Spiritual Friendship: We are Called Friends (John 15:12-15)

Hello, friends.

This is Pastor Creighton.

Thank you for tuning in to Newsong Church's Sermon Podcast.

At Newsong Church, we want to see Jesus lifted high in Port Perry, Ontario, as we worship, grow, and serve.

You can learn more about us and find contact info at newsongportperry.ca the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to John.

Glory to you, Lord Christ.

Jesus said, This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

You are my friends, if you do what I command you.

No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing, but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father, I have made known to you.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Praise to you, Lord Christ.

No longer do I call you servants, I have called you friends.

Let's pray.

Gracious Lord Jesus, we give you thanks today.

You call us to be your friends.

So teach us, Lord, what it is to be your friends.

That our lives and our spirits would just be knit together with yours and such bonds of sweetness and love.

It's in your name we pray.

Amen.

Please be seated.

So today we continue our journey together to understand what it is we're talking about when we talk about not just friendship, but spiritual friendship.

Last week we uh met a fellow named Aylred.

Aylred's been someone who's been helpful for me thinking through uh what it is we're talking about when we talk about spiritual friendship.

I think it'd be helpful for us.

And this fellow who lived maybe a thousand years ago describes friendship like this friendship is that virtue by which spirits are bound by ties of love and sweetness, and out of many are made one.

And I think that's beautiful.

Who doesn't want to be knit together in ties of sweetness and love?

We need that.

It's part of our human constitution.

We need that.

And last week we explored a kind of 30,000 feet uh tour through the great story of Scripture, beginning in creation with Genesis chapter 2, seeing that God's created us in the very context of friendship.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

We've seen in Revelation 21 that we're purposed for an eternity of friendship with our Lord and with one another.

And in John chapter 14, we see Jesus make a promise that he's going to prepare a place for us, his disciples.

John 14 · chapter mention

We've been redeemed for friendship with him.

Created, purposed, and redeemed for friendship.

So we, if we want to live the Christian life and make this pilgrimage together, it's like friendship is unavoidable.

But we can say more to that, more than that, friendship is perhaps one of the sweetest things there is about being a Christian, isn't there?

We get to be friends with our Redeemer.

It's this same supper that Jesus makes this promise that I'm going to prepare a place for you, I've created you for friendship, you're purposed for an eternity of friendship.

And now my work on the cross and my resurrection and an ascension, this promise to come again, all of this is to draw you into that eternity of friendship.

It's at this same supper on the night that he's betrayed, the night before he was crucified, that Jesus speaks these words that we read in John chapter 15.

John 15 · chapter mention

Jesus says to his disciples, No longer do I call you servants, I have called you friends.

I wonder if we ask Jesus for one word to describe our relationship with him, I wonder if he would say friendship.

These are my friends.

And Jesus says, You are my friends if I do, if you do what I command you.

This is, I think, the intersection of what, or at least I think this is what Aylred understands about friendship that maybe we sometimes miss.

Sometimes I wonder if um well I wonder if I fall into this trap from time to time.

Maybe you do too, but friendship can seem like something that happens spontaneously.

And perhaps the best friends are those friends that um that kind of augment my life or make my, you know, make my life just that much better with kind of minimal risk, you know, on my behalf, right?

It's like they make me feel good to the maximum with minimum risk of making me feel bad, right?

If there's pain or betrayal or whatever involved, right?

So sometimes I just I wonder if we can get into kind of that defensive or withdrawn posture with our friends.

We expect our friends to augment our life with minimal, it's like maximum return on minimum risk.

But I don't understand that friendship is a virtue.

It's something that gets practiced, habituated.

It's perfection is worked out over time.

And I think this is what we can understand is the relationship between friendship and discipleship right here.

Because it's kind of a strange thing to say if you're if you're my friends, you know, if if if you do what I command you to do.

If I had a friend who's like, you know why we're friends?

It's because you do everything you know I say.

It'd be like, okay, maybe I've got some boundary issues I need to figure out.

Or maybe you're like a psychopath or something.

Like, that seems like a lot.

So what's Jesus saying here?

I think Jesus is challenging us maybe to leave behind some immature, maybe just just um ideas of friendship that sell us short of becoming our very best self, the very best person Jesus intended us to be.

In no way is Jesus trying to twist our arm or coerce us into something that's not good for us.

Jesus is talking about the relationship here between discipleship and friendship.

And I think what Jesus wants us to understand here is that discipleship is a practiced friendship with Jesus.

Sometimes I wonder if we think discipleship is like another category.

It's like friendship belongs to the sweet part of being a Christian.

Discipleship belongs to being the hard part.

And I think for Jesus, he said, he wants us to understand these things go together.

