"God's Design For... Friendship" // God's Design For... // Josh Gatewood

You're listening to audio from Redeemer Church, where a gospel-centered, missional family located in Midland, Texas. If you would like to get more information or give to this ministry, please visit RedeemerMidland.org. Amen and amen. Good morning Redeemer Church. I hope you guys are doing well this morning. It is great to see you, great to be with you, and if you are a guest or you're visiting with us, let me just welcome you one more time to our worship gathering. My name is Josh Gatewood. I get to serve as one of your pastors here at Redeemer, and it's my joy to be with you as we open God's Word together. One of the things that we are doing this morning is we are continuing our short series entitled "God's Design 4," and we're taking a small break from the book of Acts. Talk about God's design for some very specific, very intentional categories, specifically that relate to human relationships and how we interact with each other in the world. And so before I jump into our topic and our text for this morning, I want to just begin our time together about making an observation and maybe bring in some things to your attention or to your mind that may be familiar to you. So one of the things that is kind of just true about me, and if we spend some time together, you'll learn this pretty quickly, is that I am a sucker for good movies. I talk about movies often. They find their way into sermon illustrations very frequently, and that is because whenever I think about good movies, sometimes what I've noticed is that some of the best movies also illustrate some of the most powerful truths. Some of the best movies will give you really good visual depictions of some powerful truths and powerful realities that I think resonate with many of us and speak to our hearts in unique ways. For example, in 1985, there was a movie came out entitled The Breakfast Club. Anybody ever seen The Breakfast Club? Yes, if you haven't seen it, please go watch it. It is a coming-of-age story about a group of teens who were locked in detention all day together, and they could not be more different, and yet by the end of the movie, they share a special bond. Or another movie that comes to mind is one of my childhood favorites, Toy Story. Anybody seen Toy Story? Yes, it's a great one. Woody and Buzz, right? They initially do not like each other, but eventually they form a very close bond, and that relationship and their conversations they have has now become the stuff of internet memes and text message gifts that we have all benefited from to this day. And many more examples could be given. We could talk about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday. We could talk about Frodo and Sam. We could talk about Harry and Ron and Hermione. All of these share something in common. Namely, they illustrate the power of friendship. They illustrate for us what good friendship can look like, often it does look like, and yet sadly, more and more people in the modern age do not know what friendship is like anymore, especially in adulthood. Some have even gone so far as to say that American adults are living in what you could call a friendship recession. And this kind of makes sense, right? Like whenever you're a child, typically your friends and your social circle is influenced and even determined by the activities that you're doing, whether it's in sports or it's in music or whatever. And then we grow up, we become adults, we get these responsibilities and obligations, and we find ourselves doing so many things in life that we have to take care of, that we have to do, that we have to make sure get done. And we often, as a result of this, have very little if not any time left for friendships. For men in particular, studies indicate that the biggest threat to men's health today is not obesity, smoking, or heart disease. It's loneliness. It's living an isolated, lonely life. By the way, that doesn't necessarily mean you're not around people. Because many people, especially men, but people in general, may be surrounded by individuals and yet known by none of them. Just because you have people around you doesn't mean that you necessarily are not lonely. And this is becoming even more pressing in the time that we live in. Just this year, the Atlantic ran an article that was speaking about young adults and teens in particular. The title of the article is called Friendship on Demand. AI chatbots offering relationships that are low efforts and completely personalized and hollow. Many young people are no longer looking to other flesh and blood human beings for relationships and friendships, but are looking to robots, to artificial intelligence. The matter effect is a Harvard Business Review for both 2025 and 26 said that the number one use for artificial intelligence above research and above finding information, the number one use right now for artificial intelligence, therapy, and companionship. And so it seems like it's a good time for us to talk about God's design for friendship. To talk about what God actually has to say to us, living with these challenges and these obstacles that we find ourselves in. So that is the question I want us to ask together this morning. What does the Bible say about friendship? And how can we cultivate meaningful friendships the way that God intended us to do so? And so to answer that question, I invite you to open your Bible to the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes chapter four, we're going to begin verses nine through eleven. And again, what we're doing is we're looking at God's design for friendship. And we're going to bring in some other voices, some other people from the past, but also look