Why Friendship is so Important

Well, good morning Summit Church. If you would, at all of our campuses, do me the favor of right now, taking out your phone.

I will tell you why in just a second, but if I can get everybody who is even remotely connected to the 21st century to pull out your little device called a phone and take it out, if you'll hold it for a second. I want to begin this weekend by calling us as a church. I want you to join me in something really important. For the entire month of June, our Directional Elder team has asked that the body, the membership of the Summit Church, have a very special focused time of prayer together.

Why? Because God has blessed this church over the last couple of years in just these incredible, exceeding, abundant ways, giving us opportunities and ministry. And we were at another time in the life of our church where we need real wisdom to know how to follow Him in the next two or three years of our church's life. We need wisdom.

We need God to provide for us. And the other team just said, could we get the church to pray during the month of June? And I know that when I say that to you, the reason that many of you are not going to do it, let's just be honest, has nothing to do with your intentions. Because right now you're like, yeah, this is a great idea.

We should do this. You're just not going to remember. You're going to remember like twice over the next month. Isn't that right?

Right? So I want you to do it every single day at 3.20. Why 3.20 p.m., not a.m. Unless you're super spiritual, then you can do it at 3.20 a.m. I want you to do it at 3.20 because Ephesians 3.20 has been a really key verse for our church.

God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all we'd ask or think. And I want you to pray that. And we're going to every day at summitrdu.com and every form of social media that we have, we are going to be releasing kind of specific prayer points that our pastors and elders are going to put forward. So I want you to get those and pray those. So right now, take your phone. And I want you to set yourself a reminder every day at 3.20.

Do it right now. That reminder, if you're younger than 30, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you're older than 30, you're like, you can send a reminder on your phone?

No way. Just go to your alarm function and say every day recurring for the next 30 days or didn't turn it off for 30 days. If you accidentally pray more days than 30 at 3.20, it won't be a problem. But everybody do that because I want us to join together. And again, summitrdu.com, we will fill every form of social media that we have with how we want you to pray. Okay. All right. Well, speaking of social media, how many of you have ever had the experience of being unfriended by somebody on social media?

Raise your hand, all of our campuses. You've been unfriended. That happened to me recently. I opened up one of my social media accounts and noticed that I had lost five friends from the time that I had previously logged on. And you know, when that happens, you always immediately are like, was it something that I said?

Did I finally post too many, you know, cute kitten videos or too many, oh, look how adorable my kids are? Hashtag blessed posts or angry political rants or maybe these are just the reasons why I de-friend people on social media, but whatever. In January of 2009, Burger King ran an ad campaign where they said if you would unfriend 10 of your friends on Facebook, they would send you a coupon for a free Whopper. The way it was supposed to work was when you unfriended the person, Burger King would send that person a notice that they had been unfriended for, you know, a hamburger and you were supposed to be like, whoa, this burger must really be something if I could lose friends over it.

Well, the New York Times reported that the stunt worked a little too well. Within the first week, six days, 233,906 friendships had been terminated and Burger King was obligated, was on the hook for 23,000 Whoppers and had to discontinue the ad, you know, because they don't want to go bankrupt. So how valuable is friendship to you? The word friendship has taken on a skewed meaning in our culture.

It's not entirely social media's fault, but they certainly haven't helped. I do not know how many friends that I have on Facebook, but I am pretty confident that they would not be what the Bible would call a friend, even if Mark Zuckerberg would refer to them as a friend. So I want to spend our last message in our From the Beginning series talking about friendship. Most people in our culture, I would submit to you, do not pursue genuine friendships.

For many of them, it's because they don't value friendships or maybe they don't know how to form those kind of friendships. A recent survey I saw asked the question, over the last six months, how many people have you discussed deeply an important matter? Over half of the respondents could not come up with a single person outside of their family that they had discussed a deep matter with in the last six months. Many people just don't think that's important.

I feel like I can prove that to you with one question. Can you name for me your dad's good friends? If you can, you are in the rare minority of people because most men quit pursuing any kind of friendships after they get married. John chapter 15, if you have a Bible, when you study God's Word, you will see that there are very few things in life that are as important as friendship for two primary reasons I'm going to explain today. First of all, because we are made for friendship, I'm going to explain today why it is virtually impossible for you to be really happy and fulfilled without friendships, and that is by God's design. Number two is because friendship makes us.

