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NewCity Orlando Sermons
M'Cheyne Reading Plan | 1 Samuel 18:1-9
Pastor of Congregational Care and Missions Jason Dunn preaches about the covenantal relationship between Jonathan and David from 1 Samuel 18, illuminating the power of friendship and loyalty. Inspired by Justin Earley's book "Made for People" and insightful research on the perils of chronic loneliness, Pastor Jason helps challenge the notion that modern technology alone can fulfill our deepest need for connection.
He also shows us Jonathan's extraordinary loyalty to David, even in the face of dire opposition from his own father, King Saul. This self-sacrificing friendship offers a powerful model for how mutual support can help us navigate life's adversities. Drawing on anthropologist Robin Dunbar's findings on the critical role human connections play in our health and longevity, Pastor Jason emphasizes that true friendships can indeed anchor us in stormy times.
Hello everyone. This is Pastor Damian. You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City, orlando. At New City, we believe all of us need all of Jesus for all of life. For more resources, visit our website at newcityorlandocom.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening. Gracious God, by your Spirit, kindle our hearts that we might be a hopeful people Through your word, keep us from growing weary, that we may not miss the glory of Christ's appearing. Even so, come quickly, o God Amen. Today's scripture reading is taken from 1 Samuel 18, beginning in verse 1. As soon as he had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David and Jonathan loved him as his own soul and Saul took him that day and would not let him return to his father's house. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as his own soul, and Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was on him and gave it to David and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt. And David went out and was successful wherever Saul sent him, so that Saul set him over the men of war. And this was good in the sight of all the people and also in the sight of Saul's servants as they were coming home.
Speaker 2:When David returned from striking down the Philistine, the women came out of all the cities of Israel singing and dancing to meet King Saul, with tambourines, with songs of joy and with musical instruments, and the women sang to one another as they celebrated. Saul has struck down his thousands and David his ten thousands. And Saul was very angry and this saying displeased him. He said they have ascribed to David ten thousands and to me they have ascribed thousands. And what more can he have but the kingdom? And Saul eyed David from that day on. This is God's word. Please be seated.
Speaker 1:Thank you, gina. Well, good morning. We recently, as a staff, we always go and do an annual retreat. Sometimes it's here locally but it's off-site from the office, and this last year, in the beginning of August, we did our annual retreat day. Sometimes it's here locally but it's off-site from the office, and this last year in the beginning of August, we did our annual retreat day at the beach and this is really just a great opportunity for us to kind of play together, to plan together and of course we get to pray together. Another P you could add in there is we like to party. So that includes all those things. Amen.
Speaker 1:And the reasons we do the annual staff retreat is because we want to build connection among our staff. We want to build friendship. You see, friendship is required to do anything worthwhile, and in our play at the beach we had a wonderful time, and that's in part because of the Hurricane Debbie. We were all kind of a little bit bummed out when Hurricane Debbie was invited to our party because we thought, well, she would be a bit of a downer, a Debbie downer. You can thank Ben for that one. He gave me that. But the sunshine did come out. Right, it came out in the afternoon and it was so much fun and the water was incredibly powerful with all these waves, and they were like, hey, let's just go jump in them and see if we can play in those waves. And most of us, kind of being adjacent to the beach, we were aware enough that if we didn't fight against the current, we knew that we would be 200 yards down the beach, and so we fought the current. Actually, in one point, we fought the current, we knew that we would be 200 yards down the beach and so we fought the current. Actually, in one point, we fought the current, arm and arm together, going direction.
Speaker 1:And isn't this true? As I was reflecting on David and Jonathan's and their relationship and the currents that we live in in our culture, there are currents that are invisible and they're pulling us and dragging us down the beach all the time. These are the currents that we find in our culture and I've noticed, as I examined this text and I prayed through this text, that there are currents within our hearts, there are desires in our hearts that also pull us and, as I've been doing some more studying, there are currents that I've seen in my own family system of origin and there are currents in the way that we form families now. So whether you're married or not with your roommates, there are currents that you're swimming in and I think one of the most significant ways that our currents are shaping us is toward loneliness. The currents that we swim in are shaping us toward loneliness, towards isolation, towards the language me versus them and the fruit of that is jealousy, it's envy and even more loneliness.