at a couple of different places in scripture that you'll see on the screen. Let me just give you a little bit of context for the book of Ecclesiastes. And so Ecclesiastes was likely written by Solomon, King Solomon, at the end of his life as he's looking back on everything that he has accomplished, everything that he has done. And one of the things that you will see and read Solomon say over and over and over again is that certain things are meaningless. I mean, he has lived a life of a lot of luxury, a lot of wealth, a lot of success, a lot of accomplishment. And he looks back on it all and he's like, yeah, like it's all kind of meaningless. Like all those things that I was living for, all those things that I was pursuing, all those things that I was giving my heart and my attention to, they are meaningless if you make them an end to yourself. But then what he does is he talks about some things that really matter. He says, for example, that ultimately what you and I must do is fear God, obey his commands, and enjoy the life that God has given us. But as we enjoy the life that God has given us, we must not worship the life that God has given us. And that distinction is very important. In other words, what the author is doing here in Ecclesiastes is he's looking back on the end of his life and he's saying, here's what really matters. In Ecclesiastes chapter four, verses nine through eleven, he tells us something that really matters. Specifically, what matters in the vein of relationships and in the importance of friendship. Look with me in verses nine, ten, and eleven. The author says this. He says two are better than one. Because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow, but woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they can keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him because a threefold cord or a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. In these verses you see something very important. Namely, that the biblical understanding of human beings is that we are not meant to live an isolated life. That we are meant to live life in community, in relationship, and in friendship. And so if you are taking notes, the first thing that we see here in this passage and in God's design for friendship is number one, the necessity of friendship. The necessity of friendship. In other words, the author in saying that so many things are meaningless does not say that relationships are meaningless. And not only that, he also says that this is something better for us to have than it is for us to be alone. In other words, God's design for friendship, very important to notice this, is not a luxury that you just add on to a well-successful life. It is not just a bonus feature. No, it is a necessity. It is something that you and I were made for. We are made in the image of a triune God who lives in relationship with himself. And that means that we are meant to live in relationship with others as well. That's why the author can say to are better than one and then gives illustrations to that effect. We were not meant to live lonely, isolated, solitary lives. You know, over the years, I have had people tell me that sometimes they wish that Jesus would just come down off of his throne and give them a hug. But oftentimes Jesus will do that through the friends that we have in our lives. There's something about friendship that is a means of God's grace and mercy and kindness to us where God directly extends or communicates some of his loving affection to us through the friendships and relationships that we have. Now, I got to tell you because I'm a little bit of a history buff and you can say history nerd. I've done a little bit of research into kind of like the history of friendship over the years. And this understanding of the necessity of friendship was pretty well understood until recent modern times. As a matter of fact, several years ago, I found a really neat article with a really neat title by the Art of Manliness website. The name of the article was called "Buzzam Buddies", a photo history of male affection. I brought it with me here on the screen, if you guys want to see that. And in this article, you can read it for yourself. It goes through photographs of men in particular from the Civil War era, all the way to the early 1900s, who would go and have their pictures taken with each other to demonstrate their friendship and affection for each other. And if you read or look through this article, you're gonna find photos like this one come up multiple times. Yes. I mean, these were men that may have fought in the Civil War. Tough, rugged men. Now I know what you were all thinking. And the answer is yes, we should try this right now in the worship gathering. I would like for all of you, I'm just kidding. No, we're not gonna do this. But I want you to see the visual here, because this visual, along with every other graphic that's inside of that article, shows you and I something very interesting, namely, that the necessity of friendship was assumed, understood, and even proclaimed publicly up until recent times. And I want you to think about how uncomfortable those photos make you feel. That should show you and I how far away we've gotten from most people in human history. Because I know especially the men in the room, we would not get caught dead in a photo like that. That just looks very uncomfortable to all of us. And yet at the same time, these photos illustrate not something romantic at all, but rather something about friendship. And you read the article, you'll get more to that. The reason I show you that is because I want you to see that biblically and historically, friendship was always seen. Again, not as a luxury, not as a bonus feature, but