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Charles Stanley, celebrating 45 years of God’s faithfulness, ensuring the gospel worldwide. Next on in touch.
Our very best friend, who is your very best friend?
Well, you say, well, I have more than one friend.
Well, let me ask you a question.
What is it about that person that first attracted you to them that ultimately led them to become one of your very best friends?
You say, well, it was appearance.
Well, that’s probably not the best way in the world to find a friend because the most important thing about a friend is something on the inside of that person.
It’s their personhood. And yet oftentimes we are attracted by different things, somebody’s personality, their gifts or whatever it might be.
But who is your very best friend or friends? Well, you know, no matter who your best friend is.
There are times when their misunderstandings and their disappointments in life and sometimes there may be a feelings of rejection and all of those things are painful, especially when this is someone that you love dearly, someone who’s been a friend a long time or even a short period of time going through those misunderstandings and disappointments and feelings of rejection and hard feelings are very difficult.
Well, today, I want to introduce you to a friend who is unlike any other friends you’ll ever have.
And I can assure you of this. He will never misunderstand you. He will never disappoint you.
He will never reject you nor will you ever find yourself standing all alone.
And this friend is the best friend ever. And that’s Jesus, the son of the living God.
And I want you to turn if you will to the 15th chapter of John where Jesus discusses this very issue of his friendship of us.
In the very beginning of this chapter, Jesus is discussing the relationship that you and I have with him.
He talks about the vine and the branch and the intimacy of that relationship.
Then he comes down to begin talking about this whole idea of his friendship with us.
And he says, beginning in verse 12, this is my commandment that you love one another just as I have loved you.
Greater love has no one than this. That one lay down his life for his friends.
You are my friends. If you do what I command you no longer do I call you slaves for the slave does not know what his master is doing.
But I have called you friends for all things that I have heard from my father.
I have made known to you.
You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit and that your fruit would remain so that whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.
This I command you that you love one another.
Most people don’t think about Jesus as being their friend.
We see God in heaven, God, the Father God, the Son God, the Holy Spirit.
We think of Him as our savior, our master, our Lord.
We know him to be the sovereign of the universe, ruling over, over all things and controlling all things.
Now, how can we see him and visualize him?
And how can we picture him relate to him as a friend if he is the savior of the entire world?
If he’s the Lord and master of life, if he is the sovereign of the universe, if he’s the creator of it all, how can I relate to this one?
Who is the ultimate ruler and sovereign controller of all things and the creator of all things as my personal friend.
And yet I need him as my friend. I desire him as my friend.
And if you’re going through those difficult circumstances of your life and you don’t understand exactly what’s happening and you’d like to change things, you’d like for things to get better.
And you’re asking God, why not?
It just might be that you have forgotten that you have the friend of all friends who is willing to befriend you if you will allow him and someone to encourage you to listen carefully.
Because Jesus has expressed his relationship to us as a friend and he said to his disciples, if you’ll notice in this passage, he said to them, you are my friends.
If you do what I command you no longer do I call you slaves or servants for the slave doesn’t know what his master is doing.
But I have called you friends for all things that I have heard from my father.
I’ve made known to you. Now, what he’s saying here is he says, one of the evidences of the evidences of friendship you’re gonna find in me.
And so I want us to see how he’s expressing his friendship and how he expresses his friendship to us.
And one of the ways he has expressed his friendship is in his sacrificial love for us.
What he did is that when we were enemies to him, he laid down his life in love for us in order to make us his friends.
So that Jesus Christ is that he is that listen, he is the possible friend of every single person.
He desires to be the friend of every single one of us.
But if I reject him and refused the relationship with him and deny him and shut him out of my life, even though he desires to be my friend.
He cannot express his friendship to the fullest.
He can’t express it in many ways that he desires to express it until I’m willing to acknowledge the fact that he’s the son of God, that he’s the savior, the Lord and the master.
And that he desires to be my loving, genuine, intimate friend who will stick with me closer than a brother who can make promises that no one else can possibly make and who can perform things, no one else could possibly perform and who can enable you and me to become and achieve and accomplish in life.
What no one else can help us accomplish and achieve or become. He’s that kind of a very special friend.
Jesus has demonstrated the most awesome love by dying on the cross for your sins.
Something, listen, no one else could do.
Someone could die in your behalf to save your life but never to save your soul.