Speaker 1:In Justin Early's book Made for People I highly recommend that book. We've also used his book the Common Rule to help build out our common rhythm together. He points to the fact that there's these currents that we're all swimming in and he points to the universal reality that we are lonely. He points to research studies that show that chronic loneliness is more dangerous than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Experts call this an epidemic of loneliness. Quote it is not the body that is killing us, it's the lonely soul that is killing the body.
Speaker 1:And if you were here last week, you heard David and Bethany Goodman. You heard our good Dr David quote the former Surgeon General saying we live in the most technologically connected age in the history of civilization, yet rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s. He goes on to make a case that loneliness is a growing health epidemic, and it's just gotten worse since 2017, since the pandemic that we've all experienced and known. In 2017, sociologists started noticing that Americans were dying younger. That means our life expectancy was decreasing, and studies continue to be released and show that a steady increase in our loneliness and a steady decrease in our ability to stay alive. A recent study by the American Enterprise Institute suggests that the portion of people who can name six close friends has dropped from 55 percent to 27 percent since the 1990s, and while people who have no close friends at all has raised from 3 percent in the 1990s to 12 percent now. And 40% of Americans don't have what they would describe as a best friend, and one in five single men say that they do not have any close friends at all. And this is a really important one for our text today. It's important because we're talking about the friendship between Jonathan and David.
Speaker 1:Sherry Turkle, an MIT technology and sociologist professor, in her book called Alone Together, says we are lonely, but we fear intimacy. Digital connections may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our network lives allow us to hide from each other. Even as we are tethered to each other. We would rather send a text than talk to someone. How true is that for you? Do you all feel the double bind that we are lonely but we also fear intimacy? And I would add that digital connections they leave us not only not they leave us connected, but they only and they don't leave us truly known. Right, that's the problem, where we're connected to all these people but we're not truly known. Digital connectivity is not the same thing as community. It's not the same thing as true friendship. Justin Early says this in his book the promise of social media is to be fully seen and fully liked, but the promise of friendship is to be fully known and fully loved. See these two things fully seen and fully liked versus fully known and fully loved. They are completely two different things. So, through our text this morning, we'll explore what covenant friendship is and you heard Damian speak about covenant just earlier and we'll look at the fully known and the fully loved relationship of Jonathan and David, and we'll also examine the way that Saul responds. And we'll do that this morning through these points the friends we need, the friends we keep and the friend we have. The friends we need, the friends we keep and the friend we have.
Speaker 1:Please open your Bibles or your devices to 1 Samuel 18 and start with me in verse 1. As soon as he had finished speaking to Saul and this is who was speaking, that's David in the previous chapter, in chapter 17. The soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And then skip down with me to verse 3. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as his own soul, and Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was on him and gave it to David and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt. So what do we see? What's going on here? This is chapter 18. It's connected to chapter 17, which is maybe not so clever, but they, chronologically, are following each other. And what happened in chapter 17? David kills Goliath, I'm sorry and David is victorious over Israel's enemies. So that's what's going on here, at the beginning of chapter 18.
Speaker 1:But who is Jonathan? If you've been following along in the McShane breeding plan, then you would know that Jonathan is the king's son. Jonathan is Saul's son and we've seen in Jonathan that he is also a great man of war. He's very much like his dad and he's very much like David. He's fought the Philistines and he has won in remarkable ways, with the lord's help. He was the next in line for the royal throne from his father, saul. And so here we have david, who has killed goliath, and we have jonathan, who's knitting his soul to david, loving him as his own, and he's taken off his robe, he's taken off his armor, he's taken off his weapons and he's given them to David. What is this all about?
