Our Very Best Friend

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Friday, October 21. Do you think of Jesus as your close companion? Today, you'll come to understand how the Savior of the world can be closer to you than a brother. 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's unlike any other friend 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 fifteenth chapter of John, where Jesus discusses this very issue of His friendship with 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 twelve, 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've called you friends. For all things that I have heard from My Father I've made known to you. 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.

Before the world ever began, Jesus Christ planned to lay down His life sacrificially for you and me. What He did is that when we were enemies to Him, He laid down His life and love for us in order to make us His friends. So that Jesus Christ 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 refuse a 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. So one of the first ways that He expresses His friendship toward us is in His sacrificial death. The second way is this, and that is the fact He takes the initiative in the relationship. Look, if you will, in this sixteenth 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 and my Name, He'll 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. He didn't see anything in us that was worthy, really, of becoming our 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 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.

Now, let me ask you this question. 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 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 eternal destiny changes. Everything begins to change. Your perspective on things.

But you know what? When you become a friend to Jesus, He's already our friend. 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 and 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, I want you to notice something in this passage that could prove to be a little bit maybe misunderstood. Notice what, if you will, what He says in this fifteenth verse.

He says, No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master's doing. But I've called you friends for all things that I've heard from my Father I've made known to you. Now, what He's simply saying is, 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 wouldn't know any other way. He said to His disciples, He said, All these things that I've heard from my Father I've made known to you.

He said, I'm your friend. And He had told them about how to trust Him. He had told them about how the Father loves them. He told them about heaven. He told them about hell. He told them about intimate relationships. He had told them what was going to happen to Him.

He had told them about the Pharisees and the Sadducees betraying Him. He told them He was going to die and He was going to be buried. He'd explained to them about His resurrection and told them how He was going to ascend to heaven. And He was going to be with the Father.

And then He was coming back with His holy angels and He was going to wrap it all up one of these days and bring everything to a finality. He explained all of those things to Him. They heard what no man had ever heard. He didn't tell everybody in His day what He shared with His disciples. He told them, shared with them things that no one else could possibly have known.

And the only reason you and I have it is because the Holy Spirit brought it to their minds and hearts and they penned it and now we have it and we call it the Bible, the living Word of God. One who is a genuine, intimate friend with someone is going to reveal and tell the other person things they're not going to 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 will 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 want to be your intimate friend. 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 is doing. Now, notice, if you will, in verse fourteen, 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. In other words, 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 grace of God as goodness and love and kindness taught 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, the emphasis here is, that is, you're going to be transformed. That is, this relationship is going to 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.

Your life is going to be so transformed, you're going to 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 going to 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 going to live your life lonely all of your life.

You're going to have a lot of casual friends. You may have some close friends, but until you discover the intimacy that comes between Jesus Christ and 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.

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?

Do you have a friend so intimate, one that you love enough to literally lay down your physical life for them? You say, well, are you talking about family? Well, yes. 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 oftentimes we think we are real, genuine, close, intimate friends with someone.

But we do have our limitations. Now, let's look at that verse another way. He says, greater love has no one than this. Then 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 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 lay down old ideas and old perspectives on things. And sometimes we have to lay down old friends because sometimes the command of our 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 now 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 with the fact that He challenges us.

He challenges us to become our best and to achieve our best. I don't believe you can ever become your best unless Jesus is your friend. You'll never be able to accomplish all that God has set for you until He becomes your friend. Because as skilled and as gifted as you may be, apart from Him there is a limitation. Apart from Him, you'll never be able to reach what God is after in your life.

You'll never be able to sense, listen, the deep, abiding, genuine, intimate love that He has in mind for you. But the question is, do you want to be His friend? He's an available friend to 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've just sort of gone through life and you really haven't been interested in having Him as your friend? Do 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 a Jesus they've only heard about, and finally recognize upon being saved, here was a friend who'd 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 die and Jesus is not your friend, then what? You say, 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, do 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 sacrificially 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 is 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.

Well, 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 our love for Him, our obedience to Him, and our service for Him. In His name we pray. Amen. Thank you for listening to Our Very Best Friend. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or In Touch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.