Good Friday 2016: Friend of God - Holy Week

You're listening to The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Hole.

And the reality is that oftentimes it is at our weakest point, it's at our point of the most humility, or maybe the most brokenness, that God sort of shows up.

And for the first time, we start to really get it.

That Christ did something for us at Calvary.

At The Road, our vision is to raise up wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ.

For more information on the road, visit theroad.org.

We hope you are encouraged by today's message from Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

Welcome to The Road.

We're glad you're here.

I'm Steve Holt, the pastor teacher at The Road.

And uh what we do at Good Friday is we focus in on the cross, the greatest event in human history, the centerpiece of our faith as Christians, but also many would say the centerpiece of all human history.

Even our dating system, BC and AD, was determined by the cross.

And even those who don't have a personal relationship with Christ, a personal faith in Jesus, acknowledge something seemingly supernatural happened at this place called the Skull or Golgotha, Calvary, in and right outside the gate of Jerusalem, some 2,000 years ago.

And there's so many angles, men and women.

As a pastor, and I've given this sermon so many times, given a Good Friday sermon, I went back and thought I'll just I'll just pull up an old one, which I never do.

I always say I'm gonna do that, and then I never do it.

Um I looked at him and I went, no, this is not from the Lord for this group.

And the reason is because there's so many ways to look at the cross.

And many years ago, I had the privilege of being in London, and we went to the London Museum where the Hope Diamond is found, and the Hope Diamond is one of the largest diamonds in the world.

And if you walk around the Hope Diamond, it's a big glass thing, and you can walk around it, and at different angles are different colors.

And from those different colors, you see the beauty of the Hope Diamond, and the cross is like that.

It's like whatever angle you take, uh, you take it from the angle of grace, or you take it from the angle of sin, or you take it from the angle of hope, or you take it from the angle of love.

There's something for all of us, for all time, about what happened on Good Friday at the cross.

And so I've chosen for today to focus on our friendship with God.

The openness of the Spirit of God through the death of Christ to give us, as that veil was torn from the top to bottom, an intimacy with God that was not available before.

That there is a relationship now available to each one of us in this room, men and women, who desire it, to know God as a friend, not just as a servant, not as a slave to a master or a subject to a king, even though all of that's true too, but that Jesus even said, I no longer call you servants, but I call you my friend.

So the friendship that we can have with God through what happened at Calvary.

Now, some of you come out of Catholic backgrounds, and I would say that the Catholic Church is better in many ways at understanding the death of Christ and the emphasis of the cross of Christ than we Protestants are.

We Protestants over the years have emphasized the resurrection of Christ.

But you can't have a resurrection without a cross.

And you can't have a cross without a resurrection.

And so today we're looking at the cross, and I want to read this is going to be a little bit bizarre, so I've asked them, we're going to do it in PowerPoint, because this is going to come from the message, which is Eugene Peterson's paraphrase of Romans chapter 5.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

And I felt like it gave a different angle at the cross as we look at it from the perspective of a relationship of intimacy that we can have with Jesus Christ.

So I'm going to read from Romans 5.

Feel free to follow if you're on our app.

I think it's on the app.

But if you're most of you are not carrying the message, I can guarantee you that.

So if you are, then that's great.

But if you're not, you'll see it on the screen, this paraphrase of Romans 5.

And I'm going to read it all and then we're going to break it down verse by verse.

Romans 5, starting in verse 6.

Christ arrives right on time to make this happen.

He didn't and doesn't wait for us to get ready.

He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready.

And even if we hadn't been so weak, we wouldn't have known what to do anyway.

We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice.

But God put his love on the line for us by offering his son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him.

Now that we are set right with God by means of his sacrificial death, the consummate blood sacrifice, there is no longer a question of being at odds with God in any way.

If, when we were at our worst, we were put on friendly terms with God by the sacrificial death of his son.

Now that we're at our best, just think of how our lives will expand and deepen by means of his resurrection life.

Isn't that awesome?

Eugene Peterson often captures the essence of a passage.

The perfect timing of God.

Now I could go on and wax eloquent about my story, but you've heard it so many times.

But each of you have a story of how you came to personal faith in Christ.

And probably the timing was quite interesting.

Having known some of you a long time and a lot of you a short time, I know some of your testimonies.

And the reality is that oftentimes that it's at our weakest point, it's at our point of the most humility or maybe the most brokenness that God sort of shows up.

And for the first time, we start to really get it, that Christ did something for us at Calvary.

