A Friendship with Jesus…
In the gospel of John, Jesus invites us into his circle of friendship. In this circle of love we can expect the following: love, honesty, loyalty, mutuality, intimacy, companionship and more. We’ll get to the more in a minute, but first, consider this:
A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.
You are my friends, if you do what I command you.
I shall not call you servants any more, because a servant does not know his master’s business; I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have learned from my Father.
You did not choose me, no, I chose you.
John 15:13-16
After the initial rush of gratitude for all that friendship offers, we need to pause and count the cost. Jesus was offering friendship with conditions. In human friendships following commands should NEVER be part of the equation! But with Jesus, he is saying that friends of his have common values, listen to his voice, and follow him. When we accept friendship with Jesus we are also surrendering to know everything Jesus learned from God. We are signing up for the kinds of friendship God endorses.
Friendship involves suffering. It requires humility. It invokes the opportunity for patience.
Over twenty years ago when I signed up to participate in Northstar Community I had one of those rare moments when I sensed God explicitly giving me directions and offering me the opportunity to be his friend and follow him. It was a warm summer night in 1998, the sun had set, and a group of us had just left a meeting with our beloved Pastor James Pardue. We paused under the portico that stands between the church and the parking lot. It occurred to us that permission might indeed be granted for us to launch this new pilot project. It came to me in a flash of insight that this might “work” and perhaps it would last longer than 8 weeks. I did not want to be gone from my routine, the weekly spiritual food found in Jim’s carefully crafted sermons, my tenth grade Sunday School class that I loved teaching with my friends Rob and Jean, being on the same schedule and in the same building as my kids. But deep down in my heart, I knew something else. I knew that if we started this new thing, I had to be willing to stay for the long haul. Creating space for suffering folks would mean, for me at least, that if they gathered, I could not abandon the effort. I think I said to Pete, “You know, if we join this effort, and if it works, we have to be committed. This is not the kind of thing you enter with half a heart.” I had my own baggage and a certain lethargy in my feet about taking on this kind of project. But my heart had other ideas about spiritual friendship knowing that God invites us to lay down our life for not only our friends (the families of this church we had been in for decades) but HIS friends. I believe that once we experience being chosen by God for friendship, it becomes necessary to be the kind of person who chooses others - whether or not it suits our preferences.