We are made for it, and it makes us. There is no more formative factor in your life than your friendships. I am going to suggest, quite compellingly I think, that if you get your friends right, that one single factor, maybe more than any other, is going to set you up for success.

And on the flip side, if you get your friendships wrong, you are almost guaranteed significant struggles for yourself and maybe even failure in your future. Here is a phrase that I'm going to use a lot and I think I will have convinced you of by the time we get done. Here's the phrase, you show me your friends and I will show you your future.

You show me your friends and I will show you your future. In fact, so that I can make this really, really tangible to you. I want you to take out what you got when you came in. You should have received a Nifty Summit pen. I have found these pens littered at restaurants all over the world.

All over the triangle, so now you have your very own Summit Church pen. I want you to take it and I want you to take this little post-it note. Somebody said, was this to take sermon notes on?

Not hardly. You know, take like a hundred of those. You take out this little sticky note. I want you to write down right now.

I want everybody to write, everybody, I want you to write down your five closest friends. By the way, everybody at the Summit Church has a really strange meaning. It means every body. It means if you have a body, I'm talking to you right now.

If you are a disembodied spirit floating around in here, you'll need to pay attention to what I'm saying. But if you've got a body, I need you to take this out and write down your five friends. Now this is the part of the program where I put this down and for the next 15 seconds I stand here in silence and just stare awkwardly at whoever is not doing it.

I'm going to start and write it down. Five friends. You've got nine seconds left. Five seconds.

Two seconds. Pencils down. Hands yours to your neighbor.

We're not going to grade them. Here's what we're going to do. Just hold on to that. Put it in your Bible for a second if you've got your Bible. If friendship really matters in life, then I'm going to tell you how you can pursue the right kind of friendships and become the right kind of friend.

Number one, friendship matters because we are made for it. John chapter 15 verse 9. I want to start in this message where I have and every other message in this series with what Jesus says about God's design for these kinds of relationships from the beginning. John 15 verse 9. My commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone laid down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants for the servant does not know what his master is doing. I've called you friends for all that I heard from my father I made known to you. You do not choose me to be friends.

I chose you when I appointed you. These things, verse 17, I command you so that you will love one another. Well, in case you can't tell, this passage is all about friendship. The word friend, Jesus uses it three times.

It's clearly his subject. So when Jesus uses the word love in this passage, he is talking about friendship love. That's the kind of love that he's referring to. Why is friendship important? Well, the short answer is in verse 9. From all eternity, the Father and the Son have existed as friends. And being made in the image of God, that means you and I are made for friendship. The doctrine of the Trinity I know is difficult to understand, but the doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation for understanding how you and I are wired.

From all eternity, the doctrine of the Trinity teaches, from all eternity, the one God, only one God, has existed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit bound together in friendship love. That means that friendship was never created. Friendship is part of the eternal nature of God. There has never been a time in all of eternity when there was not friendship.

And you and I being created in God's image means that we were ourselves patterned after and created for friendship, just like God. That's why, by the way, when God created Adam, the first thing he says after he creates Adam is, it's not good. It's not good that man should be alone.

Right? I mean, he doesn't make junk, and he designed it exactly according to his specifications. Nobody's messed it up. Adam hadn't sinned yet. Why is God looking at what he just made and saying it's not good? Well, it's because we're like God. God made us like us, and Adam was alone. And because Adam was like God, God was not alone, so Adam was different than God even though God had made Adam just like him. You see, Adam was not lonely because he was imperfect.

Adam was lonely because he was perfect. All of our other problems in life, arise out of our sin and our imperfections. Loneliness is the one problem in our lives that we have because we are made in the image of God. So you say, well, I just feel like I don't really need friends. I'm kind of a loner. I work best when I'm just fishing or working on my car.

