WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.000 This is our 13th look at the book of Proverbs and we've seen that the book of Proverbs 00:00:09.439 --> 00:00:16.120 says that you can either be wise or you can be a fool. What we've said about wisdom so 00:00:16.120 --> 00:00:22.480 far is that wisdom is learning how to live when there are no rules telling you how to 00:00:22.480 --> 00:00:28.679 live. In other words, to do that you have to be in relationship with God which Proverbs 00:00:28.679 --> 00:00:33.359 calls the fear of the Lord. You have to know that God's created the world, that the world 00:00:33.359 --> 00:00:39.280 has a moral order, a creational norm that he's applied to this world, relational laws, 00:00:39.280 --> 00:00:44.799 but it's more than just being moral, it's actually knowing how to live well skillfully 00:00:44.799 --> 00:00:48.640 before God when there aren't rules telling you exactly how to live and that's most of 00:00:48.640 --> 00:00:53.439 our lives. There aren't specific commandments in the Bible telling you how to do every single 00:00:53.439 --> 00:00:58.120 thing, every decision you make in life and so wisdom is the ability to apply the principles 00:00:58.119 --> 00:01:03.239 of Scripture in the light of God to all the situations you have in life and live life 00:01:03.239 --> 00:01:10.239 well. Tonight the book of Proverbs is telling us that if you want to be wise you have to 00:01:10.239 --> 00:01:17.239 have friends. There's a deep association in Proverbs as well as across the whole Bible 00:01:17.679 --> 00:01:24.680 between friendship, wisdom and blood and you'll see what I mean in a minute. We're going 00:01:24.680 --> 00:01:31.680 to look at three things. First, that friends are thicker than blood. Second, that true 00:01:32.040 --> 00:01:38.720 friends will make you bleed. Third, we'll look at the friend who bled. I think across 00:01:38.720 --> 00:01:45.360 all that you'll see that with the Bible's message about friendship is that true friendship 00:01:45.360 --> 00:01:51.000 is loving somebody all the way to the point of great cost to you. That's true friendship 00:01:51.000 --> 00:01:57.000 in the Bible. First, friends are thicker than blood. We said this a number of times recently 00:01:57.000 --> 00:02:04.000 but the English language doesn't have all the words for love that most languages do. 00:02:05.640 --> 00:02:09.920 For instance in Greek which is what the New Testament was written in, there are seven 00:02:09.920 --> 00:02:15.120 different words for the word love and that's appropriate as it is in most languages besides 00:02:15.120 --> 00:02:19.159 English actually because there are all sorts of different ways of loving people. Of course 00:02:19.159 --> 00:02:25.359 the famous example in the 20th century, a book about this was C.S. Lewis's Four Loves 00:02:25.359 --> 00:02:31.859 and in this book he just gives four that you see in Greek instead of the seven that we 00:02:31.859 --> 00:02:38.460 see in the New Testament but the first that he writes about is called Storgi. It's just 00:02:38.460 --> 00:02:42.919 the Greek word for a particular type of love and Storgi, it's the hardest one to kind of 00:02:42.919 --> 00:02:49.919 get your language, get words around. It's affection for home. It's what many of you 00:02:50.000 --> 00:02:56.239 will do when you get off the plane in Jackson and you'll say, oh, that's Storgi. It's the 00:02:56.239 --> 00:03:01.159 love of leather bound books in a beautiful library. It's the love of a good ending to 00:03:01.159 --> 00:03:07.039 a great film. That's Storgi. You know what I'm talking about. There's of course Eros 00:03:07.039 --> 00:03:14.039 and Eros is the love of face to face. It's seeing her across the room when you're 19 00:03:14.840 --> 00:03:21.120 or whatever. It's the love of romance and it's the love that ultimately keeps people 00:03:21.120 --> 00:03:26.280 on this world. The greatest of loves that Lewis writes about from the Bible is the love 00:03:26.280 --> 00:03:33.280 Agape. Agape, you've heard of Agape. It's divine love. The greatest of love, it's what 00:03:33.280 --> 00:03:40.280 Jesus Christ introduces into the world and it's the love of steadfast loyalty to sinners. 00:03:41.360 --> 00:03:48.360 It's love that really cost. But Lewis writes his fourth essay on the word philos, which 00:03:48.479 --> 00:03:55.240 is the Greek word for friend. Philos, a friend, and Greek literally means a very particular 00:03:55.240 --> 00:04:00.360 type of love and the way he describes it is that friendship, the love of friendship, is 00:04:00.360 --> 00:04:07.360 not love that is born in standing across from somebody face to face like romance or Eros. 00:04:07.960 --> 00:04:13.140 It's the love of two people that are standing shoulder to shoulder looking together at something 00:04:13.140 --> 00:04:17.879 that they have in common. An interest that's out in front of them that they have in common. 