Get in the Game, Part 1: Friendship

Launching Life Groups
We want the Life Groups we are starting this autumn to be built around five core values, which are represented by the acrostic FOOTBALL: Friendship, One-anothering, Outreach, Teaching & Body Life.

In addition to the preaching series I am doing, we have a set of daily bible study notes prepared to run alongside this series. These are available here.

We want Life Groups to be a place to grow friendships, because we all need friends.

Sometimes people take fairly extreme steps to try and find friends. The son of 88 year-old Jack Hammond advertised in his local Post Office for a friend to take his father to the pub. This ‘job’ paid £7/hour, and not surprisingly got a lot of applicants.

Hopefully we don’t need to pay people to sit and drink beer with us, but we need to see how friendship is possible for all of us because of what Jesus has done.

John 15:12-17

The awesomeness of God
Friendship with God is the most remarkable thing. Too often our view of God is too small – we have a shrunken, shrink-wrapped Jesus. Because we live in a casual culture, where we call everyone by their first names and don’t stand on ceremony we are in danger of reducing Jesus to our ‘mate’.

In the Old Testament only two were people described as a friend of God: Abraham (2 Chr 20:7; Is 41:8; Js 2:23) and Moses (Ex 33:11). No-one else! Not David, or Elijah, or Samuel. This should make us stop and think…

The people of Israel lived with an awareness of God’s awesomeness. They were so afraid of over familiarity that they wouldn’t even say the personal name of God (‘Yahweh’) when reading out the scriptures, for fear of profaning it.

So, what changes with Jesus?

The Cross changes everything
This passage comes just before Jesus goes to the cross. It was at the cross that God made his plan for the salvation of the world clear, and it is the revealing of this plan to the disciples that enables them to be described as friends.

Abraham and Moses had unique revelation of God; now the plan of God has been made clear to all his people.

Paul describes this in Ephesians 3:9 as the The mysterious plan brought to light; and in 1 Corinthians 2:16 says that we now, have the mind of Christ. Disciples of Jesus are no longer kept in the dark, as servants are, but have been let into God’s plan, as friends are.

How has this happened?

The gulf between sinful humans and an awesome God is indescribably huge. Recent images from the Hubble space telescope reveal something of the enormity of the universe, but the gulf between us and God is even more huge.

The good news of the gospel is that God reconciles us to himself. We are sinners deserving God’s wrath, but this wrath was dealt with at the cross, so we can be at peace with God: For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21).

Because of the cross we stand in this new position where God calls us friends.

Being a friend of God
Even though God calls us friends, we still need to know awe at who God is. This is not a relationship of equality! It is Jesus who calls us friends; not the other way round. It is Jesus who chooses us; not the other way round.

We are still slaves of God! But slaves to whom he has revealed his plan. We are slaves who stand in a place of friendship with our master.

What does this friendship with God result in? Jesus gives us two answers: Love for his people, and fruitfulness. Jesus’ command is that we love one another and he chooses us in order that we might be fruitful.

How does this work out?!

The challenges of friendship
There are several challenges to building friendships in the church.

Some people are EGR people (‘extra grace required’). But the reality is that most of us require extra grace at times! All of us have the potential to irritate and upset others. Church can be messy, because we are messy people.

Another common problem is that we buy the lie that “no-one cares about me.” If we start to believe this lie it makes it very hard for others to reach out to us and demonstrate care.

We can also have expectations that are too high, while our efforts at making friends are too low. It is easy to think that being part of a church should mean our every need and concern will be taken care of, which won’t happen! At the same time we can be so focussed on whether other people are meeting our needs that we fail to meet the needs of others.

There is also the reality that it tends to get harder to make friends as we get older. As we get older it takes more effort to reach out to new people, and many people stop bothering.

And then there is the challenge of building biblical community in 21st century Britain. We live in an individualistic culture, and often in a very isolated way. It is hard for us to be open to other people because it is not what we have been conditioned to do.

Expectations for Life Groups
What, then, are our expectations for friendships in Life Groups?

First, we must begin with a theological understanding of what Jesus has done for us.
Because God has reconciled us to himself, we can be reconciled to one another. Jesus has crossed unbelievable barriers to reach out to us – by his grace we can cross the much smaller barriers that would separate us from one another.

We want Life Groups to be a place for friendship, more than intimacy. Intimacy is good, but it takes a long time to develop. Most of us can probably count ourselves fortunate if we have half a dozen truly intimate friends over the course of our lifetimes – people who really know us inside out. Jesus only had three – Peter, James and John. Also, the thought of ‘intimacy’ can actually be very off-putting to many people – it just sounds too intense. So lets pitch at friendship instead.

We want Life Groups to be a place to have fun! As God is revealing his manifold wisdom through the church, the church should specialize in multicoloured living! We should know how to celebrate and enjoy life. Life Groups should be places where we can tell our stories and listen to the stories of others. And Life Groups should be places where we eat a lot of food together, because that is what friends having fun do!

Friendship results in fruitfulness because the Christian life can’t be lived alone. All the things we have been called to do as disciples of Jesus we can only do alongside other believers, as part of the Body of Christ. Like Jack Hammond we need friends, but Life Groups mean we shouldn’t have to pay people to befriend us. We want Life Groups to be, Communities together on a mission for Jesus, where we love one another and are fruitful.