Friendships are things we don’t often think too much about. We just have friends and we enjoy they’re company and that’s it. But there is such incredible power in a God–ordained friendship. And God … God means for us to lay a hold of that power.   Laying Down Your Life Today we're continuing on in a series of messages that I've called, "A Friend In Need Is A Friend Indeed" and I really want to take a look at the heart of friendship, what friendship is all about because I wonder whether in this disposable world in which we live whether we're only too prepared to trash friends who don't suit us. People who don't always tell us what we want to hear, people who don't pander to our whims. Now don't get me wrong I believe there are some people that we all know that we shouldn't have as close friends because they'll do us more harm than good. We talked about that last week on the program. But we live in increasingly in a world where there are so many other distractions, well if our friends are a bit too difficult to get on with we just ditch them and we immerse ourselves in a rapidly growing range of entertainment options. And that is, in fact, what a lot of people are doing. They're kind of cocooning themselves in things that please them and in so doing withdrawing step by step from meaningful friendships. It kind of works for a while but my what a lonely place that ends up being. I wonder where you are right now in your life when it comes to the friendship stakes? When some young lawyer – schooled in the Old Testament Law of Moses, which is what lawyers in the 1st Century of Israel relied on – when this lawyer asks Jesus in effect, "Out of all the commandments in the law (and there are, the scholars tell me, around six hundred and thirteen commandments) which ones were the most important." Jesus was very quick to answer. Mark chapter 12, verse 29-34: The first is, ‘Hear O Israel the Lord our God the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength'. The second is 'you shall love your neighbour as yourself'. There is no other commandment greater than these. Then the Scribe said to him, 'you're right teacher, you have truly said that he is one and besides him there is no other and to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength and to love one's neighbour as one self. This is much more important than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices'. When Jesus saw that he'd answered wisely he said to him, 'you are not far from the kingdom of God'. After that no one dared to ask him any more questions. And the thing that really leaps out for me in this is not so much the bit about loving God, I mean as absolutely vital as that is, you kind of expect the Son of God to say that. The bit that kind of leaps out for me is that we should love our neighbours as ourselves and the Scribe, the lawyer replies, "You're right, Rabboni!" In fact loving God and loving others, well those things are so much more important than any religious ritual we'd care to name. Loving our neighbours, making friends, serving them with all that we are is more important than sitting in a Church and singing songs or listening to a sermon, as important as all those things of course are. The word here for love is "Agape" which means unconditional love, sacrificial love and the word used for neighbour is "Friend". You shall love your friends with all that you are unconditionally, without reservation and sacrificially. This is precisely what Jesus is saying here and it follows right on from loving God with all that we are. In fact it's the flip side of that coin if you will. Now if we should love our friends as we love ourselves then let’s stop and think for a minute, how is it that we love ourselves? Do we care for ourselves, provide for ourselves, protect ourselves, nurture ourselves? Yeah, by and large we do. And if we didn't have a roof over our heads we'd do everything we could to get one. If we didn't have food to eat we'd do everything we could to get food. If we were drowning we'd do everything we possibly could to get air and survive. It turns out that not only do we have a strong survival instinct, we have rather a strong provision instinct. We want to survive and thrive and we do what we need to do to make those things happen. So right here Jesus is actually saying, that's how you love you now love your friends in exactly the same way. Do you see the power of what He's saying here? Take this survive and thrive love that we have for ourselves and in exactly the same way that you apply it to yourself, Jesus is saying to you and to me, apply it to your friends, to your neighbours. Now when it comes to doing the whole "survive and thrive" love for ourselves, by and large, it's pretty much not a sacrifice. We look after ourselves, we look after our family, we provide for them, we're kind of hard wired to do that. Making sure that I'm safe and I'm fed and I'm well provided for. Okay I have to get up each morning and I have to go to work to earn a crust to make that happen. I just can't lounge around in front of the television all day. But that's not a sacrifice, it's just what I do for me and for my family and yet when we take the love we have for ourselves and we start doing with it what Jesus is saying here, loving our friends the way we love ourselves all of sudden it can seem like a huge sacrifice. Can I tell you something? Love is always a sacrifice and this unconditional love that Jesus is calling each one of us to have for our friends can be a huge sacrifice. Unconditional love, agape love comes at a price because it's unconditional and Jesus is calling us to fire Him into loving our friends with that sort of love and as He does that He makes it abundantly clear that it's going to cost us something. Matthew chapter 16, verse 24: Jesus told his disciples, 'if any one wants to become one of my followers let them deny themselves and to take up their cross and follow me.' Loving friends – loving them the way God means for us to love them, loving them in the way that is so much more important than any religious ritual under the sun – is about laying down our lives for them. It's about putting their needs before our needs. It's about sacrificing what we want for them. Do you see how radically different Gods take on friendship is from the worlds approach? Many people have friends because of what they can get out of the friend. Companionship, maybe money or a business deal or a good time and when they're no longer of any use we just kind of toss them on the scrap heap. Done with them, no good to me anymore, move on. And yet the people whom we choose as friends we're meant to love with all the drive that we have to love ourselves to survive and to thrive, with all the instinct we have to provide for ourselves we're meant to take that drive and that instinct and love our friends with that. Unconditionally in the same way that we love ourselves, dying to self, sacrificing for our friends and in Gods scheme of things this comes second to only loving God Himself with all that we are. Being a friend means laying down our lives, being a friend means being there for someone no matter how badly they maybe acting up right now. It's about denying ourselves, taking up that grizzly brutal cross of sacrifice and following Jesus.   The Jonathan Story When we talk about friendship there's one young man, Jonathan, whose story in the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel, I simply can't go past. I want to unpack that story a bit more with you today because it's like a powerful case study of what we've just been talk...

Released on 10 Jan 2021