FRIENDS OF GOD AND OF CHRIST
Robert Gardiner
James 2: 21–23; Exodus 33: 1–3 (to “…honey”), 7–11 (to “…friend”); 2 Samuel 15: 30–37; John 15: 11–15
You will have noticed, dear brethren, as we have read these scriptures together, that they speak of being friends of God and friends of Christ. This is a verse that rings true in, and rejoices the heart of, every person in this room that knows the Lord Jesus as their Saviour.
I’ve found a Friend, O such a Friend!
He loved me ere I knew Him;
He drew me with the cords of love,
And thus He bound me to Him (Hymn 187)
I would just say at the outset, if one of you does not know your sins forgiven, does not know the Lord Jesus as your personal Saviour, does not know what it is to fall down in repentance before Him and give Him the place of supremacy in your heart, may I say to you that the blood of Jesus Christ God’s Son that cleanses us from all sin, (see 1 John 1: 7) is still as available to you now as it has been for nearly two thousand years. All that God is waiting for is that you might put your trust in Jesus and His finished work and the shedding of His precious blood:
Precious, precious blood of Jesus,
Shed on Calvary!
Shed for rebels, shed for sinners,
Shed for me. (Hymn 167)
Now, I would like to ask, can every person in this room say, ‘Shed for me’? An opportunity is given at the beginning of this address for every person to – commit themselves afresh to the Lord Jesus who died for them on the cross at Calvary. As we know, the whole of Buckie and the whole of Scotland and the whole of the world stands tonight in propitiation because He “gave himself a ransom for all”. What God requires from man is that we might accept Him as our Saviour and then be able to say “He bore the sins of many” (Heb 9: 28), and know that we are included in the ‘many’; that we have accepted Him as the One who has been the Bearer of our guilt, of our sin and sins, and that He is now the One to whom we own allegiance. Might I ask you at this time, to whom do you own allegiance? Is it to somebody outside the Lord’s domain? Is it to some person in the world? Is it to some person that only has a span of life of “threescore years and ten; and if, by reason of strength” (Psalm 90: 10), a few years more? Is that to whom your allegiance is? Your allegiance tonight is demanded that it might be to the Lord Jesus Christ! God commands “men that they shall all everywhere repent” (Acts 17: 30) and He would, I believe at this moment, command every person in this room to bow their knee to Jesus and own their full allegiance to Him, the One who is the Friend of sinners.
Well, I now speak to those that have found the Lord Jesus as their Friend. We referred in our prayer to “a friend that sticketh closer than a brother” (Prov. 18: 24), and those that know the Lord Jesus and have the Spirit are following closely Him whom they have known as, “a friend that sticketh closer than a brother”. Closer than a natural brother. That would be somebody that you probably have been brought up with, somebody who has the same natural father and mother, but here is a Man who “sticketh closer than a brother”; sticks so close that He will never leave you or forsake you, but no He is looking to us to display features that would justify Him calling us “His friends”. The two scriptures that we read first referred to being friends of God, and the last two to friends of Christ, and I just want for the few minutes that we are together to impress you with the features that come out in persons who are true friends of God and friends of Christ.
And so I read in James. James is a very practical man and he is drawing attention in this section to Abraham. Abraham, you will recall, was a man of whom God say, “I called him when he was alone” (Isa 51: 2) out of Ur of the Chaldeans. There he was, a solitary persons and God called him when he was alone, one man being called out. Abraham honoured God. He answered the call. He came out of Mesopotamia, a cultured place, a place at that time that had all the wisdom of the world, you might say, resident in it. He came out of that and was given a promise, and although he never got possession of the promise, he still walked in faith with God. He came to see that to walk in faith with God meant that there had to be a lesson learned, and that lesson was that everything that is for God has to be beyond the scene of nature. The scripture that we have read speaks about him believing God at a time when you might have said, well, how can you believe God? God had said to him that He would give him an heir, and He gave him that heir in his old age. He gave him an heir, and now at this point, God says to him, “Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, Isaac … and … offer him up for a burnt-offering on one of the mountains which I will tell thee of” Gen 22: 2. Now, is he going to continue to believe God? One of the features of a friend of God is that he believes Him. He took his son Isaac, as you will all remember, and the wood and the fire for the burnt-offering, and he bound him and he put him on the altar and he lifted his hand, with the knife in his hand: and as he lifted it, there was that voice from heaven, “Abraham, Abraham!”, God recognising that here was a man of faith, a man that believed God and was prepared to turn his back on everything that was of nature, even to the giving up of his son, his only son, whom he loved. Beloved brethren, what a man Abraham was, what an example he is for us, a man of faith! When James recalls this, he says, “He was called Friend of God”. And it was on that basis, that he was prepared to give up for God even what was most precious to him. It says, as you will recall, “And the scripture was fulfilled which says, Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, and he was called Friend of God”. Friends of God are going in with Christ to eternity, and all that is of nature will be left behind, and Abraham was in the light of that. He never got a possession in the land of Canaan – we know that – but “he waited for the city which has foundations of which God is the artificer and constructor”, Heb 11: 10. Beloved brethren, just to believe God. It has often been said that John writes so that he might make believers out of believers and that is what this is all about tonight. To become a friend of God, you have to display in your actions and in your walk and in your outlook that you are prepared to give up that which is even the closest to you in nature, give it up in the knowledge that God will see you through. Oh how God saw him through!
