If you put a rat alone in a cage with two bottles of water to drink from--one plain, the other laced with morphine and sugar—he will, in a short time, drink enough morphine to kill himself. But if you take a rat and place him in a large group of other rats, where he can socialize and play, and then offer him the same choice, he will prefer plain water. This experiment was conducted back in the late 70’s and was a landmark discovery in the role isolation plays in drug abuse and the benefits of social connection. The lonelier we are, the more we deteriorate; the more connected we are, the more resilient and healthier we become—and not only that, but happier. In the world’s longest scientific study on what makes human beings happy, Harvard researchers spent 84 years following two groups of men, 268 sophomores enrolled in Harvard College, and 456 boys from some of Boston’s worst inner-city neighborhoods—the highs and lows. Naturally, those who graduated from Harvard tended to land high-paying jobs in prominent positions, while the other group tended to have lower wages in more blue-collar jobs. But the amount of money made, or respectability of profession had little bearing on happiness. The happiest people were those with the most meaningful relationships in their life.
A couple of weeks ago, when I preached out of Acts 4 on the call to courage for the Christian life, I made a brief point on the role that meaningful community plays in making us brave; brave to face the dangers and difficulties of obedience to Christ, to resist temptations, and to not cave to the enticements of the world. And really, lurking behind that point was a whole other sermon. And that is what I want to share with you today. In C.S. Lewis’ meditation on friendship, he notes the role that friends play in strengthening our convictions:
“Alone among unsympathetic companions, I hold certain views and standards timidly, half ashamed to avow them and doubtful if they can after all be right. Put me back among my Friends and in…ten minutes these same views and standards become once more indisputable. The opinion of this little circle, while I am in it, outweighs that of a thousand outsiders…The little pockets of early Christians survived because they cared exclusively for the love of “the brethren” and stopped their ears to the opinion of the Pagan society all round them.” C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
But what happens to us if we lack that communion of friends? The reason we are studying Friendship and Hospitality for our Midweek Gathering is because our entire society is going through an epidemic of loneliness. It feels hard to make or sustain friendships today. And I think we would be served well by considering Jesus’ own words about friendship.
12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 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. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. 17 These things I command you, so that you will love one another.
- John 15:12-17
Jesus wants us to love one another. Notice that the paragraph we are looking at opens with Jesus’ command: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you,” (John 15:12). And it is bookended with another summons to love one another, “These things I command you, so that you will love one another,” (John 15:17). Verse 12 is the front cover of the book, and on it we read: love one another. After we pass through the middle we come to the final page of verse 17, and there we read: “Remember, everything you just read was put there to help you love one another.” This would lead us to assume that the meat of the book, the content between those two covers would be addressing how we apply the commandment to love one another.
What do we see in those middle passages? Surprisingly, we see nothing in those middle passages about how to love one another, but instead we see what it looks like for Jesus to show His love for us, and our love for Him. What does that mean? Well, if we are to love one another as Christ has loved us, then it makes sense for Jesus to lean in to what it looks like for Him to love us. If I tell you, “Cook other people steak, just like I cooked it for you…Sing to other people this melody, just as I sang it to you,” then it makes sense that you would need to experience what I am offering first before you could give it to others. In other words, we can only give what we first have.
There are many kinds of relationships used in the Bible to describe the Christian’s relationship with other Christians. We are fellow members of the body of Christ, we are brothers and sisters, branches on the vine, fellow citizens of the kingdom, the bride of Christ, and on and on. And all of those flow out of our relationship with Christ: He is the head, we are the body; He is the older brother, we are adopted in; He is the vine, we are the branches; He is the king, we are His subjects. But what is most surprising for us here is that Jesus identifies His relationship with us as a relationship of friendship. Which tells us that of the many kinds of relationships Jesus is wanting us to think of as we relate to each other, as we love each other, one of them is the relationship of friends. And it is that specific relationship He emphasizes here.
So, what makes a good friend? How can you be a good friend? We can learn from observing how the best of all friends, Jesus, has been a good friend to us.
Sacrifice
Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. – John 15:13
Good friends sacrifice for each other. You make the hospital visit, you watch kids, you show up to help clean out the garage, you sit with them in the broken places and pray. We may assume that friendship should always be effortless, that every interaction is cup-filling and convenient. And if we have a friend who is going through a season where there is a lot of need, where there isn’t much “cup-filling” going on, we may be tempted to think: Man, this friendship is costing me a lot right now, is this worth it? Or, if we are the ones who have a lot of need, we may be afraid to open up about that need to others because we are afraid of becoming too costly!
