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[Music] Speaking from Pasadena Covenant Church, Dr. Bruce W. Thielman brings you a message, "Friendship with the Highest." [Music]

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It's been good to be with you today. This morning we began by picking up just one of the themes in the first part of the 15th chapter of John's Gospel. Tonight I want to go on to the second half of the chapter and pick up just a single theme from that second half. I'm reading from John, the 15th chapter.

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I'm beginning the reading at verse number 11, and I'm reading from the New English Translation. "I have spoken thus to you so that my joy may be in you and your joy complete. This is my commandment, love one another as I have loved you. There is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends.

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You are my friends if you do what I command you. I call you servants no longer. A servant does not know what his master is about. I have called you friends because I have disclosed to you everything that I heard from my father.

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You did not choose me, I chose you. I appointed you to go on and bear fruit, fruit that shall last, so that the father may give you all that you ask in my name. This is my commandment to you, love one another. If the world hates you, it hated me first, as you know well.

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If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own. But because you do not belong to the world, because I have chosen you out of the world, for that reason the world hates you. Remember what I said, a servant is not greater than his master. As they persecuted me, they will persecute you.

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They will follow your teaching as little as they have followed mine. It is on my account that they will treat you thus, because they do not know the one who sent me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin. But now they have no excuse for their sin.

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He who hates me, hates my father. If I had not worked among them and accomplished what no other man has done, they would not be guilty of sin. But now they have both seen and hated both me and my father. However, this text in their law had to come true.

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They hated me without reason. But when your advocate has come, whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth that issues from the Father, he will bear witness to me. And you also are my witnesses, because you have been with me from the first.

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And may the same God who inspired these words incline our hearts to their understanding. Will you pray with me? In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. In the quiet of this evening hour, I would like to talk with you about perhaps the most beautiful thing that Jesus ever said to his disciples.

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That occasion when he said to them, and says tonight to us, "I do not call you servants. I call you friends." Emerson, the New England transcendentalist, said once that friendship was very much the Olympics of the spirit. And he warned that anyone who entered into the competition which friendship is, had to be willing to do battle with time, and with want, and with danger. Only those should enter the test, he said, who can live truthfully and with tenderness.

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Well if this is what the mark of friendship is, if it is an Olympics of the spirit, and truth and tenderness belong to the victor, then our Lord Jesus Christ takes home all the gold medals. For no one has been a friend as Jesus has been a friend. He indeed shows us what friendship is.

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He says to us first of all that friendship is openness. Friendship is sharing. Friendship is vulnerability. Notice the text.

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"No longer do I call you servants. I call you friends. For all that I have heard from my Father, I have made known to you." No secrets. Everything open. Everything revealed. I think Jesus probably has in mind here a custom which was very common in the Mediterranean world at that time. A king or emperor would often have what were called intimates of the king.

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Now these intimates or friends were much more important to the king than any statesman or ambassador or general in his realm. These individuals were the ones who had constant and continuing access to the king. They could get to him any time in the day or in the night. They could interfere even into his bedchamber.

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They were so close. And these were his counselors, his friends, the intimates of royalty. And what Jesus is saying to his disciples and thence to us is this. "I call you friends. You are the ones to whom I have revealed all that my Father has told me. You are intimates with royalty."

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I marvel at the frankness and the openness that was typical of Jesus. How he never labored to bring anyone to devotion to himself with the expression of anything less than the truth. You never see Jesus concealing even the hardest and most brutal realities of discipleship in an attempt to win someone's allegiance. Oh no.

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Jesus always tells it like it is. He lays it out in all of its truth and invites us to respond in the light of that truth, in the light of that total openness. Sometimes you encounter persons who have been won to the gospel by some zealous but misguided individual who has sugar-coated the gospel. They have presented a gospel in which the promise is laid down that if you become the disciple of Jesus Christ,

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from that time on everything will be victory after victory. You will climb from triumph to triumph. And when, in the Christian walk, they discover that this is not always and invariably so, these people, having committed themselves to a sugar-coated gospel, fall aside.

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No one in presenting the gospel should ever present it with less honesty and truth than Jesus did. He put it very plainly. He said, "As the world has hated me, so the world is going to hate you." And in doing this, Jesus set an example, I believe, for all the world's great leaders of men.