Someone can instantaneously without thought because of their love for you, give their life, but it will never accomplish what his sacrificial death accomplished.
So, one of the first ways that he expresses his friendship taught us is in his sacrificial death.
The second way is this And that is the fact he takes the initiative in the relationship.
Look back again, if you will in the, look, if you will, in this 16th verse, he takes the initiative.
He says you didn’t choose me but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, that your fruit would remain so that whatever you ask of my father in my name, he will give it to you.
Now, what is he saying? Simply this. He’s saying we didn’t choose to become his friends.
He chose to become our friend.
And as a result of his choosing those of us who have responded to his reaching out to us and have accepted him as our saving the forgiveness of our sins.
Now we are now capable of making the Lord Jesus Christ our friend.
From our perspective, we can now become his friend and he can become our friend.
And now we can have an intimate relationship no longer.
The relationship that Jesus up there is up there somewhere seated, the father’s right hand.
But now Jesus who is seated to Father’s right hand is also living on the inside of us in the presence of the power of the Holy Spirit.
We have an indwelling friend. He chose us. He took the initiative.
He didn’t see anything in us that was worthy really of becoming a friend.
It wasn’t the result of our works, it wasn’t the result of good attributes and characteristics in us.
He because of his unconditional love for us, decided he wanted to be our friend.
He wanted to be able to enable us to fulfill his purpose and his plan for our life.
And so he chose to become our friend. So what did he do?
He came to earth for example, to walk among men so that you and I would be able to understand that he understands the kind of savior.
He is the kind of lord, he is the kind of master, but also the kind of friend that he can be.
One who could look at someone who is sick and say friend, I’m going to hell you, Someone who could look out upon a group of people who are his heroes and say friends.
I want you to listen fairly, fairly one who could relate to the most obnoxious, the most sinful, the most rejected people in society.
And when others looked how he related to them, they would say that man is a friend of sinners and tax collectors.
One who could drop in on the home of Mary Martha and Lazarus love them and be considered their friend and he considered them his friend.
He said he loved them. So when you look at this passage and you ask yourself the question who took the initiative is very evident.
He chose us in him in Christ before the foundation of the world.
Let me ask you this question among your friendships for the most part among all of your friends, whether you have two or three or one or a whole bunch of friends who usually takes the initiative.
Are you the kind of person who waits for someone else? To take the initiative.
Are you the kind of person who sort of reserved and you hold back and a little embarrassed and you’re not outgoing and you realize you’re not a little bit introverted and so you’re not the kind of person who is going to step forward and say hi, how are you?
And you make a friendship, who was the one who did most of the introduction, most of the initiative in your friendships, I can tell you who took the initiative in your relationship to Jesus.
And that’s Jesus Christ himself always takes the initiative, planned it, purposed, it determined to do it and has done it.
The question is, how have you responded to his invitation to be your friend?
What have you said over all these years in your life when he’s been expressing all different kinds of ways that he loves you.
He cares for you. He desires the best for you. Have you responded to that?
Have you rejected him shunned him, shut him out?
Or have you recognized that his invitation was an invitation of awesome love and intimacy with the very God of this universe?
Think about it. The God who created it all says I want to be your friend.
If you’ll let me, I will be a very intimate, loyal, loving friend to you. Another way.
He expressed his friendship and his love for us is this and that is the revolutionary effect that it has upon our life.
When you and I become a child of God, something happens when we listen to this.
When you become a child of God, when you trust the Lord Jesus Christ, as your personal savior, a revolutionary effect takes place, everything changes your spirit, changes your heart, your soul, that is your, your eternal destiny changes, everything begins to change your perspective on things.
But you know what, when you become a friend of Jesus, he’s already our friend.
When, when we, when we begin to recognize him as our friend, something else is going to happen, this relationship that we have, whereby we see him as savior and master and Lord and God and sovereign creator.
All of a sudden, you know what happens.
It’s like he comes out of the heavens down to earth on our level and we begin to relate to him in a whole different fashion.
Now, once you notice something in this passage that could prove to be a little bit uh maybe misunderstood notice what if you will, what he says in this 15th verse, he says no longer, do I call you slaves?
For the slave does not know what his master is doing.
But I have called you friends for all things that I’ve heard from my father.
I have made known to you.
Now, what he’s simply saying is one of the ways, one of the ways that I have expressed my friendship to you, speaking to his disciples.
One of the ways he’s expressed his friendship to us is that he has told us, revealed to us things we would know any other way.