Speaker 1:I think Jonathan perceived that God had anointed David as the great future leader. He anointed David to be the king after Jonathan's father, king Saul. So Jonathan perceived that God had chosen David to be the future king, not himself, and he accepted that and he recognized that. How did he recognize that? He took off his robe, right, and what is that robe? The robe is his royal robe. One commentator says this about Jonathan taking off his robe. He said essentially, this is the same thing as giving David his crown. This is a remarkable statement of Jonathan honoring a self-sacrificing, generous love towards another, where he could have, in the land of scarcity, in the mindset of scarcity, claimed everything that was his.
Speaker 1:But Jonathan does something different and as the story continues, right, this chapter 18 was in our beginning of our reading plan this week and, if you've been following along, the story continues. Jonathan did everything he could essentially to always protect and save David from his father, saul. There was a consistency in the way that Jonathan's affections and his affections and his commitments towards David there was a way of covenant right. We read that in our chapter here and we see that commitment again in chapter 19. And I'm just going to run through this real quickly because this is a one-off sermon, but I want you guys to understand the narrative arc of their relationship off sermon. But I want you guys to understand the narrative arc of their relationship.
Speaker 1:And in chapter 19, jonathan confronts his father's plan to kill him and convinces him to not sin against David in this way. And Jonathan was really he was successful in that attempt and interesting in the text it says that Saul turned his heart back toward David. And then in chapter 20, jonathan confronts his dad's desire to kill David again, but he fails this time to convince his father to not kill David. And then in chapter 20, jonathan confronts his dad's desire to kill David again, but he fails this time to convince his father to not kill David and Jonathan comes to David to tell him of that plot and there's this whole scenario with bows and arrows and it gets really complicated. But at the end of the interchange they remind each other of the pledges and the commitments that they had made for each other. And then finally the story comes to a close in chapter 23 of Samuel.
Speaker 1:Again, saul is trying to kill David. He's coming after him and so Jonathan finds David in the wilderness. And remember what we talk about here at New City as we walk through the book of Exodus the wilderness is God's discipleship training school. This is where Jonathan disrupts the manhunt for David in some way and he says in 1 Samuel 23, verse 17,. He says this this is the last time that David and Jonathan ever sees her, and they renew their covenant of friendship in chapter 23. We see that that began here in chapter 18. And I say all this to talk about the narrative arc, to point out this fact that friendship is what gets us through adversity. Proverbs 17,. 17 is all it says this a friend loves at all times and a brother is born for adversity. So we see here in 1 Samuel that Jonathan's covenant friendship. It brackets all of the adversity, all of the pain, all of the isolation and loneliness that David experienced from chapter 18 to chapter 23. And they rekindle and they reaffirm that in the middle of those chapters in chapter 20. So David's rise to kingship is through much adversity and David, I think, in a lot of really tangible ways, is only sustained by the friendship of Jonathan.
Speaker 1:So let me go back to the research that I talked about earlier about our longevity in life, about the fight against the current of loneliness, the current of isolation that we find ourselves in. Robin Dunbar is an anthropologist and an evolutionary psychologist which I think is an amazing kind of title to have and he works, he studies and specializes in human behavior at the University of Oxford. He says this if you want to live a long and healthy life, you must do two things One, stop smoking. Two, you must make friends. And but why? Why are we built to need friendship and it is in our design to need people. We were created this way.
Speaker 1:Let me jump back to the book of Genesis. In the first chapter, first two chapters, god created the heavens and the earth. He created all things right. And it says after God each day, he said it was good, it was good, it was good. And he says this seven times. And then in chapter, he said it was not good, it was not good for Adam to be alone. Why? Why was it not good for Adam to be alone? He was walking and talking with God. Because we are made in the image of a Trinitarian God. It's three persons, equal in power and of the same substance. They were in relationship together. They were in friendship with one another before time the Father, son and Holy Spirit. And this is who we are made in the image of. Therefore, friendship is the very essence of God. This means friendship for us is just not a nice thing to have, but it is something that we need. It is something that you need.
