Relating to Friendship

Proverbs 18:24; 17:17; 27:6,9-10, 17; 26:18-19; 25:17; 27:14; 17:9; 25:8-10

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

You're listening to R U F at KSU Podcast. You can go ahead and open up to John chapter 15. We're actually going to be looking at multiple verses in different books of the Bible, primarily in Proverbs as well as in John. The Proverbs will be on the screen, but you can go ahead and turn to John 15, verses 12 through 15, and that's where we'll close tonight. This is the time in large group where we open up God's word, we read it together, we study it together. And normally we go through a book of the Bible, but this semester we're taking a little break from that and doing a series on relationships. And we think that is a really good thing because the Bible has a lot to say about relationships. And if you are here tonight and you're a human being and you live in this world, then you have multiple relationships going on with your parents, with your roommates, with classmates, coworkers, if you're dating someone, if you just have friends, whatever it may be, you're in relationship with multiple people. And like we said, the Bible has a lot to say about that. And as we go along in this series, we're gonna be kind of narrowing down our focus, hitting on certain topics of relationships. And so let me just say kind of up front, as we go along, there's gonna be more chances where there might be confusion, or even you might be offended by something I say. And hey, if that's the case, like please come and talk to me afterward. We'll have a sign up for like a one-on-one. If I've offended accidentally, you know, I'd love to clear that up. Or if you're just confused by something I'd say, I'd love to try to clarify so that we can figure this out together. Alright, well, with that being said, let's turn our attention now to the reading of God's word. We're going to be starting in Proverbs, and it'll be on the screen here. A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, I'm only joking. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, profuse are the kisses of an enemy. Oil and perfume make the heart glad, and the sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel. Do not forsake your friend or your father's friend, and do not go to your brother's house in the day of your calamity. Better is a neighbor who is near than a brother who is far away. Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another. Whoever covers an offense seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates close friends. Alright, let's turn now to John chapter 15, verses 12 through 15. These are the words of Jesus. It says, 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. This is the word of the Lord.

unknown 3:25

Thanks be to God.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Alright, so clearly we're talking about your relationship with parents tonight. No, clearly we're talking about friendship if you haven't picked that up yet. As we're going through this relationship series, I kind of have one main point for all the messages and then specific points as we go through. So the main point is that you were created by God to love and to be loved in relationship with God and with others. That you were created by God to love and be loved in relationship with God and others. It sounds maybe obvious and simple, and yet there's so much to unpack there. And tonight we're gonna be unpacking what that looks like to relate to friends. Thinking about friendship, uh, I was reminded a lot of my college experience. You're gonna hear a number of stories here. Uh I had a job my freshman year of college, I worked as like the greeter at a museum. So like you walk in, and I was the first person you met. Uh, and usually people were very disappointed that it was me and not someone cooler. But uh they'd walk in and I would tell them where to go and all that stuff. The museum also had volunteers, and so there was this older businessman who was volunteering as a greeter at the museum I worked at. And there was a lot of downtime between customers coming in. Uh, so I would talk to him a lot, and I was, you know, uh a college student who thought I knew a lot more than I really did. So I turned to him thinking I'm gonna say something really smart, and I was like, you know, I saw a movie where one of the characters said, every man needs a good lawyer, a good accountant, and a good priest. What do you think of that? And I'm kind of like impressed with myself that I would ask such a mature question. And he pauses for a minute and then finally turns to me, he's like, honestly, I just have good friends. Like, that's gonna do you way more than any of those people. I was devastated, y'all. I thought I had got this guy's like good favor and he was gonna, you know, do great things for my career, but instead he revealed uh that friendships have great value to them, even though sometimes it's hard to quantify. I love how C.S. Lewis puts it in his