Tag: friendship

Lent Sermon Series 2: Relationship with God, John 15:9-17

John 15:9-17

Group of friends enjoying a sunset together. From Freerange Stock, Public Domain.

Last week, in the first part of our Circuit Lent Sermon Series, we aimed to answer the question, ‘Why Lent?’ with the reply, ‘To reorient ourselves towards Jesus.’

Reorienting ourselves towards Jesus implies one of the most wonderful truths in the Christian faith: that we were made for a relationship with God through him. It is not something that every major religion claims. For our Muslim friends, the main claim of Islam is the call to submission to God. We believe in that (in a Christian form), but we believe more. Islam has ninety-nine names for God, but one of them is not ‘Father.’

But in Exodus 33:7-11 we heard the remarkable statement that Moses was described as a ‘friend of God.’ Astonishingly, Jesus ups the ante. He says to his disciples in verse 15 of our John reading,

I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

Disciples of Jesus are friends of Jesus. It seems almost too hard to believe, but that is what he says. Maybe we’ve been put off by those Christians who take this up in such a way that it sounds like they have a chummy and casual relationship with the Almighty. That’s not what I’m talking about. Friendship with the Triune God is inevitably different from ordinary friendships. But it is still friendship.

We’re going to look at it from two angles – Jesus’ side and our side.

Firstly, then, friendship from Jesus’ side:

Verse 9:

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.

God is love. Wikimedia Commons. CC 4.0.

‘As the Father has loved me.’ At the heart of God the Holy Trinity is love. That’s why John tells us in his First Epistle that ‘God is love.’ It is the most basic statement about the nature of God that we have. God is love. There is love between the Persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Love was there, which led to creation. God could not hold love within the Godhead, because that would be mutual self-indulgence. Mutual love looks beyond, to love others.

And the divine love was so deep and so rich that even when the pinnacle of creation, the human race made in God’s image, rejected that love, it could not stop. Such was God love that he continued to pursue humans in love, forming a people who would be his witnesses, and continually choosing and sending those who would speak for him, frequently at immense cost. Ultimately, he sent his only begotten Son, because God so loved the world. Or as Jesus put it in our reading in verse 13:

Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

And so something else is true that John also said in his First Epistle – not only that God is love, but also that ‘We love, because God first loved us.’ God has consistently made the first move in love towards the human race.

Moreover, within the relationship he seeks to make with us through love, he speaks to us. We have it in what Jesus says in verse 15b:

Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

Jesus has made known the Father’s will to his disciples. He has engaged in a ministry of teaching. We have the authoritative record of that teaching in the Gospels. Elsewhere in John’s Gospel in chapter 5 Jesus endorsed seeing what we call the Old Testament as pointing to him, so that we might find eternal life. And in chapter 14 he explained how the Holy Spirit would teach his followers all things and remind them of what he had said. It is not just the Gospels, then, but the whole of Scripture that we have for understanding what God says to us through Jesus. Our God speaks to his friends.

Yes, of course, there are some rather unbalanced friends who make some silly claims about God speaking to them. But the solution to misuse of this doctrine is not its disuse but its right and careful use. So we weigh carefully what Jesus is teaching us in the Scriptures. And if someone in the church family believes God is speaking to them in another more temporary way, then we weigh that carefully and prayerfully, too.

Is it not the most natural thing to accept that a friend would love us and would want to speak with us? Next week is my birthday, and usually on that day my Best Man phones me. We don’t speak as often as we might or we could these days, but I can be pretty sure that when he calls it will not be a short phone call. We shall each want to know what the other has been doing, and what our family members have been up to. We shall probably talk about everything from world politics to what music we’ve been listening to.

And is that not a small picture of God in Christ talking to us as his friends? He has the serious matter of his will and his ways to communicate with us, but he also takes interest in the small details of our lives. This is what a friend does. So yes, we can pray for the provision of a parking space, just so long as that isn’t the limit of our prayers!

Secondly, friendship from our side:

Verse 14:

You are my friends if you do what I command.

Image from Abundant Life. CC4.0.

If I’m honest, that doesn’t sound much like the friendship we experience in everyday life. It’s not normal in a friendship for one party to issue commands to the other. We think of friendships as mutual and equal in status. Doing what one friend commands doesn’t sound like that.