00:04:17.879 --> 00:04:23.720 So he puts it like this, friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another, 00:04:23.720 --> 00:04:29.520 wait, you too? I thought I was the only one. It's shoulder to shoulder, interest, that's 00:04:29.519 --> 00:04:34.959 where it's born, but it can't stay there. It has to become face to face. Committed 00:04:34.959 --> 00:04:41.959 friendships have to then turn into deep commitment and love for one another. Like any other great 00:04:42.039 --> 00:04:48.319 relationship, friendship is founded in knowing somebody and truly loving them. And so it's 00:04:48.319 --> 00:04:53.799 become a bit of a cliche, I think, now, but Tim Keller's really famous quote now about 00:04:53.800 --> 00:05:00.800 being known and being loved. It's worth saying again, everybody wants this. And so everybody 00:05:00.879 --> 00:05:07.879 wants friendship to be loved but not truly known. That's comforting, but that's superficial. 00:05:11.360 --> 00:05:18.360 To be known and not loved, that's the human being's greatest fear for somebody who you 00:05:18.360 --> 00:05:25.360 really are and not love you. And why? Because it's not, why are we so afraid of that? Because 00:05:27.280 --> 00:05:34.040 it's not good for human beings to be alone. And that's how it was from the very beginning. 00:05:34.040 --> 00:05:41.040 In Genesis chapter two, God creates a woman, Eve, for the first time. And before that relationship 00:05:41.600 --> 00:05:48.100 was one of eros or romance, which it certainly was, before that it was friendship. And when 00:05:48.100 --> 00:05:55.100 she's first formed out of Adam's own body, the first thing he says is, at last, at last, 00:05:57.800 --> 00:06:03.120 one of these, like me, in other words, he was aching for a being in this world that 00:06:03.120 --> 00:06:09.920 was like him, for companionship, for deep friendship. And so one theologian puts it like this, 00:06:09.920 --> 00:06:16.960 Adam wasn't longing for a companion because he was imperfect, but because he was perfect. 00:06:16.959 --> 00:06:23.959 The ache for friendship is not the result of sin. It's good. We need friends. It's 00:06:25.599 --> 00:06:32.599 core to who we are as human beings. It's how God created the world. And it's rare today. 00:06:34.120 --> 00:06:38.079 What we're talking about this type of friendship, it's rare today. Robert Bella, the sociologist 00:06:38.079 --> 00:06:42.240 at Berkeley who recently passed away, we've said this a couple of times in our series, 00:06:42.240 --> 00:06:49.240 he characterized the 20th and 21st century with scholars called the late modern world 00:06:49.400 --> 00:06:55.560 as an age of the plague of expressive individualism. And some of you have heard that phrase, but 00:06:55.560 --> 00:07:01.480 basically an expressive individualist culture, people find their worth entirely from within 00:07:01.480 --> 00:07:05.840 themselves. And so it's a culture that talks a lot about self-esteem and about turning 00:07:05.840 --> 00:07:10.720 in and finding out your own identity through your feelings and searching yourself. It's 00:07:10.720 --> 00:07:16.200 a culture that is less concerned about being defined by external relationships. And because 00:07:16.200 --> 00:07:23.200 of that, Bella says, we've had the plague of expressive individualism means the plague, 00:07:23.700 --> 00:07:30.700 the disease of loneliness. Loneliness. It's an epidemic in the 21st century. And it doesn't 00:07:32.880 --> 00:07:38.640 take very much research to find out how much it's changed from the pre-modern era to today, 00:07:38.639 --> 00:07:44.439 how much lonelier people are. And we know this, it's especially true often times of 00:07:44.439 --> 00:07:49.319 ministers. And the statistics, and I have a couple studies that I'm not going to reference 00:07:49.319 --> 00:07:54.479 them for the sake of time, but it says that it's especially men in the 21st century that 00:07:54.479 --> 00:07:58.479 are prone more than anybody to loneliness, because men are much less likely to start 00:07:58.479 --> 00:08:05.479 face-to-face relationships than women often are. And so the first point of the book of 00:08:05.480 --> 00:08:12.480 Proverbs, which we're diving into now, is you need friends. And so chapter 20, verse 00:08:12.480 --> 00:08:19.480 6, Proverbs, many a person professes loyalty, but who can find a loyal friend? Many a person 00:08:21.280 --> 00:08:28.280 will profess their loyalty to you, but who can really find a true loyal friend? In other 00:08:28.280 --> 00:08:31.400 words, he's saying everybody's longing for friendship, but they're hard to find, they're 00:08:31.399 --> 00:08:37.639 hard to get, they're hard to grab onto, and Lewis goes on in that book and says this, 00:08:37.639 --> 00:08:44.639 why? Why is this the case? And he says because friendship is unnecessary. It's like philosophy, 00:08:45.360 --> 00:08:52.360 it's like art. It has no survival value. In other words, for busy 21st century people, 00:08:56.759 --> 00:09:00.319 when you don't have a lot of time, the first type of relationship that's going to go for 00:09:00.320 --> 00:09:04.760 you is one that doesn't have survival value. What is a relationship with survival value? 