book on the four loves. That friendship is one of the highest virtues, one of the greatest blessings in our life, and yet it's the thing that is least necessary to life. There's no biological need for friends, there's no practical benefits as much as people try to sell friends. Friendship has practical. It's really just something to enjoy one another's company. And so the Bible has a lot to say about friendship. It actually has more to say than we might think. It's just not necessarily neatly summed up in one verse. So that's why we're drawing from a lot of Proverbs here as well as from the Gospel of John. And I have three points I want us to look at about friendship in the Bible here. The first one is friendship is good, second one is friendship is challenging, and the third one is friendship is redemptive. I know, deep points. So let's look at the first one. Friendship is good. God created us for relationships, and that includes friendships. That might sound like the most obvious thing in the world that I would say that friendships are a good thing. Uh, and yet we're gonna see here in a minute that actually there's a lot of thinking that pushes back against that. Let's go back to the Garden of Eden, though, Genesis 2.18. God creates Adam before there's sin in the world, and one of the first things he says is it's not good for him to be alone. Like, we can often jump to like, oh, like God made a wife for Adam. That's nice. Okay, but like, before even all that, God just made another human being so that this human being is not lonely. And this is before sin. This is before brokenness like that entered into anything. You know, nowhere does it say that God created more human beings so they'd be more efficient at their work. Or that they could, like, protect each other, you know, if lions came by or something like that. It doesn't even, like, it does talk about procreation, but that's not even the main focus of that passage right there. It's just that it's not good for Adam to be alone. It's not good for us to be alone. That there's a goodness of being in relationship and community with other people that God wants us to experience. And that actually makes a lot of sense because God Himself is in a Trinity, He's in community with Himself, and He wants us to experience that as well. You know this instinctively because if you've ever met with me one-on-one, especially like your first year, probably one of the first questions I asked from you is, what are you looking for in a campus ministry? And 99% of the time, you guys tell me, I'm looking for friends, I'm looking for community, I'm looking for uh deep uh connections with other people. And that's a good thing to be looking for. You want people to connect with about your faith or at least ask questions about faith. Uh, and I think the truth is, one of the biggest challenges you're gonna face in college is not necessarily binge drinking or atheist professors, but it's actually the challenge of loneliness and finding community. Uh, the Harvard Medical Journal recently published a study that says that loneliness is worse for your heart health than smoking. Alright, so like if you got a pack of marlhes on you right now, smoke them all because, like, as long as you got friends, you're good, right? Did my pastor just tell me to smoke? Uh no, don't smoke, it's bad for you. But loneliness is even worse than smoking, y'all. Don't don't be lonely. We'll talk after. Uh good friends are a gift from God that we can love and experience love from. Friendship is not just good for us on a practical, secular level, it's also key to the Christian life. Think about it. Jesus didn't just die to save us individually, he died for his church, for the body of Christ. That's a community of people. And do you really think Jesus died for his church, for his body, for his people, so that they could like not enjoy each other's company and not get along and actually be miserable and hate each other? No, like that's like the worst group imaginable. Oh, we have to be together, but no one enjoys each other. We'd rather all be doing something else with other people. No, Jesus wants his church to be filled with rich and deep friendships. And we're gonna talk about how he does that a lot more later. Alright, but this is why fellowship is in our name here. R-U-F, if you don't know, the F there stands for fellowship. Because we love reading the Bible, we love teaching the Bible, we love gathering around scripture and prayer and things like that. But we also love fellowship, like even just the social fun things we do together. We think that's good and healthy and essential part of doing life together in community. That you're not just a Christian robot that needs regular inputs of sermons and Bible studies. You also, like you're not a robot, you're an organic being created in the image of God, in community with the Trinity, with a God who's Trinitarian who wants that for you as well. That God wants you to experience fellowship and community. God gave us