That's how I recharge. That just means you're not very much like God. Let us make man in our image because you are in the image of God. You have a deep need for true friendship. Tim Keller points out that in these verses, Jesus gives us a glimpse into what real God-like friendship actually looks like. According to these verses, Jesus believes, listen, a true friend is someone who always lets you in, never lets you down. Always lets you in. Let's take apart those phrases.

Always lets you in. See verse 15 where Jesus said, no longer do I call you servants because the servant does not know what his master is doing. But I've called you friends because everything I heard from my father I made known to you. Servants don't really know the hearts of their masters. They just obey. That's what a servant's role is. The master doesn't share his heart with the servant. The servant just does what the master says. Jesus says, I've always wanted more from you. I created you to share my life with you, my joys, my thoughts, my pain.

I didn't say merely obey me. I said fellowship with me, commune with me, walk with me. The Hebrew word for friendship that Jesus would have used here when he originally said it is the same word for secret.

The word in Hebrew for friendship and secret are the same word, sod in Hebrew. A friend is somebody you let into the secret places of your heart. That is why, incidentally, you can't have that many true friends. There's just not enough space in your life to tell everybody everything. And it's not even safe to do that. You cannot promise everybody in your life that you could just be there for them whenever.

I don't know how many friends I have on Facebook, but I can't just post on Facebook to all my friends, call me anytime, night or day. You need help moving? I got a truck. You need somebody to watch your cat while you're on vacation? Send your cat to me. By the way, my real friends would never do that because they know I would box that thing up and FedEx it back to the gates of Sheol where it came from. But seriously, you just can't have that many people who show up at your house at 2 a.m., right? I mean, I don't have space. That's why I love all of you.

You're all my friends. But I don't tell you where I live. So that you can just show up at my house at 2 a.m. and be like, I have a need. I don't want you to know where I live, you know, so that you don't show up. You can know where I live. But you know what I'm saying.

There is like, you know, you just don't have that much space to always let everybody in. A true friend, that group of friends always lets you in and a true friend never lets you down. Greater love, Jesus says, verse 13, is no one than this, that someone laid down his life for his friends.

You are my friends. You who are doing what I commanded you. Jesus was so committed to not letting his friends down that he would lay his life down literally for them. He would literally go to hell and back to purchase them.

There was nothing that could make him turn away. There was no burden he would not bear, no offense he would not forgive. We used to sing when I was a kid, what a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear.

What a privilege now to carry everything to God in prayer. By the way, this is one of the most absolutely distinct features of Creole Christianity. Other religious leaders, Muhammad, Buddha, Confucius, for example, they never related to their followers this way. When they died they left behind a body of teaching their followers were to obey. Jesus did not leave a body of teaching behind, Jesus left himself behind. In the Holy Spirit he said, not just obey my teaching, he said commune with me, walk with me, fellowship with me, follow me. So friendship matters because we are made for it, we're made in the image of God.

We are made to be friends with God himself and then from that to become friends with one another. And I will tell you without any question at all, the quality of your life, whether you are an extrovert or introvert, goes up dramatically when you have the right kind of friends. Last year, for example, researchers from the University of Virginia did a study with a bunch of students and they took students and they gave them a weighted backpack, really heavy, and they put them at the bottom of a pretty steep hill. And then they asked them to estimate the steepness of that hill.

They put some of them by themselves and they put others of them in groups of two or three and they said invariably the students that were in groups of two or three rated the hill less steep than those who were by themselves. And the point is that no matter what you encounter in life, it looks less difficult when you are around the right kind of friends. By the way, many marriage researchers say the single greatest factor that determines the quality of your marriage is the quality of the friendship you have with your spouse and your marriage. One study showed, and I quote, whether wives feel satisfied with the sex, romance, and passion in their marriage is 70% dependent on the quality of the couple's friendship. For men, though, men, we're wired differently, aren't we? For men, whether we are satisfied with our marriage is 70% dependent on the quality of the friendship within the marriage.

The researcher says it turns out that men and women are from the same planet after all. Many of us don't think of marriage in terms of friendship. We think mainly, as men, marriage is primarily attraction and romance, spiced with a little friendship maybe, but good marriages are primarily friendship spiced with a little romance. Good marriages turn out, in fact, to be friends with benefits.

