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.

Divers

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?  What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?  What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. -- 2 Corinthians 6:14-16

Yesterday we talked about our witness to an unbelieving world, about hating sin while seeking to rescue those tangled in its snares.  We understand, too, that we each have our individual weaknesses and have to watch ourselves around certain situations.  We want to reach out to people, but can we be friends with those who reject Christ?  Matthew Henry thought not:

The caution also extends to common conversation. We should not join in friendship and acquaintance with wicked men and unbelievers. Though we cannot wholly avoid seeing and hearing, and being with such, yet we should never choose them for friends. We must not defile ourselves by converse with those who defile themselves with sin.

I have to disagree with that interpretation.  Too much in Scripture points a different direction.  Jesus was a friend of sinners.  Now it is true that those with whom He associated were often repentant seekers, or perhaps people seeking to repent; nevertheless, He broke with the pharisaic view of complete separation.  At the same time, those tax collectors and prostitutes were mostly Jews or sympathetic to the people and faith of Abraham, with the possible exception of the Syrophoenician woman whose daughter was afflicted (Mark 7:24-30).

In our case, when the overall culture was more permeated with Judeo-Christian values, it was probably easier to be a friend of sinners.  At worst we were dealing “cultural Christians”.  I heard John Starnes, the gospel singer, give his testimony.  Before he came to Christ, he had someone ask him if he was a Christian.  He replied, “Of course.  I’m an American.”  That reminds me of a convict I was talking to one time.  He was a black guy, and he was wearing a scarf over his head, kind of Arab fashion.  Nation of Islam is extremely popular in prison.  I knew this guy, and we talked all the time, but I’d never seen him with that headgear, so I asked him if he was a Muslim.  He said, “Hell no, man.  I’m a Baptist!” 

However, it seems to me, perhaps because I am getting old and because I don’t get out much anymore, that our nation is becoming less “Christian” in its overall morals, ethics, and mindset.  The zeitgeist is not the Holy Ghost. Our public discourse is saturated with lies and deception.  We have become decadent.  The most egregious immorality is excused when it is not lauded and celebrated. 

In this world, in this society, the idea of separation starts to make more sense.  We do risk becoming contaminated when we allow ourselves to be immersed in vulgarity, lust, and violence, baptized in nihilism. 

Perhaps the balance comes in being open vertically only to God while searching for kindred and lost treasures in the horizontal.  It’s like being in a surface-supplied diving suit, tethered and connected to a source of fresh air and power by a diver's umbilical giving us light and life as we explore the murky depths looking for that which may be saved.  As long as we remain in the suit – having put on Christ, the new man – and don’t break our connection, we can stay down here and do our job.  Our life is always, though, above, and we can never forget that we are in -- but not of, this world.

The Dynamic Tension

You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. -- James 4:4

I was traveling with some co-workers, both good, honest men, and we observed a billboard with this verse posted along the highway.  My colleague who was driving asked what I thought about the sign and why it was worded so harshly, as he saw it.  They are decent boys but not raccoons, and my own raccoon-fu was, at best, quite proto back then.  As I recall, I said that it was a relative thing, like Jesus telling us we have to hate father and mother in comparison to the love we should have toward our Father in heaven.  After all, it is Jesus who told us we are to love our enemies and do good to those who persecute us. 

I talked about what the world is yesterday.  It’s not necessarily a good place yet it is familiar.  I think about the character Brooksie played by James Whitmore in The Shawshank Redemption.  Once a person has fully adjusted to life in a prison, the freedom of a more normal life with its openness and lack of structure can be overwhelming.  Some of us prefer to remain in the confines to which we have become accustomed. 

I said I would like to get beamed up and out of the world.  The trouble is that we are called to be in the world though not of the world -- I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world (John 17:14).  We are sent into the world as Jesus was sent, agents of reality invading Vanity Fair -- As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world (v.18).

As long as we are dwelling in this tabernacle of meat and bone, we are going to have to interact with the world system.  Even if we are not deluded and seduced by it, it remains a fact to be dealt with.  Meat and bone reminds me of one of the late Dottie Rambo’s most poetic lines, from “The Holy Hills of Heaven Call Me” -- This house of clay is but a prison / Bars of bone hold my soul .  We have to feed this old body and clothe it, walk it around, and accept the effects of time and space, physics, chemistry, and biology.  To that extent, we play by the same rules as the world, but we are governed by the truth from another realm.  Our true home and our allegiance are in heaven.   

We can be friendly to the world, at peace with it unilaterally, from our side, so much as it will allow, but we can’t be friends.  Friends necessarily share a common view, a communion.  We are to love those who are in opposition to us, but we cannot be yoked to them for we bear the easy yoke of Christ with Him.  They have to surrender to Christ.  We don’t surrender to the world.  As Charles Atlas used to teach us, dynamic tension builds strength.