Job 16:18-21 (NIV)
“O earth, do not cover my blood;
may my cry never be laid to rest!
Even now my witness is in heaven;
my advocate is on high.
My intercessor is my friend
as my eyes pour out tears to God;
on behalf of a man he pleads with God
as a man pleads for his friend.
I probably enjoyed my fifth grade year more then I enjoyed any other year of elementary school. In that year the youth soccer team I was on won our league placed fourth in the regional tournament, I competed in the state math competition, I got my first paper route, and the University of Kansas advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball championship game. And even though Kansas lost to Duke 72-65, it was still a great year.
Fifth grade was also the year that I learned school text books could be wrong. Sometimes I think that the process of growing up is just the gradual realization that nothing is always perfect. I think everyone remembers the first time the realized their parents weren’t perfect, or the first time they realized that their teachers made mistakes (and, boy did that make school more fun). Fifth grade was when I realized that text books could be wrong.
We were reading along in our history book. It was the section on “Religion in America.” I scanned down to the bottom of the page and suddenly got very excited. There at the bottom of the page was a bolded section title that read: “Quakers: the peaceful people.”
Even at the age of twelve I had had enough experience with explaining what denomination I belonged to to know that most people had no clue who Quakers were. Here, I was finally going to be able to show off my expertise. Here, people would finally understand what a Quaker was. It didn’t matter that the section on “Quakers: the peaceful people” was only two paragraphs long; that was longer then the Baptists had gotten.
We began reading the section. I still remember Laura sitting in the front right corner as she began to read, “The Quakers moved to Pennsylvania in the early 1700’s. They were also known as Friends, because they were friendly to everyone…”
My mind suddenly raced back to Sunday school. “That’s not right.” I thought to myself. “Quakers were called Friends because of something Jesus said…’you are my friends if…if…’ something.”
I raised my hand. The teacher called on me. “Yes Matt, why don’t you read the next section?”
“But…” I started.
She interrupted me, “We need to read the next section so we can go to recess.”
My chance to explain my beliefs was lost. Slowly I stumbled through those next few words, “The Iroquois Confederacy: A tribe of six nations…”
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Why are we called Friends? That’s an important question. It comes from John chapter 15. Let’s turn in our bibles and read…
John 15:1-17
“You are my friends, if you do what I command.” That’s why we call ourselves Friends. With that said, the obvious question becomes, “what did Christ command?”
Well that’s not to hard to figure out either, we just go back up to verse 12. “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” So Jesus was really saying “You are my friends, if you love each other as I have loved you.”
Now we all know how the story of Jesus turns out. At the end, Jesus sacrifices his life so that we can have the opportunity to have our sins forgiven. And I’m sure that John, who wrote this many years after Christ’s death and resurrection, is alluding to that event in verse 13 when he writes “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
But Jesus command to “Love each other as I have loved you,” is in the past perfect tense. It is referring to how Jesus had expressed his love for his disciples at a previous point in time up until the present time. It is not referring to how he will express his love for them at a future point in time, that being his death and resurrection.
That brings us back to the first eight verses in this section; the section that begins, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.”
How does the gardener care for the vine? He cares for it, that is, he shows it love, by cutting off the branches that produce no fruit, and by enabling the branches trying to produce fruit to produce even more.
God shows his love to each of us in two ways: through his judgment and through his blessings.
How does God judge us? From these verses it seems that God judges us on whether or not we produce fruit. It would be really easy to make the leap from that statement to a theology of salvation through works. I think that making that leap would come from a misunderstanding of how we produce fruit. In verse 4 it reads “No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine” and verse 5 “If a man remains [in the vine]…he will bear much fruit.”
God demonstrates his love for us by judging whether or not we bear fruit. The only way we can bear fruit, this passage says, is through a relationship with Jesus Christ. Furthermore, I would contend that that if we are seeking out, in any way, a relationship with Jesus, our lives will automatically bear some portion of fruit.
God shows his love, to all people, through judging their fruit which can come only through Christ.
God then shows his love, to those who have a relationship with Christ, through blessing. God shows his love by enabling those branches that have fruit to become more fruitful. This occurs through pruning. Pruning is a less then pleasant process for the branch being pruned; it means that parts of you are cut away and destroyed. Pruning can be a painful process. But without that pruning, it would be impossible for new growth and new fruit to be produced.
The ways in which God shows his love to us are not the ways we would wish him to show his love. To be judged and to be pruned are both unpleasant experiences, but they allow us to enter into a relationship with God; a relationship would be unattainable on our own.
When the gardener was cutting off the branches that produced no fruit, or pruning the branches that had some fruit, he was really cutting and pruning the vine. The branches produce the fruit, the vine produces the branches, but they are really one and the same thing. Each time the Father prunes or cuts a branch he is showing his love not only to the branch, but also to the vine.
Let’s return to our paraphrase of John 15:14. “You are my friends, if you love each other as I have loved you.” The next question we need to ask to understand how we are Christ’s friend is: “how did Christ love us?”
In verse 9 Jesus says, “As the Father [the gardener] has loved me, so have I loved you.” From this we can make our paraphrase “You are my friends, if you love each other as the gardener has loved me.”
The final question that needs to be asked is: “how did the gardener love Christ?”
The Gardener loved his vine by cutting off and pruning its branches. The Father loved the Son by building up and growing the disciples he would teach and by casting those aside who would not enter into a relationship with him.
We are Christ’s friends when we build up and enable the disciples around us and when we judge the branches in our churches that are not bearing fruit.
It is so hard to judge in today’s world. Anyone who judges is looked on as being almost evil. I believe, that as friends of Christ, we are called to judge. But we are only called to judge one thing: does a person have a relationship with Jesus Christ. If a person does have a relationship with Jesus then we are called to help prune them.
We must be very careful how we prune. We help to prune people by following the example of our heavenly Gardener who prunes each of us. We are pruned with love, and care, and patience, and attention. A hasty pruner will destroy the branch to be pruned. A true friend will take the time to prune with love. It is this love that we are commanded to show one another.
What about those people that have no relationship with Christ. Our job is to offer that relationship to them, and if they reject it, to move on and let the gardener do with them what He will; whether that be thrown into the fire, or pruned by a masters hand.
We can be Christ’s friends only by doing what he commanded: that is by having a relationship with him, and by enabling others to grow in him. In the same way, this is how we show ourselves as Friends to others.
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