You can take that phrase and you can make it Christian. God believes in the friends with benefits concept just within the bonds of monogamous covenant marriage, of course, okay? So friendship matters because we are made for it, because we're made in the image of God.

Number two, friendship matters because it makes us. Say bye-bye to John and go all the way to the book of Proverbs, Proverbs chapter 13. It's to your left in your Bible, or if you panic when I say that, just look on the screen right here below my feet.

It'll be there. Proverbs 13, 20. Proverbs is written by the wisest man to ever live, Solomon, and Solomon says this, Listen, what one factor, one factor determines how your life is going to turn out. What one factor, I know there are other verses that talk about other things, but according to that verse, what is the one factor that will determine how your life turns out?

The quality of the people that you choose to walk with in life. You show me your friends, Proverbs 13, 20 says, and I will show you your future. Or as Craig Groeschel says it, your friends are your future you. Your friends are the future you. Craig Groeschel says you are usually the average of your five closest friends.

So that's why I want you to take back out that little post-it note that I had you fill out, and I want you to take a look at it. You show me your friends, and I'm going to show you your future. You are the average of your five closest friends, right? So cut out like the extremes.

You got one in there that's awesome and one that's a dud. So take out the extremes. Just look at the mean, the average. If you were stoned last night, if you were drunk last night, chances are three or four of your close friends were too. If you're following hard after God, there's a real good chance that three or four of your closest friends are as well. Your friends show you the future you.

You will become the average of your five closest friends. That's the most significant relationship when it comes to determining how much weight you're going to gain in the future. If your spouse gains weight, you have a 37% chance of also gaining weight.

37%. If your sibling gains weight, you have a 40% chance of gaining weight in the future, right? Because some things are genetic. But if your friend gains weight, you have a 57% chance of gaining weight in the future. What your friends are eating is actually more of an indicator of your health habits than your closest family members.

That means if your bestie all of a sudden decides that every day is golden corral day and every night is ice cream night, you probably ought to have a talk. Craig Groeschel says, we all have something that we would like to become, something different. Many of us want to be better parents or want to be a better worker, a better student. You want to be a more solid Christian. Groeschel says, what if the decision to become that was actually a decision of the people that you chose to most closely align yourself with?

Because according to Proverbs 1320, that's exactly what it is. I often tell you guys, it's not the dreams you dream, it's the decisions you make. What if the dream of being whatever it is you want to become, what if the decision that got you from here to there was actually the people that you chose to align yourself most closely with? He says you are one friend away from being a better parent, one friend away from being a better spouse. You're also one friend away from being a worse one of those.

You show me your friends and I'll show you your future. Here's the way I've heard it explained and I think it's really, really helpful. Our friends, you could classify them in three concentric circles. You know what concentric circles are?

It looks like this. Intimacy, influence, and care. The circle of intimacy are the three or four people that are the closest to you. You just don't have space for more people than that. No matter how nice you are, you're not going to have more than three or four in that circle of intimacy.

You're going to influence them. The circle outside of that is the circle of care. These are people that you spend time with, you talk to, you care about, you pray for.

What really Proverbs 13-20 is saying is that the circle of intimacy ought to be people who have the same convictions and values that love God like you do because you're going to become just like them. I know that you're like, well, no, it's just the way God designed you. God designed you that you're going to become like the people you are.

He kind of wrote that into your DNA. I'll prove it to you from the animal kingdom. I know we're not animals like the animals are animals, but there's obviously similarities. A bunch of scientists were studying fish.

This is awesome. You know how fish travel in schools? You've seen the fish that are all together and then they all go this way and they all go that way.

It's just like how they communicate. They wanted to figure out what part of the brain made that happen, so they identified the part of the fish's brain that made it always want to be in schools. Then they took one of the fish.

This is kind of cruel. They performed a partial lobotomy and took out that part of the brain. So now this fish has no more compelling reason to stay with the herd or the school or whatever. So they drop it back in. Sure enough, this fish leaves the school and just swims out by itself. The researcher said then the most unbelievable thing happened that we weren't expecting and that is the entire school started to follow that one fish that is now partially lobotomized. I read that and I thought that is a perfect explanation of what happens in our high schools. Because you get one kid who is brainless who establishes the fad. Everybody's like, oh, let's do that over here.