as a necessity, even to the point of risking certain social, different taboos being violated to indicate or to demonstrate someone's friendship. Now, I know whenever I say some of that, I know some of you might have an objection, and that objection goes something like this. Well, Josh, that sounds good. But I don't really need friends in my life because I have Jesus. And all I need is Jesus. To that, I would respond with a quotation from John Stott, the British pastor theologian who wrote these words, you'll see them on the screen. One sometimes meets a super spiritual people who claim that they never feel lonely and have no need of human friends. For the companionship of Christ satisfies all their needs. But human friendship is the loving provision of God for mankind. Wonderful, as are both the presence of the Lord Jesus every day, and the prospect of his coming on the last day, they are not intended to be a substitute for human friendships. When our spirit is lonely, we need friends. To admit this is not unspiritual, it is human. In other words, whenever you and I think about how Jesus is enough for us, we must not take that and be more spiritual about it than even Jesus himself is. And Jesus tells you and I that we need friends, that we need each other. And that oftentimes the way that we will experience him is through one another, living in friendship with each other. Now, let me just clarify and be very clear, you and I need Jesus as our ultimate friend. And yet at the same time, we need each other to be friends in the name of Jesus. Because Satan loves it whenever people in general and Christians in particular isolate themselves. The most vulnerable member of the pack is the one who goes out on their own and is not protected or surrounded by their friends. The one of the worst things you can do to somebody in prison is put them into solitary confinement where they are alone and without human connection. In other words, friends, set it before already. I'll say it again, God did not design you to live a lonely, isolated life away from deep, meaningful human friendships and deep, meaningful human connection. And I'll tell you one of the reasons why that burdens me because it is so easy in a setting like this on a Sunday morning to come into a gathering of people, hear a good message, sing some great songs, maybe say hi, how you doing, and then walk right out and there's no relationships being formed in your life. The reality is that if you and I want to be intentional about cultivating friendships, we have to see friendship as a necessity but also as something that God wants us to pursue actively. And so let me give you some homework, let me give you some action steps. One of the things that you can do is if you are currently living isolated from other believers, you can go onto our groups page on our website, you can talk to Abby or to Cole or to one of us out there at the Welcome Desk. We would love to help you take some steps toward community but also help you figure out how to find a path toward maybe even making some friends in that community so that you find yourself not just acknowledging the necessity of friendship but actually experiencing the beauty and the blessing of friendship. That's the first point, the necessity of friendship. Number two, if you're taking notes is not just the necessity of friendship but on the other hand, the limits of friendship. The limits of friendship. I think it is instructive that here, the author and Ecclesiastes foretells us two are better than one and he illustrates two versus one. Two versus one. Two versus one and then at the end, you get to a threefold chord is not quickly broken. I think it's instructive that the author says two are better than one, he doesn't say 200. Doesn't even say 20. Why? Because the Bible does not assume that you and I can be friends meaningfully with everyone in the same way. Typically, we can have a larger set of community but a smaller set of close friends. And by the way, the person who tries to be friends with everyone will usually be someone who is very insecure and unhealthy because they are asking all those people to be for them what only Jesus can be for them. And on the other hand, if you try to be friends with everyone in the same way, you will find yourself exhausted and burned out because you have limits, they have limits and those are not meant to be transgressed whenever we think about cultivating friendships. You see this, by the way, in Jesus' life, right? Like Jesus had typically a large crowd of people that were listening to his teaching but then he had a circle of 12 disciples but even within that circle of 12 disciples, he had three really close friends, Peter, James, and John who had access to him in ways that others did not. Book of Proverbs, you'll see this on the screen. Proverbs 18, 24 puts it this way. A man of many companions may come to ruin but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. Do you see the contrast? Many friends, you might actually come to ruin but if you have that one friend that sticks closer than a brother or sister or sibling, then you might be in good shape. Now, I'm gonna be very clear. Ultimately, you need to know, Jesus is that friend that sticks closer than a brother. Jesus is that friend that will never leave you or forsake you. Jesus is the one you can always count on but you can always trust but you can always lean on and depend on no matter what is going through your life. And at the same time, Jesus wants you and I to experience that in human form through the relationships and the friendships that we have. I've heard it said before that your community can oftentimes be like a jet ski where you might go on the surface a lot and