this terrific gift of friendship. Uh, but like, let's think about some ways that sometimes we can struggle with friendship here, real quick, uh, especially as Christians. So I want to look at two things in particular: the ways we can either over-spiritualize or under-spiritualize friendship. So let's look first at over-spiritualizing friendship. Uh, sometimes this happens where, you know, maybe you're here and you're the person where you're like, I take this stuff seriously. I like talking deep theology, I like talking deep Bible stuff. You know, I don't want the shallow stuff that other people do. I'm gonna get into it and get in deep. That's great. I love you. I'm so glad you're into that. I'm into that too. Uh, let's nerd out together. But uh every friendship encounter doesn't have to be that. Uh, and when we do that, we're actually saying uh that the only friendships that matter are you know friendships where we just talk about this one topic and everything else is somehow less than an inferior. That there's a way we can over-spiritualize it. Or sometimes we see making friends with new people as just an opportunity to evangelize, just to tell someone who doesn't know about Jesus, about Jesus. You should do that. You should tell your friends about Jesus, don't mishear me. But we don't want to take that kind of thinking. That's a businessman's logic. You know, oh, if I just maximize the number of friends, you know, then I can like gain more followers and blah, blah, blah. No, it's not about that. We can enjoy people just for who they are. That God has made them uniquely, and we can see bits of God's image in them, yes, when we study the Bible, but also when we go for bike rides and rock climbs and play Secret Hitler and stuff like that together. Like, that's an if you don't know what that is, that's a board game. Sorry if I just confused a lot of people. Alright, so I already mentioned smoking in Hitler. Alright, we're on a good roll here. So you can over-spiritualize friendships, but hey, for some of you, that's not your struggle. Your struggle is that you under-spiritualize your friendships. For some of you, the problem is that your faith seems to never come up with your friends. They wouldn't even know if you were a Christian unless they went to your funeral. That you can talk about football or love island all day, but your faith in Jesus is the most uncomfortable thing to come up. Come on, y'all. Like, it's it's as if you're ashamed of it. We don't want to under-spiritualize our friendships either. That Jesus can work in and through those, both with Christians and non-Christians. That we don't want to discount the power of a good friendship in the ways that we can encourage one another in our faith or share our faith with someone who's never heard the good news. For some of you, growing in mature friendships is not forcing every conversation into a Bible study. But for others, it's making the faith you confess a regular part of your life. Alright, so let's think about that. Let's step back, think about ourselves here. So, who has God put in your life that you can revel in his beauty in new ways? How can you experience God in new ways through the people he's already put in your life? You all have friends of some sort. Whether it's friends here at college or friends back home or friends online, we'll get to that. But you all have friends of some sort, some kind of connection, relationship. Who has God already put into your life? Because I think there are ways that we talk about friendships and we're like, we love friendships, they're great, we want to value them, we want to welcome people into friendships here at RUF. But sometimes we can mentally be selective about that. We're really kind of imagining only certain types of people. We're like, we want friendships with the people who, you know, have the exact same views as us politically, or we want to have friendships with the same people who have the same hobbies as us. You know, we kind of already start discounting like, you know, that like nerdy incel dude who like, you know, posts questionable things online, uh, or that girl who's in a sorority who can't stop taking selfies. Like, we are selective about who we actually want to be friends with. And I love how C.S. Lewis, once again, who I'm gonna quote a lot here, talks about this in his book, The Four Loves. He says, look, um, in friendship, we actually think we have chosen our friends, but for a Christian, there are strictly speaking, there's no chances, there's no random connection. That friendship is not a reward for discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It's an instrument by which God reveals to us the beauties of others. That your friends you have in your life now, whether you love them or hate them or wish you had better friends or more friends, it's not an accident you have them. That God has put them in your life so that you can experience his beauty in them. So you can have opportunities, yes, to encourage them to share the