The sweetness of our friendship with him belongs to the sweetness of our discipleship with him.

It's a practiced friendship with Jesus.

And what does that mean?

What does it mean to be a disciple as a practiced friend of Jesus?

I think we see a couple of things here.

I think it means to live obediently.

And I think practiced friendship means knowing personally.

Discipleship is a practiced friendship with Jesus through living obediently, through knowing personally.

And as we put these things into practice, we habituate them, we practice this as a virtue, we discover that our spirits get knit together with our Lord Jesus with ties of sweetness and love.

We discover the fullness and flourishing that comes with friendship with our Redeemer.

So discipleship is practicing friendship with Jesus through living obediently.

Let's look at verses 12 and 13.

We're going to start to see that friendship with Jesus is perhaps unlike friendship with uh, you know, with with anyone else.

I mean, anyone else that we'll brush shoulders with is going to be a peer, right?

It's going to be perhaps as a brother and sister in Christ among us right here.

But friendship with Jesus is friendship with our Redeemer, our Lord, our ascended and risen Savior.

Jesus says, This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

Greater love has no one than this, that someone should lay down his life for his friends.

So discipleship is practicing friendship through living obediently, submitting ourselves to what it is that Jesus commands.

And that might seem like a strange idea.

Because again, if a friend came up to me and says, I'm just so glad you do everything I tell you to do, it's like we need to figure something out.

Why is it that Jesus understands that my commands and our friendship have everything to do with one another?

And I think it's this.

I think it's because Jesus understands that the best kinds of friendships shape us into being the very best versions of ourselves that we can be.

We talk about the minimal risk idea of friendship.

Makes me feel maximum good with minimal risk.

Those friendships can be dissolved as quickly as I stop feeling good, right?

And we kind of know that.

Or maybe it's maybe there's a utility to it.

The second we've accomplished this goal, it's like we don't really have a reason to be connecting anymore.

But the best friendships are the ones that don't avoid conflict or dissolve when we hit difficulty.

It's those that march into it together and emerge confidently out the other side, having been made stronger for it.

You know, having grown us in goodness and in virtue and in steadfastness.

The best kinds of friendships shape us into better people because we submit ourselves to the greater good of one another.

And Jesus being our Lord, who's created us out of his goodness and to share in his goodness, he alone is the one who can submit to us what it is to practice that goodness.

When he gives us commands, it's not because he wants to coerce us or twist our arm, it's because he has our very best in mind.

This is our friend asking us to trust him and to walk with him to become more and more like him in his goodness and in his fullness.

Friendship with God makes us or betters us through our submission to his commandments.

So he says, This is my command that you love one another as I have loved you.

What is it that Jesus is asking us to do as his friends?

Love one another.

This is Jesus talking to his disciples on the night before his crucifixion.

Love one another as I have loved you.

And I wonder if these words resonate with what we've already read in our service, the summary of the law.

Right?

We read the summary, love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

And it's this principle that sums up all of God's commands for us.

Love fulfills the law, is what Paul writes in Romans chapter 13.

Romans 13 · chapter mention

Love God, love your neighbor.

And in John chapter 13, just two chapters earlier, Jesus opened up this supper by washing the feet of his disciples.

John 13 · chapter mention

He wants to put servant love into practice and give them an example.

And then he concludes this act by saying, I give you a new commandment, love one another.

And then he adds this by this all people will know that you are my disciples.

Isn't that a wild thing to think about?

People know we're Jesus' disciples.

Maybe not just because of the Jesus fish, you know, bumper sticker thing we have on our car.

Truthfully, no one knows I'm a Christian by the way I drive.

You know, I'll just confess that.

But that's not what Jesus says.

They're not going to know, you know, by the decal on your car.

They're going to know by your love for one another that you are my disciples.

When people come to New Song, I'm so encouraged.

When I hear things like, people here are just so full of love.

And I feel welcomed here.

That makes me go, we're putting that discipleship into practice.

We're submitting ourselves to Jesus' command.

We're practicing friendship with Him by practicing friendship with one another.

And Jesus says just a few verses earlier from our reading, abide in my love.

This is us resting and drawing our life and our strength from this love that Jesus has for us.

And so we'll notice that this love that Jesus describes, love one another, is not just mere sentiment, right?

It's not something that's just kind of nice and you know a fuzzy feeling.

I mean, maybe those things go with that, and that's a wonderful thing too.

But this kind of love calls us into actions of self-denial for the sake of someone else.

Risking, making a personal risk to will the good of the other.

It's like true friendship is willing to take on pain if it's going to benefit the other person.

And this is exactly the kind of love we see here, isn't it?

Greater love has no one than this, than someone lay down his life for his friends.

Here we see the love of Jesus coming into view, don't we?