But this is not a conventional friendship. We have already at the beginning been surprised at the thought of the Author of the Universe wanting a friendship with us. Whatever it is, it cannot be the equal and mutual friendship that we are used to.

However, we can have friendships between parents and children. We can have friendships between someone who is in authority and another who is not. There may come a time in such relationships where the one with authority has to say to the other, ‘I need you to do this, please.’ Jesus gives us his commands with the voice of a loving friend, not that of a tyrant. And since in a relationship of friendship we shall want to please our friend, in this case we shall want to please Jesus by doing what he asks of us.

There is a verse in Ephesians where Paul enjoins us to ‘Find out what pleases the Lord’, and while that is sometimes simple and straightforward, at other times it is more of a challenge. The next three weeks of the sermon series will look at various spiritual disciplines we can use to tune in more clearly to what Jesus wants of us, and I don’t want to steal the thunder of other preachers you will hear on those subjects.

However, in the meantime, in this passage Jesus gives us one concrete action we can get on with to show we are serious about responding to his love and friendship by doing something that pleases him. It occurs in verse 12:

My command is this: love each other as I have loved you.

If we want to please Jesus out of friendship, we can love one another. It’s one of those easy to state but harder to practise commands of his. For just as we say about human families that you can choose your friends but not your family, the same is true of our spiritual family. In the church, Jesus puts us alongside people who are not all the same as us. We cross the generations, ethnic backgrounds, health conditions, social classes, educational achievements, finances, political convictions, and all sorts of other things that the world divides on. But Jesus is pleased when we cross those barriers and unite in love in his name, because that is his will and pleasure.

And as I said, it’s easy to state but more challenging to do. We are a varied lot as God’s people, and we don’t always fit together easily. As one book I read on the subject many years ago put it, it is like building with bananas.

But our world needs this witness. We are increasingly divided: just look at the world of politics, where people cannot disagree with one another civilly and instead label their opponents as demonic. Look at social media, where the algorithms keep on feeding you only the stuff they think you agree with, and thus force people into separate silos.

Perhaps it’s no accident that the one illustration Jesus gives us of obeying his commands out of friendship is this one. Love one another. Does it not remain one of the most important ways we can live out our friendship with Jesus? Has it not always been so? Because that friendship makes a practical difference in the world.

You have heard it said that in the early church the observation that pagans made of the first Christians was, ‘See how these Christians love one another.’ Do we not think that in our world a similar witness is needed? Jesus clearly thought it was important, because at the end of the reading in verse 17 he comes back and repeats it:

This is my command: love each other.

Conclusion

Let’s sum up: reorienting ourselves towards Jesus implies that we are being brought into a relationship with God. But more than a relationship, it’s a friendship, even if that sounds strange given our unequal status.

However, God who is in his very inner nature love, has reached out in love to the human race before we ever had a thought for him. In Jesus Christ, this comes to fullest expression in his calling his disciples friends.

Like any friendship, we desire to please our friend. With our status not being equal to that of Jesus, that will entail us obeying his commands.

And Jesus has a particularly important command for us to put into practice right away: love each other.

Other commands may not be as simple to discern as that one, but the next three weeks of this sermon series will introduce us to disciplines that help us listen to find out what pleases the Lord.

In the meantime, we have no excuse but to get on with that simple but challenging command which shows we are serious about our friendship with Jesus.

In the words of a song: we may never have this day again, so let us love like we could love. We may never pass this way again, so let us love like we could love.

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A Loving Friendship With Jesus, John 15:9-17 (Easter 6 2024)

John 15:9-17

In those sadly increasingly rare times when I get to prepare a couple for marriage, one thing I impress upon them is that the success of their relationship will depend on the effort that both of them put in.

I say this, because we so often hear quotations in the media from famous couples who are breaking up, saying things like, ‘Marriage didn’t work for us.’ And it’s nonsense. Marriage is not some separate entity like a car that might malfunction. Nor do we say it in other parts of life. When a friendship ends, we are usually more honest and say, ‘We fell out with each other.’

Now why put this up front in this sermon? Because our Bible passage is about the relationship we have with Jesus and the effort required to maintain it.

Yet putting it as starkly as that will set off the alarm for some Christians. Effort to maintain our relationship with Jesus? Whatever happened to God’s grace? Don’t we depend entirely on God’s grace for all good things?

