in our lives and and call them a no touch zone. We can’t tell the Lord of the universe, our creator, where he can go and where he can’t go in our lives. So when Jesus links friendship to our obedience, he’s declaring that he has every right to meddle in every area of our lives. And he wants friends who won’t blow off his commands, what he has to say to them, still hoping for some kind of warm relationship with him. He wants friends in whom he says his words will remain. His commands will develop traction, will have permanence in their lives. Our obedience isn’t what makes us Jesus’ friends. But Jesus says obedience should always characterize the lives of branches that are vitally connected to the vine. It’s all for our good. In God, obedience and friendship are all cut from the same cloth. And as we sang today, our obedience is always for God’s glory and for our good at the same time. And our obedience isn’t intended to be drudgery. It’s to liberate us, to bring us joy. In verse 11, Jesus says, “I’ve told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” So Jesus calls us his friends in a in a non-rescrocal, fully obedient relationship. He goes on to make an important distinction in verse 15 between slaves or servants and friends. He says, “I no longer call you servants because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I’ve called you friends. For everything that I learned from my father, I’ve made known to you.” What’s the distinction here that Jesus is making between a servant and a friend? It’s disclosure. It’s whether or not the master lets you in on his plans and his strategies and his reasons and his wisdom and his secrets. Psalm 25:14 says, “The friendship of the Lord or other translations say the secret of the Lord is for those who fear him and he makes known to them his covenant.” You know, a servant can be told, “Could you please go get my car and bring it around to the front?” But the servant doesn’t have the right to ask, “Really, where are we going? What are we going to do? Is it going to be fun? Can I come along with you? A servant you can keep in the dark. But a friend is someone you let in. I no longer call you servants because a servant does not know his master. His master’s business. Instead, I’ve called you friends. For everything that I learned from my father, I’ve made known to you. So, a friend is not an instrument. A friend is a trusted participant. A friend has this elevated status in our lives. To be called a friend of Jesus is to be known by him, seen by him, trusted by him, and confided in by him. So in friendship with Jesus, he trusts us with his heart and with his mission. And our acts of obedience to Jesus always bring greater revelation, greater insight, greater knowledge, greater wisdom. If we hold back on obeying him and we hold off areas of our lives where we don’t want to follow through in obedience, then the light of revelation just won’t shine as brightly on us as if we’d as it would if we’d surrendered. I think how much more Jesus has let us in compared to all of the Old Testament saints. They weren’t given the big picture about how God would save the world and reconcile people back to himself. But for us, that whole blueprint has been revealed. We can look, we can look at the world history of the last 2,000 years and see how beautifully and consistently God’s kingdom has been revealed on our planet. And millions upon millions of disciples have responded to the gospel and placed their faith in Jesus and followed him. Jesus has led us in on all of his strategies. He’s told us to participate with him, go bear fruit, fruit that will last and to pray, he says, with the kind of agency that sees results. Verse 16, he says, “You didn’t choose me. I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit. Fruit that will last. Then the father will give you whatever you ask in my name.” So Jesus is teaching us about friendship this morning. The eternal importance of friendship for our well-being. The friend that friendship with Jesus is like no other friendship you and I know. And that being Jesus’ friend means that he lets us in. He doesn’t shut us out. He discloses himself and his plans and his purposes to us. It doesn’t often cost any of us much to develop a friendship. But what it cost Jesus to develop friendships with us was everything. Verse 13, anticipating what was in store for him the next day, Jesus says, “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Now, we know that death is going to be the executioner of all of us. and and uh it will come in God’s time and the Bible tells us it comes as the temporal punishment for our sin. The wages of sin is death. One day that wage is going to get paid to all of us. And if any of us were to actually lay down our life for a friend, what that would mean is that we would voluntarily move up our execution date either a few months or a few years. I mean, all of our lives are already on the way out. To lay down some years for a friend would be making an early payment on our debt. But Jesus says in John 10 that no one takes his life from him. He lays it down voluntarily. He was only the only one over whom death had no claim. He was without sin. His record was perfect, making him the only one who could truly and permanently lay down his life for us, pay for every sin we committed, every penalty we owed. He’s the true and only substitutionary friend. He offers us not just a few more years. That’s all we could offer a friend if we laid down our life for them. Jesus says, “I’ll lay down my life for you and I’ll make your years uncountable. I’ll make them infinite.” Greater love has no man than this than he laid down his life for his friends. Jesus is in a category all by himself with that. So, think what Jesus went through to make us his friends. If one of our friends called us up late at night and said, “I’m having the worst night of my life. I could sure use some company.” Likely all of us would would put on our coat, would go out in the cold, would start our car, would drive over to our friend’s house. But what if they began then sharing their story with us, telling us why this was the worst night of their life, and we simply nodded off on their couch? What kind of friend would we be? But the same men that Jesus called his friends in the upper room did exactly that to him. Later that evening, on the worst night of his life, Jesus asked if they would just come stay with him for a while. and they all nodded off. So Jesus didn’t sacrifice himself uh to make us his friends because we’re such great candidates as friends. We’re actually horrible candidates for friendship. But Jesus very good to his friends. And when we put our faith and trust in what he accomplished on the cross on our behalf, we slide into a relationship that none of us deserve but all of us cherish becomes the greatest friendship of our lives. The final verse this morning is how Jesus calls us to kind of spread that loving friendship with others. He says in verse 17, “This is my command. Love each other.” The friendship love of Jesus is what he calls us to give to one another. It’s no accident that we find ourselves together in this room this morning. When CS Lewis Lewis wrote his uh his book, The Four Loves, he meditated on the magic and mystery that goes into even gathering a group of Christians like this. this morning. He says, “In friendship, we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a few years difference in the dates of our births, few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting. Any of these chances might have kept us apart. But for a Christian, there are strictly no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ who said to the disciples, “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” can truly say to every group of Christian friends, “You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.” So, as Christians, our potential for friendships has almost no limit. We’re put together as friends. We’re called to bear fruit by going and making more friends. Our participation uh in Jesus’ uh friendship call in all of our lives. There’s a guy named Martin Mins and he was the director of All Angels Church in New York City and his church had a ministry every Sunday of feeding a great number of homeless people. One day Martin Mins told his church that they were going to scale back the ministry and feed only about a third of what they were doing. And people were upset about it and they asked him why. And his answer was because that’s the greatest number of homeless people we can feed and still befriend them. You see, we don’t need to just deliver services. The only way these people’s lives are going to be changed is if we actually make them our friends. So, there are a lot of friends or potential friends in this room for all of us. There are many outside these walls who are waiting for someone to befriend them and help bring them in to Christ. And our call is just to go out and bear some fruit this year, some fruit that will last. And as we pray together, just this is your time with God to respond to his word. His word is strong. It’s good meat for us this morning. You might want to pray uh you might want to thank Jesus that he would call you his friend. And pray that you would learn quick obedience as you grow in him. Confess ways and that you’ve been slow to obey. You’ve held things back in your life. Thank Jesus that he laid down his life for you. And thank God that he’s put you here among a group of friends. This is your prayer time with Jesus. So, take a few moments and I’ll lead us.