I read in Exodus 33 because there we have Moses who is spoken of as a friend of God. This was a dark time when Moses was called a friend of God. He had been up the mountain and had come down with the two tables of stone. The people had given themselves up to idolatry. It is like Christendom in our time, given up to idolatry. He had to break the tables of stone and then it says that God said to him, “Depart, go up hence, thou and the people that thou has brought up out of the land of Egypt, into the land that I swore unto Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob”. God is demanding now that he should move in the midst of all that had occurred, all the degradation, all the shame of a golden calf to which they had bowed down. After such a dismal display, you might say, by the children of Israel in rejecting their God, God looks upon Moses and He says, “Depart, go up hence”. And what does it then say? It says that he “took the tent, and pitched it outside the camp, far from the camp”. Now this is not the tabernacle, of course. He took the tent. No doubt it was Moses’ own tent – we do not know – but he took the tent, it says. It was obviously a tent that would be recognised as the Tent of meeting, “took the tent … and called it the Tent of meeting. And it came to pass that every one who sought Jehovah went out to the Tent of meeting which was outside the camp”. Now I just want to draw attention to one thing here. There were those that went with Moses outside the camp with him and there were those that stood in their tent door and watched him. When the camp has been rejected and the Tent of meeting has been taken outside the camp and set up, there are those that answer to the call of love by the Lord and they follow Him into that tent and they hear the most wonderful things. They hear of the great things of God; they hear of the truth as it is opened up; they hear what God’s current mind is, not His mind that was – but they hear His current mind and that is most important – that we hear the current mind of God. Those that stood in their tent doors and watched never heard that current mind, they were too far away; but there were those that followed Moses, and it says Jehovah “spoke with Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend”. I truly believe that those that went with Moses outside the camp to the Tent of meeting also heard the voice of Jehovah and were considered friends of God. By extension, I believe the Spirit of God would say that those who follow Moses, not only see Moses as one that is spoken to face to face as the friend of God, but also hear what is being said to Moses, as if it is being said to them and who consequently can be called the friend of God.
Beloved brethren, it behoves us always to be where Jehovah is speaking. Do not let us opt out of that! Do not let us leave it! We hear of people who think there is a greater sphere for them in the preaching of the gospel and they leave the tent. They go out to evangelise, as they say, or to be missionaries. I only caution any person that might have aspirations on these lines; keep to the Tent of meeting! It is a very remarkable expression, the Tent of meeting. It does not only mean meeting one another; it is meeting Jehovah who speaks face to face in the Tent of meeting. In Revelation the Spirit speaks to each of the assemblies. He continues to say something to each of the assemblies. If, as has been said ‘all the truth it out’, then we would be as well just settling down, but the Spirit continues to speak. Mr Taylor said in Bristol in 1946 (and I just say this because I know there are some who wonder about this) that ‘all the truth is out’. While that, of course is true – the Spirit is the truth – is there nothing fresh to come? You will remember that a year or two later we had truth as to the service of the Spirit and the response in worship to the Spirit of God. I only say that to demonstrate that “the Spirit speaks expressly” (1 Tim 4: 1) and continues to speak, but we will only hear if we are in the Tent of meeting and hear Jehovah as He speaks to His friends face to face.