occasionally dip down under a wave but those close friendships are like a submarine where you really plunge the dips and you get deeper with each other on the things that matter most. And you might be thinking to yourself, okay, if that is true, how can I cultivate, how can I move toward meaningful friendship in my life. Well, I'm going to give you a couple of ideas that I think might be helpful. Number one, if you and I want to cultivate meaningful friendships in light of our limits, number one, we have to be intentional. We have to be intentional. Sometimes God just brings you the right friend and you did nothing that you could trace back to explain it. But very often, you and I have to be the friend that we want others to be for us first. And that means that we have to be intentional. We have to make the time to look for friends and to put ourselves in situations where we can be a friend to others. Another way to say that though is to say this, the time to make friends is before you need them. The time to make friends is whenever things are going well because you don't want to be in that situation when you have no one to call and you desperately need. The time to make friends is before you need them. Now, I understand that when I say that, some of you might have some reservations. You might not like the idea of being intentional and putting yourself out there to make friends. Maybe you've been hurt even in the church. Maybe you have had people that have broken your trust. I get that. Let me just tell you personally, one of the things that have been true for my wife and I is like, we make friends with people in Midland and then they move away two or three years later. And it's like, "God, Lee, if Houston would just not stop taking our friends away from us, that would be great." Let me just say this. It's very easy to think, you know what? I'm just not going to worry about making friends. I'm going to say on the surface of my entire life, that may be easier in some sense because you might not think that you're hurting, you're not setting yourself up to get hurt, but you are hurting yourself because you are missing out on chances for meaningful friendships even if they have a timeline on them and God moves that friend away in a year or five years down the road. In other words, it is better to have your heart broken because you've had meaningful friendships that move away than to have your heart hardened because you're staying in isolation from the people that God has sent into your path. So be intentional. Number two is it's indirect. Now this kind of sounds like a little bit of a contradiction. That on the one hand, whenever we're making friends, we have to be intentional, but very often, friendships are made indirectly. That's another way of saying, friendships are often made as we're doing other things, as we're pursuing common interests, as we're doing the things that we care about, shared hobbies, shared passions, and we look up and realize, "Oh, wow, somebody else likes this too. Somebody else enjoys this too. Somebody else shares this interest as well, and then you form a friendship around some of those common interests." This is why the church can be so powerful, because all of us in this room share a common, not just interest, but common passion and love for Jesus. The church should be the place where we can make friends a little bit easier because we are all coming into the room with a shared assumption that we are about the kingdom of God. And so, whenever we think about friendship, here's what we must not do. We must not think that friendship is an end to itself, or we just go and try to have friends for its own sake. Now, friendship is a means that God uses to advance His kingdom, to cultivate the virtues of the Spirit, and to help us walk more closely with Him. Very practically, here's what this means. Don't leave today, and then go up to the next person that you meet and say, "Hey, do you want to be my best friend forever?" Maybe one person will say yes, but they won't call you back. Instead, what you might do is do the things that God has put on your heart to do, maybe what you could do, is you could ask somebody to read the Bible with you, do something together, and then shoulder to shoulder, you begin to forge a friendship. Cultivating friendship must be intentional, but it is also indirect, and then finally is the word inconvenience. When you look here in the text, you will see something, verse 10, "For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow." That implies there are circumstances that are not convenient, that are not comfortable, that are not easy. Again, if two lie down together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone, and no man might prevail against one who is alone too will withstand. There's this idea that as we go through situations in life, there's going to be suffering, there's going to be difficulty, there's going to be discomfort, there's going to be inconvenience. There's going to be times when ever loving, serving, and being a friend to somebody does not fit with your schedule and does not come at a convenient time. Let me just ask you the question. How many of you, Shelf Hands, have that inconvenient friend in your life from time to time? How many of you are that inconvenient friend from time to time? Yeah, we all are, right? That's one of the beautiful things about the way God designed this. When the other person gets no benefit from us and has the opportunity just to sacrificially love us and serve us, and then we do the same for them in return, that pictures, that portrays, that proclaims the beauty of the sacrificial love of Jesus in our friendships. It shows us and others what Jesus is like. And I can't tell you