gospel with them. It's not accidental. So don't waste your time with your friendships and don't waste your time imagining and dreaming of better friendships somewhere else. God has already given you people to connect with. Alright, that's my first point. Friends, friends is good. Friendship is good. Uh, second point though, friendship is challenging. Oof. Uh I ran into one of y'all earlier today, and I was like, hey, we're talking about friendship tonight. Any thoughts? And you're like, oh man, friendship is hard. And I was like, amen, sister. Like, friendship is hard at times. And a lot of you are already nodding your heads. Uh, and hey, we're five weeks into the semester. Uh, and especially if you're a freshman, this is about the time where we start to hear students say, like, hey, I'm really struggling with loneliness, I really don't like it here, and I want to transfer to another school. And so, like, hey, well, you know, why are you feeling that way? Why are you communicating that? And it's usually, I haven't built the same kind of deep friendships here that I had back home. And all my friends got into UGA and I didn't, or they all got into tech, or they're all at Auburn, or they all didn't go to college and you know, have money and I don't. Uh, and like I want to be there with them. I miss those deep friendships from high school, and I want to try to get that back. Well, look, the reality is that friendship takes time, it takes proximity, it takes effort. Of course you have deeper friendships with those people. Like five months ago, you were all still together in high school, and you were probably with those same friends for like a decade before. You've only been here five weeks. There's no way you're gonna form those kind of deep relationships that quickly or that strongly. And that's why I love that verse where it says, a friend sticks closer than a brother, right? Because it's saying, look, if you want that kind of friendship that sticks closer to you than a brother, it's not gonna happen overnight. Of course you feel closer to them, but you're gonna have to put in some effort. Give yourself some grace and realize it's gonna take time to get beyond the necessary step of acquaintances to get to true friendship. Because honestly, it's easier to hide away. It's easier to just go back home every weekend, it's easier to just hop online and you know, play video games with the same people over and over. But you're not gonna grow the deep roots of friendship with people here that are only gonna ultimately blossom after going through seasons of winter and spring, of going through life together. You have to make yourself vulnerable. Put yourself in that place where true friendship can really grow and foster. Friendship is challenging. Alright, uh, it reminds me of a friend from my freshman year of college. He lived across the hall from me in the dorm. And um, I don't know why. This was like old school when they had like metal keys and not just like tapping things with your phone or whatever. Uh so like his key for some reason also unlocked our door. I don't know how we figured this out. Uh and he was a nice dude and we got along, but he was always over, and even if we locked our door, he could just like come in, which is a little weird. But we liked him, it was fine. We'd hang out a lot. We were all lonely freshmen and we wanted friends, right? Uh but I remember he was over in our dorm room, we were hanging out, and he got a phone call from his mom. And instead of like being polite and stepping outside, he just like, hey mom, like while we're all hanging out in the room, so we had to listen to him talk to his mom. Uh but even worse is he starts getting in this conversation with his mom about wanting to transfer. And being very honest, he's like, Well, yeah, mom, I don't have any friends here, I don't like it here, and so I want to go somewhere else. And I'm just sitting there like, what am I? Like, you're in my room right now. Like, geez, what did I do to you? Uh, and I probably wasn't a great friend to him either, if I'm being honest at times. But I think that's just so telling at times that we often think if I could just go somewhere else, if I could just be around other people, then like the magic of friendship will happen. The truth is, wherever you go, it's gonna take hard work, it's gonna take time, it's gonna take trusting Jesus to bring that about. That's one reason why friendship is challenging. Alright, but what are some other reasons? Well, a big one is our commodified view of friendship, where we see friends as a means to an end. You know, I made that joke a couple weeks ago of like that meme where, you know, your your uh network is your net worth. You know, it's like the friends in your life have to like benefit you somehow financially or socially or like get you access to jobs and things like that. And if they're not doing that, then they're bad friends. Uh, this is a very like economic view of friendship, but it it's one that has no joy in