Because Jesus isn't just telling us this in theory, this is something Jesus is going to practice.

I think Jesus knows exactly what he's saying at exactly this moment.

He is going to put greater love into practice through his cross, so that by his resurrection we can have a share in his new life as well.

He is willing to lay down his life for his friends, and he calls us to imitate that love by loving one another.

That's why this same John will go on to write in one of his letters this is how we know what love is.

Jesus Christ laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.

This vertical love that we receive from Jesus, this greater love that is willing to pay the penalty for our sin on the cross, is the same kind of love we show to one another when we exercise self-denial and we put the good of the other before our own.

I mean, I wonder if it gives us a whole other way to measure what true friendship really is.

You know, if you're like me and you tend to think maybe my best friends make me feel the maximum good.

I mean, there's there is, that's true.

I mean, true friends shouldn't just make you feel awful all the time, always.

You've got to work on that too.

But perhaps the truest friends are those friends, those friends that I know I'm willing to put it all on the line for, and I know they're willing to do the same for me.

Maybe I don't measure the friendship by the, you know, how augmented my life is made to feel.

Maybe I measure the friendship by how much I know my friend and I are willing to sacrifice for one another, and Jesus is willing to lay it all on the line for us.

This is the friend of sinners.

Discipleship is practicing friendship when we live obediently to his command to love one another.

We live obediently by loving sacrificially.

When we put that into practice in our own lives, in our community with one another, it's like we're starting to see the friendship of Jesus take real concrete shape among us.

Living obediently.

Discipleship is practicing friendship also by knowing personally.

And this I think is pretty wild for us to catch.

Let's look at verses uh, well, let's look at 14 and 15.

I've read verse 14 already, but it's a good pivot point.

Let's read it again.

You are my friends, Jesus says, if you do what I command you.

Now again, we might read this and go, like, well, that sounds a lot more like servitude, Jesus, than it does friendship, or at least that rings of that.

But Jesus wants to say, oh contraire, no longer do I call you servants.

Why?

Because the servant does not know what his master is doing.

But I have called you friends.

What's the difference?

For all that I have heard from the Father, I have made known to you.

Disclosure is the difference.

And Jesus wants us to know that He has made known his very heart and the will of the Father to us.

He has not kept us in the dark.

I think this takes us to our Old Testament reading in Exodus 33, which is an interesting reading for a number of reasons, but I want to highlight just a couple of things.

So there's this tent of meeting.

And the tent of meeting is exactly what it sounds like.

It's a tent in which we, you know, in which Moses met with God.

It was set up outside the camp.

The idea is like how do you approach a holy God when we're an unholy people?

And there are all, and the whole Old Testament sacrificial system was meant to point us towards that greatest sacrifice that will reconcile God and man.

But here's Moses, who's able to enter into the tent, and all the people worshiping outside looking on, they see that Moses, when Moses goes into this tent, a cloud would descend, and the Lord would speak with Moses face to face as a man speaks to his friend.

This is a place where God wants friendship to happen.

And it should tell us that this God who invites Moses to set up this tent of meeting actually wants to meet with his friends.

That is to say, God isn't content to stay unknown to us.

He wants to make himself known to his people.

He wants to tabernacle with us.

He wants us to say with confidence that we know him and we know true things of him.

And we might tend to think, boy, well, it makes sense that Moses would be considered a friend of God, and we see the same.

Abraham is called a friend of God and James chapter 2.

James 2 · chapter mention

Moses and Abraham are pretty exceptional people.

And when was the last time, you know, we helped to free a whole nation from slavery?

Like, probably not recently.

They were pretty extraordinary people.

It makes for sense that an extraordinary God would be friends with extraordinary people.

But let's be reminded what Jesus is saying right here in John chapter 15.

John 15 · chapter mention

He's talking to his disciples.

These are fishermen, tax collectors.

It's like these are not the society's elite and exceptional people.

The remarkable thing about the disciples is how unremarkable they are.

But Jesus has sought fit to call them to himself and say, You are my friend.

Wherever we're at, or however we're coming in, Jesus, if we are in Christ, Jesus looks at us and says, You are my friend.

And I desire to meet with you.

You know, this Old Testament tent of meeting, this tabernacle, points us towards this work that God does in Christ to tabernacle with us.

In John chapter 1, the introduction to this gospel, it says that the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

John 1 · chapter mention

And that word dwells, the same word that can be translated tabernacle.

It's like this is the place I want to meet with you in Christ Himself.

So when we come to Christ, we come to that place where we meet with God, not just as strangers, but as friends who are invited in.

All that I've known from the Father, which is to say, the whole purpose of my coming, the significance of my cross and resurrection, my ascension, my promise to come again that I've given you, the hope you have for the future, all of these things I've let you in on.

