Friendship With Jesus Means Friendship in the Church

As a boy, growing up with two very cheeky brothers, there was no temptation greater than coming up with very inventive, mischievous games. Playing pranks on people became a full-time obsession during school holidays, which some of our young kids this morning might know of, being on school holidays themselves. Now, of course, in the heat of the moment, these pranks were incredible fun. The problem came, however, when mum found out. It's remarkable how quickly then the fun stops, and any attempts to argue your way out of the situation, or even to sweet talk mum, we'd be met with a line we knew all too well: I'm not your friend.

Now, as a fledgling parent myself, I'm starting to realise what my mum meant. With a busy little girl who, even at the age of five, knows the difference between right and wrong, knows the difference between obedience and disobedience, and I understand all the more how I try to position myself as she does to me. You see, even at this age, a leader can give you a cheeky smile as she's reaching for that bin or that hot cup of coffee or that plate full of food when you've told her ten times not to touch it. Cheeky, crooked little smile with those teeth coming in, I know what I'm doing. I know you've told me no, but maybe this time it works.

Why the cheeky smile? Because she's trying to move me, manipulate me to see that this is just fun, not disobedient. She's inviting me into a game, not a matter of moral principle. And in my head, guess whose voice I'm hearing? My mum.

I am not your friend. When it comes to our view of God, I believe there's an interesting correlation between how we view authority, especially our parents' authority, and how we view our God. I believe this because there's an image of God in the Bible which makes me slightly uncomfortable. In fact, my natural inclination, my, could you say, personal theology, would not prefer to think of God in terms like this. And that is that God is my friend.

This morning, I want to read from a passage of Jesus' last words to His disciples. The night before He went to the cross, the thing that we celebrate this morning in the supper, Jesus, on that night, made a startling claim that His disciples are considered His friends. Let's turn this morning to John chapter 15, and we read from verse 12 to verse 17. John 15, verse 12.

Jesus said, "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay 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. But I have called you friends, for all 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 should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide. So that whatever you ask the Father in my name, He may give it to you. These things I command you, so that you will love one another." This is the word of the Lord. I want to share this morning with you from this passage the truth that Jesus' friendship actually drives us to be friends.

Jesus' friendship with us drives us to make friends. Now, if that sounds dangerously moralistic, if that sounds a little bit too straightforward from the passage here, strap yourselves in because I'm going to explain to you that this is exactly what the passage is getting at: that Jesus' friendship drives us to make friends. Firstly, we begin with Jesus' understanding, His own understanding of His friendship to us. In verse 12, we get the summary statement. This is the theme statement for this little paragraph.

"Love one another as I have loved you." Then in verse 13, we get the idea of how much Jesus has loved us. Jesus makes mention of a hypothetical person, someone, He says. But we know from how the gospel of John ends exactly who this someone is. The love of this someone, i.e., Jesus, is expressed in terms of a friendship.

And the statement that He makes is "Greater love has no one than this, that someone laid down his life for his friends." In that famous statement, we see three basic elements of this friendship, and I'm going to list them for us this morning, starting with the letter V. OK? So hopefully we can remember this. Firstly, we see Jesus' friendship is voluntary.

The statement in verse 13, to lay down his life, indicates a voluntary act. No man murders Jesus. No person took away his life against His will. God the Father doesn't even force the Son into this sacrifice. There are some cynics of Christianity that say that if the death of Jesus was really a death in my place, then what happened on the cross was some sort of astronomical child abuse, that God the Father would dare to send His Son, would dare to sacrifice His Son on my behalf.

But here we see that Jesus declares His mission to be His own. He gives up His life on the cross. Remember how Jesus powerfully put it in John 10, just a few chapters before. "I am the good shepherd," He said. And what does the good shepherd do?

"I lay down my life for the sheep." There's that phrase again. No one takes that life. No one steals that life from Jesus. He lays it down voluntarily.

That's the first element of this friendship statement. The second is that Jesus' friendship is vicarious. Now the word vicarious means something performed or suffered by a person for the benefit of someone else. Jesus tells us that His life is given up for His friends. His death, in other words, is not a death for Himself.

Now we know, if you've been a Christian for a while, that the fundamental message of Christianity isn't simply that God exists. It is that God has loved humanity so much that He would send His Son, that He, in fact, as God, would come in the flesh, be punished on our behalf, in our place, in order to reunite us with Himself. God dies the death that we should have died for our sin. You see, every living person will one day need to pay the penalty of their sin one way or another. But Christianity offers the only thing that could be considered true forgiveness, and that is a substitute.

Every other religion may talk about forgiveness, may talk about appealing to their God for mercy. Only Christianity says a substitute took your punishment. In Jesus' loving sacrifice then, God forgives by absorbing the cost of our rebellion against His law, and He pays for that rebellion by Himself. Jesus' friendship, therefore, secures a forgiveness on our behalf. He died and was punished for us, He says. And so the conclusion is that a greater friendship cannot exist than this.

A greater friend does not exist than a friend who gives up His life for another friend. That's the second element of this friendship of Jesus. His friendship is vicarious. And then thirdly, it is vital. To lay down your life means to give up your life.