it. And like I said, sometimes as Christians we can make the mistake of thinking this way about evangelism. I've got to make the most friends so I can tell the most people about Jesus, so then God will be happy with me. Which once again is not a very gospel way of thinking, it's a very economic way of thinking. How can I maximize efficiency instead of enjoy people for who they are and what God is doing in them? Okay, but let's be honest, when we think of commodifying friendships, probably the most common way we do this is with thinking about friends romantically. That we see friends as a way to meet romantic partners. Because, you know, when you walked into a large group today, you scan the room and you immediately categorize people in your brain. You know, you discounted 90% of them, you picked out the 10% that you found really attractive, and then you're like, I'm gonna go be their friends. Because that's what we do, right? Like, we have this idea of I'm gonna maximize friendship so that I get some kind of benefit from it. And if it doesn't turn out the way I want, then maybe this is just not for me. It's someone else's fault, it can't be me. We can take this even a step further in the way we tend to sexualize friendships. You know, think of like the worst examples of dudes complaining about, like, oh, I'm being put in the friend zone. And it's like, why are you saying being a friend is a bad thing? You know, it's like because you clearly think that being a friend with someone of the opposite sex means you should just get sex out of it. Which is a terrible and extremely unbiblical way of thinking. That there is value in just friendship alone. I get that it's frustrating. When you like someone and they don't like you back. But at the end of the day, you're missing out on the value of just a good, healthy friendship. Or a way we can take that even further, this is somewhat controversial to bring up, but it's the way that we can sometimes look at friendships and even get a little confused about them. I think this is prevalent today, even when it comes to same-sex attraction. I used to work in youth ministry, and there was a girl we were working with who came to us and was like, yeah, like I think I'm gay. We're like, okay, like let's talk about that. Why do you think that way? Like, what's maybe going on? What's led you to this conclusion? And you know, she was just sharing a few things. And we were like, so are you saying like you want to be romantic in a physical way with other girls? And she was like, ew, no. We're like, oh, okay. Well, then why do you think you're gay? And she's like, well, I just enjoy hanging out with girls more than guys. It was like, oh, I get that. Yeah, guys are hairy and smelly and nasty. Like, yeah, okay, you just want to hang out with, you want deeper friendships with more girls, but because of confusion around friendship, then it's led you to this very false conclusion, that's really unhealthy conclusion. And C.S. Lewis speaks to this once again perfectly in his book on the four loves. He says, those who cannot conceive friendship as a substantive love, but only as a disguise of romance, betray the fact that they have never had a friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person, yet in some ways nothing is less like a friendship than a love affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love. Friends hardly ever about their friendship. Lovers are normally face-to-face, absorbed in one another. Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, romance, while it lasts, is necessary between two and two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for friendship, is not even the best. In romance, we have naked bodies, but in friendship, naked personalities. That's like one of the best lines ever when it comes to like romance is two people staring at each other, but friendship is two people staring at something else side by side. That's a good, healthy friendship. And we shouldn't confuse the two. It's not that you shouldn't be good friends with your significant other, but that we don't want to confuse that, not every friendship has to also be romantic or sexual in nature. Alright, final thing I want you to see here about challenges of friendships is confusion about friendship. Sometimes people are just difficult, y'all. Let's be honest. Sometimes people are just hard to be around. And honestly, we would rather seek out easy friendships where we feel comfortable, where we can be in control. And when things get difficult, we start talking about boundaries real quick. And look, there are appropriate times to walk away from a relationship, a friendship, when it gets to a certain level of unhealthy and toxic. But the reality is we're usually way too quick to do that. We are way too quick to walk away or put up boundaries. I like how Proverbs 26 put this: like a madman who throws firebrands and arrows, and death is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, I am only joking.

unknown 25:23

Right?