Speaker 1:Keller says this about that framing in Genesis. He says the Genesis narrative is implying that our intense relational capacity. It's created and given to us by God, but it was not fulfilled completely by God in this vertical relationship. God designed us to need this horizontal relationship with other human beings. This is why, in paradise, even loneliness is a terrible and tragic thing. So some may say that I'm talking about in Genesis here, that is, only speaking to the idea of marriage between a man and a woman. But what marriage is able to be sustained over the 20, 30, and 40, and 50 years if it doesn't include friendship? The allure of eros will only satisfy for a time. We must build strong friendships in our marriages, and that's another sermon to preach a different time. But what we also do is to build strong friendships outside of marriage Men with men and women with women. This is the truth from our text in 1 Samuel 18.
Speaker 1:So then, what happened after Genesis 2? What happened after the paradise? How did the fall affect the need of friendship, the need of being known, if you turn that within your Bibles and kind of go down to verse 6. Instruments and the women sang to one another as they celebrated. Saul has struck down his thousands and David his ten thousands. And Saul was very angry and this saying displeased them. They said they had ascribed to David ten thousands and to me they have ascribed thousands. What more can he have? But the kingdom? And Saul eyed David from that day on. You see, after the fall there was a flaw in our nature and maybe I'm understating that right. A flaw is just putting it lightly. We were dead in our trespasses and in community we are tempted to envy and jealousy that leads to murder. And you saw that with Cain and Abel, right. What did Jesus say in the Sermon on the Mount? Anyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. And we see in Saul's response to God's anointing of David the response of envy, the response of jealousy. Peterson, eugene Peterson, puts this in his commentary that King Saul became jealous, and you can see this by the writer of Samuel and in the succession of verbs that he develops here, and so follow with me as I talk about these verbs.
Speaker 1:In verse 8, saul was very angry. That's part of our text. In verse 10, he raved. In verse 11, he hurled the spear. In verse 12, he was afraid. In verse 13, saul removed David. And finally, in verse 15, saul stood in fearful awe of David.
Speaker 1:Saul was sensing for the first time perhaps that more than mere popularity in this song that he was hearing, hearing sung, that more than popularity was being involved and God's purposes were being worked out in this young man. And this led to jealousy and murderous envy. So when we read in verse 9 in our text that Saul eyed David, we know that it was a very evil eye indeed, and this is in contrast to Jonathan, Jonathan's covenantal friendship with David and the people, as we saw here, their extravagant and celebratory love of David's success. So what we learn in Saul's example is that the currents toward loneliness is not just the currents outside in our culture, but the currents are within our hearts, the currents of pride and self-sufficiency and envy that keep us from moving toward the friends we have. And so this reality became really evident and true to me the first time, I think one of the beginning times in my life, when you're in college, right, you're exploring a lot of things and the idea that I need friends came alive to me when I started to take risks with God and step out in faith.
Speaker 1:And so there was this random idea that me and my buddy, donald had, and we said we want to do missions this summer. Right, we don't. We were both influenced by John Piper and we thought, well, we can't just do a two-week trip, that's way too small and not radical enough. We want to be gone the whole summer. And so we said let's figure out a way that we can be gone for three months. And we persuaded each other and we randomly went to the middle of Papua New Guinea, in the highlands region and we stayed in the Bena Bena tribe right and there was a lot of before we even left. There was a lot of before we even left. There was a lot of convincing of New Tribes Missions like, hey, we're good for it, we can do the whole thing because they only had a program for a few weeks. But we convinced them, no, you can send us there for the whole three months. And, funny enough, they let us go and our funding hadn't come in.