Let's do this over here. Because God just designed us to stay together. So you become like the people that are most around you. What God is saying is, 2 Corinthians 6, don't be unequally yoked with an unbeliever.

What that means is not that you don't have friends who are unbelievers. It just means that that closest circle of intimacy are people that you are going to become like because your friends are your future you. Some of you, if you really want to make a decision about becoming something in the future, that decision changes that circle of intimacy. That's what that means. That's the decision we're talking about because that's going to determine what happens over here.

Does that make sense? That means some of you ought to move some of the circle of intimacy into the circle of influence. People that influence you. You go to school with them. They influence you. You influence them. Some of you need to move them into the circle of care, which means you spend time with them. You're friends with them, but they're just not in those circles.

You don't send them an official notification that you're moving them. This is a mental taxonomy. It's not like, hey, you just got upgraded to influence. That's not what I'm talking about. But I'm just saying that if you understand what Proverbs 13 is saying, you understand how key and important these things are in your life.

Parents, listen. That's what they would put down on that list. You're like, oh, but I bring them here every week. I could be the greatest preacher in America. I could be the greatest preacher in the world. I could be the greatest preacher that ever lived. It would not make as much difference as the five people that are the closest to them. That is what they are going to become.

Which is why I tell you, and I'm not being self-interested in this. Our youth pastor's not paying me product placement when I say this. You, if you love your kids and you care about them, about their walk with God in the future, will make sure that you prioritize Godly community in their lives. You will make sure, that's why we have you get them involved here, because their community needs to be otherwise boys and girls, men and women, who are pointing them to the places that God wants them to go. Your friends are your future you. Proverbs 12 26, Solomon says it this way, the righteous man is cautious. Cautious, by the way, in Hebrew means spies out. The wise man, the righteous man, he spies out who he's going to be friends with because he knows how important it is. I told you the book of Proverbs was written by Solomon.

Jewish rabbis believe that a lot of what Solomon wrote was actually things that his daddy, King David, taught him. And what makes that interesting when it comes to the friendship passages in Proverbs is when you realize that King David's life can really be told as the story of three friendships he had. King David had three friends, and I'm going to suggest to you that these three friends of David's represent type of friends that we all should have.

They're very important. The first friend is named Samuel, and I'm going to call him the crown bestower. The crown bestower. Samuel was a prophet that when David was a shepherd, God told Samuel David's supposed to be a king. And Samuel went to David and says, I know you feel like you're just a shepherd and you feel like you're the least of your seven brothers, but God has appointed you to be king. And David and Samuel, to use a cliche, put a crown above David's head and helped encourage David to grow up into it. Do I do that for you?

I do. And they've been some of the most influential people in my lives because they are friends who have seen what God was doing even when I couldn't see it. When I was discouraged, when I feel like I just really didn't have a great future. These friends said, no, we see God's hand on your life.

We see these talents he's put in you. This is what God's called you to. Don't forfeit it with unbelief. Don't walk away.

Don't get distracted. Become what God wants you to become. You need a Samuel, a crown bestower, in your life. What you think about yourself is always based on what the most important people in your life think about you.

You will become what they think you are. So you need Samuels who say, I see shepherd, but God says king. You say a kind of friend, Jonathan. Jonathan was, I'm going to call him the faithful companion. Jonathan was David's best friend when he was a teenager. Jonathan, follow this, was King Saul's son. King Saul was the current king. King Saul hated David because David was, you know, threatening to him.

Saul was jealous of him. Jonathan would end up risking his own life several times to warn David, to encourage him, to protect him. What's really remarkable about that is when you consider the fact that Jonathan was encouraging David into being king at the expense of Jonathan being king. Jonathan should have been the next king of Israel because he was Saul's son. But Jonathan knew that God had chosen David and Jonathan said, well, even though that's not good for me, this is what God has said and I'm going to help you become that even if it's at great personal cost to me. Do you have friends like that?