00:09:04.760 --> 00:09:08.000 Well, it's a relationship that you can't get out of. It's a relationship you have to have. 00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:13.920 If you have a child, you'll never stop being a parent. If you're a child, you'll never stop 00:09:13.920 --> 00:09:19.920 being a son or a daughter. You have to be an employee. You have to be an employer, perhaps, 00:09:19.920 --> 00:09:24.120 if you're a boss. You've got to work to live to eat. These are all survival relationships, 00:09:24.120 --> 00:09:29.080 and you've got to have them. But when people are busy in an age of expressive individualism, 00:09:29.080 --> 00:09:35.680 the first thing that's going to go is relationships that aren't necessary. Friendship's not necessary. 00:09:35.680 --> 00:09:42.680 It's not a survival relationship, but we want them. Here's what Lewis says. Friendship has 00:09:45.879 --> 00:09:52.879 no survival value, but it is one of those things that gives value to survival, like 00:09:52.879 --> 00:09:59.879 art, like philosophy, like the beauty of architecture. It gives value to survival. It's a great gift 00:10:01.279 --> 00:10:08.279 of God. So, 26, it's hard to come by. It's not central to the late modern culture that 00:10:10.200 --> 00:10:17.200 we live in. Part of the fault of that, I think, is that the term friend has been really trivialized, 00:10:17.200 --> 00:10:23.200 and the concept of friendship has been really trivialized. This is especially in some ways 00:10:23.200 --> 00:10:29.879 due to the way the term is used on social media. When you use the term friend for something 00:10:29.879 --> 00:10:35.440 that you can have a thousand of, then the term no longer means what it did in history. 00:10:35.440 --> 00:10:40.440 It's been trivialized. The word friend now actually means acquaintance and maybe someone 00:10:40.440 --> 00:10:47.440 that you have no knowledge of whatsoever. Another reason for that is, look, friendship, 00:10:50.960 --> 00:10:56.620 it's not like eros. It's not like romance. It doesn't quicken the pulse. It doesn't 00:10:56.620 --> 00:11:03.620 make the heart flutter. If you listen to music and you go buy a bunch of albums from 00:11:03.620 --> 00:11:10.620 the 20th and 21st century, just make a stack of how many will list 10 songs about great 00:11:10.980 --> 00:11:17.980 friendships versus how many will be about great romance. Obviously, it'll be skewed, 00:11:19.860 --> 00:11:26.860 of course, but friendship is central to both the way God has organized the world and it 00:11:26.860 --> 00:11:33.860 is a means of his providential care of humanity. Humans get taken care of in God's providence 00:11:34.940 --> 00:11:41.940 through friendship. In one sense, friendship is at the center of the entire history of 00:11:42.940 --> 00:11:49.940 redemption. We'll see that in just a second. The first point of Proverbs, you need friends. 00:11:50.580 --> 00:11:56.580 Get friends. You need them. Everybody needs friendship. You need them. You need them. 00:11:56.580 --> 00:12:03.580 You need deep friendship. Why? Because friendship, Proverbs is saying, and we'll see this in 00:12:03.820 --> 00:12:10.820 just a second, is thicker than blood. Proverbs 17, 17, a friend loves at all times. A brother 00:12:15.180 --> 00:12:22.180 is born for adversity. A friend loves at all times, but a brother is born for adversity. 