JOHN 15:9–15 – As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.”

I have a book in my library titled Iron Sharpens Iron: Friendship and the Grace of God by Michael A. G. Haykin.  In the introduction, the author paints a grim but true picture of friendship.  He writes, “Modern culture in the West is not one that provides great encouragement for the nurture and development of deep, long-lasting, satisfying friendships. Such friendships take time and sacrifice, and the West in the early twenty-first century  is a busy, busy world that, generally speaking, is far more interested in getting and possessing than sacrificing and giving. Moreover, during the course of the twentieth century, popular Western culture developed an obsession with individual selfhood and sexual desire that marginalized friendship.”

Also in the introduction, Haykei quotes a mid-eighteenth, early nineteenth pastor named Robert Hall, Jr. and his thoughts on friendship – “Next to the immediate guidance of God by His Spirit, the counsel and encouragement of virtuous and enlightened friends afford the most powerful aid, in the encounter of temptation and in the career of duty. Friendship is a reserve of strength, ready to be called into action when most needed; a fountain of sweets, to which we may continually repair, whose waters are inexhaustible.”

Ponder Pastor Hall’s qualities in a friend – a reserve of strength, ready to be called upon when needed, a refreshing sweet, faithful and as satisfying as pure water to a parched soul.  Do we have friends like that? Are we friends like that?  I am afraid what we think are friends are really acquaintances. True friends are sacrificial, loyal, loving despite faults, never inconvenienced, and model the grace, mercy and love of Jesus. Acquaintances never get into the depths of heart-to-heart relationships.

In today’s scripture, we have the best of all friends in the Lord Jesus.  And what does our Lord say of true friends?  They love deeply.  They are willing to sacrifice to the point of giving up life itself.  Basically, they model Christ as the best of friends.  Now the hard question… are we Jesus-type friends?  If not, let’s strive to change that in our relationships with other believers.  After all, it is a significant part of our growth in becoming like the Lord.

PRAYER: “Father, thank You for making me Your Friend through Your Son, the Lord Jesus.”

QUOTE: “Don’t mistake acquaintances as friends.  The former is shallow. The latter deep.”