November 8, 2015
Scripture:
Hymn 282 - What a friend we have in Jesus
So far we have talked about Jesus is my Saviour, Lord, Shepherd, High Priest, Advocate, and Peace. Today we will talk about Jesus is my Friend.
The hymn we sang was written by a man named Joseph Scriven. He wrote it about 120 years ago. He grew up in a Christian home, and his father was a minister in Ireland. Joseph fell in love with a young woman and soon they planned to be married. However the day before the wedding, his fiancee drowned. Joseph was devastated. He decided to start over, so he came to Canada and took a job as a school teacher in Port Hope. Here he fell in love again; but again, she passed away before they married. It was around this time that he wrote, “What a friend we have in Jesus.” Shortly after he received a letter from his mother and learned that she did not have long to live. He sent a letter back to his mother, and in it he included the poem that he had written. Somehow his poem was published. Years later, Charles Converse read the poem and wrote a tune to it. This was around the time D. L. Moody was preaching the gospel. Ira Sankey was D. L. Moody’s singer, and he was compiling a hymn book. He heard the song and decided to put it in his hymn book. It ended up being the last hymn in his book, but he said that it was the number one song in the book for favourites. And we still sing it today.
So far what we have talked about are things that Jesus is to us. He is the Shepherd and we are His sheep; He is our advocate, and we are the ones He brings to God; He is our Lord and we are His servants. However, when we say “Jesus is my Friend,” aren’t we His friends, too? It works both ways. I wonder what kind of friends Jesus has in us. A friend is someone who loves and likes someone else who loves and likes them.
John 15:12-15
The Lord Jesus had taken His disciples to the upper room and was teaching them, and giving them instructions. He told them to love each other as He had loved them. That is hard, but it is something He has asked us to do.
According to v. 13, love can be small or big. The Lord is looking for great love. When Jesus laid down His life He showed great love.
Jesus said that we are His friends if we do what He has told us to do. We can be the friends of Jesus, but how friendly are we? He says He calls us friends instead of calling us servants. What is the difference? Suppose you are visiting someone and you are all sitting around the table having dinner. These people, who are very important people, have a button that they can press to call in their servants. When the servants come in and do their work, the conversation hushes. As soon as they leave the conversation starts up again. It is friends around the table, and it is servants who are doing all the work.
As Jesus friends, we have a privilege that servants do not have. He makes known the secrets from His Father. We are given a close place in the family circle. Because of this place we can tell Him about our problems in life. We can ask for needs, give thanks, and praise Him.
Your friends may be someone from school, someone from your family, or someone you met at the FEW! To have friends, you have to show love. The greatest Friend of all showed the greatest love. No wonder Joseph Scriven said, “What a friend we have in Jesus”! His close loved ones had passed away, but Jesus never changed.
Jesus talks to us as friends. A real friendship is not one-sided. May we be the friends we are supposed to be as the children of God. We can thank God that we can say Jesus is my Friend.
Ephesians 5:8-21
We are still in the “walking” part of Ephesians, the part that deals with our behaviour and moral actions. We’ve had “walk in love”, and now verse 8 gives us “walk in light.” These are things that we can’t take lightly or contaminate. They are holy and divine.
We Gentiles once walked in darkness. In the physical world, darkness is the absence of light: you can shine light, but you can’t shine darkness. God can see what is opposite to Himself, though, and worldly darkness actually contains a lot of bad things!
Then comes a big “but”. We were once darkness, BUT now the Lord has saved us, and we are light in Him. Light brings truth and righteousness, but it also exposes wrong. We hold the truth in our hands: the word of God. We can be thankful for the time it shone into our lives and showed us what we were. It showed us the way of salvation, and gave us the responsibility to walk in it’s light. We are now children of the Light; with the God of Light as our father.
We are to have no fellowship with, and nothing in common with, the darkness. Today, darkness is a big business; Satan dramafies and glorifies its works. We have to carefully and circumspectly walk in the light.
We need to prove what is acceptable to the Lord—finding those treasures—and reprove (expose) the darkness. Exposing the darkness might not be pleasant; but if we don’t, we and others could fall into it. We can be subtlety drawn into it, and therefore must be circumspect. We need to be careful what we see and read, and where it came from. The works of darkness are hardly a secret anymore, they’re mainstream, but the light exposes their true character.
A sleeping person and a dead person look similar. If we become involved with darkness, we aren’t dead, but we look like it. That’s a sad sight and bad testimony. Christ will give us light, but we must judge the darkness we’re involved in first. We have the light inside us if we are saved, so it’s bad when we have strayed so far from God that He must shine the light on us.
If we don’t walk carefully, we walk as fools. We must use our time wisely, occupying until He comes. We only have so much time, and when it is lost, it is lost forever. There are a lot of necessary things that we have to spend our time on—work, school, etc—but what do we do when we don’t have to be doing something? We can pray, “Lord what will you have me to do?”
All told, we are given 13 or more commands in these verses. We are not to be drunk, but filled with the Spirit. It’s through His Spirit that God guides and directs us in His will. We are to make melody in our hearts, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to the Lord. There was a time in the past when some brethren thought we should just sing psalms; they wanted no songs from man. Finally, though, after much resistance, hymns and spiritual songs were brought in. Hymns are more along the topic of praise and worship than spiritual songs are. We are to give thanks. God is looking for a grateful people; even though we might not always FEEL thankful for all things. Finally, we must submit ourselves to each other.
Hymn 323 — There’s a Friend for little children
Prayer