00:12:22.179 --> 00:12:29.179 A sibling is born for adversity. Now, these Proverbs aren't rules that apply in 100% of 00:12:29.219 --> 00:12:36.219 cases, but they are general principles of wisdom. What the author is saying is this, that family 00:12:36.379 --> 00:12:41.859 is going to be there in times of adversity, generally. A sibling's got to be there whenever 00:12:41.859 --> 00:12:47.179 you're in deep suffering. They got to come because it's blood, because they have to. 00:12:47.179 --> 00:12:53.639 That's the rule. Family will be there when they have to, but a friend. A friend loves 00:12:53.639 --> 00:12:58.259 at all times. What's the difference? Your family's got to be there because they're your 00:12:58.259 --> 00:13:05.259 family, but friends are people who actually like you. Family's got to show up, but friends 00:13:05.939 --> 00:13:10.299 are the people who actually chose you. They wanted you. They're thicker than blood. This 00:13:10.299 --> 00:13:14.859 is what Jesus is getting at when he says, who is my brother and my sister and my mother 00:13:14.860 --> 00:13:20.060 and my father? Who are these people? Those people that are doing the will of God, the 00:13:20.060 --> 00:13:23.700 people I'm walking side by side, shoulder to shoulder with. They're the people that love 00:13:23.700 --> 00:13:30.700 me and want me. It's thicker than blood. It's bigger than family. The great example of friendship, 00:13:31.180 --> 00:13:35.620 of course, in the Bible is Jonathan and David, and it's spoke of them. They're not blood 00:13:35.620 --> 00:13:41.980 related, but it says that their souls were knit together. Friendship is thicker than 00:13:41.980 --> 00:13:48.980 blood. We know that because we know that great relationships are all fundamentally friendships. 00:13:49.659 --> 00:13:55.500 If you haven't been married that long, but I do know that in marriage, there are all 00:13:55.500 --> 00:14:00.100 sorts of love. Of course, the love of romance is absolutely necessary, the eros that Lewis 00:14:00.100 --> 00:14:07.100 describes. Really great marriage, of course, is deep, abiding friendship. It's really liking 00:14:07.100 --> 00:14:14.100 the other person and really wanting them for who they are and chasing after them and all 00:14:14.100 --> 00:14:18.740 their foes. It's knowing them and loving them. That's friendship. Proverbs says the same 00:14:18.740 --> 00:14:25.100 thing two other times in chapter 27, verse 10. Do not forsake your friend or your father's 00:14:25.100 --> 00:14:30.620 friends. Do not go to your brother's house on the day of your calamity. Don't go to your 00:14:30.620 --> 00:14:37.340 sibling's house. And David, better is a neighbor who is near than a brother who is far away. 00:14:37.340 --> 00:14:40.460 Now of course, they're not literally saying, don't ever run to your family. That's not 00:14:40.460 --> 00:14:46.899 the point. The point is to establish the thickness of friendship, of the Bible's idea of friendship. 00:14:46.899 --> 00:14:53.899 It says it again in 1824. A person of many companions will come to ruin. So there's the 00:14:53.899 --> 00:15:00.899 condemnation of Facebook friends. Just kidding. A person of many companions will come to ruin. 00:15:00.899 --> 00:15:06.899 But there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. So here's friendship so far in 00:15:06.899 --> 00:15:11.899 the book of Proverbs. It's very different from what we think of often times today. It's 00:15:11.899 --> 00:15:18.899 very deep. It's very committed. It's more like one to three people total. That's what 00:15:18.899 --> 00:15:25.899 it's talking about. You can't have many of these, the type of friend that's being described 00:15:26.899 --> 00:15:32.899 here. It's intimate. It's committed. It's people who deeply like you and love you and 00:15:32.899 --> 00:15:39.899 it's hard to come by. So what does real friendship look like? Secondly, we could do a whole series 00:15:39.899 --> 00:15:46.899 on this, but I'm just going to say one thing that real friendship looks like. This is what's 00:15:46.899 --> 00:15:53.899 really central in the book of Proverbs. Second point, true friends will make you bleed. For real 00:15:53.899 --> 00:16:00.899 friendship, and Proverbs at least, says that true friends will make you bleed. So 1226, a friend 00:16:00.899 --> 00:16:07.899 who is righteous is a guide to you. But the way of the wicked will lead you astray. Now 00:16:08.899 --> 00:16:14.899 everybody knows that who we are as people and our personalities is formed up by the kind 00:16:14.899 --> 00:16:18.899 of relationships we have by the people that we're around all the time. When you're a child, 00:16:18.899 --> 00:16:24.899 much of your formation is based on your parents and the way they raised you. But as you know, 00:16:24.899 --> 00:16:31.899 you get older and older and more independent and more independent, what the Proverb is 00:16:31.899 --> 00:16:37.899 simply saying is that the friends you have really matter in your formation. The type of 00:16:37.899 --> 00:16:42.899 friendship, a friend who is righteous will be your guide, but a friend who is the way of 00:16:42.899 --> 00:16:48.899 the wicked will lead you astray. And that's basically what the really famous passage in 00:16:48.899 --> 00:16:55.899 2717 is getting at, the one that everybody has memorized probably as iron sharpens iron, 00:16:55.899 --> 00:17:02.899 so one person, so one man sharpens another. But how? How? And in that very same passage, 00:17:02.899 --> 00:17:09.900 it says this, blessed are the wounds of a friend. The literal word there means something 00:17:09.900 --> 00:17:18.900 more like blessed are the knife stabbings of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy is deceitful. 