Well, yes we do, and no, I am not about to preach a religion where good works earn our salvation. In that sense, grace is certainly opposed to good works. But what I want to emphasise today was caught in the words of the late great Christian philosopher Dallas Willard, when he said that while grace is opposed to good works, it is not opposed to effort.

In other words, this is not about effort in order to be saved, but effort in response to being saved.

Jesus speaks about this in the two ways here in which he describes our relationship with him: love and friendship.

Firstly, love:

9 ‘As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 

God’s love comes first, before any love we give. We do not love in order to be loved by God: we love because God in Christ loves us first. That’s why Jesus says here, ‘Remain in my love.’ What we do is only ever in response to what God has done for us. Our love does not earn favour with God. We love because God has already favoured us with his love. I often like to say that our love for Jesus is an act of gratitude.

So that may clear up one puzzle here, about our motivation to love Jesus. But it isn’t the only conundrum. It sounds strange to our ears to hear Jesus saying that the way to remain in his love is to keep his commands. In our day and age, we are used to the idea that a relationship of love is a relationship between two equals. So the days of a bride promised to obey the bridegroom in her wedding vows are ones we have left behind. In our marriage service, both bride and groom make the same vows to each other.[1]

We should freely admit that our relationship with Jesus is not a relationship of equals. He is Lord. We are his disciples. Yet despite that, love stretches across the gap. His lofty divine status does not stop him from loving us. Indeed, it is his very nature, for God is love.

We do see examples of this in smaller ways in other parts of life. I remember a church member who was the boss of an engineering company. Any time one of his staff was ill, and particularly if they were in hospital, he took time to visit them. He would enquire whether there was anything the employee’s family needed. He was not checking up on them; he was in a small way imitating Jesus.

And therefore since we are under the authority of Jesus it isn’t out of place for obedience to his commands to be the way in which we show our response of love to him. He has the right as Lord to command us, but his commands are characterised by his love for us. Therefore it is only fitting that our response of love is to do what he commands.

I could put it another way, although this may sound like a slightly diluted version of what Jesus says, and it’s simply to say that if we love someone then we want to do what pleases them. If we love Jesus, because of his great love for us, then we shall want to please him. You could say that of a relationship between equals, as well as our unequal relationship with Jesus.

However we express it, our response of loving obedience constitutes remaining in his love, because this is what we do on our side of the relationship in order to maintain it and keep it strong.

We move on to the second dimension of the relationship, namely friendship:

13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I’ve read verse 13 for both love and friendship. It’s the verse that acts like a hinge in the passage, for it mentions love and friendship, it talks about love for friends:

13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 

Jesus has loved us into friendship. It’s still the unequal relationship, but the friendship crosses that. And it’s still the case that what maintains the relationship from our side is obedience, because on his side Jesus still has the right to command certain things of us, yet he does so from a posture of friendship, not authoritarianism. And on our side, we want to please our friend Jesus by doing what he wants. It’s not a shallow, matey friendship: it’s much deeper than that.

And that ‘hinge verse’ shows us just how deep. It’s a friendship where our love for one another is such that one would lay down his life for his friends. Of course, the primary reference here is to Jesus going to the Cross to die for his friends and for all who would become his friends. In his case, the laying down of his life accomplishes things that no other sacrificial death ever did or ever will.

But at the same time it is also a model and an example for us of what friendship looks like. It’s more than drinks together in the pub after work. It’s more than what passes for fellowship in many a church. It’s a willingness to lay down our lives, if that’s what our friends – or even our Great Friend – need.

Yet this deep, loving friendship is not wholly described by this solemn obligation. It is also described in the amazing privilege that Jesus grants to us because he has called us friends:

15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 

He gives us an inside track on the will and the purposes of God. He does not simply give us commands to follow: if obeying his commands was all there was on our side of the relationship, then we would be mere servants. But no. We are friends. He lets us in on his Father’s business. It is possible for us to know what God wants of us and of his creation.

Now of course, some Christians take this to silly extremes. I remember hearing one preacher castigating those ‘who claim to have had more words from the Lord before breakfast than Billy Graham had in a lifetime.’ I think of those who reduce the will of God to trivia – although I concede there will be the odd occasion when it’s right to pray for a parking place.