Friends who don't treat you with jealousy, friends who are selfless. Listen to this verse about Jonathan. I love this.

First thing with 2318. Jonathan hears that David is discouraged. And Jonathan, Saul's son, rose and went to David at Horesh, which was 30 miles away, by the way, and he strengthened David's hand in God. But you get annoyed by passive friends who won't text you back. It just really ticks me off. I only need like three or four friends that when I have any, bam, they're on it. And these people are close to me. Jonathan is the opposite of a passive friend. Jonathan gets in his version of a text message about David being discouraged and the dude walks 30 miles to answer the text message because he wants to encourage David. A faithful companion like Jonathan is the person who walks in when everybody else walks out. For you, I'm going to pray with you because all the things you care about are the things I now care about. You need these kinds of friends.

My favorite place where Solomon talks about this is in another book that he wrote, the book of Ecclesiastes chapter four. Look at this. Two are better than one.

Why? Because if one falls, one can lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls for he has no one to help him up. Again, two lie down together. They will keep warm.

What? But how can one be warm alone? Translation, when you lie down and life's cold, you need somebody to spoon with. That's what Solomon says. Proverbs 18 verse 24. A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. If you have your Hebrew Old Testament open, and I know that many of you do, you have just noticed that the word for sticks in that verse is the same Hebrew word for cleaves in Genesis chapter two.

When God says a man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. In other words, there are things about a friendship relationship that mimic even the loyalty and the faithfulness in a marriage relationship. There is a loyalty in friendship that rivals even marriage. You say, I want these kinds of friends.

I want these kinds of friends. Friendships. It's what we call small groups. Small groups don't equal friendships.

But small groups are at least the place where these things can begin to develop. Which is why I'm always up here yelling at you that you need to get out of just the rows and get into the circles at the Summit Church because that's where these formative relationships begin to happen. Friend type number three is we'll call him Nathan because that's his name.

Then we'll also call him the loyal wounder. Later in David's life, if you know the story, he got into some pretty bad sin. He slept with his best friend's wife and he tried to cover it up.

He tried to cover it up and God sent Nathan who essentially puts his finger in his face and said you have sinned against God and it's destroying your life if you don't come clean about it. You need people in your life who put their finger in your face and say you are making a stupid decision. Do you have those kinds of friends? How do you treat them when they say that to you? A lot of us get mad and that terminates our friendship because it hurts.

It's embarrassing. It hurts. Here's how Proverbs would say it. Proverbs 27 says faithful are the wounds of a friend. Perfused are the kisses of an enemy.

I'm going to tell you something. Kisses always feel better than wounds. I don't care who's doing what. Kisses always feel better than wounds. If someone wounds you, it hurts. But if all you have around you is people who give you kisses, life is going to feel good for a while but then you're going to destroy yourself. Which means you've got to deputize a few of your friends.

You've got to give them a hunting license and a weapon in your life. And you say I need you to point out the blind spots in my life. You've got blind spots. And the definition of a blind spot is you don't know it's there. That's why we call it a blind spot. If you know it's there, it's called a weakness.

You've got blind spots which means you can't see them but everybody else can see them. And you're the last person to know about some of these things. And you've got to have a friend who says you are destroying your family. You're destroying your career. You're destroying your walk with God. You're destroying your kids. For God's sake, stop it!

And if you don't have friends like this, if you surround yourself with people who give you kisses all the time, it feels good for a while. But it ends in destruction. You can inevitably grow mutant.

I don't care if you're 62 years old and you're a guy and this is just the way I'd like to go fishing and work on my car and I'm fine, that's when I'm happiest. Your life has grown mutant. It's mutant. And the sad thing is you can't even see it.

God can see it but things in a secret garden, they always grow mutant because God does not design you to live that way. Those are the two reasons that friendship matters because you're made for it and because it makes you. Spy out Proverbs 12, 26, those friendships because of how important they are.

Now before I end this message and really in this whole series, I want to do what I've done every single week up until now. I want to show you how the power for these kinds of relationships, the power for friendships ultimately comes from friendship with Jesus. That's sort of the theme of this series is that every horizontal relationship we have is preconditioned on the quality of our vertical relationship with Jesus. You see Jesus is the best.