We can remember the friend we have in Jesus. Jesus loves us with the greatest love possible. And this love compels Him to thrust Himself into our greatest problem, and makes it His problem. A good friend doesn’t stand aloof and disinterested as their friend suffers. Jesus does not sit idly by while you suffer. He suffered. He suffered for your sins by making them His own. And if He would not abandon you then, at your worst, He will not abandon you now. He will insert Himself into every problem of your life and lend you all His help. He will absorb your emotional swings, your flakiness, your self-centeredness, your constant requests…He will continue to approach you with the warmth of His attention, and the gift of His friendship. You are His friend, what else could He do?
Reciprocity
You are my friends if you do what I command you. – John 15:14
Friendships are built on mutual delight. Both persons enjoy each other, and because they do, they desire to please the other—there is a spirit of deference, of a “No, you go ahead.” The individual who is blind to the preferences or desires of their friends is not a good friend. A friendship that only goes one direction, where one person sets the terms isn’t really a friendship. So what then are we to make of Jesus’ words here?
Jesus is our Lord and God. This makes our friendship with Him unique from all other friendships. This means that there is an asymmetry in our relationship with Him. He is never wrong, always knows what is best, and commands us to worship Him—if we disobey Him, we sin. There is no one other person like that. If your friend keeps insisting that you need to try out this new boardgame with them—but you hate boardgames—their insistence isn’t right, and your refusal isn’t necessarily wrong. But if Jesus insists that you love your enemy—but you hate your enemy—His insistence is always right, and your refusal is wrong.
But, isn’t it amazing that Jesus still uses the dimension of friendship here to describe our relationship with Him? Normally, if another person came up to us and said: “I will be friends with you if you do what I command you,” we would likely pass on that friendship. But if God descended in the flesh and told us: “Do what I command you,” we would reply, “Yes, of course.” Jesus telling us to obey Him doesn’t surprise us, shouldn’t surprise us.
What should surprise us is Him telling us that we can be His friends if we obey Him. What does that mean? Friends long to please each other. Jesus has already shown us His love for us in what He is willing to sacrifice for our good. He is God, He is King—He does not obey us the way we obey Him. But He does serve us. And it is right for Him to expect us to respond to His service with a desire to obey. Friends of Jesus are not created by their obedience to Him—they are created out of sheer and total grace and the work of Christ. But they are characterized by obedience to Him. We long to obey our dear friend, we want to please Him. Real friends desire to please each other, to serve each other.
Honor
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. – John 15:15
Jesus no longer calls His disciples servants—this is another strange thing. In the gospel of Luke, Jesus taught His disciples, “So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’” (Luke 17:10). It is right for you to identify yourself as a servant—an unworthy servant! The most common title Paul uses to identify himself in his letters is “a servant of Jesus Christ.”
So what does Jesus mean by this? He is honoring His friends, who really are servants, by going out of His way to name them as friends, naming us as friends. We were rebel enemies, at war with the king. But through His love and sacrifice, we have now been restored to His kingdom. The most generous application of Justice in the world would then put us at the status of servants in the kingdom. That is what we deserve, what we are. But the King comes down and tells us, You aren’t just servants…you are my friends. And to prove it, Jesus tells the disciples that He has disclosed everything He has heard from the Father to them. In other words, Jesus opens up to share with His friends what is closest to His heart: what the Father has spoken to Him. When you become friends with Jesus, you do not have to spend years before you are let in to His heart. You don’t wear Him down and prove yourself till eventually you learn what really matters to Him. When you become His friend, He shares His heart freely. And in this, He honors you.
Friends honor each other. There may be some healthy joking and sarcasm here and there, but that does not define their relationship. They speak words of honor and respect to each other; they speak without guile or embarrassment as they encourage each other. When they see something commendable in one another, they say, “You know, you are so good at…” Or they simply say, “Man, I have missed you so much, you are such a good friend.” And in that honor, they are honest and open with each other.
Initiative
You did not choose me, but I chose you. (John 15:16a)
If you are eager for more thick friendships in your life, then do not sit and wait for it to happen to you. Jesus did not wait for you to become friends with Him. As in all of these teachings, there is not a one-for-one application of precisely the same way that Jesus is our friend to how we become friends with others. We are not God. Our application is only analogous to it. Jesus’ pursuit of us was unique in that we were dead in our sins prior to His intervention. He predestined us from before the foundation of the earth. We can’t do that with our friends! Nevertheless, Jesus sets all of this teaching in the context of how we are to love one another, so there is something here we are to learn about how we should love, should pursue friendship.
