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FRIENDSHIPS: LOVED AND CHOSEN

Building Great Relationships, Part 5

June 3, 2007

Pastor Bob Sanders

John 15:12-17

12“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

Coping Alone

I hope you won’t mind if I ask you a personal question: How are you fixed for friends?

Not acquaintances. Most of us have lots of those. I’m talking about friends – folks you care about and count on, folks who care about and count on you. And while dogs and cats are wonderful companions, this is about human beings, not pets. Do you have some real friends? Friends you spend regular time with. Friends who’ve seen you at your best and at your worst and still love you. Friends who know you well enough to pray intelligently for you. Friends who do, in fact, pray for you.

How are you fixed for friends?

If you’re like most Americans, the answer is, “Not very well.” Last June a team of researchers published a report entitled “Social Isolation in America.” Nearly 1,500 people across this country were interviewed face-to-face, and fully one quarter of these said they have nobody to talk to about important matters. Another quarter said they are just one person away from nobody. The troubling thing is that this study is identical to one done twenty years earlier. And what it shows is that in those two decades the number of people who have no one to talk to has doubled. The survey did show that people are talking more in their families, but friendships are in trouble. 1

And that’s a serious problem because these are the people we depend on to help us get through, the human safety net we all need. A few years back Robert Putnam wrote about the breakdown of ties that bind us as a community and as a nation in his book Bowling Alone. This new survey suggests that nowadays more and more of us are coping alone, suffering alone, even dying alone.

I think the church of Jesus Christ is supposed to be a community where we break through this epidemic of aloneness, a community where we build significant supportive friendships. I want to think with you about friendship as we continue in this series of messages on Building Great Relationships. How would you describe a friend? Proverbs 18 talks about “a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” Charlie Brown must have had that in mind when in a Peanuts cartoon he said a friend is “someone who sticks up for you when you aren’t there.” I think the columnist Walter Winchell said it best: “A friend is one who walks in when others walk out.”

There’s no question Jesus was a person of many friendships. He chose the Twelve to be with him as close friends, and selected three of them – Peter, James, and John – to be his inner circle. He enjoyed friendship with Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha, and would stay in their home for periods of time. Even Jesus’ critics recognized this quality about him. The worst thing they could say about him was that he was “a friend of sinners and tax collectors.” 2 Everybody knew Jesus was a man who made and kept friends.

But there’s something unique about this Friend. For one thing, he assumes the right to command his friends. “You are my friends,” he said, “if you do what I command you.” And what does Jesus command us to do? In our text today it’s quite simple: we are to love one another just as he loved us. We are to befriend one another as he befriended us. How do we do that? Let me briefly describe three qualities of Jesus-style friendships that arise from our text. If you’re taking notes, these qualities are time, transparency, and trust.

It Takes Time

First, it takes time, lots of time, to cultivate good relationships. The study I mentioned earlier suggests one major reason for the decline in friendships is a simple lack of time. We all experience this – more and more time needed for work, for travel, for family responsibilities means less time available for making and keeping friends. In his helpful book The Friendship Factor, Alan Loy McGinnis noted that people who are deeply loved usually devote lots of time to their friendships. They make friendships one of their top priorities. Lonely people wish they had better relationships, but in fact they place little emphasis and devote less time to cultivating good friends. 3

When we look at Jesus, we see his top priority (next to his relationship with God) was his friends. When I was in Israel last month I visited Galilee and I saw how much time Jesus must have spent walking from town to town. And all that time was spent with these twelve – talking with them, teaching them, discussing with them. Our reading from John 15 comes at the close of those three years spent so closely together. Lots and lots of time.

What about us? What’s our priority? It’s hard, I know. It’s hard to develop quality friendships when we’re so busy and pulled apart by so many competing demands. It’s hard when you’ve had to move away from close friends you spent lots of time developing and come to a new place and have to start all over. It would be nice if there were a formula for instant relationships, but there is none. It takes time – time spent doing things together, walking together, golfing together, having lunch together, talking about the stuff of life together. It takes time, and that means you can’t do this with lots of people. Most of us, including Jesus, have time for just a few.

McGinnis writes,

"It may be that your friendships are being impeded by your social life. Some people immerse themselves in such a whirl of social affairs that there is no opportunity to establish a close relationship. The fact of the matter is that one cannot have a profound connection with more than a few people. Time prohibits it. Deep friendship requires cultivation over the years. . . If your social calendar is too full for such intimate bonding, it should be pared. . . Getting close to a few people is more important than being popular enough to receive 300 Christmas cards every year." 4

I find the best way to develop and maintain friendships is through small groups. I’ve been in different small groups ever since I first became a Christian. I think of two small groups I’m part of today. One is a group of amateur musicians who get together to play music and enjoy one another’s company. The other is small group of pastors who get together for sharing and prayer. Both are very important to me, and I jealously guard our times together. See, I’ve discovered I need these people, these friends. And the only way to maintain these friendships is by devoting time. There are no shortcuts. It takes time to grow a friendship.