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Do you remember what Garibaldi said to his troops as he tried to rally them to unify Italy? He said, "Come to me, for I have such gifts to offer you. Forced marches, nights on hard ground, wounds, perhaps it may even be death itself for Italy." Or Churchill stands up before the Parliament in England and says,

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"I would say to this house, as I have said to those who joined the government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toils, tears, and sweat." Or Solzhenitsyn, who spoke such words of power over English television a few weeks ago. The program has now been heard here in the United States several times already.

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He calls us to hold high the banner of faith and then to be willing to die in defense of it. No concealing, you see, in fact, that in significant living, in living which is in friendship with God and Christ, there's going to be a price to pay.

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Remember that when John wrote the words with which we are concerned tonight, many years had elapsed since the time of the crucifixion and the resurrection and the ascension. In point of fact, many of the disciples to whom Jesus addressed these words were already gone from the earth, and they had died without exception in horrible ways.

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They had been crucified, they had been burned, they had been sawn in half, they had been skinned alive. John is writing these words out of the full recognition of their most painful truth, that discipleship oft times leads to this kind of suffering.

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But still he writes it, "For the friendship that exists between Christ and his own is to rest always upon openness and truth." This is the difference between the relationship between a master and a servant and friends. A servant does what his master tells him.

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He receives orders and he does what he does as an act of obedience. But a friend not only hears that which is expected of him, but is given to understand why, and is told in total candor the cost of what he is about to do. And out of this openness he responds not so much as an act of obedience, as an act of love.

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Servanthood, you see, is order. Friendship is ardor. And ardor is based always, passion is based always, love is based always on openness and truth. So Jesus in showing us what friendship is, speaks to us of sharing. And then he goes on to point out the other crucial ingredient in friendship.

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Friendship is to be built on sacrificial love. The Greeks said there were three kinds of friendship. There were friendships for pleasure, friendships for profit, and friendships for goodness. And they went on to say that only the friendship for goodness sake continues to live and bears fruit.

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Well, you know that that's true. You have perhaps encountered an individual who wanted to be your friend only for pleasure or profit, only for what they could get out of you. There are some people who believe it's not what you know, it's who you know,

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and they know you and they plan to get everything out of you that they can get out of you. I remember one night at Dodger Stadium. It was my task to go to that particular inning to get the Pepsis and the hot dogs. And you know they put them in one of those flimsy cartons.

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You have to carry them kind of like this. And I was coming back and as I walked along I noticed a gentleman standing to my right, no one around. I don't know what it was about him. He was wearing dark glasses and he had his hand this way so I couldn't even see all his face.

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But I recognized him immediately. It was an entertainer whose work has always delighted me. So I stopped and holding this teetery thing I said to him, "Mr. Astaire," it was Fred Astaire, "I want to tell you how very much I have enjoyed your entertainment across the years."

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And he was very open and very friendly and we began to chat for a minute. And as we talked other people going by would walk over and say, "Can I have your autograph? Can I have your autograph?" And very patiently he would take out his own pen. They never seemed to have one.

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And he would write his autograph on the paper and then they would go away. And he was standing there with his pen when at the end of our conversation I said, "Well, they're waiting for the hot dogs and Pepsi. I better get it back." And he had his pen out and he said, "Would you like me to sign something for you?"

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And I said, "No." I said, "I've received so much delight from you across the years, I would think it grossly improper to ask you for anything more." And his face just lighted up and he said, "I don't care whether we win tonight or not."

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You know, it was a beautiful moment because he was being appreciated for what he was. Now, what I'm trying to say right now is that the kind of friendship which exists and grows is not the friendship in which we seek to get, but the friendship in which we seek to offer. This is exactly what Jesus says in this passage.

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He puts it this way, "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend." There's no more that you can offer than that. When I was in high school, I worked in a day camp. And one day a little girl running along a wooden boardwalk fell

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and picked up a lot of splinters in her hand. And we thought it best to take her to the doctor to have the splinters removed. And I called her mother and asked her to meet us at the doctor's office, which she did. And the mother held the little girl while the doctor was removing the splinters.