00:17:21.900 --> 00:17:27.900 In other words, better to have a friend who is willing to slice you open than a person 00:17:27.900 --> 00:17:31.900 who's going to flatter you. Better to have a friend who will cut you open and cut you 00:17:31.900 --> 00:17:38.900 deep than a person who's going to flatter you. This is why one poet says it like this, 00:17:38.900 --> 00:17:45.900 some people would rather make enemies instead of real friends than real friends. 00:17:46.900 --> 00:17:52.900 And that's why I'm saying this, I'm saying this, I'm saying this, I'm saying this, 00:17:52.900 --> 00:17:58.900 I'm saying this, I'm saying this, I'm saying this, I'm saying this, I'm saying this, 00:17:58.900 --> 00:18:05.900 make enemies instead of real friends because the first is a lot easier. 00:18:06.900 --> 00:18:12.900 Because here's what the Proverbs is saying, real friendship follows the paradigm of truth 00:18:12.900 --> 00:18:20.900 and love. And Paul says it in the epistles, friendship is speaking the truth in love. 00:18:20.900 --> 00:18:25.900 Now what does he mean like that? If you're one of those people that, if you're willing 00:18:25.900 --> 00:18:35.900 to really tell people the truth but you do it without love, it hardens and it kills and 00:18:35.900 --> 00:18:40.900 it cuts, it's not the type of cut that this Proverbs is talking about, it's the type of 00:18:40.900 --> 00:18:45.900 wound that really destroys when you speak the truth without love. 00:18:45.900 --> 00:18:50.900 But if you love everybody, if you love your friends without telling them the truth, 00:18:50.900 --> 00:18:56.900 that's not deep friendship, that's superficial, that's what's being said here. 00:18:57.900 --> 00:19:01.900 In other words, what it's saying is that real friendship is when you are committed to somebody 00:19:01.900 --> 00:19:05.900 to such an extent, you're so intimate with them, you know them, you're committed to them 00:19:05.900 --> 00:19:12.900 for such the long haul that you, unlike anybody else in their life, are able to go to them 00:19:12.900 --> 00:19:17.900 and cut them not with the sword that kills but with the surgeon's scalpel, right? 00:19:17.900 --> 00:19:21.900 To slice them with the surgeon's scalpel in order to heal, to tell them the truth. 00:19:21.900 --> 00:19:25.900 In other words, to chase after them, to get them to confess their sins to you, to confess 00:19:25.900 --> 00:19:30.900 your sins to them, to pursue them when they're going astray and doing dumb things. 00:19:30.900 --> 00:19:36.900 That's exactly what the author here is talking about, true friends go after one another. 00:19:36.900 --> 00:19:41.900 In other words, they care deeply about the other person's welfare. 00:19:41.900 --> 00:19:45.900 So much so that they don't gossip, they defend them. 00:19:45.900 --> 00:19:48.900 They're not going to throw them under the bus. 00:19:48.900 --> 00:19:51.900 Instead, they're going to go after them when they made bad decisions. 00:19:51.900 --> 00:19:54.900 And they're going to cut them with the knife with the surgeon because the knife with the surgeon 00:19:54.900 --> 00:19:56.900 is meant to heal. 00:19:56.900 --> 00:19:59.900 It's truth and love at the very same time. 00:19:59.900 --> 00:20:06.900 One of my favorite stories ever in one of the great stories of church history, 00:20:06.900 --> 00:20:09.900 I know as soon as I say great stories of church history, everybody's like, oh, 00:20:09.900 --> 00:20:11.900 I thought it was going to be something pretty good. 00:20:11.900 --> 00:20:15.900 But this is good, I promise. 00:20:15.900 --> 00:20:23.900 The story of the apostle John, and there's one of his disciples, John's disciples, 00:20:23.900 --> 00:20:25.900 was a guy named Clement. 00:20:25.900 --> 00:20:30.900 And Clement wrote a letter in the second century after John had died and recounted this story. 00:20:30.900 --> 00:20:31.900 That's just incredible. 00:20:31.900 --> 00:20:33.900 I hope it's true. 00:20:33.900 --> 00:20:38.900 John, we don't know exactly what happened to John at the end of his life. 00:20:38.900 --> 00:20:42.900 John wrote the gospel, he wrote the letters, and he wrote the book of Revelation. 00:20:42.900 --> 00:20:48.900 But he was a pastor in Ephesus, and he was called away for a while. 00:20:48.900 --> 00:20:53.900 But before he was called away while he was pastoring, he talked to this young man, 00:20:53.900 --> 00:20:57.900 young military guy about the gospel, and the guy believes on Jesus. 