And the ultimate friend that we could ever have. When you think about it, Jesus is the combination of Samuel, Jonathan and Nathan. Jesus is Samuel because he spoke courage into our life and he held a crown up when we did not deserve it. He said you're a sinner but I'm going to change your name to Saint. You're dead, I'm going to declare you to be alive. You are not my people but I'm going to declare that you are my people. Your name was wrath, your name was failure, your name was judgment.

I'm going to start calling you mercy, new creation, more than a conqueror and you are useful for my service. And he declared what God wanted to do in us before God had even started it. And he held a crown up above our heads and he grew us into it. Jesus is Jonathan.

He served us at great personal cost to himself. When David was in need, Jonathan walked 30 miles to Haresh to meet his need. Jesus walked more than 30 miles, he crossed the gap between deity and humanity. Jonathan gave up his right to the palace to help David get in. Jesus did more than give up his right to it, he shed his blood so that we could be included in the palace. Jesus, like Jonathan, would make his cause, or excuse me, our cause, his cause. He took our sins and our sorrows and he made them his very own.

What we felt, he felt. I was talking to my kids the other night in our family devotions about John chapter 11 where Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. Lazarus and Mary and Martha, their three siblings, Lazarus dies, Jesus shows up at the tomb, Mary is weeping and Jesus John 11, 35, shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus starts weeping too.

I asked my kids, I was like, no, why doesn't that, it doesn't make sense to me, at least at first. Why Jesus would start crying there? Because Jesus knows he's about to raise Lazarus from the dead.

In like less than three minutes Lazarus is gonna be alive. If I had been Jesus, what I would do is I would be like, Mary, quit crying, I'm gonna raise him from the dead, dry it up, you know, watch this happen. That's what I would do, which is why I'm not Jesus. But what Jesus does is he begins to, why would he weep if he knows he's about to raise Lazarus from the dead? Because that's what friends do.

Friends can't watch you go through emotion and not go through the same emotion. What that means is that when you walk through your divorce, when you walk through your betrayal, it means when you walk through your bereavement, when you were in pain, when you got stabbed in the back, he just went in heaven saying, no, shut up, I'll fix it. He was there in that moment weeping with you. What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear, what a privilege now to carry everything to God in prayer.

Jesus is Jonathan, Jesus is Nathan. He loved us enough to confront us. He could have just ignored us and then annihilated us, but instead he came to us and he told us the truth and he wouldn't shut up even when we despised him and reviled him and murdered him. Jesus is the best friend that he describes in John 15. He is the friend who always let us in. In fact, he would have his body ripped open so that we could come into his presence. He's the one who never let us down.

He said, I will give up my life and I'll literally go to hell and back before I will let you down. It enables us to become the right kind of friends because it does two things for us. Friendship with Jesus, first of all, gives us the ability to be vulnerable. You know the reason you can't really open up and let people in in your life is because you're afraid that when they see the secret parts of you, they'll either yawn or walk away. Isn't that the fear? They'll be like, hey, you look pretty awesome in the outside, but now that I get to know you in the inside, you're actually kind of boring and predictable. And then also, I just see some stuff that's really screwed up and I don't have room in my life for screwed up people.

They just walk away. What friendship with Jesus does is it gives you safety. And it's found in John 15, 16, my favorite verse in that whole passage. Jesus said, you didn't choose me, I chose you. You know what Jesus was telling them there? He wasn't saying, hey dudes, I'm a Calvinist. That wasn't his main point. His main point was when I chose you, you were nothing.

I didn't choose you because you were the popular kids. You know the theme of Disney movies is you got a princess who is really rough on the outside, but she's beautiful on the inside. And we see through the rough exterior because on the inside she's beautiful.

And that's the opposite of Jesus's choosing. Jesus was like, I looked through the rough exterior on the outside and I found even rougher stuff on the inside. The prettiest part of you is the outside. The inside is really screwed up. You're no Cinderella on the inside or outside. In fact, you're like a whitewashed tomb. The best part of a tomb is the outside.