And so here's the way our passage reads in verse 6 Christ arrives right on time to make this happen.

He didn't and he doesn't wait for us to get ready.

He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready.

And so the Lord comes in our most sinful state, and oftentimes our most broken state.

And here's the irony: I do know of some that speak of being at a moment of success and they came to know Christ, but that's so rare.

For most of us, we've utilized our resources, run out of energy and strength, and then Jesus, who is orchestrating all this stuff behind the scenes anyway, comes right on time.

John Calvin said this: For as we are born the children of wrath, so we are kept under the curse until we become partakers of Christ.

And he calls those weak who have nothing in themselves but what is sinful.

And so, if you're like me, coming out of the background that I came out of, I was always trying to be pious and do the good works.

And so I went to confirmation and I went through catechism, and I was a pretty good kid.

In high school, I was a pretty good kid with good kids, and I was a pretty rebellious kid with rebellious kids.

So it wasn't exactly like there was any deep conviction within my heart.

It was more like peer pressure drove me.

And so for many of us, we may have looked at our lives as maybe pious and good and righteous because of the good things that we've done.

But the reality is, is that our religion, our good works, our piety gets us nowhere, but only sets us in a place where the reality is that we can never make ourselves righteous enough with God.

We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice.

And so it makes sense to us in the broad spectrum of even movie making, that, and most of our, many of our movies are made this way, of those who would sacrifice for others, who would sacrifice for someone they love, or sacrifice for someone who might even be a better person than they are.

And they're willing to give that sacrifice and lay their life on the line for that relationship or that friendship, the husband for the wife, the friend for a friend.

And many times even in the military, we know the stories of the men that have sacrificed their lives for their country, but also for their comrades.

I came across this article in ABC News dated March 29th, 2012, about a sergeant Dennis Wetchel.

Sergeant Dennis Wetchel, 29, died in Afghanistan last week as he lifted an Afghan girl who was in the path of a large military vehicle barreling down a road.

Wetchel, a Rhode Island National Guardsman, was riding along in a convoy in Lagman Province in eastern Afghanistan when some children were spotted on the road ahead.

The children were picking up shell casings lying on the road.

The casings are recycled for money in Afghanistan.

Wetchel and other soldiers in the convoy got out of their vehicles to get them out of the way of the heavy trucks in the convoy.

The children were moved out of the way, but an Afghan girl darted back onto the road to pick up some more casings that lay underneath a passing MRAP Mirap, a mine resistance ambush protected vehicle.

The huge armored trucks can weigh as much as 16 tons and are designed to protect the troops they carry from roadside bombs.

Wetchell spotted the girl and quickly moved toward her to get her out of the way.

He succeeded, but not before he was run over by the heavily armored truck.

The girl was safe, but Wetchel later died of his injuries.

He'd arrived in Afghanistan a few weeks ago and had been a member of the Rhode Island National Guard since 2001.

When I read that, it reminded me of John 15.

Jesus said, Greater love is no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

And we're moved by that, and we understand that, and biographies are written about men like that and women like that who give their lives for others.

I know of a young man in this church who was on a boat a number of years ago in the Amazon River, and uh and one of the members of that group, this mission group, fell into the river, jumped into the river, and he jumped in and basically saved his life.

But what Jesus did at Calvary is not only uncommon, but it's the greatest sacrifice known because he sacrificed for those who are actually his enemies.

And that's you and me in our sinful state.

We're literally enemies of God.

The passage goes on to read, but God.

And you guys have heard me say this that come to the road on a regular basis.

That's one of my favorite passages in all of the Bible.

But God.

Don't forget that.

When things are at their lowest ebb, when you're struggling, when you're battling thoughts of suicide or depression, but God.

So here it says it again in verse 8.

But God put his love on the line for us by offering his son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him.

In other words, while we were still enemies of God, sinners, rebellious toward God, Jesus died for us.

Jesus put his love on the line for each of you.

And here we are, 2,000 years later, and we are gathered on Good Friday, and we're joining millions across the globe that are having services on Good Friday, i.e., I think it could be argued billions, because Jesus not only did the most uncommon valor, but he did something that the world had never seen before at that time, was that he died for his enemies.

One commentator translates this verse, sinners as wholly vicious, given over to sin, men abandoned to wickedness.

And the Bible says, For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

In our rebellion and in our selfishness, we were of no good use to God.

He died for us because he was going to transform us into an intimacy with him that would make us not only useful for the kingdom, but in a loving relationship with the king.

Verse 9.