Speaker 1:There's so much to say about that trip and I wish I could tell you all the details and I'd love to sometime. But grab me how Donald and I committed to each other before that trip, during that trip and after the trip. The adversity of harsh climate, the unknown language there's two different languages there, there's a pidgin language, and then the tribe had a language and there was limited connection. Right, this is back in 2002. There wasn't a way to really connect with the world, but I was sustained in large part by my friendship with Donald. I mean for me alone. When I arrived, I got an infection in my eyes that left me blind for a day. I experienced heat stroke while I was there and I was left immobile. I had skin infections that looked like a whole different world to me, and I actually had a broken heart because right before I left on this trip, my girlfriend had broke up with me, and that's always hard to deal with, no matter what continent you are on. But through it all, donald was by my side, literally and physically. We slept in a room where he was only about four feet away from me, and our friendship, our commitment to each other, really has shaped who I have become.
Speaker 1:We both needed each other in that season and the point is this we need friends. Even if we are married, we still need friends, men with men and women with women. The currents are pulling us away towards isolation and loneliness, but the good fight is to move toward a few covenant friends. Adversity is guaranteed to come to us all in this life, but that will be sustained by our friendships. So we've understood so far that we were designed to need friends. But what is a friend? How do you keep and maintain a friend? Look down with me again in your Bibles to verse 3 and 4. I won't read it again, but just that's where we're going to be talking about. For this next point, the friends we keep. We've already mentioned in the context of Jonathan giving David his robe right he was giving his crown to David. But the other details also point to something that we see throughout their friendship. Let me get at those details and describe the elements or the essence, the character of friendship.
Speaker 1:The categories I'm using here are from Timothy Keller's description of the character of friendship, and he writes this actually in the Meaning of Marriage. He says the friends are those friends that we want to keep, are friends that show constancy, transparency and sympathy Constancy, transparency and sympathy. Let me run through those quickly For Keller. He talks about how the primary character of friendship is constancy or consistency. We're always showing up and I was just talking to a friend here in our church and we were discussing a mentor in his life and he said this the mentor said 80% of success is showing up and 20% is follow-up. And isn't this true for our friendships? I mentioned earlier the Proverbs 17, 7, right, friends love at all times, especially during adversity. We see that clearly from the story of Jonathan. He always showed up for David, no matter the personal cost to himself. And if he wasn't able to show up, what did he do for the other 20% he followed up.
Speaker 1:The second character of friendship is transparency. So even if we do show up, we can still have a tendency to hide. So we need to be vulnerable and willing to be wounded by our friends. This is what we call in our circle environment, transparent trust. This is where we are fully known and fully loved. And I see this in the text demonstrated in two ways. First, if you look down again with me in verse three no, verse four, no, verse three, verse three. First, jonathan and David's souls. They were knit together, it says in verse three, and Jonathan loved David as his own soul. When you're sharing your soul with somebody I think the Hebrew is getting that that you're sharing your inner being, you're sharing your emotions, your passions, your desires. You reveal kind of the inner world within yourself, the good, the bad and the ugly. And the second point that I see here in our text, in verse 4, is the way that transparency and vulnerability play out in Jonathan's relationship. Is that Jonathan gives to David his armor, his sword, his bow. Jonathan was putting himself in a place of vulnerability, a place of openness, a place where he could be wounded by his friend.
Speaker 1:Proverbs tells us faithful are the wounds of a friend by his friend. Proverbs tells us, faithful are the wounds of a friend. And Keller kind of sums all of this up and says that real friends encourage and effectually affirm one another and at the same time they offer bracing critiques. Friends are like a surgeon who cuts you in order to heal you. Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints. And this is what I believe the author of Hebrews is getting at in chapter three when he says exhort one another every day, as long as it is called today, that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. We need friends to come along and cut out the hardness in our hearts, the deceitfulness of sin. We need friends to come along and cut out the hardness in our hearts, the deceitfulness of sin.
Speaker 1:What is the counterfeit friend? The counterfeit to this transparency is the friend who never actually shows up for anything. They are self-sufficient and their relationships never go deep enough to expose the areas of real need in their life. There is a front or a facade that's always present with these type of friends. Dietrich Bonhoeffer states he who is alone with his sin and you could even say your need is utterly alone.