But there are others among us who act as if we don’t know the will of God and we can’t possibly know the will of God. And that is a sad state of affairs, which misses the beautiful gift Jesus offers us here, arising out of our relationship with him as friends.

There is a middle ground to be struck between those who think we should know every fine detail of our lives from God and those who don’t think we can hear anything from him.

Jesus has let us in on God’s overall plans for creation and his specific plans of salvation for the human race. He has let us in on his commands to follow so that we remain in his love. But within that overall revealing of his Father’s business he often leaves us to apply it specifically. He does not micro-manage us.

For example, I have seen too many Christians get over-wrought about finding a marriage partner. For most of us, Jesus and the apostles simply give us God’s general will in this area, and leave us to apply it. Only in a few rare cases, usually where someone has a particularly tricky calling in life anyway, do I believe God has just one particular person in mind for us. The rest of us can choose – just so long as we remain within the general will of God. That is one way in which divine sovereignty and human freedom hold together.

And all this leads us to the concluding verses:

16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit – fruit that will last – and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my command: love each other.

Jesus reminds us that it all starts with him, not us, so it cannot be that we earn his love. He always makes the first move, and anything we do is in response to his love and friendship for us.

And we live out that response to his love and friendship in the church and in the world – bearing fruit and loving one another. These are the signs that we have a loving friendship with Jesus.

[1] “But what about ‘Wives, submit to your husbands’?” some will object. In Ephesians 5 where Paul says this, he also calls husbands to love their wives like Christ loves the Church – that is, by being willing to die for them. In other words, Paul calls both spouses to radical self-giving, but in different language.

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The Picnic

Yesterday (Thursday), our children finished at their primary school before our forthcoming move from Essex to Surrey. The other week, the mother of one of our daughter’s friends texted us to ask whether we would be free to share a picnic with her today. We were, so we agreed.

At 11 this morning, we made our way over to the park where we had agreed to meet. Only it wasn’t just this one family. It was a whole collection of families. And more turned up over the next couple of hours. We were deeply touched by their affection for us, and their gratitude for the part we had played in the community.

It reminded me of a story from a previous sabbatical, when Debbie and I worshipped at a Church Of Another Denomination. The pastor was a friend and a good preacher, but one Sunday morning a lay elder preached. He pranced around at the front like an evangelical superstar, and pronounced in his sermon that when non-Christians ask you how you are, they never mean it. Only your Christian friends truly care about you.

“Idiot,” we both thought. We have both had good reason to be grateful for our non-Christian friends. Sometimes they have been far better friends than some of our Christian acquaintances.

Whatever I believe about the need for everyone to follow Christ (and I do believe that), we need a theology to cope with the goodness of non-Christians.

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Friends

Yesterday, we travelled back to Kent for a barbecue. We had been one couple among eight on a National Childbirth Trust ante-natal course six years ago. Five of the eight couples remained friends. As it happens, two of the other couples are also Christians, one couple has started to show an interest in spiritual things recently, but the other couple – to our knowledge, at least – hasn’t. But they are our friends, regardless. We enjoy each other’s company. None of the other families has moved away, only us. But when we return, we seem to pick up where we left off.

Debbie and I are glad to have both Christian and non-Christian friends – both from before we ever met each other, and since. Some of the families we know through school here are good friends. As far as we know, only one of those families is Christian.

I think back to 2003, when I was on a sabbatical. We got away from Methodism and worshipped at the nearby Baptist Church, where we knew the pastor and his wife quite well. When he (or one or two others) preached, it was thoughtful and challenging. However, there were some regulars in the pulpit who were not so good.

One was a church deacon. He prowled across the dais like an evangelical superstar, waiting to pounce like a spiritual lion. In one sermon, he told us how Christian friends would always be there for us, but it would never be true of non-Christians. They would ask you how you were, but would not be interested in your response.

Idiot.

Both of us are grateful for friends who have stuck with us in the darkest of times, not all of them people who share our faith at all.

People are made in the image of God, and are capable of good and loving acts. Those acts are not salvific, but neither are ours. We hope we can be a model of Christian love – that our deliberate intention to cultivate friendships will be missional.

I’m glad we’re not trapped in the holy huddle. Thank God for our non-Christian friends.

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