One who is the genuine intimate friend with someone is going to reveal and tell the other person things they’re not gonna tell anybody else.
Do you have the kind of friend with whom you can be confidential and tell them things that you know, that they will never tell anyone else?
Do you have the kind of friendship that you know that you can tell a secret and it’ll stay a secret?
Jesus told them not necessarily secrets, but he says, I have revealed, I have taken the covers off.
I’ve lifted the top off the pot and you can look in and you can see all the things that my father told me.
I’ve told you all of these things because I’m your friend and I wanna be your intimate friend.
And the only way to be an intimate friend is to share our hearts, our minds, what we know what we’ve experienced, what we feel, things we’ve been through, things, we think we’re going through and this is exactly what Jesus do is doing.
Now, notice if you will in verse 14, another verse, I want us to look at you are my friends.
If you do what I command you now, that does not mean that that is the emphasis of that verse is not, I’ll let you be my friend.
If you do so. And so there was, we don’t have to live up to something in order to be his friend.
We don’t live up to something in order to get saved.
We are saved by the, by the grace of God, his goodness and love and kindness toward us without regard to our worth or whatever we say, it’s God’s unmerited favor so that his friendship toward us is not based on our worthiness.
It’s based on his unconditional love.
So when he says, you are my friends, if you do what I command you, what is the emphasis here is that is you’re gonna be transformed.
That is this relationship is gonna be awesome.
If you will do what I command you and you notice what he said.
He said, what’s my commandment that you love one another?
He says, when you begin to love one another, something is going to happen, then you’re gonna, then you’re gonna be, listen, your life is gonna be so transformed.
You’re gonna be living out what I desire for you that you love one another.
And so one of the things that happens to people who fall in love with the Lord Jesus Christ is we’re able to love someone else.
In fact, the more you love the Lord Jesus Christ, listen, the more the greater your capacity to love someone else because you see, the more we love him, the more like him we’re gonna become and the more like him, we become the more our capacity to love someone else within the same way.
He’s loved us, sacrificial love, taking the initiative, sharing our heart, pouring out our soul, pouring out our minds, doing all the things that true, genuine intimate friends are able to do.
And yet many of you are gonna live your life, lonely all of your life.
You’re gonna have a lot of casual friends. You may have some close friends.
But until you discover the intimacy that comes between Jesus Christ, another person, you will never be able to experience friendship to that level.
You’ll never be able to express friendship to someone else to the same degree you can when you fall in love with the Lord Jesus Christ and recognize the awesome friend he is to you.
And so when I think about who he is and the fact that he says in this passage, he says, this is my commandment that you love.
One of them just as I’ve loved you. How has he loved us?
Sacrificial e the ultimate expression of love is that he laid down his life.
He says, now I want you, he says, now I want you to love each other.
I want you to love one of the same way.
So let me ask you a question, whom do you love?
What friendship do you have to this degree that you would step in front of whatever was necessary to protect their life would you be, do you have a friend so intimate one that you love enough to literally lay down your physical life for them?
He said, what are you talking about? Family? Well, yes. What, what about even family? Oh, yes.
Are you sure? What about someone who is not your family?
Someone who is a friend? You say I love this friend?
Do you love them enough to lay down your life for them?
I think there are people who do but I think that so often times we think we are real genuine, close intimate friends with someone, but we do have limitations.
Now, let’s look at that verse another way.
He says, greater love has no one than this than you lay down your life for your friends.
Now watch this carefully laying down my life for my friend does not only include the possibility of laying it down physically, but what about laying down my life in this light?
Then I’m willing to give up my goals for him or for her?
Am I willing to lay down my plans for him or her?
Am I willing, am I willing to lay down my ideas, my wishes, my wants.
Am I willing to lay down my life in order for the other person to have their way because I love them.
You see when it comes to becoming a Christian, living a relationship with Jesus Christ, that’s really intimate.
We have to lay down our life.
We lay down our old life, we lead down old ideas and old perspectives on things.
And sometimes we have to lay down old friends because sometimes the command of the Lord Jesus Christ is so demanding because he wants the best for us.
We have to lay down our life to say Lord no longer my life.
But I want you not to live your life in me and through me, you see, he desires an intimate relationship.
He wants to be the kind of friend that’s not casual, not distant but warm, intimate and personal, just as intimate and personal as God himself can possibly be.