00:20:57.900 --> 00:21:01.900 They become just deep friends, intimate friends. 00:21:01.900 --> 00:21:05.900 John is really old, probably 90 to 100 years old. 00:21:05.900 --> 00:21:10.900 And this guy's probably, it seems like they're describing God as 20s or 30s. 00:21:10.900 --> 00:21:12.900 But they were deep friends. 00:21:12.900 --> 00:21:14.900 And John is called away. 00:21:14.900 --> 00:21:17.900 He has to go visit a number of churches. 00:21:17.900 --> 00:21:23.900 And John leaves this young man in the care of what Clement calls the bishop, 00:21:23.900 --> 00:21:25.900 which just means pastor. 00:21:25.900 --> 00:21:30.900 He said to this guy, look, this is my best man right here. 00:21:30.900 --> 00:21:31.900 I want you to take care of him. 00:21:31.900 --> 00:21:36.900 He says I want you to knit your soul with him and look after him. 00:21:36.900 --> 00:21:40.900 And so John goes off and he's away for years according to Clement. 00:21:40.900 --> 00:21:45.900 And he comes back, and the first thing he says, basically the Presbytery meeting, 00:21:45.900 --> 00:21:47.900 is he says, where is my friend? 00:21:47.900 --> 00:21:49.900 Clement never names him. 00:21:49.900 --> 00:21:50.900 He says, where's my friend? 00:21:50.900 --> 00:21:53.900 The man that I left to you, to this bishop. 00:21:53.900 --> 00:21:56.900 And the bishop says, he's dead. 00:21:56.900 --> 00:22:01.900 And John says, where's his body? 00:22:01.900 --> 00:22:02.900 How did he die? 00:22:02.900 --> 00:22:06.900 And he says, well, he's not dead, dead, but he's dead to God. 00:22:06.900 --> 00:22:12.900 And he recounts to them, look, after you left, he left the church. 00:22:12.900 --> 00:22:15.900 He started committing petty crimes. 00:22:15.900 --> 00:22:18.900 He went off eventually and committed murder. 00:22:18.900 --> 00:22:22.900 He joined into a band of criminals. 00:22:22.900 --> 00:22:27.900 And now he hides in the mountains above the city of Ephesus with his band. 00:22:27.900 --> 00:22:33.900 And he's now the captain of a great gang, if you will, a first century gang. 00:22:33.900 --> 00:22:36.900 And this is John's response. 00:22:36.900 --> 00:22:39.900 What a fine friend you are. 00:22:39.900 --> 00:22:44.900 I should have never left him in your care, that's what Clement records. 00:22:44.900 --> 00:22:46.900 And then he says, bring me my horse. 00:22:46.900 --> 00:22:49.900 So this is like a 90-year-old man, bring me my horse. 00:22:49.900 --> 00:22:55.900 And John rides into the mountains and gets captured by these criminals on purpose, 00:22:55.900 --> 00:23:01.900 and they beat him, and they take him to their captain to be executed. 00:23:01.900 --> 00:23:04.900 And here's, I'm going to just read what Clement says. 00:23:04.900 --> 00:23:10.900 When the man who was now the captain of this gang saw it was John, 00:23:10.900 --> 00:23:19.900 he turned from about to hit him, dropped his weapon, and ran away, ashamed. 00:23:19.900 --> 00:23:23.900 John, a very old man, ran after him with all his might saying, 00:23:23.900 --> 00:23:29.900 why are you running from me, your friend, who is unarmed and old? 00:23:29.900 --> 00:23:32.900 There is hope for you. 00:23:32.900 --> 00:23:34.900 I will give an account to Christ for you. 00:23:34.900 --> 00:23:40.900 I will surrender my life willingly and endure your death as the Lord died for me. 00:23:40.900 --> 00:23:44.900 For you, I am committed to give my life. 00:23:44.900 --> 00:23:49.900 And the man stopped, and he wept bitterly, and they embraced. 00:23:49.900 --> 00:23:55.900 And John baptized him a second time with his tears. 00:23:55.900 --> 00:24:05.900 True friendship seeks the welfare of the one you are committed to at great cost. 00:24:05.900 --> 00:24:08.900 Friendship chases after friends. 00:24:08.900 --> 00:24:11.900 It doesn't gossip, but it longs for them. 00:24:11.900 --> 00:24:15.900 It longs for their good and for their welfare. 00:24:15.900 --> 00:24:18.900 Do you have one of these? 00:24:18.900 --> 00:24:21.900 Do you have a friendship like this? 00:24:21.900 --> 00:24:24.900 Like a John? 00:24:24.900 --> 00:24:29.900 Somebody that's knit with your soul, that doesn't just like you, they love you. 00:24:29.900 --> 00:24:35.900 Thicker than blood, that knows you enough to strike you with a wound that will bleed, 00:24:35.900 --> 00:24:40.900 but heal and make you better and make you holier, make you see your sin. 00:24:40.900 --> 00:24:46.900 And the answer, I think, is that some of you probably do, but I think most of us probably don't. 00:24:46.900 --> 00:24:49.900 That's just a speculation. 00:24:49.900 --> 00:24:52.900 But it's not very common anymore. 