It Takes Transparency

A second quality of Jesus-style friendship is transparency. Jesus is open and transparent with his friends. “I do not call you servants any longer,” he says, “because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.”

Jesus let himself be known by his friends. He lived his life openly among them. He shared meals with them, worshiped and prayed with them, wept and laughed with them, worked through questions and quarrels with them. And he let them know, in deeds and in words, that he loved them.

Transparency is the willingness to be vulnerable. Genuine friends are not afraid to ask for help, or express a need. Genuine friends don’t put up with the “I don’t want to be a burden” excuse that keeps so many of us from sharing what’s going on inside. They tell their friends what it’s really like. When Jesus went up on the Mount of Transfiguration to pray through his direction, he took Peter, James and John to be with him. The same is true when he wrestled in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. He specifically asked his three closest friends to stay with him, to pray with him. He was open with them, vulnerable, transparent.

It’s a tough thing, this transparency. There are three of us in my pastors’ covenant group. Some years ago there were five. We lost two of them. One of them died of cancer, which was incredibly painful, but he let us in on it, let us go through it with him, hurt with him, weep with him, pray with him. We lost the other one in a different way. He was going through some deep personal problems, but he couldn’t talk about them – even when it was obvious to all of us he was in trouble. We asked, we prayed, we reached out, we even challenged him. But he couldn’t handle being transparent. He dropped out the group, and eventually those problems cost him his marriage and his ministry.

Many of us here – and I’m thinking especially of many of the men here – miss out on real friendship because we’re afraid to be transparent. It’s so hard to admit we’re struggling. It’s so hard to let someone else know where we’re hurting. And it’s hard for many of us – again, I’m thinking of men here, but I’m sure it’s true for lots of women – to tell our friends not only that we need them but that we care for them. Our culture has conditioned us to keep our deepest emotions inside. It may be that some of us would find deeper friendships if once in a while we dared to be vulnerable. It’s hard for some of us, but we need to find ways to tell our friends, our spouse, our children how dear they are to us, how much we appreciate and value them. It’s hard, but we need to let our friends know when we’re hurting, when we’re in trouble. It takes transparency.

It Takes Trust

Time. Transparency. And a third quality of Jesus-style friendship is trust. Jesus trusted himself to his disciples, even though they let him down at times. Who do you trust? Many of us never get beyond surface relationships because we’re afraid to trust. We’ve been let down before, our trust was broken, so we keep our defenses on full alert, unwilling to let anybody get that close again. Watching some of us approach friendships is like watching a pair of turtles. Ever so slowly and cautiously we stick out our heads, a millimeter at a time, to see if it’s safe to proceed. The slightest hint of danger, real or imagined, and we pull back into our shells.

It’s always risky to enter a friendship. It’s always risky to extend trust. But what a wonderful thing when we find someone who is willing to trust us. The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “the glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is in spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.”

Think about that. The glory of friendship is when we realize someone we care about believes in us, actually trusts us.

Trust like that is a gift. I know that trust is something we’re supposed to earn. People trust you only if you prove yourself to be trustworthy. And that’s true as far as it goes, but I’ve come to believe that trust is always a choice. You never fully earn my trust. It’s always something I choose to give you. Trust is a gift. Trust is a choice.

Jesus knew these people he called friends weren’t fully reliable. He wasn’t naïve. He knew their limitations and their weaknesses. But he trusted them anyway. Trusted what God could do with them. Trusted what the Holy Spirit could accomplish through them. And he chose to entrust them with his mission of reconciliation and redemption. “You didn’t choose me,” he said, “but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.”

Who do you have in your life that you really trust? The friends I trust the most are the ones who’ve trusted their lives to Jesus Christ, who put him first in their lives, who want to grow in their relationship with him. The basis of these friendships is that we share a common friendship with Jesus Christ. I think of these friendships like a triangle. My friend and I stand at the corners of the base of the triangle, and Jesus Christ is at the top. The closer my friend and I grow to the Lord, the closer we are to each other.

Have you known that kind of friendship? Do you have friends with whom you spend quality time? Friends with whom you can be transparent and vulnerable – who know your heart? Friends you can trust because Jesus Christ is at the center?

If you do, you ought to thank God every day, for such friendships are a wonderful gift. If you don’t, if you’re looking for some supportive friendships, you’re not alone. Many here today are looking for a friend. Some are here for the first or second or third time. Some have been coming here for years. The place to begin is to accept the friendship our Lord offers us. Come to this Table and hear him say to you, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends.” Come to him today, and ask him to lead you to that friendship where he can be at the center.

“I have called you friends,” says Jesus. “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” Love and befriend one another. As I have loved and befriended you.

Shankar Vedantam, “Social Isolation Growing in U.S.,” Washington Post, June 23, 2006. www.washingtonpost.com; “Americans Have Fewer Friends Outside the Family,” Duke University News and Communications, June 23, 2006. www.dukenews.duke.edu.
Matthew 11:19.
Alan Loy McGinnis, The Friendship Factor (Augsburg, 1979) p.22.
Ibid, p.24.