how many times I have needed that friend to answer the phone at 2 a.m. to have coffee with me, to have lunch with me, to take that phone call whenever I was desperate needing advice. We all need that person. We can all be that person, but we need to cultivate that for each other. In other words, we can't always be that friend for somebody, but we've got to have space for it, because if we don't allow space for inconvenience in our friendships, then we will short circuit one of the instrumental means that God uses to forge deep friendships in our lives. Some of those people that I've called it 2 a.m. were still very close, because I know that person I can count on, and I can depend upon them, and they've had it the same with me as well. It's when it's not convenient that you find out, as the old saying goes, who your friends are. So let me give you an action step. If you are not currently in a setting like this already, I would encourage you to start what we call a fight club here at Redeemer. What is a fight club? Fight Club is a Tuesday night, martial arts ring that Jason leads. I'm just kidding. A fight club is another way of saying a small discipleship group. You simply look to your right until you're left, and you find out who the people are in your life. Same gender, maybe three, no more than four or five people, and you just simply start reading a book of the Bible together. At the welcome desk, we have bookmarks to help you do this so that you can have some structure, but this is your way of saying, we're going to fight for each other to follow Jesus. We're going to fight for each other to not live lonely, isolated lives. We're going to fight sin in our lives because that's the greatest robber of joy for any of us, and you can do that very organically and very easily if you need some help, ask somebody at the welcome desk to do that. Those are two things that I want you to see when we think about God's design for friendship. There is the necessity of friendship. You got to have it, but there's also the limits of friendship. You can't have it with everybody in the exact same way, but this brings us to our last point, which I think helps us illustrate maybe in profound terms God's design for friendship, and it's not just the necessity, not just the limits, but it is the mission of friendship. It is the mission of friendship. What God is accomplishing and wants to accomplish in our friendship. Let me ask you all the question. Have you ever had a friend in your life tell you something? You did not want to hear, but you needed to hear it anyway. Yeah, we have. Book of Proverbs puts it this way. Faithful are the wounds of a friend. Proverbs 27 verse 6, or as the famous verse goes, iron, sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another. Proverbs 27 17. Let me be very clear. That is not an excuse to be rude or to be a jerk. I feel like I should say that for some of us in the room. What it does mean is this, that the best friends you can have are not simply the ones that you have fun with, but it's the ones who help you follow Jesus. It's the ones who will point you toward him, remind you of him. It's the one you can call when you literally say, listen, I know all the answers, but I need you to say them back to me because my heart doesn't believe them right now. I need you to remind me of the grace of Jesus, the truth of Jesus, the mercy of Jesus, because my heart is having a hard time seeing it and believing it. I said this before, I think Jesus was saying, there are no Jason Borns in the kingdom of heaven. There is nobody who can just figure it all out on their own. You and I need each other, and we need each other to share the gospel with each other and to help one another grow in Christ. As my son gets older, I try to tell him sometimes the old saying that the only difference between the person you are today and the person you are ten years from now is the books that you read and the friends that you keep. That comes by the way from Proverbs 1320. You'll see it on the screen. Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools suffers harm. If you're taking notes, here's what I think we need to see about the mission of friendship, and it's simply this, that your friendships are key to your formation. Your friendships are key, essential, critical, vital to your formation. That's another way of saying the person you are becoming, your friendships play a huge part in that. And that is another way by the way of saying that you and I are always becoming what we will one day be. There is no neutrality. We are always heading toward a future version of ourselves. The question is, will we be more wise and Christ-like because of the friends in our lives or not? Again, notice what friends provide here in the text. They provide help for our work, a hand to pick you up when you fall, someone to keep you warm, someone to fight alongside you when you are facing out position. Friendships in other words are dependable and they are life-giving. Now I know, again, even as I say that, some of you might object and you are like, "Yeah, but Josh, I don't like depending on anybody. I like being a self-made person. I'd rather pull myself up by my bootstraps. Thank you very much." Can I just remind you for a second that one of the things that we have been learning over the years is just how destructive living and isolation can be. I mean, we can only look back a couple of years to the mental health crisis of COVID in 2020. People living isolated from each other and the sort of things that happened as a result. But let me just speak to you more directly. I know that many of us, myself included, do not like the idea of depending on other people or being weak or needy. Can I just