He expresses his love in different ways.
Another way I think he expresses his love to us is the fact that he challenges us.
He listen, he challenges us to become our best and to achieve our best.
Now, lots of people listen to sermons and read books and sing songs. For example, we sing uh my Jesus.
I love the, I know thou art mine. What a friend we have in Jesus.
There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus. And you know what we sing.
Those songs comes to our mind, right of our mouth and we don’t feel it.
But I wonder how many of you think about Jesus being your friend.
I can sing my Jesus. I love thee.
I know thou art mind and I can be thinking about something else the whole time because I know those words, what a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear.
We can sing those songs. He read those words not even think that is, it comes from to our mind out of our mouth, no emotion whatsoever.
Jesus desires to be listened, an emotional friend, someone, we love someone, we cherish someone we desire because that’s who he is to us.
He is one who has revealed himself. He wants us to reach our potential.
That’s what he’s, that’s what he’s referring to in this passage. Listen, he said, you didn’t choose me.
I chose you and I didn’t just, I didn’t just choose you, but I appointed you that you would go and bear fruit and that your fruit would remain.
You say, well, he’s talking to his apostles.
You know what he says that every single one of us is to bear fruit.
And the first quality of fruit to bear is the fruit of the spirit of love, joy, and peace, and goodness and gentleness and kindness, self control.
These are the qualities of that kind of relationship, but fruit also in good works, giving ourselves away to other people, doing good deeds, serving him in whatever fashion he may choose to call us.
One of the ways that he expresses his love for us is to challenge us to become our best.
I don’t believe you can ever become your best.
Unless Jesus is your friend, you’ll never, never be able to accomplish all that God has set for you until He becomes your friend.
Apart from him. You’ll never be able to reach what God is after in your life.
But the question is, do you want to be his friend?
He’s an available friend, every single one of us? But is he your friend? From his perspective?
He’s our friend. But is he my friend from my perspective or have you been one of those persons who just sort of gone through life?
And you really haven’t been interested in having him as your friend?
You know, when most people call upon Jesus, when they’re down, you know, when they cry the hardest when they’re down the furthest, you know, when their unbelief and all of their skepticism and atheism crumbles all around them when they know that there is no other way and they hope us Christians are right and they cry out to God.
They don’t know to Jesus they’ve only heard about and finally recognized upon being saved.
Here was a friend who had been there all along and they had ignored him.
Every single one of us is coming to life and death.
Suppose you die without Jesus as your friend. Let me ask you a question.
Then what if you died? Jesus is not your friend? Then what you said?
Well, I guess I’ll just disappear. Oh, no, you won’t. I guess I’ll just evaporate. No, you won’t.
If you die without Jesus Christ being your friend, you realize that you will be eternally separated forever and ever separated from the one who loved you so much all your life that he laid down his life sacrificial e for you because he loves you because he loved you.
And because he wanted to build an intimate relationship with you to die without him, it would be better if you’d never been born to live your life without him.
It’s a tragedy when you can live your life and understand and experience life at its very, very best because that’s what he has in store for us.
He’s that kind of a friend. Now, suppose you’re one of those persons.
And you say, how does all this relate to me? I’m not even a Christian.
Let me say, first of all, you certainly need to be, you need to trust the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior because you know what, as much as he wants to be your friend, he can’t be all that to you if you reject him as your friend.
And if you’re willing to ask him to forgive you of your sins, and you will entrust him as your personal savior, which simply means that you believe that his death at the cross paid your sin debt in full and you accept him as your savior, that your sins are forgiven.
Your name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life and Forever.
You’re a child of God and Jesus becomes your friend.
He’s your friend, an available friend if you’ll allow him to be so, and it may be that you are a believer and you’ve never thought about him being your friend.
I want to encourage you just to go through that list and ask yourself the question.
Do I really see Jesus this way in my life?
Do I really believe he loves me this much? Do I believe he’s real enough to be, to me?
Everything I need him to be he is and he will be.
If you’ll let him, he’ll prove to you to be the best friend ever.
And father, how grateful we are that you sent the son of God, your beloved son to be our friend as well as our savior.
And I pray the Holy Spirit will take these simple truths and let them be investigative of our own heart.
Let us see how we match up the kind of friends we are.
But above all the kind of friend the Lord Jesus Christ is to us and then respond accordingly by love for him, our obedience to him and our service for him in his name.
We pray amen.