Sermon Cloud

Who are you? How do you identify yourself? How do you envision that others see you?  How does God view you? Over the last three weeks we’ve tried to address this question of our existence:  Who are you?  And one of the things we’ve realized is that we don’t always see ourselves the way God does.  We don’t usually show up at school or our job basking in the glow of being the Apple of God’s Eye.  We have a hard time believing God is for us all the time, that we are His beloved.  But we are.  That’s how God sees you if you have faith in Jesus…  But not only that, many of us walk around shackled by shame.  We have poor view of ourselves because we’ve messed up one way or another and just don’t see ourselves as acceptable to God or anyone else.  But that’s not how God sees us.  God sees us as holy.  When he looks at you, He doesn’t see your past - He only sees how He has changed you through Jesus: How He has made you pure, good and beautiful in His eyes.  That’s how God sees you…  And if you still had any question about that - last week, Scott showed us from the story of the Ten Lepers, that God doesn’t look at us on the basis of our status, or health, our race or religion.  God looks past all that because He created every single person with value.  He made us in His image and likeness.  Now today, we’re going to look at another way God sees us, but before we go there, I need to ask you another question, and that is this:

What is the measure of your success? How do you know when you’ve arrived, when you’ve made it?  I mean, there’s something inside of us that wants to be somebody – we want our lives to count – to matter.  We don’t just want to float through life and then die. We want to be recognized and appreciated, even valued for what we do in life. We want people to think well of us. We get bent out of shape if no one ever appreciates us or tells us how valuable we are to the company or family. We start to feel invisible if no one ever acknowledges our achievements.  We don’t want people to look down on us, but to applaud us as great moms or dads, or good students, good athletes, productive employees or good citizens. We need to be needed.  We want to be admired. We want to succeed.  But how do we measure that?  If you’ve got a lot of nice stuff, like a nice car, nice clothes and a nice house, does that make you somebody?  If you’ve built a company and made a lot of money, does that mean you’re successful? If you’ve got a degree or stayed in the same marriage all your life – is that it? What’s the measure of your success? This past week, God reminded me that success is not found in any of the achievements that our world normally holds up as the measure.  No, it’s not what you’ve done that matters, it’s who you’ve loved that lasts.  From God’s point of view I would say it this way:

1.    God’s Measure of Success:  Friendship!
Now I’ve had many friends over the span of my life.    I had all the boyhood friends, like the buddies I built forts and played dirt clod wars with: Guys like Jeff Hillficker, Rodney Brown and Scott Armstrong.  And I’ve had my golfing buddies like Mark Clarke, Jim Fitzsimons, and Randy Clarke, who played hundreds of rounds of golf and had a lot of fun together. And these guys were good guys that had lots of great qualities as friends.  But it wasn’t until I got to know Jesus Christ, that I really began to understand the true meaning of friendship.  And that’s what God has led me to share with you today. So if you have a Bible with you I’m going to read from the Gospel of John 15:12-17.  If you don’t have a Bible with you this morning, you can grab a pew Bible and to page 824 and follow along as I read.  And as I read listen to what God has modeled for us as the true meaning of friendship:  This is my commandment: Love each other in the same way I have loved you.  There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you slaves, because a master doesn’t confide in his slaves. Now you are my friends, since I have told you everything the Father told me. You didn’t choose me. I chose you. I appointed you to go and produce lasting fruit, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask for, using my name. This is my command: Love each other. John 15:12-17

Now there’s a ton in these few lines that can teach us how to be a true friend.  But we must approach this text first and foremost from God’s point of few.  Because this text shows us How God Makes You His Friend:  Maybe you’ve never seen yourself that way before, but if you are a follower of Jesus Christ, if you are a person who obeys His commands, then God’s Word says you are not just a servant of God, but that you are a FRIEND OF GOD.  And as we look at this text today we are going to look at some of the ways God makes you His friend, and in the process maybe even change our understanding of what it means to be successful.  So the first God does to make you His friend is this:

He Puts His Life on the Line For You!  Verse 13 says this: There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  This is the ultimate selfless act.  This is why Jesus came.  Jesus put his life on the line for you so He could make you His friend. Most of you here understand this. You understand that without Jesus willingly volunteering to die in your place you could never know God.  This is how He proved His love for you.  What He did for you changed your life.  You believed this, and now you have friendship with God. He did this once and for all when He hung on the cross.  But the good news from this passage tells us that there’s so much more.  A second thing about God’s friendship to us is this:   

He Never Stops Loving You! Verse 12 says, Love each other in the same way I have loved you.  When Jesus says love each other in the same way I have loved you, He is not talking now about “the one time act” of laying down His life for them.  He’s talking about a continuous, never giving up on you kind of love.  A kind of love that’s not dependent on circumstances or feelings.  Jesus loved His disciples when they sinned, when they deserted him, when they stopped following and went back to fishing.  His commitment to love them was not dependent on their love for Him.  And once God makes you His friend this is true for you. His love for you is constant. It’s strong.  He will never stop loving you. He will never take His eye off you.  He will always be for you and nothing can or will stop Him from loving you.  Thirdly,