Speaker 1:The third character of friendship. So we talked about constancy. Transparency is sympathy, and what Keller means by this is our common passion. Together, like Donald and I, we had a common passion to see the nations reached for the gospel, and so we drove in that direction together, as friends. We see this in David and Jonathan right In their love for God, they clearly have a love for Yahweh and their love for God's people, in fact, in the establishment of God's kingdom. The counterfeit to this are friends who desire only friendship as the end goal. Cs Lewis in his book on the four loves, he states this in the chapter of friendship Friendship must be about something. Even if it were only about enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice or Monopoly with my daughter now, those who have nothing can share nothing. Those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travelers. Friends are those who are on mission together. They are about something together. They are on mission. So the friends we are keeping are friends that are made up of friendships, that have constancy, transparency and sympathy.
Speaker 1:One word from our text summarizes this for me and Damien was getting at this earlier in his discussion about our baptism, sacrament of baptism. It's the word covenant in verse 3. This can be a technical term that theologians and seminarians use to discuss the way that God works out his plan over salvation, a plan of salvation over history. But it's also it captures this idea of commitment. It captures this idea of intimacy. And here Jonathan and David make a covenant to show this intimate and committed way that they want to be in relationship to one another. They live out that covenant with constancy, transparency and sympathy. Eugene Peterson notes in his commentary that it is the covenant, not the conditions, not the surrounding circumstances, that carries the day. It is the covenant that carries the day. It is the covenant that carries the day and I kind of wanted to illustrate this as I was thinking about this was.
Speaker 1:I was tempted to share another story about me moving to China, but I thought I'd save that for another day. But I want to share and illustrate the beauty of the friends we keep in the story of a young lady I know she in her adult life she was abused and traumatized by men and as a consequence she was deathly afraid of entering into marriage, but she desperately wanted to be married. She also had a deep set of friends, friends who were consistent, friends who were transparent and friends who had the same sympathy toward wholeness and healing. They walked with her to the wedding day and, moments before that door opened, when she would walk down that aisle, they spoke truth to her and they helped her and supported her and she was able to carry forward because of the friends that she has kept. So the question then becomes how do you form these types of friends, the friends that we need, the friends that we need to keep?
Speaker 1:Damien talked about it earlier. He talked about the launching, the kickoff, if you will, of our communities and circles this month For New City. These are the environments where we can build habits of love toward one another, god and neighbors. For all of our communities they have different purposes, but for a lot of them, the purpose is to practice our common rhythm together. There's places that are made for us to find and make deeper connections, connections that lead to our intimate environment of circles, and I love our circles because this is a place where we are really relational, and one way that Ben has to define that relational aspect is that we get to live in relationships in circles, face-to-face, shoulder-to-shoulder and back-to-back, which is so reminiscent of the character of friendship that I just described. These are spaces both our communities and circles that'll help us make friends. It can't be prescribed. It's not like a medicine you take, but if we enter up and enter into these communities and circles and we show up, we can take little steps along the way. That can be an aggregate of friendship.
Speaker 1:Justin early I recommend his book. I already said this, but he has these habits of habits of rebuke and encouragement, habits of making promises, habits of forgiveness, habits of proximity. Early goes on to describe 10 different habits in his book that help us build our friendship. And the point is that our church, new City, we can help create these environments, but these environments aren't going to give you those friends. You actually have to show up and do the work of friendship. So how are we doing at that? Everybody wants friends but not everybody has friendship like Jonathan and David. I could go back to the stats of loneliness and talk about how it's not much different inside the church than outside the church, but I know many of you here are lonely and I don't need stats to tell me that. We don't need stats to tell us that there are sufferers among us.
Speaker 1:John Tyson, in his book Fighting Shadows, shares this joke. The reason men golf, he says, is because they are too afraid to ask each other to go on walks. He goes on to say that there's some truth in that Men don't know how to be a good friend, and the stats that I mentioned earlier show that to be true. So, men, I'm challenging you to show up. But for all of us, men and women, we have a hard time making friends. We're all a bit too busy. We see friendship as a nice thing to have, but not maybe necessary thing to have.