SPEAKER_00 25:23

So he's saying, like, look, sometimes our friends are annoying. Sometimes they make jokes at our expense and they're like, oh, I'm just kidding, man. Like, get over it. Like, it's easy for us to hear that and experience that and be like, look, I'm just not going to be your friend anymore. You're a jerk. I'm going to walk away from it. And like the reality is, as Christians, we need to try as much as is up to us to seek reconciliation, to seek to live in peace with one another, to speak the truth in love. So that's a necessary aspect of a good and healthy friendship. We can call out people when they're acting like a fool. You know, the whole like, I'm only joking. Like, oh man, it's okay to call that out as like, okay, but what you said still hurts. You know, that's why we can say confidently things like sexism and racism should have no place in our fellowship, even if it's just a good-natured joke. Because it can still hurt people. Even if everyone's laughing along, hurt can still be there. And our goal as Christians should not be to hurt one another unnecessarily. The best friendships are where we can speak the truth to one another in love, to learn to repent and repair when we hurt each other. Think of that proverb: whoever covers over an offense is one who stirs up love. To say, look, brother, sister, okay, you did something, you said something, and it really did hurt me. But I want you to know that I'm not giving up on this relationship. I still love you, I'm still in it with you, but I love you enough to tell you that what you did hurt me. And I want to work towards bettering the situation. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, profuse are the kisses of an enemy, iron sharpens iron. Be a good friend. Don't be afraid to tell the truth in love when you need to. Alright, last thing that's confusing that I want to talk about is online social media, AI, friendships. This is a hot topic these days. But I really just kind of want to make one simple point here, which is uh I'm not that much on social media. Like I use sometimes our RUF1 for promoting stuff, but like I've gotten rid of a lot of my own personal things, or I just don't use them anymore. And often people will ask, like, well, how do you keep up with friends? How do you see pictures? How do you message them? How do you send endless memes to them? Uh and I'm being honest, like, yeah, you're right. I I don't keep up with as many people. Uh, and I think that's actually a good and healthy thing, and I think you should all consider it as well. Uh, like, you know, there's so much research about Gen Z being the loneliest generation. Uh, how about this? Here's some like simple advice from one of my favorite writers, Freya India. She says, look, forget those who view your Instagram story but never ask how you are feeling. Forget those who use you like a prop to look popular on Instagram, but otherwise can't be bothered to come over. And if someone wouldn't remember you if you deleted your Snapchat account, so be it. It is in this quiet place that I've realized that sometimes the best thing you can do to reconnect is to disconnect. The best thing you can do for loneliness is to log out. And the only way to forge deep friendships is to risk losing some shallow ones first. Let me say that again. The only way to forge deep friendships is to risk losing some shallow ones first. A good friend of mine, when he was in college, uh, like had this massive arm injury, and he ended up being in the hospital for a month. Uh and so, you know, he's stuck there, he's lonely. So, you know, pulls out his phone, takes a selfie, posts on Instagram, and he said he got like dozens of messages from friends. Oh, I'm so sorry, oh like anything you need, we'll be there for you in an instant. Anything you need, bro. We got we love you, you know, thinking about you, blah, blah, blah. He said that was cool for like a second. But then none of those people came and visited him, except for one guy who lived on his hall in the dorm. And that one guy actually showed up every single day at the hospital, the check-on. Like, had to go through like the check-in process. If you've ever been to a hospital, you gotta like give your ID and you know, who are you gonna go visit? Like, he had to like miss class at times, you know, like take schedule his time so you could go and visit him in the hospital for that month. And that guy's still one of his best friends to this day. And it taught him a valuable lesson that, yeah, I can post this picture and get a lot of you know love and response from friends, but like the true friend is the one who shows up. As it says in the proverb, right? A true friend is there in adversity. Or if I had to give a translation of one of the other proverbs we looked at, uh, better is a neighbor who is near than a million followers. Better is a friend that you can meet with in person than a thousand likes. Alright, well, let's look at the final point here. That friendship is redemptive. That friendship is redemptive. Look at this point you may be thinking, oh man, I'm kind of sad I came to large group because I'm feeling really called out right now. Uh or, oh man, I I wish I had friends like that. So then I could think about how this applies to me. Uh maybe you're just feeling your loneliness amplified, or maybe you're kind of worried about thinking about the nature of your friendships currently. So, how do we make good friends? How do we make good and healthy friendships? Well, as we mentioned from C.S. Lewis, great advice here. You have to have something that brings you together. Something not just friendship itself, but some other activity, some other joy, some other thing.

