How to Become a Friend of Jesus

CONSECRATE Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  HEAR John 16:12–15 ESV “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. CONSIDER “A little while, and you will see me no longer; and again a little while, and you will see me.” (v. 16) There was never going to be an easy way for Jesus to do this—to explain the eternal verities and incomprehensible mysteries of his presence in the midst of his absence to his disciples. I’m convinced it’s why he spent the first two years, eleven months, and twenty-seven days (give or take) working to develop them into the kind of people who were capable of friendship with God. It’s no small thing—becoming the kind of person who can be a friend of Jesus. This is what discipleship is all about—embracing our adoption as sons and daughters and growing to trust in God as our good Father, being trained to imitate Jesus in the humble way of a servant, and learning to walk in friendship with Jesus in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. This is the outline of what I’m calling the threefold movement of discipleship to Jesus. It is as comprehensive as it is simple, and yet it inspires a million questions—like these: So some of his disciples said to one another, “What is this that he says to us, ‘A little while, and you will not see me, and again a little while, and you will see me’; and, ‘because I am going to the Father’?” (v. 17) This is what the disciples of Jesus do. They put down pretense, confess their ignorance, and ask one another questions in order to grow in their faith and understanding. So they were saying, “What does he mean by ‘a little while’?" (v. 18a) Maybe the biggest insight to be had here is this one: we cannot hope to become the friends of Jesus apart from becoming the friends of one another. It takes the context of real friendship to lay aside our need to know it all and to be right and to be someone other than who we really are. Only friends can make this admission to one another: "We do not know what he is talking about.” (v. 18b) PRAY Abba Father, we thank you for your Son, Jesus, who trains us as servants and transforms us as friends. Give us the humility to be honest about what we don’t understand and the courage to ask one another. Teach us the way of walking in friendship with a few others that we might grow together as disciples in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. We pray in Jesus’s name, amen.