In other words, it means you die. It means to give up your vitality. And the price that Jesus pays for this vicarious friendship, He says, is His life. As human beings, we know that life is the highest price that you can offer for anything. You and I could give away all the cash in our bank.

We could sell all our possessions, but the value of your life is worth all of that and more. Why? Because you wouldn't have been able to have acquired all that cash in your bank or the possessions that you have if you did not have your life. Because you are alive, you have the capacity to live, and all your gifts, all your talents, all your mental ability, your energy to produce, to love, to give, to take, all of that is bound up in your life. There is no more expensive a thing to give than your life because the potential of life is so immense.

Your life is your most valuable asset. But think for a moment of the value of the life of the eternal Son of God. Of all the capacity that you have to produce, to give, to take, think of the eternal God who created everything. Think of His power. Think of His capacity.

It is infinite. And Jesus took this infinitely valuable life, and He exchanged it for yours. Voluntarily, vicariously, He took His life and He sacrificed it in our place so that we might live. The friendship of Jesus was voluntary, vicarious, and vital. His life secured the lives of His friends.

That's verse 13. Then Jesus moves on to define who His friends are in verses 14 to 16. In verse 14, Jesus simply tells us that His friends are those who obey His commands. Now at first, this might seem jarring because that's not typical of how friendship works. I'm not someone's friend because I do what they tell me to do.

Friendship is usually a relationship of equality. It's a peer relationship of equals. Similarly, it seems like it goes against the theology of the rest of the Bible. If you were to read this in isolation, you may think that our ability to obey Jesus' commands is the thing that makes us His friends, is the thing that causes Him to love us and therefore to save us by His vicarious action. Thankfully, we know that this cannot be true because even the Apostle John writes in his letter to the churches in 1 John 4. The same Apostle famously put it this way: "We love because He first loved us."

The point that he makes is that Jesus loved us before we have the ability to obey His commandments to love. What verse 14 gives us is an inkling that Jesus' friends will somehow be aligned with the same desire to love that He has. We will share the same character of Jesus and therefore we will want to obey that command. In other words, His friends merely resemble Him. It's really when we get now down to verse 15 that we start seeing a clearer picture of how Jesus then defines His friends.

He says to His disciples that He no longer calls them servants. He calls them friends now. And again, we have to be careful because some people have read this passage again in isolation and say that we should now never see ourselves as servants of Christ, that that is part of the old understanding, the old covenant perhaps. But we see and we understand from Paul's main self-identity that he sees himself and he calls himself a what? Servant of Christ.

So apart from the change in title here, our relationship of service to Jesus is not being nullified. Jesus remains our Master. In fact, this same night when Jesus is sharing this in chapter 15, in John 13, Jesus says, "You call me Master. You call me Lord, and this is true." Meaning, you're my servants.

I'm your Master. Jesus doesn't nullify the relationship of service. Our function of service and submission hasn't changed, but our relational title has. While we still render service and submission to Jesus, it is a relationship we might like to label as a servant-friend. We share a deep intimacy with our Master.

Jesus is emphasising that we are no mere servants. Why? Because there are secrets between servants and masters. There are secrets between servants and masters. Masters don't owe their servants any explanations for why they're commanded to do what they need to do.

But between friends, there are no secrets. What Jesus has been taught, He says, by the Father during His earthly ministry, He has in turn shared with His disciples. First to the Apostles in the upper room and then to us as the disciples to come. So what Jesus has given us is not just the command to love one another. What Jesus gives us also, and why He can call us friends, is the why behind the command.

You see, a master-slave dynamic would simply have ended with that statement: "Love one another. Go and do it." But a servant-friend relationship adds, "Because I have laid down my life for you." In other words, not only do we know what to do as servants, we know why we do it as friends. And finally, Jesus tells His friends that they have been specially chosen.

In verse 16, we find essentially Jesus giving the Great Commission of Matthew 28, verses 18 to 20. In Matthew 28, Jesus says to the disciples, "Go and make disciples of all nations." Here, Jesus is saying the same thing, but He says it this way: "Go and bear fruit." Raymond Brown, in his commentary, an excellent commentary on John, makes the compelling argument that the language of Jesus here, the language of His choosing, when He says, "You did not choose me, I chose you and appointed you," is not simply referring to the choosing of the twelve. It's talking of the elect, of Christians everywhere.

And then the verb to appoint, ethika, has Old Testament connotations for what? Commissioning. And the reason we know that Jesus is speaking not only to the Apostles here, but through the Apostles to us, is that Jesus brings back the language of what has been said earlier in the chapter of bearing fruit. The bearing of fruit is something that all believers have to do, isn't it? "I am the vine, you are the branches."

So very interestingly, we find Jesus commissioning us to do what? Go and bear fruit. What is this fruit? It's not the fruit of the Spirit, which Paul wrote about in Galatians 5. To bear fruit is to make more disciples.

It's the same verb: to go and make disciples. Matthew 28:18 said, "Go and bear fruit." How do I know that it is making disciples? Because Jesus says here that these fruit must also abide. Mene in the Greek.