Speaker 1:Lewis says our culture sees friendship as something quite marginal, not the main course in life's banquet, a diversion. And he goes on. He ponders why has this come about? And he says that we don't see friendships as life's main course because the cultural currents pull us towards isolation and friendship, because we're trying to get ahead, we're trying to keep to our schedules, but the currents aren't always out there, right? I've already described the currents that are within our hearts. They move us to forsake friends as well. We see that highlighted or hinted towards in verse 2 of our text.
Speaker 1:And Saul took him in that day. Saul took in David, and if you are reading in our plan in chapter 16, he had already taken David in to play music for him, and so Saul. It says in chapter 16 of 1 Samuel that Saul loved David greatly, and here Saul brought him in to his inner circle, but for some reason, pride, jealousy and envy moved David to be an enemy. We too suffer from envy and pride. For me, I think, the current that I suffer most within is self-sufficiency, self-sufficiency which moves me away from friendship. It moves me away from connection. We also fear exposure. We fear being known and not loved. We disdain the work it takes to be a friend. We are often selfish with our time and we love our comfort more.
Speaker 1:So then, what is our only hope? What is the source to rescue us from the currents of our loneliness in our culture and the currents of our jealous hearts? It is the friend we have in Jesus. This is the point. Jesus is the friend we need. Jesus is the friend that keeps us. Jesus is the only one who has the strong arms to pull us out of the deadly currents of our culture. Jesus is the only one who can pull us away from the deadly currents within our hearts. Jesus is the friend we have, and we read this earlier in John 15 from our words of assurance Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends. Jesus laid down his life for you because you are his friends, so that we can have newness of life in him. Jesus was abandoned by his friends so that we will not be abandoned by him.
Speaker 1:Our great friend and redeemer, thomas Watson, in the Art of Divine Contentment, says Jesus is the best friend. He lists these six qualities of his friendship. I'll go quickly here. Jesus is a loving friend. There is no stop or break in his love for us. Jesus is our caring friend. He counts all our interests as his own. Jesus is our prudent friend. All wisdom and might belong to him. He is skillful All wisdom and might belong to him. He is skillful. Jesus is our faithful friend. He will never leave us or forsake us. He promises always to be true. Jesus is our compassionate friend. When our hearts were turned away from God, his heart was turned towards us and his eyes return toward the cross. Jesus is our constant friend. No adversity can separate us from the love of God. He loves us to the very end and there is no end of his love.
Speaker 1:I would add the idea that in Jesus, in his friendship, he is a mirror for us that truly sees us. Jesus fully sees us, he fully knows us and he fully loves us. Keller says it in this way to be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved well, that's our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is well. It's a lot like being loved by God. It's what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense. It humbles us out of our self-righteousness. It fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us. Jesus is our true friend, as the one that truly sees us. We are fully known by him and we are fully loved by him.
Speaker 1:Being in friendship with Jesus requires us showing up and spending time with him consistently. It requires we take off our hiding fig leaves and repent of our jealous hearts through transparent trust. It requires us to have a common passion to see his kingdom come in our lives and in the lives of our neighbors. I will close with the words of a familiar and beautiful hymn. You all should look up the backstory and it goes like this what a friend we have in Jesus. All our sins and griefs to bear. Can we find a friend so faithful who will all our sorrows share.
Speaker 1:Jesus knows our every weakness. Take it to the Lord in prayer, the dangerous currents that we swim in. We cannot be pulled out by ourselves. We need the love and friendship of Jesus, and that will lead to the love and friendship of our covenant brothers and sisters. Let us pray, father. We are grateful for your love for us in this way that you sent your Son to ransom the people, that you sent your Son to be our friend. In Jesus we have found life. We have found a Redeemer and Savior and a friend. Jesus, you are our shepherd. You are the one who leads us, and not only are you our groom, but you also are the one who calls us friend. Spirit, I pray that you would fill us up, help us to love and behold you in praise. Move us towards others as true covenant friends. We give you the glory, amen.