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And every time the child would groan, the mother would groan. And every time the child would wince, the mother would wince. And every time the child would cry, the mother would cry. And the child became nauseous and so did the mother.

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I had to drive them both home. Now, the point is, the love between them was such that when one suffered, the other suffered. And it's just this that we discover in meaningful friendship. It is on a level where we offer ourselves to one another

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to the degree where we know suffering on one another's behalf. As long as you love only yourself, then only that which affects you will give you pain or joy. But as soon as you love another, then what affects you and what affects that other will give you joy or pain.

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And as you increase the circle of your love, the circle of your capacity to be hurt grows larger and larger. And this is what speaks to me so intensely about the cross. For you see, the great act of self-offering, which was Christ, is not so much the lashes and the thorns and the nails, hideous as that is,

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far worse than that. Christ, you see, as the firstborn of all creation, as the great lover of all mankind, as that one who is the head of humanity and the elder brother of all those who believe, Christ reaches out and He grasps within the arms of His love all those for whom His heart hurts

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and He clasps them with their sin and their suffering and their selfishness and their death. He draws it all close to Himself. He cannot defend Himself, for to defend Himself is to defend Himself against love itself. And this He will not do.

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So He picks us up in all the ugliness which is ours and holding us to Himself with one vast cry He offers us to God, "Father, into Thy hands I commit my spirit." The cross for Him was not just that wooden thing of which we're told in the Gospels, but that reality which is plunged down into the very center of history.

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Our friend takes us to Himself and suffers in our behalf. And this, you see, is what friendship really is. So when Jesus says to us, "I would have you be my friend," He's speaking to us in utter openness and with infinite self-offering.

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And I guess that's the reason that His invitation to friendship means so much to us. You see, if He were to call us "servant," that in itself would be enough. He called Moses "servant" and Moses delighted in the Word. He called Joshua "servant" and Joshua delighted in the Word.

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He called David "servant" and David delighted in the Word. Paul and James are called the servants of the Master. And I'm sure they delighted in the title. But long after the Old Testament and the Epistles were written, the Gospels were written.

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And in the Gospels, Jesus says, and here is our highest and noblest theology, Jesus says, "I call you friends." You know, one of the great marks of any theological system, of any religion that you might imagine, is the accessibility of God.

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Is God someone who has to be reminded or is God someone who reminds you? Is God someone who has to be placated or is God someone who pursues you? Here Christianity stands apart, infinitely above all of the world's other religions. For we have to do with a God who pursues us,

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with a Yahweh who wheels and deals in the desert on our behalf, with a Father who loves us like a father who forgives a runaway kid even before the kid has a chance to offer an apology. Who loves us like a crazy farmer who pays employees who haven't done any work.

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Who loves us like an insane shepherd who will leave 99 sheep and search out the one. Who loves us like a nutty old woman who will spend all day sweeping the straw floor of her Palestinian hut looking for one small coin. The authors of Scripture are so anxious that we understand how much God loves us, how much God seeks after us, that they're bold enough to say in both the Old and the New Testaments

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that he pursues us like a groom pursues the body of his bride. All of this love, all of this passion, all of this reaching out is summed up in these words of Jesus, "I would have you be my friend." Reuben Youngdahl, the great Lutheran pastor, was visiting in India once

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and he met a woman whose husband had died and she, being a very wise Christian woman, had invested herself in the sufferings of others and found in this the greatest healing balm for her own hurts. She had gone out and found 21 lonely people and invited them all to live in her house. And he went to visit her in her home where she cared for all of these people, old and young,

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and she found them delightfully happy. And he said to her, "How is it that they are all so happy?" And she said, "Everyone is happy when they know they belong to somebody." That's the kind of happiness that should flood through us,

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that we have a Christ who calls us friend and it is to him that we belong. Now lest you think this is maudlin sentimentality, let me take a moment to try to put a theological foundation under it. Jesus again and again in his ministry spoke about this truth,

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that our relationship to God is not to be understood in legal terms. It is not a matter of law. Rudolf Bultmann talks about formal obedience, which is to be related to God only in terms of "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots."

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No other relationship than a statutory relationship for the benefit of you young theologians. This is Tillich's heteronomy, hetero, strange, no-mas law. Strange law, the law that is imposed from the outside, that never really reaches the heart.