00:24:52.900 --> 00:24:57.900 Why not? And I think we can get an answer from this finally, and we'll be brief here in close, 00:24:57.900 --> 00:25:00.900 by looking at the friend who bled. 00:25:00.900 --> 00:25:04.900 There are two great examples of friendship in the Bible. 00:25:04.900 --> 00:25:08.900 And this is wisdom friendship, the kind of friendship we've been talking about. 00:25:08.900 --> 00:25:11.900 The first I've already mentioned, Jonathan and David. 00:25:11.900 --> 00:25:18.900 Most of you will know the story of Jonathan and David, but in 1st Samuel 18, there's this moment 00:25:18.900 --> 00:25:25.900 where Jonathan is standing before David, and he takes off his royal robe 00:25:25.900 --> 00:25:31.900 and removes his belt and his sword and lays it at David's feet. 00:25:31.900 --> 00:25:38.900 And if you read a biblical scholars, Hebrew scholars on that, they'll tell you that that's not a small deal 00:25:38.900 --> 00:25:42.900 in the ancient Near East. What's happening there is something like this. 00:25:42.900 --> 00:25:48.900 Jonathan is the rightful heir of the kingship in Israel. 00:25:48.900 --> 00:25:57.900 He is the firstborn son by blood. It's his throne after Saul. 00:25:57.900 --> 00:26:03.900 And what he's doing, this is the son of the king, the son of the father of Israel. 00:26:03.900 --> 00:26:06.900 And he's taking off his royal robe. 00:26:06.900 --> 00:26:15.900 He's laying down his sword and he's declaring, I will give up my kingship for you, because you're my friend. 00:26:15.900 --> 00:26:22.900 I will do whatever it takes. I will give up my kingship for you for this friendship. 00:26:22.900 --> 00:26:25.900 Remind you of something else. 00:26:25.900 --> 00:26:29.900 The second great friendship in the Bible. 00:26:29.900 --> 00:26:34.900 We first start to see it as a friendship in John chapter 15. 00:26:34.900 --> 00:26:40.900 When Jesus is preparing his disciples for the fact that he's about to go to the cross, 00:26:40.900 --> 00:26:48.900 and he says to them, I don't call you servants anymore. I now call you my friends. 00:26:48.900 --> 00:26:51.900 And this is in the shadows of the cross. He's about to go to the cross. 00:26:51.900 --> 00:26:55.900 And so he's describing for them, he literally defines for them what is friendship. 00:26:55.900 --> 00:27:02.900 And he says, greater love has no person than this, but that they lay down their life for a friend. 00:27:02.900 --> 00:27:08.900 That's the love of friends. Greater love has nobody than this, and they lay down their life for one's friend. 00:27:08.900 --> 00:27:16.900 But just before that, literally one chapter, he had asked Peter, will you lay down your life for me? 00:27:16.900 --> 00:27:19.900 So now we know that that's what Jesus thinks is friendship. 00:27:19.900 --> 00:27:22.900 And he had just asked Peter, will you lay down your life for me? 00:27:22.900 --> 00:27:26.900 And Peter of course says, yeah, absolutely I will. I will go where you go. 00:27:26.900 --> 00:27:28.900 I will lay down my, in other words, what is Peter saying? 00:27:28.900 --> 00:27:33.900 Jesus is saying, will you be my friend? And Peter is saying, I will be your friend. 00:27:33.900 --> 00:27:39.900 I will go wherever you go. I will suffer for you at great cost. 00:27:39.900 --> 00:27:46.900 And then Jesus asked them, will you come with me to Gethsemane? 00:27:46.900 --> 00:27:53.900 Because I'm afraid. I'm about to go to the cross. 00:27:53.900 --> 00:27:58.900 He was a human being. He knew what he was facing. 00:27:58.900 --> 00:28:04.900 And he said, will you come and sit with me and pray for me? 00:28:04.900 --> 00:28:12.900 And Peter and the rest of them, they abandoned him. They didn't do it. They fell asleep. 00:28:12.900 --> 00:28:18.900 And he was lonely without friends. 00:28:18.900 --> 00:28:24.900 Will you speak for him in front of the authorities? And they abandoned him. 00:28:24.900 --> 00:28:29.900 Will you say in public that this man was your friend? 00:28:29.900 --> 00:28:33.900 And he was abandoned. And we knew this was going to happen. 00:28:33.900 --> 00:28:40.900 Because he said, foxes have holes, birds have nests. I have nowhere to lay my head. 00:28:40.900 --> 00:28:44.900 And this is no different than what happened in Genesis chapter 2, 00:28:44.900 --> 00:28:49.900 when God came down and walked without him, and even the garden walking in Hebrew, 00:28:49.900 --> 00:28:55.900 is a metaphor for friendship. And God said, I'm here as your friend. 00:28:55.900 --> 00:29:02.900 And they said, no. You see, it's one thing for Jonathan to take off his robe and say to David, 00:29:02.900 --> 00:29:09.900 I'll be yours. I'll give up my sonship as king for you, for a friend. 00:29:09.900 --> 00:29:13.900 Because David was loyal to Jonathan. They had a great relationship. 