What Are Friends For?

I sought the LORD, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. -- Psalms 34:4

I often seek God for something.  I think it’s good to ask, seek, and knock, to look for God’s help when one is troubled.  But a lot of the time, when I’m praying, what I am seeking is not God.  Instead I want the relief or the deliverance.  I recognize that healing, wholeness, salvation, help, and liberty come through the Lord, and that’s good.  There comes a point when we can take another step:  He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption (1 Corinthians 1:30).  All that we need isn’t just in Christ, it is Christ. 

I don’t always go to my friends to get help moving heavy objects.  Sometimes I go to help them.  Sometimes I am happy to simply sit down with them, drink coffee and tell stories or hear stories.   We sing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”.  Jesus, we say, is the Friend of sinners.  What kind of friend am I to the Lord?  Am I one who only shows up when I have a dead battery or an empty bank account?  I’ve had friends like that.  If you need help, you need help, though I’d rather not be that kind myself.       

If we’re not careful, sometimes we start thinking that the friendship and help can go only one way.  God doesn’t really need us.  He loves us in a paternalistic way, but there’s really nothing we can do for Him.  Lewis used the example of a child who asks for money from his father to buy the father a gift.  Every parent is touched by and appreciates that, but none of us think we’re ahead on the deal. 

Yet, at the same time, I think of the Lord crying out:  And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it, but I found none (Ezekiel 22:30).  Eventually, a man, in fact, the Man was found, and He did stand in the gap for all.  It does not end there.  In Colossians 1:24, Paul speaks of his ministry this way:  Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.    

We, too, are called to stand firm and be part of the shield wall the Apostle describes in Ephesians 6.  God gives us the power, the courage, the strength, and the determination to stand where He needs us.  We have all the weapons, all the tools, and all the protection we need in Him, but we are the ones who have to stand.  If we seek the Lord Himself, we will find our rest and our warfare, our liberty and our purpose, our deliverance and our destiny.  And if we seek Him, we will find Him.

Alone

I never played much in the way of team sports or what most people think of as sports or games – like tennis or golf. I very briefly tried playing basketball in eighth grade, and I boxed and wrestled a little in high school. Mainly I did my schoolwork, did our farm work, did some target shooting, hunted, fished, and rode horses, a bicycle, or a dirt bike. None of this involved much cheerleading. Personally, I never understood the need for cheerleaders. Either you are giving your best effort or you are not. No amount of “support” from the sidelines is going to change what a person is capable of doing.

This kind of thinking probably indicates some sort of character flaw on my part.

Then they all deserted Him and ran away – Mark 14:50

It’s a verse worthy of committing to memory, though it is probably rarely quoted. All the cheerleaders were gone. His teaching, His wisdom, His love and compassion, even the miracles they had witnessed could not hold them. They all deserted Jesus. They left Him to face His doom.

But He was not yet alone. Through the rest of those dark morning hours, the Lord continued to do what He knew He had to do. He had been born for this ugly, painful, humiliating day. He had known all along this was where He was headed. He had, in His humanity, no doubt wondered if there might be some other way of fulfilling the prophecies, perhaps a more figurative, allegorical understanding. Even at the last in the garden, He had beseeched the Father for another path to follow, but when Judas arrived with the soldiers, He knew that was not to be. Still, He knew He was doing His Father’s will in the kangaroo court of the Sanhedrin, before the petty, cynical Roman governor, in the decadent presence of Herod, under the lash at the whipping post, and, stumbling under the weight of the cross, all the way up the hill.

The blood didn’t shake Him. The pain didn’t move Him. He was doing His Father’s will. It had to be done, and He had to do it.

And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried out in a loud voice … “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” – Mark 15:34

Then He was alone.