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It's just a matter of obedience to requirements. And this is the relationship you see between the master and the slave or the servant. But we're called in this passage to a relationship between friends. And that's not a relationship which rests on duty,

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but which rests, as we said, on openness and on self-offering. And this Bultmann calls radical obedience, because it involves everything from the roots up in us. It's not just a matter of the head.

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It's a matter of the whole being. And this is what Tillich calls theonomy, God's law, the image of God in us reaching out to the God who made us and sustains us. And in this reaching out, we find ourselves responding with a sense of indebtedness.

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But the indebtedness does not weigh us down, it lifts us up. This is the righteousness which exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, for it is not built upon what is required, but it is built upon a rejoicing heart that wants to respond to a God who says,

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"I want you as my friend." I've worshipped in all kinds of places about the world. I've worshipped in mud huts in Africa, on an airstrip in Iceland,

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in a beer hall in Germany, in churches in more countries than I can name. And everywhere I've been, there are certain hymns that are common to Christians. One of those hymns, it seems to me, sums everything that I'm trying to share tonight.

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It's a hymn by a man named Joseph Scriven. Scriven was an Irishman. He graduated from Trinity College in Dublin, fell in love with a girl, loved her with all his heart,

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and then on the very night before they were to be married, she was drowned and his heart was broken. And trying to leave all of the hurt behind him, he took his widowed mother, and the two of them came from Ireland to Canada.

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And there he gave himself to Christian service. It was said of him that he never would serve anyone who was able to pay for the service. He offered himself in total and utter generosity. And not long after they got him Canada, his mother became seriously ill.

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And as an act of ministry to her and as an act of comfort, he sat down and he wrote a poem, which he shared only with her. And after she became well, he took that poem and put it in his Bible. And no one ever saw it until decades later, the mother now long gone,

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when Joseph Scriven himself became ill. And a friend sitting up with him one night sought to comfort him by reading the scriptures. And as he turned through the pages of the man's Bible, he found this poem.

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A poem which I think sums that in us which should reach out to him when he pursues us with his love. You know the words. What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear.

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What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer. Oh, what peace we often forfeit. Oh, what needless pain we bear, all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer. See, we need Jesus as our friend.

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We need him as our example. Charles Kingsley, that great character and great writer and great teacher, was once asked by Elizabeth Barrett Browning why he was such a great man. And Kingsley said, "I had a friend."

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And then he went on to comment that we should all seek to have a friend who stands so far above us that we are in awe of him. A friend who will demand from us the very most of which we are capable. A friend who will be so important in our lives

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that we would never think of doing in his presence some things that we might think of doing in the presence of others. Well, Jesus is to us that kind of friend. We need him as our example, and we need him to unite us.

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In January, I was in Moscow, and I was trying to find an open church for the Orthodox Christmas. And I found a church, but they're not allowed to put signs outside advertising the times of their service or anything of that kind,

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and I don't read the Cyrillic alphabet, so I couldn't read it anyway. And as I went up to the church, there were some women sweeping the steps, and I tried to communicate with them. I had no Russian. They had no English.

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It was an exercise in folly until I said the word "Jesus." And as soon as I said "Jesus," there was instant communication. They knew that word, and they lighted up. And when they lighted up, I lighted up in response.

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One of us was reflecting the other. I'm not sure which. But there was in that beauty, you see, communication, and we managed to convey to one another the information I was seeking. There is a unifying power in the friendship of Christ.

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And Jesus also is needed by us because he helps to make us more loving. Maybe there is someone whom you find it very difficult to love, someone in your own family, someone in your office, someone in your neighborhood. Have you ever thought that you could love that person better

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if you let Jesus love them through you? Taking Paul's words, "It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me," could we not paraphrase those, "It is not I who love, it is Christ who loves through me"? It's very like, well, let me propose a preposterous illustration.

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I'm especially good at preposterous illustrations. Please turn your cassette to the other side. There's a woman with whom you play tennis, and she beats you every time. It's very humiliating. Every time you're out on the court, she really stomps you.

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And you want to defeat her. So your great idol in the world of tennis is Rod Laver. So somehow you manage, and here's where the preposterous part comes in, somehow you manage to get Rod Laver inside of you.