It's the same word as abiding in the vine. To remain in the vine. So these fruit that we bear, they must also remain. The friends of Jesus go and make other friends, other disciples who in turn remain in Jesus. And then finally, in verse 17 in our passage, Jesus summarises again the main thought, that main theme of His teaching.

"These things I command you so that you will love one another." OK. So we've broken up Jesus' friendship, who the friends are that Jesus is talking to, and now we come to the brass tacks, the ministry of friendship. Why does Jesus give His disciples this teaching about what His friendship looks like and who His friends are?

Why does Jesus give His disciples this teaching about what His friendship looks like and who His friends are? Would you be shocked if I told you that the reason we have this passage is to tell us to make friends? The passage begins and finishes in verse 12 and then ends in 17 with the same idea: "Love one another." This is the key understanding of, and the main aim of, the teaching. We are to be friends to one another as Jesus was a friend to us.

Brass tacks now. The life of a Christian is not a lonely one. The life of a Christian is to be surrounded by friends, to be invested in the lives of others deeply, to care for and to love, to receive joy from others. This is part of the essential nature of Christianity. You and I are meant to have friends. You and I are meant to pursue friendship.

Friendship, therefore, is not a Christian possibility. It is a Christian necessity. The thing that makes Jesus' statement "Greater love has no one than this, and He laid down His life for His friends" so profound is that Jesus not simply talks the language of friendship, but He says that His life and death exemplifies this friendship. But that's not the radical part. The radical part is that He then commands us to go and do likewise.

The commandment to love as Jesus loved is perhaps the most radical words in the gospel of John because it claims that the love which enabled Jesus to lay down His life for those friends is not unique to Him. This love can and in fact should be replicated over and over again by His followers. That is the radical teaching of this passage. So that the self-sacrificing nature of Christ's love for us does not simply model the intensity of the love by which we should love one another. He loved us so much that He would give His life.

It's not just the intensity of His love. We are given the model of how to express that love: to give our lives to our friends. What does it mean to lay down our life for our friends? Well, it surely doesn't mean we die a vicarious, self-sacrificing eternal death on behalf of our friend. It does mean sacrifice.

And who are these friends? Well, they're in essence the same friends of Jesus. Jesus says that we are to love one another as He talks to His disciples, means those following Jesus Christ. Our friendship, which doesn't exclude those who don't know Jesus, certainly prioritises fellow believers. As Christians, we don't see the people in our church as fellow pilgrims just on the same path to heaven.

We see each other as beloved, cherished, worthwhile people who we want to love, who we need to love, who we want to be friends with. The radical teaching of this passage is not so much that Jesus showed us how He is our friend. The radical message here actually is: by our love for fellow believers, we show Him that we are His friends. So can I get basic here? Can I get picky again?

It means we make an effort for people in our church. We make an effort to catch up with people here outside of Sunday worship. We make an effort to have morning tea and to go and meet new people that we haven't talked to before. We choose the language we use very carefully to include our friends. We are brave and talk to people we don't yet know, may not think we can get along with, and we do all the things that you would normally do in order to become friends with people outside in the world.

You break open your friendship circle a little bit more. You exchange numbers. You catch up for coffee. You go out for play dates with their kids. You go to the football together.

You invite a family over for Sunday lunch, for Friday dinner. Why? Because Jesus said, "Love one another as I have loved you." And if you are my friends, you need to love my friends as well. If Jesus' great love was expressed to us in terms of a friendship, and then if Jesus said, "Love as I have loved you," then it is not a stretch to see that to love in a way that He wants us to love actually begins with just becoming friends with the people in this church.

Friendship with Jesus means friendship in the church. And so that means we reprioritise our lives, we make time, we cancel the extra soccer training we have in our week in order to have people over, we work fewer shifts to be involved in Bible studies, we dare to be brave to a new face at church, we count the cost of making friends, and then we pay that cost. Because compared to the infinite value of Jesus' friendship, why and how could we say no to becoming friends with our church family? This is our great privilege. This is our opportunity, and this is our necessity.

Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank You for this profound, penetrating understanding of Your love. Not simply in Paul's great theological expression that in Your love You came to die for Your enemies, but here, a relational ethic that You have died for Your friends. Help us, Lord, to show that we are Your friends by doing what You command us to do. Help us to be brave.

Help us to find a depth in our faith to truly believe in every aspect of our hearts that we are bound closer to our brothers and sisters sitting in this church than the friend we go to the pub with who doesn't know You. Help us to believe that. Help us to understand that that causes us to be unified in a way that cannot be found anywhere else. And then because of that, Lord, help us to bear with one another. Help us not to think of ourselves as anything, but to remember that we are nothing.

Help us to know the infinite cost of our friendship so that any hint of discomfort, any hint of social anxiety, any hint of selfishness of my time over others, Lord, will be cast off in an instant when we remember the value of Your friendship. But Lord, don't lead us with guilt, and You don't. Lead us with an immense gratitude, for we are Your friends and You have died in our place. And now we have the wonderful chance to love as You would have us love. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.