Why did Jesus have to be the one who initiated a relationship with us? Because our sin had made us so self-centered, that we could not see anything outside of us. If Jesus was willing to be the one who initiated His friendship with us, we should be willing to initiate with others. We invite people, we send the text, and we account for other people’s sin so clouding their vision and filling their mind that they struggle to see anything outside of themselves.
Helps You Grow
“…and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.” John 15:16b
What is the mission of friendship? Why did Jesus become friends with us? That we may bear fruit and that our fruit would last, so that we may pray with boldness. Second only to who you marry, who you are friends with will bear more influence on your life than anything else. They are the thermostat in your life, for good or for ill. We want to be on mission when it comes to befriending those whose lives are in need of a good friend. But we also want to make the pillars of friendships, the core of our relational lives, centered on those who are going to strengthen our faith, who are going to encourage us to bear fruit.
Before I was a Christian, I had a group of friends that reinforced the idea that God, church, and faith were things to be laughed or yawned at. Then, one day, I made a friend who changed my life. And he didn’t do it by blasting away arguments or locking horns with me. He befriended me and the attractiveness of his life, which was suffused with Christ, drew me in. Now, in time, I had questions, I had challenges—but it was set in the context of a friendship that made me willing to listen, willing to trust.
Closing
Friendship is hard. Maybe you feel like you lack the kind of friendships you desire. You wish you had more people in your life who really knew you, who you could unload your burdens on, who you could laugh with. Here is what I brought up in the last Midweek Gathering: everyone feels like that. Everyone is nursing the secret suspicion that they alone are the lonely ones, and everyone else is running around in troops of tight knit friendship. But that isn’t the case. We live in a peculiar time where the shape of our society, the unique temptations of our culture, make friendships particularly difficult. This is one of the reasons why we are spending our whole Midweek Gathering addressing this issue in particular. This is also why we are starting the Future Men events. We realize that we need to try put some extra firepower towards this to push against the currents of our day. But I want to take at least one rock out of your shoe by dispelling the high school fantasy that there is a “cool kids” club where all the “insiders” are all best friends, and you are on the outside looking in. Everyone, if they are honest, feels the bite of loneliness, feels the suspicion that they are not “really in.” And I am not saying that there is anything peculiar about our church—if anything, I think our church is more relational in connections than most. But we just live in an exceptional time where relationships are not prioritized.
But we dare not neglect it. Immediately after Jesus teaches us about friendship, he says, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you,” (John 15:18).
So, what do we do about it? Here is what I am advocating: invest more in friendship. Christianity has unique resources in itself to address this problem head on with the beauty of meaningful friendship.
The Christian life is hard. You need to be a good parent, a good grandparent, a good spouse, a good single person. You need to work hard at your job, but don’t overwork. Make enough money to be generous and pay your bills, but don’t make so much money that you become greedy. Engage with the world, but don’t become worldly. Read books, study the Bible, pray fervently, defend the faith, serve at church, go to small group, get to know your neighbors, serve the community, help the poor, think about how to help the global church, go on mission trips, stay aware of what is happening politically, navigate difficult conversations with the poise a Christian should, resist temptation, confess sin, and on and on and on. And to do all of that just feels exhausting and overwhelming. And here I am telling you to do one more thing—prioritize friendships.
You know what helps when you feel overwhelmed? Venting it all out to a friend. In the old hymn, What a Friend We Have in Jesus, we are told over and over again to “bring it to the Lord in prayer.” “Oh what peace we often forfeit, oh what needless pain we bear, all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.” You have a friend who is eager to listen to your overstress, anxious, frantic prayers. Who is eager for you to unload your burdens on to His shoulders. And then, you can ask Him for help. Ask Him for wisdom on what to do. All of the practical questions about how to do this in real life are complicated. But just imagine what it would be like to be in a community of people where we all adopted the posture of Jesus in pursuing friendship with each other? A community where sacrificing for each other was the norm, not the thing that disqualified us from meaningful connection. A community where we outdid each other in striving to honor and prefer one another? Where we vocalized our encouragement towards each other, where we were honest—didn’t keep people at the surface of our life. Where we all took the first step in initiating? Where we made it our mission to help each other grow in our faith?
Maybe you aren’t a very good friend. Maybe you don’t text back. Maybe you flake out. Maybe you don’t sacrifice your time, don’t give attention to your relationships. Maybe your work and hobbies and extracurricular activities has so packed your schedule that you cannot be a good friend because you are so busy. But here is what we can all do: we can all be honest and admit that we aren’t good friends, and let’s all accept that as we pursue this loft goal, we will probably do it imperfectly. But we are all eager to learn, to grow. And we all can look to the Ultimate Friend, and what He has done to befriend us.