Because what's on the inside is rot and decay. And I chose you anyway. Which means there's nothing I'm going to discover now that's actually going to surprise me. And what happens is when I feel safe with Jesus, suddenly I feel safe with you. Because I know that when you discover that broken part of my life, there's somebody more important to you than who's already discovered it.

And he's already declared my acceptance and I feel safe with him and he's already declared that he's going to change it. So I can be open enough to let you see the broken parts of me because I'm not afraid of you discovering something he hasn't already discovered and has promised me. And what happens when that happens is you suddenly develop the ability to be friends because true friendships, true friendships are formed around shared weaknesses. Here's what I've learned.

You can impress people with your strengths. You can only connect with them over weaknesses. So true friendship is connecting over weaknesses and some of you don't have the ability to be friends because you've never learned to be vulnerable enough to actually let people into your weaknesses.

Here's the other thing. Friendship with Jesus teaches you to be gracious. Here's the other thing I've learned about friendship after having a number of good friends over the years. True friendship is hard. Light friendship is easy.

Light friendship is, hey, I like you, you make me laugh, let's hang out. But what happens is inevitably if you're going to go the distance with somebody, if you're going to get close to them, they're going to disappoint you. They're going to be self-centered.

They're going to be inflexible. They're going to, you're going to look at them and you're going to say, how can you be so blind to what I need because you're so self-centered to what you need? How can you let me down this way?

What's wrong with you? That is going to happen with any human being that you choose to be friends with. And unless you've learned to treat other people graciously, you'll never be able to have good friends. The way that that begins is by beginning to treat others as you have been treated by Jesus, which is why ultimately all this comes back to a vertical relationship that gives you the capacity to have these horizontal relationships.

But I will end not just this message but this whole series on. Are you a friend of Jesus? Do you have friendship with Jesus? I'm not asking if you're religious.

A lot of you are very religious. Are you a friend of Jesus? Because Jesus, yes, he's the Lord and you submit to him. But Jesus came in not just, not just to get you to obey. He came in to share his life with you.

I'll give you a couple tests. Here's how you know if Jesus is your friend. How do you pray? If Jesus is your friend, prayer is not a duty. Prayer is your natural response when something goes wrong.

Why? Because you know that he shares, he weeps with you in it and he's the first place you want to go. What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear. What a privilege now to carry everything to God in prayer. Listen, if you are not the kind of person who daily craves to seek with God, seeks to be with God, then you probably have never really experienced the friendship of Jesus.

Here's the other thing that changes. Your attitude towards sin starts to change. Before you know Jesus as a friend, God is like this ruler that you're trying to avoid.

Like, oh, you know, I don't want you to crush me for my bad stuff. But when Jesus becomes a friend, you begin to want to not sin against him. You know, when Judas betrayed Jesus, Jesus looked at him and he said, friend.

In other words, if you were an enemy, I would get this, but you're a friend. And you betray me? When I sin against Jesus, it's like I hear his voice saying, I would get this if you were an enemy, but I'm a friend who let you in and I never let you down.

And suddenly I don't want to let down the one who has never let me down. You see, the judgment of God can curb your behavior, but the friendship of Jesus will change your heart. And if you want to be transformed from the heart, which is what God wants for you and me, it won't come by the demands of the law, it's going to come by the friendship of Jesus. So are you friends with Jesus? Have you ever received him as a friend, as a gift that he offers to you? And it's the foundation of everything else.

Why don't you bow your heads at all of our campuses? Do you know him as friend? Have you received him as friend? It just means you acknowledge that he's the Lord. You receive his love and his gift of salvation.

You can do that through a simple prayer. Jesus, I surrender and I receive. Greater love is no man than this, that he would lay down his life for you. He loves you. He loves you because he chose you as friend.

He laid down his life for you because he wanted you eternally as friend. Just receive it. If you have received it, you know that, then in this moment I would invite you just to re-embrace the beautiful friendship of Jesus. Lord Jesus, what a friend we have in you. Make it new.

Make it real. So that prayer becomes a privilege. So that burdens become light. So that sin becomes horrific. So that the mission becomes passion. We ask that God in Jesus' name.