00:29:13.900 --> 00:29:18.900 That's exactly what it should look like. Jesus Christ came into the world and said, 00:29:18.900 --> 00:29:22.900 I don't call you people, servants. I call you friends. 00:29:22.900 --> 00:29:31.900 And he said it not in front of David's or Jonathan's, but to people that betrayed him. 00:29:31.900 --> 00:29:37.900 Why aren't we able to cultivate deep relationships like this? 00:29:37.900 --> 00:29:42.900 Why don't we have friends like this most often? Because we aren't those friends, right? 00:29:42.900 --> 00:29:48.900 Because we're not that for somebody else. 00:29:48.900 --> 00:29:55.900 I think Peter is reflecting on this precisely in Acts chapter 2 at the end of his sermon. 00:29:55.900 --> 00:30:01.900 We're closing in just two minutes, but he says, all of you looking out to the people that have 00:30:01.900 --> 00:30:06.900 persistivated in Pentecost, which is people from all over the world that were not there for Jesus' crucifixion, 00:30:06.900 --> 00:30:10.900 and he says, all of you crucified him. All of you crucified him. 00:30:10.900 --> 00:30:15.900 All of you betrayed him. All of you left him. God came and said, you're my friend, and you said, no. 00:30:15.900 --> 00:30:22.900 Why don't we have friends? Because of sin. Because relationships are broken. 00:30:22.900 --> 00:30:27.900 Because it's been that way since the beginning of history. 00:30:27.900 --> 00:30:35.900 At the cross, Jesus Christ laid down his royal robe, and he took off his belt and his sword of power. 00:30:35.900 --> 00:30:42.900 And he didn't get the love of the David, but he swallowed the betrayal of his friends, me and you. 00:30:42.900 --> 00:30:50.900 And he did it willingly. And he came to be the friend of people that didn't want him. 00:30:50.900 --> 00:30:57.900 In other words, you can think of the entire history of the world as the history of a friend who would not give up the chase. 00:30:57.900 --> 00:31:04.900 One theologian puts it like this, the world is not itself capable of reconciliation with God. 00:31:04.900 --> 00:31:09.900 He cannot make, man, humans cannot make themselves the friends of God. 00:31:09.900 --> 00:31:19.900 But in the friendship of Jesus Christ to humans, humans become the friends of God and are no longer his enemies. 00:31:19.900 --> 00:31:24.900 This means that the cross is ultimate friendship on display, true friendship. 00:31:24.900 --> 00:31:28.900 It's going all the way to the point of great cost. 00:31:28.900 --> 00:31:36.900 And so I'll just close by saying this. I don't have all the practical answers for the curse of loneliness in the modern age. 00:31:36.900 --> 00:31:40.900 And that's something that has to really be worked out in everybody's own life. 00:31:40.900 --> 00:31:47.900 And we could talk about that more. But what I can say is that the cross of Christ is the pronouncement in a cursed world 00:31:47.900 --> 00:31:53.900 that in Christ Jesus, a person who is lonely, does not have to be forever. 00:31:53.900 --> 00:32:01.900 Does not have to be forever. That God will not have it so by faith for now. 00:32:01.900 --> 00:32:05.900 But one day it will be site. 00:32:05.900 --> 00:32:11.900 So look at St. Columbus. We just, St. Columbus just wrote a new philosophy of ministry. 00:32:11.900 --> 00:32:16.900 And one of the distinctives for our people, especially in that philosophy of ministry that we included, 00:32:16.900 --> 00:32:24.900 was deep Christian friendship in our cultural ethos as one of our marks of who we are here. 00:32:24.900 --> 00:32:30.900 And this is it. We're committed to this because the Bible is committed to it. 00:32:30.900 --> 00:32:34.900 So commune with God as his friend. 00:32:34.900 --> 00:32:41.900 Seek deep, long-term, face-to-face Christian friends in this life, one to three. 00:32:41.900 --> 00:32:46.900 Confess your sins to them. Go after them when they do dumb stuff. 00:32:46.900 --> 00:32:52.900 Call them out, give them hugs, be affectionate, love their families, be on their team, 00:32:52.900 --> 00:33:01.900 don't gossip about them, and develop a heart that is vulnerable and available and ready to be known and loved. 00:33:01.900 --> 00:33:06.900 Do you have any real friends? Go get some. Let's pray. 00:33:06.900 --> 00:33:15.900 Father, we ask, oh Lord, we give thanks for the friendship of Christ, 00:33:15.900 --> 00:33:22.900 for the reconciliation of enemies with God, that you didn't come for us because you made a covenant. 00:33:22.900 --> 00:33:26.900 You made a covenant because you wanted us to be friends. 00:33:26.900 --> 00:33:33.900 And that's incredible. So we ask that we would look at you and our relationship that is healing 00:33:33.900 --> 00:33:39.900 and seek others because we need it. And we pray for this in Jesus' name. Amen.