I move on to the section in 2 Samuel. This is a dark day also. It is a dark day for David. Absalom his son is attracting persons after himself. It is so easy to try and be somebody, to try and attract persons after yourself. Many of us have known something of that practically and, thank God, we saw the light and we rejected it and, may I say now, we should reject it forever. There is only one Man that is to be followed and that is Christ, David in type. Anyone that leads you to himself and not to Christ is not to be followed. Anyone that leads you to Christ, hang on to him. Well now, here is David in the time of his rejection on the one hand, and Absalom, on the other, a man whose hair was shorn once a year and weighed. What pride he had! Absalom sat down and said to the children of Judah, if you will come to me, I will solve your problems for you. He lured them away after himself. David goes up the mountain weeping as he went up. But then there is this man Hushai. There are also two priests – two men that are faithful to David and they are going to remain in Jerusalem. But then there is Hushai and he wants to be with David. David knew him. He was “David’s friend”, David says to him, “if thou passest on with me, thou wilt be a burden to me” but you will be of great value to me if you just go now and be with those that maintaining what is true in the time of my rejection where Absalom is reigning in Jerusalem.
I want to apply this tonight this way. You might say why did he send Hushai into the very area where there was opposition to David? I would like to refer to the fact that some of our brethren have had a period of time when they have had no work and we pray that they might find suitable employment. Now Hushai was given suitable employment because he was sent by David. He was sent by David. He did not go there because he wanted to go there. He wanted to be with David. He did not go into his secular occupation, as it were, under his own volition, satisfying his own desires. He did not do that. Beloved brother, beloved sister, if you find yourself in an occupation and you can honestly say before the Lord, I know that He sent me there, then you will find what can be carried back to David (in the type) who is in rejection at the present time. That is what Hushai did. He gave information in the right place at the right time and that is what the prayer meeting is convened for. At the prayer meeting you can convey information to God Himself from an area where God’s name is not revered nor recognised, and maybe even ridiculed and rejected, as you work in a sphere into which the Lord has sent you. You can then bring that which can be presented to God prayerfully with a view to there being some alleviation for the people of God until the Lord comes. David was not in rejection forever. He came back again. Our Lord is not in rejection forever. He will come back again and He is coming very, very soon. In the meantime, let us be guided by the Lord in all that we do and then, wherever we are, we will find that which we can carry to the Lord so that the testimony might be able to go through until He comes.
The last section of scripture refers to the friends of the Lord Jesus when He was here – wonderful thing to think of the Lord having these persons surrounding Him. He says, “No one has greater love than this, that one should lay down his life for his friends”. May I point out to you that this is not His laying down His life for sinners. That is not what it is. The Lord has demonstrated His love, as we said at the beginning of this meeting, admirably and more than adequately in the giving of His life at Calvary’s cross. That is for sinners. But here He is demonstrating His love for His friends. These are persons that knew they were sinners but were no longer sinners on the basis that “their sins and their lawlessness’s I will never remember any more”, Heb 10: 17. On that basis the Lord calls them His friends. He says, “I have spoken these things to you that my joy may be in you, and your joy be full. This is my commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you … Ye are my friends if ye practise whoever I command you”. Beloved brethren, to love one another is commanded of us. He has shown His love to His friends. If we are His friends, we will do what He says. A friend loves and that is what the disciples did. He had shown His love for them but they were showing their love for Him if they answered to His commandment that they love one another. I believe the Lord will, before He comes, have a testimony in the world that there are companies of people, no matter how small they are, who demonstrate their love for Him by loving one another. Well, He continues, “but I have called you friends, for all things which I have heard of my Father I have made known to you”. Think of the Lord Jesus speaking to persons here that He can look upon as His friends and to whom He can say, “for all things which I have heard of my Father I have made known to you”. Beloved brethren, what an opportunity just to be in the circle of divine love as the friends of Jesus and to hear everything that exists in conversational terms, if I can use that expression carefully, between the Father and the Son. That is what the Lord delights to bring to us.
It is attractive to me. I trust it is attractive to you. To be called a friend of God and a friend of the Lord is something wonderful. It is something that demands, however, that there are evidences of our friendship. He has given every evidence of His friendship to us. Now, it is for us to show that we are His friends by believing on Him, by going to Him outside the camp, by being in the place that He would have us testimonially until He comes in all His glory, and by practising whatever He commands us – that is that we love one another. Our privilege would then be to know something of all that the Father has (in conversation and in communion with the Son), conveyed to us by the Son and taken, therefore, into the realm of love itself that only exists in its fulness and in its perfectness between Christ and His Father. That is where love is perfect, between the Father and the Son. That is where love is at its greatest because that is where love is at home. Beloved brethren, that is what we can enter into and share because the Lord delights to share with us the great things that are existing in the heavenly realm.
May we be attracted into these things, beloved brethren, and go on from here with fresh resolve that we will demonstrate those features that constitute us friends of God and friends of the Lord Jesus. For His Name’s sake!
BUCKIE
7 September 2002