That's not the case with servants.

I mean, I can think back in some of my working experience, working in some of these jobs in like high school or something, and remember showing up to work at, you know, like I worked in a butchery in a grocery store, and from time to time there just seemed to be such menial tasks that were kind of mind-numbing.

And that's just the nature of work.

You just do them sometimes.

You show up and you get told, well, you're going to move these boxes from this side of the store to that side of the store.

So you start moving those 50 or 100 boxes over, and then sometimes you show up to the next shift and, like, okay, we want you to move the boxes back, and you're a little like, Pardon me?

And you know, you can ask why, and sometimes a supervisor will let you know, but sometimes it's just like, because I'm asking you to.

And that's just the nature of being employed.

All right, let's do it.

But Jesus says, that's not my relationship with you.

I want you to know not just what I'm asking you, I want you to know why.

I want you to be in on God's heart for you.

I'm making known to you everything that.

I've heard from the Father.

So here we have this new and better tabernacle in Jesus, this meeting with God and his people, with nothing held back, speaking to us as it were, speaking to us as his friends.

And I'm convinced that Jesus speaks to us today.

We hear his voice in Scripture.

And it's why it is that we have these four readings together.

I love that in our liturgy we have these four readings.

Sometimes I select readings like this Sunday.

We also have lectionary that gives us readings on a particular Sunday.

But one way or the other we open up scripture together, and we don't just do that to learn some interesting factoids.

We do that because we, as God's people, as his friends, want to hear the voice of our shepherds.

We want to hear the voice of Jesus carried through these words and through the ages and into our hearts.

We go looking to hear Jesus speak to us, and he speaks to us through his word in Scripture.

This word that he's inspired, and he speaks to us through the inward illumination of his Holy Spirit.

Paul describes in Romans chapter 5, he says, God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who's been given to us.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

So this love that Jesus is talking about right here, love one another as I've loved you.

This is the love that God's poured into our hearts, which is a wild image.

I just think about, you know, that action of pouring water into another vessel.

It's rich and it's full and it makes such a distinct sound, doesn't it?

He pours that love into our very being.

That love, that essence of our friendship.

It's as though Jesus is pouring his friendship into our very being through the Holy Spirit who indwells the believer.

Which means wherever we go, we can't escape Jesus' friendship.

He's poured it into us.

We carry it with us wherever we go.

And when we hear the voice of Christ, when we're sensitive to the illumination and the voice of the Holy Spirit, we're hearing the voice of our friend.

We attend to that.

And we also meet with Jesus as a friend, I'm convinced, in the life of his church.

The New Testament describes the church as the body of Christ.

It's like we make manifest Jesus' presence to one another and to the world.

And I don't think that that's an exaggeration.

I think that's absolutely true.

If the Holy Spirit has been poured into our hearts and we carry that Holy Spirit wherever we go, then when we gather together, we are showing forth the very love of Christ that animates our lives, that knits us together in ties of love and sweetness.

So when we come together as His Church, the body, we are coming together to meet with Jesus, our friend, wherever two or three are gathered, there I will be among them.

And that's pretty wild.

It means that if we're going to be serious about a life of discipleship as practiced friendship, we cannot do that apart from the life of the church.

We cannot practice friendship with Jesus, you know, on my own.

And sometimes I've heard folks say, you know, it's kind of like all I need is my Bible, me and Jesus, and we're going to make this work.

And I think the error we make there is critical.

Jesus has given us this gift to be members of his body, to see his love poured out in the lives of others and see his lives, his love poured into our lives through one another.

It's supposed to animate everything that we as his disciples do.

He draws us into this community of faith together, not just as folks who hold the same doctrine together, but are knit together by the very love of his Holy Spirit.

So, friends, here's the essence of discipleship, isn't it?

Practicing friendship with Jesus through living obediently, by loving sacrificially, and through knowing personally God's heart and will for us.

So, friends, this is how Jesus regards those who trust in him and follow after him.

This is, I think, the word that Jesus wants to say to you and I.

If we're in Christ, this is the word of assurance Jesus wants to speak to you.

You are my friend.

What greater assurance could there be?

What greater sweetness?

And friends, if you don't know this friendship of Jesus yourself, today can be the day where you invite Jesus to be your friend.

And he will in no wise cast you out.

No longer do I call you servants.

I have called you friends.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

We worship a generous God who calls us to follow him in giving willfully, cheerfully, and sacrificially.

Newsong Church's mission and ministry is 100% funded by the generous gifts of those worshiping and journeying with us.

If you'd like to offer a gift towards Newsong's ministry, please visit Newsongportperry.ca slash giving for more information on how to do that.

May God bless you and keep you today and every day.