tell you, you are more weak and more needy and more dependent than you give yourself credit for because self-sufficiency is a delusion. It is just not something, again, if you and are made in the image of God, we are made in the image of a relational God. One God, three persons, made us in His image. We are designed to live in relationship and in community. And by the way, this is understood, not just by the Bible, but by non-Christians and throughout history. In ancient times, if you went to war, very often, what would happen is you would move into battle holding a shield. And then your shield protected the person next to you and their shield protected the person next to them. And there was this thing in ancient military called a shield wall. And the idea was that your shield isn't there to protect you. It's there to protect the person next to you. And whenever those shields are together, you are impenetrable, you have what you need, you have the resources, you have the the the armory that you need to protect yourself and each other. Friends, the mission of friendship, part of God's design for us is that we would live through this life shield to shield, looking out for each other, helping one another see their blind spots and growing together in Christlikeness. You'll see this on the screen. Jesus accomplishes His mission through His people living in friendship. Jesus accomplishes His mission in part through His people, you and I, living in friendship. But one of the things that I will tell you is that one of the things that are one of the ways that you and I will experience that, in fact, I might even argue one of the key ways that you and I are going to experience that is only if we get honest and vulnerable and real with each other about the struggles and the challenges in our lives. This mission is rarely accomplished if we just live life on the surface superficially. So I'm going to give you one more accent step, one more homework assignment. Here it is. Take somebody in your life, a trusted friend, a trusted member of your community group, someone in this church. Take them out for coffee, take them out for lunch, invite them over to your house. The purpose of that time, well, yes, we'd get to know each other and hang out, but here's your objective. Share with them one thing that you are struggling with and that you need prayer for and let them minister to you. Again, make sure you pick somebody that you can trust but do it nonetheless and maybe just maybe Jesus will show up in that situation to give you grace and to give you mercy and to help you fulfill and walk out the mission that He has for you. JC Ryle, the Bishop of Liverpool in Britain, 1878, said these words. He said, "This world is full of sorrow because this world is full of sin. It is a dark place. It is a lonely place. It is a disappointing place and the brightest sunbeam in it is a friend because this friendship has our troubles and doubles our joys." If that is true with our friendships with each other, let me just tell you that is even more true when it comes to our friendship with Jesus because I know some of you may be thinking here this morning, "Who would want to be friends with me?" In light of all that I've done and a lot of everywhere I've been and I'm just going to tell you the answer to that question is Jesus because one of the names of Jesus is that He is a friend of sinners. He came for people just like you and just like me and that means it doesn't matter what kind of guilt, shame, regret or exhaustion you came in here with. There is good news for you at the foot of the cross of Jesus where He died in your place so that you can be forgiven, so that you can be reconciled to God, no longer an enemy of God, but now a friend of God. Jesus said it this way in John 15 13. He says, "Greater love has no one than this and that He lay down His life for His friends." Church, Jesus has laid down His life for us so that we may know Him and be friends with Him, but also so that we may be expressions of that friendship to each other. If you are looking for a friend this morning, I just invite you to place your faith in Jesus, the only one who has offered up his life so that you may be forgiven and saved by His grace. And if you are looking for friendship, I just invite you to simply take a step, join a group, have a conversation and let us help you figure out how to experience God's design for friendship in your life. Let's pray. So Father, God, thank you. Thank you that you have not called us to live life on our own or on our own terms. God, thank you for loving us, for sending Jesus to lay down His life for us. And God, I just want to pray that you would take your word, sink it into our hearts and let it produce the fruit in our lives that you so desire. May we become increasingly a people who embody and express your friendship to each other. God, if there is anyone here this morning who does not know you as their ultimate friend, God, I pray that you bring them under conviction that you would lead them to repentance and that you would bring them to saving faith by grace alone. What I pray for us, that you would help us to be the sort of people who bear with each other, who love each other, and who cultivate and express your loving friendship in our midst. God, would you bring us into contact with people this week who need to know you as their friend and would you give us the courage, the boldness, the compassion to share the good news of the gospel with them. God, we thank you for your grace. We thank you for this morning. We ask all this in Jesus name. Amen. Thank you for listening to this message from Redeemer Church. If you like to get connected or learn more about Redeemer, visit RedeemerMidland.org.