He Holds Nothing Back from You! Verse 15 says,  “I no longer call you slaves, because a master doesn’t confide in his slaves.  Now you are my friends, since I have told you everything the Father told me."
I especially like this one.  A slave does not have the place to know his master’s business.  A slave is simply expected to do what he is told.  That’s it.  So, here Jesus shows how He makes us a friend, by giving us insider information, intimate information.  In fact, Jesus says that He holds nothing back.  He is an open book.  He has revealed everything that the Father has taught him or shown Him.  He is unguarded with them.  They know what’s on His heart and on His mind. He has made them confidants.  And he will do the same for you.  J. Oswald Sanders once said, “Each of us is as close to God as we choose to be.”  That’s the beauty of this truth.  If God makes you His friend, He gives you His Spirit, and the one of the jobs of the Spirit is to reveal the truth of Christ to you.  That what John wrote in 1 John 2:27, saying, “But you have received the Holy Spirit, and he lives within you, so you don’t need anyone to teach you what is true. For the Spirit teaches you everything you need to know, and what he teaches is true.”  Don’t you just love this about God?  He shares His most intimate thoughts with us.  He doesn’t have an inner circle and an outer circle.  With God, everyone who trusts in Christ can get close to Him.  Now, that’s a friend.  He holds nothing back from you.  Next,

He Takes the Initiative With You  He takes the first step with you. In verse 16 He says, “You didn’t choose me. I chose you.” John 15:16a  Again, this teaching tells us that our friendship with God is not dependent on us.  God took the initiative to love us, to confide in us and bring us into relationship with Him.  It was all His choosing.  His plan.  He left heaven and came to our turf.  That’s what Christmas is all about.  Jesus willingly laid aside His glory and took on humanity so He could connect with us in a way we could understand.  He came to us and pursued us so we could know Him, even when we weren’t looking for a relationship.  It was all Him. He chose to love us and lay down His life for us.  And that’s Good news. The fact that He initiated this whole relationship takes the pressure off.  We don’t have to do anything to make Him to love us. There’s security in that: To be included, to be accepted, to be embraced just because He chooses to make us friends.

But He didn’t just choose us to befriend us.   He didn’t just choose us to love us, and he didn’t just choose us to confide in us.  That’s the final thing He wants us to see from this passage.  The beauty of God’s choosing to be your friend is that... 

He Wants You to Succeed  The last two verses in this passage spell it out this way: I appointed you to go and produce lasting fruit, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask for, using my name. This is my command: Love each other. John 15:16b-17      God’s idea of success is so much different than ours.  God sees success as when we produce what He created us to produce.  And God created us and then pursued us with His love, so He could help us produce a certain kind of fruit with our lives. What kind of fruit you ask?  “The fruit of our union with Him.”  In the verses prior to this, Jesus tells us that we cannot produce fruit unless we remain connected to Him.  Jesus is the vine and we are the branches.  The fruit He has appointed for us to produce is a fruit that flows from Him.  And what was that?  Well, Jesus said it over and over and over again.  It’s love.  When we love like Jesus loves – when we lay down our lives for our friends, when we never give up on our friends, when we open our lives to our friends, when we take the initiative to make new friends so we can love them with the love of Christ – this is the fruit that lasts forever! There is no power on earth that can stop this kind of love.  This is how God wants you to succeed!

And here’s the great part in all this – when we are producing this kind of fruit, when we let the love of Jesus flows through us to others - Jesus promises that the Father will give us whatever we need to succeed!  He wants us to succeed in loving like Jesus.  Here are the marks of a true friend:  

3. Marks of a True Friend:
•    A true friend will put your needs above his/her own
•    A true friend will never give up on you
•    A true friend will always confide in you
•    A true friend will never wait to take the first step
•    A true friend will do whatever it takes to help you succeed!

I believe that the greatest longing in our world today is that each of us wants to know a friend like that – to have a friend like that.  We are tired of shallow relationships – we tired of artificial friendships.  What we need are friends that will sacrifice for us, never give up on us, confide in us, initiate friendship and help us succeed. And my question is, if you would love to have a friend like that, why not start with being a friend like that?
Here’s our challenge:  God created every person with this need for friendship.  You have that need, I have that need, your neighbor has that need, the most successful person you know has that need.  People in this room have this need.  But if all of us wait for someone else to take the first step, that need will never be met.   But now, because God has met that need for you in Jesus, you have the capacity to begin a new friendship today.   Jesus said, “Love each other in the same way I have loved you.” Jesus would not command this if it were not possible.So if this is true, then that means

4. The First Step Begins With You:  I hold in my hand a little lego.  Right now our ushers are passing ones out for you.  If you know how legos work, they’re meant to connect with other legos.  They are meant for connection like we are meant for connection – some have room to connect in as many as six ways, some four, some two.  In this way they are kind of like people.  But if the lego in your hand is never connected with another lego it will not fulfill it’s purpose - the same with you.  How can you fulfill your purpose?  Like Jesus did for you, you need to make the first step toward someone and make a friend.  I want you to take this lego home with you and begin to ask God to show you who needs a friend – it may be your neighbor, it may be someone here today, it may be someone you work with, it may even be your spouse.  Maybe it’s one person, or two or even three.  Ask Him to show you who you need to love like Jesus loved you – and then take the first step, and make a friend, and God will help you succeed!

Can you imagine what would happen if each one of us to the initiative to make a new friend this week, this month, this year?  If you want to be successful, if you want your love to last forever, then take the first step and love someone this week.