Now that we are set right with God, and men and women, you that have a personal, intimate, growing, dynamic relationship with Christ here this morning, you're set right with God.

You are set right with God, and don't forget that.

Now that we are set right with God by means of this sacrificial death, the consummate blood sacrifice, there is no longer a question of being at odds with God in any way.

So Jesus sacrificed as the perfect Lamb of God to make you right.

So you can never be good enough to earn Calvary, but you can certainly be bad enough.

And that's most of us here.

Because he was good enough.

He lived the life we could not live and died the death we could not die to give us the life we've always wanted.

Lacrae's words from the cross, I quote, Jesus lived the life I could not live and died the death I should have died, you know, that gets me every time.

If when we were at our worst, we were put on friendly terms with God by the sacrificial death of his son.

Now that we're at our best, just think of how our lives will expand and deepen by means of his resurrection life.

And so Jesus says to his disciples just before the cross, I no longer call you servants, but my friends.

We are friends with God.

You may not have many friends on this earth, but you can be a friend of God.

You may have lived a pretty rotten life, but through the resurrection life of Jesus Christ, you can turn that around.

You can push reset.

Let me give you three things that happen by becoming a friend of God.

Three things.

Number one, this is my favorite one.

I'll start with my favorite.

As a friend of God, we can have a present moment by moment intimacy with Jesus.

Men and women, that's really good news.

I mean, I love my wife, and we have a daily intimacy of communication that I love.

But she makes a lot of mistakes.

And I always have to help her out.

All right.

We all know that's a big lie.

But it's true for all of us.

We all have relationships that are that are meaningful, but they let us down.

They're human relationships.

We have struggles.

We let people down, they let us down.

But there's an intimacy with Jesus that makes this friendship unique in that the Lord has already covered you with the blood of Christ and the forgiveness of Christ.

And for by grace you've been saved through faith.

Your faith in Christ has opened up this relationship that doesn't change.

Now, your intimacy can change by virtue of you walking away, but he's always right, like as the great Thompson's great poem, the hound of heaven.

He's on your path because he loves you that much.

And so it was said in Exodus 33 of Moses, and the Lord spoke unto Moses face to face as a man speaks to his friend.

Moses was a friend of God.

You can be as close to Christ as you desire.

So Jesus in his closing moments with his disciples says, I am the vine.

You are the branches.

When you're joined with me and I with you, the relationship is intimate and organic, and the harvest is sure to be abundant.

So, first of all, men and women, as a friend of God, and what happened at Good Friday is that you can have a friendship through intimacy that's moment by moment through the feast of Pentecost, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Secondly, as a friend of God, we can ask Jesus to help us and to meet our needs through prayer.

Through prayer, we're commanded by Jesus to ask.

He loves when we ask.

He even says, you have not because you ask not.

He wants you to ask for the things that you long for.

He loves prayer warriors who war in prayer about those things that are on their heart.

He said this: Ask and it will be given to you.

Seek and you will find.

Knock, and it will be open to you.

For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and him who knocks, it will be open.

This carte blanche commitment by the Lord toward us that if we'll ask, he'll meet our needs and he'll help us.

That's a true friend.

And then thirdly and lastly, as a friend of God, we can hear his voice and be led and instructed and guided by him.

And men and women, that's why we're so big at the road on you being in the word.

We call it PB and J, Prayer, Bible, and Journal.

And that's why we have the bookmark that you received, or in the last few weeks you may have received.

Because it's the word that's the most powerful in guiding us to hear his voice.

Psalm 119 reads, Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.

Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.

And so spend time in God's Word.

And that's how we join up with the intimacy with Christ as a vine and a branch that bears fruit.

So there's no other way, no greater way, than through worship, prayer, and the word of God that we develop that intimacy with the Lord.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for today.

We thank you that today we're meditating, we're thinking on, and we're in fellowship with the death of your son Jesus Christ.

Father, I pray your saints here and the saints of the road would know that they can have an intimate, moment by moment relationship with you.

That Lord, they can come to you and ask for those things that are on their heart, seeking you, crying out to you.

And that Lord, you will guide us and you will speak to us.

And Father, we just rejoice in that.

And we bless you.

In the name of Jesus.

Amen.

You've been listening to The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

We hope you have been blessed by today's message.

To connect with us further, visit theroad.org.

If you are walking through a difficult time, we want to pray for you.

Go to theroad.org, click on the ministries tab, and go to our prayer page to send us your prayer request.

Thanks again for tuning in today, and be sure to listen to the next edition of The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.