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There he is, with all of his shots, and all of his skills, and all of his talent. He's in you. Now you go out on the court for the game, and of course you don't let on that Rod Laver is in you.

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Not a bit of it. And when you warm up, you make the same mistakes as always, you know. And she's sitting over there thinking, "Charlie's just as poor today as he is any other day." And now it's time for the game to begin.

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And you're going to serve first. And as you throw the ball up, you let Rod Laver in you take over. And you smash that serve, and its spread eagles are right against the fence on the back of the other side of the court. Wow!

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And now you start to play. And you smash, and your forehand is magnificent. And you volley, and you drive, and you half-volley, and you move in, and you're terrific on the net. And your play is gorgeous.

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And then there comes a moment when you give a magnificent backhand, as only Rod Laver can do. And she sees this, and she thinks to herself, "That looked like Rod Laver." And so she grabs the ball, and she says, "Who am I playing, Charlie or Rod Laver?" And you say, "Well, it's really Rod Laver because Rod Laver is in me."

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And she says, "That's absurd! That's preposterous! Rod Laver can't be in you." And that's true. There's no way for Rod Laver to be in you, because Rod Laver is a man. But Jesus is not only man, he is Holy Spirit, so that he can enter into you.

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He can play the game from within you. And as you open yourself to him, he can begin to love through you, so that your whole level of loving is changed. That's one of the reasons we need him as our friend. And we need him as our friend when we know suffering.

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Especially when we suffer for him. There was a missionary during the Boxer Rebellion who got hit on the head with a rock. And as he reached up and felt the blood and looked at it, he said, "Hallelujah! At last I'm a Christian!" There's a sense, you see, in which it's only when we begin to suffer that we discover what our faith really is.

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I know very little about suffering. But I know more about suffering now than I did two years ago. Because two years ago I encountered selfishness and deceit and brutality and callousness in a way that I never knew existed. And it wounded me.

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It hurt me beyond any hurt I had ever known. But in the midst of it, I had a vision. And I was given the peace of Christ, the opportunity to serve him, and a beauty in him that was beyond and is beyond anything I've ever known. That's one of the reasons we need him so much as friend.

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And most of all, of course, we need him as our friend because of our sin. And that's the great beauty of the Upper Room. That it isn't located thousands of miles from us and thousands of years from us. But it's right now and right here.

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It's not bound by space or time. It is forever. And that means that at any moment we can walk into that Upper Room and we can stand face to face with this Jesus who says to us, "I do not want you to be my servant. I want you to be my friend." And we can accept that invitation.

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Now you understand it has to be accepted. You can't force a friendship. You can't jam friendship down anybody's throat. It has to be entered into with openness and with love.

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It involves the acceptance of him as he is and the offering of ourselves as we are. And when it occurs, we find him to be what the Bible says he is. The friend who sticketh closer than a brother. If you do not know Jesus as your friend,

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if you've not been altogether open with him, if you've not offered yourself to him, then I invite you to the Upper Room tonight. I invite you to an encounter with him which can change all the course of your day.

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I invite you to accept him and to know the infinite peace of being accepted by him. And if you do that, well then, then Plato will have written much more truly than he knew when he scribbled the words, "What if man had eyes to see the true beauty, the divine beauty?"

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I mean pure and clear and unalloyed. Do you not see that in that communion, and in that communion only, will we be enabled to bring forth not just images of beauty, but the reality of beauty itself.

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And in our friendship with God, we will produce that which is nourishing and virtuous. We will have become the friends of God. And to be the friend of God is to be immortal. Praise be to God for his unspeakable gift

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that he should invite us to be his friends for all eternity. Let us pray. Our Father, our hearts are filled with gratitude tonight for John. For John, that youngest of the disciples,

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who after many years wrote down out of his heart and his memory the precious words, "Thy Son spoken thy name," to his disciples in the upper room. For a brief time this morning and this night, we have fellowshiped in that room with him. We have been called to friendship with the highest,

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and to the joy which is beyond the world's understanding. Our hearts are full. Praise be to thee. All honor and glory, dominion and power be unto thee.

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Father, Son, Holy Spirit, friend. And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you,

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and give to you and to all those whom you love, and to all those whom nobody loves, his peace. Amen.