unknown 30:56

C.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

S. Lewis, once again in his book on the four loves, says, friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another, What? You two? I thought I was the only one. It's when you meet someone and you find out you have a shared love of something. The very condition of having friends is that we should want something else besides friends. Where the truthful answer to the question is, do you see the same truth? Would be, I see nothing and I don't care about the truth, I only want a friend, no friendship can arise. There would be nothing for the friendship to be about. And the friendship must be about something. Even if we're only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice, those who have nothing can share nothing. Those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travelers. How do we make good friends? Well, our friendship has to be about something, it has to be centered on something other than just being friends. And so, look, if you're here tonight and you're a follower of Jesus, then you have something that can bring you into friendship, actually, with anyone else who's also a follower of Jesus. We have this amazing thing that unites the body of Christ. It unites us by faith. That as we are shaped by God's word as a community, it should naturally overflow as greater friendships with one another. That this is how God uses friendships in his redemptive purposes to bring about healing and restoration. How many people do you know who have stories of good friends who went out of their way to help someone at great cost to themselves? Great examples of redemption. When I was uh in college, my freshman year, there were two guys on the same hall. They were from the same hometown. Uh they didn't hang out like a ton when they went to college, but they obviously knew each other from high school. The one guy in particular was really struggling with depression and self-harm. Uh and one day that other guy from his hometown found him after he had harmed himself. And so, like, picked him up, took him to his car, took him to the hospital, stayed with him overnight, stayed with him for the next few days, and then when he was good enough, drove him all the way back home, like hours and hours, to get him back to his family. And I thought, man, what a beautiful example of how this friendship was so redemptive in this other person's life. Because he showed up when no one else would. He showed up to get him the help he needs. He showed up to make sure that there was life where there was only death originally. And ultimately, the greatest picture of redemptive friendship is in Jesus Christ. That God has given us this great friendship in Christ Himself. Jesus says in John 15, no greater love is this than if you lay down your life for your friends. And then Jesus proceeds to say, I call you now my friends if you obey my Father's commandments. That Jesus is saying, I want you to be my friend. And I'm willing to die for you. I'm willing to give myself for you. I'm willing to show you what true sacrificial love looks like in a friendship. He showed us what true loving friendship looks like through his sacrifice, empowers us to live it out in good and godly friendships. That's how friendship can be redemptive here in this community. So as we wrap up, let's think about what are the things that we're struggling with in our friendships. Is it fear? Is it shame that's keeping you from God? Keeping you from pursuing deep and meaningful relationships with others? Is it taking the easier road of just going back to your room, turning on a show or something like that, and not putting yourself out there to make the effort to get to know people, for them to get to know you. You know, I keep thinking of that great and very profound movie, K-pop Demon Hunters. Where Rumi and her two friends, they have a great friendship. But Rumi, you know, she's she's ashamed because underneath this impressive exterior, this great life she has, is something she's hiding, something she's trying to cover up. She doesn't want anyone to know, especially her friends, because she's worried that if they found out they would reject her. She's worried if they found out they'd hate her and not want to be her friend anymore. They wouldn't love her. But the truth is they have to face those lies. And it's only when they face those lies and face them together, that yes, the old friendship does pass away, but a new and better bond is formed. It's only then, then their friendship takes on a new level of love that exists. And look, I want you to know tonight that Jesus, he sees you, he sees you of all your fears, your shame, your struggles, your sin, but he still loves you. And is still inviting you in to call you friend. He's willing to give his life for you so that you would experience this new bond, this new community, this new family in him. He's calling you tonight a friend. Will you hear it? And will you respond? Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for your word, for the ways it teaches us about friendship, the ways it challenges us to think about our friendships. Lord, we pray that we, as followers of Jesus, would be known for being great friends, for speaking the truth to our friends, yes, even when it hurts, but out of a place of love, because we know that God can do so much more in our friends' lives, because that's what He's done in ours. Lord, we pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's stand and sing together.