This morning we have the great privilege of having the Reverend Peter Durfler come and preach God's word for us. Those of you that have been around for a long time know Peter since he was a wee lad. Peter grew up in this church and is a son of our church and now ministers at Stillwater's Presbyterian Church in the Philadelphia area. And it is a privilege to have one of our own come and preach. And so I was thrilled when I had a feeling I would be either out or out of it when I came back to know that Peter would come and fill the pulpit for us. So Peter, would you come and preach for us? Good morning. It is good to be back. It's been a while. I went the wrong way on 78, but quickly recovered. Made it here on time. We live down in Kennett Square. I have three young boys, four, six, and 10-year-olds. And they're home with my wife and at our church this morning. But it is a pleasure to be able to preach. I'm going to be reading from John 15, if you turn to John 15, 13 to 16. I want to thank Walt for reading through all those proverbs which I gave to the bulletin to be read as we will also be talking on the theme of friendship this morning. And so from John 15, reading from verses 13 to 16, greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing. But I have called you friends for all that I have heard from my father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide so that whatever you ask the father in my name, he may give it to you. These things I command you so that you will love one another. Lord, we do ask that the Word of God will be opened into our hearts and minds today, that the Spirit would do the work of convicting and enlightening, and Lord, that you would instruct us, Father, in how we keep our friendships. And Lord, in knowing you also, that you have called us a friend of God. In Jesus, in your name we pray, amen. Running through the halls of my old college dressed up like a superhero and blasting couples with super soakers who were kissing in public was more fun because I was doing it with my friends while being chased by the campus police. And studying Hebrew and Greek in seminary was more productive because I was studying with my friends into the late hours of the night. And raising three young boys has been an awesome adventure because my wife is also my best friend. And friendships are an amazing gift from God, are they not? Friendships are the thing we often, in some ways, take for granted until they're not there, and then we feel very lonely at times, and we pull back. And my prayer this morning is that as we open the word of God, and we read and listen to what God says, both about finding and keeping friends, but also about knowing Jesus, who would call us friend, that we would be directed by God's word, that we would draw to the Lord in grace, that we would consider or perhaps reconsider how we choose friends and how we keep friends and how we actually are a friend to other folks. Friendships make life sweeter. They make the sad times better. They make the happy times better. And it is interesting that friendship in America and really sort of in the broader Western world is in a bit of a precarious spot. I was reading different kind of reports and research as I was preparing and one sociologist was pointing out that for the first time almost in all of the history of the world, we have moved from spending the majority of time with our friends face to face with sort of those who are truly our friends to the majority of our time keeping up with acquaintances on social media. And I'm about as guilty as this is anybody. More than ever, we've kind of flipped it. And this is, if you will, a new experiment in the world, where people spend much, in some ways, more of their time tracking down old acquaintances and seeing what they're doing, rather than actually doing that harder work of getting together, finding time to meet face to face, to be a true and a deep and a real friend to someone. And so my thought this morning is that, In some ways, my hope is to remind you, to remind myself, that friendships, in some ways, they're more important than we often think they are. They often bring more to our life than I think we give credit for. And as I go through two sections talking about finding and keeping friends and receiving Christ as a friend, I wanted to just start by queuing up a few statistics that make the point a little bit more. There's a guy, Tom Rath, who works for the Gallup organization. And he wrote a book called Vital Friendships, The People You Can't Afford to Live Without. And he did just a slew of research on friendship. And there's a couple of points he makes that I wanted to share that kind of caught my attention. One is that he says that if you ask people why they became homeless, that's a significant life issue, right? He's not talking about the little things like why you were sad on Sunday because your team lost or something like that. Why you became homeless, why their marriage failed, why they chronically overeat, they often say it's because of the poor quality or the nonexistence of friendships. They feel outcast or unloved. He says that in the data they pulled, if your best friend eats healthy, you are five times more likely to have a healthy diet. That's interesting. My wife sells pies, which explains why I don't have a very good diet. But friends influence us when we let them into their life. Married people say that friendship is more than five times as important as physical intimacy within marriage. And this third one is in the realm of work. Those who have no real friends at work have only a 1 in 12 chance, so less than 10% chance of actually feeling engaged at work, which is interesting to think about. If you go to work and your friend is there, you feel more connected to the whole work environment. You could go and do the same exact job, but if you have no friends there, you just feel like, I'm just doing a job. I don't know if you've been there. I've been there in both scenarios. But here's a really compelling one. And this is the New York Times. from 2009 did a study. In 2006, they did a study of 3,000 nurses with breast cancer. And they found that women without close friends were four times as likely to die from the disease as women with 10 or more friends. Did you catch that? Women without close friends in a study of 3,000 nurses over years who had breast cancer were 400% more likely to die than women who had a network of friends, 10 or more friends. Friends are a gift from God. The Bible speaks to friendship, and it calls us to be the kind of friends to others that breathe, if you will, I'm using the expression that we breathe life into our friends. I think you've probably all been there. Anyone remember like a first day at college or first day at a new job? I remember when I worked at Bank of America where I spent eight years, I went into their new hire orientation. And I don't know about you. For me, it's a mixture of dread and a little bit of excitement. You walk in and you know you're not going to know anybody. How are we going to pass four hours learning about corporate history? And then at the same time, there's a little excitement to think, wow, I might meet someone who I like. And so, like a metal detector, you know, it's kind of ticking as you move it through the sand. My friend detector was like, brrrr. You know, it's like going off, and I'm looking for someone who could possibly be a friend. And we kind of do the same thing. We look for people with common interests. I was looking for a Mets fan, perhaps. Hard to find out in Philadelphia. You know, and then deeper, you're looking for someone who shares your values. And ultimately, if you're really looking for a friend, you're wondering, are they going to care for me? and do they want to be with me? And the Bible speaks to it. And I want to start with the Proverbs 22, 24 to 25. We're going to start with where the Bible says, as you find and look for friends in your life, kind of start here, which is an odd place to start, but it broadens as we go. Proverbs 22, 24 to 25 says, make no friendship with a man given to anger, nor go with a wrathful man, lest you learn his ways and entangle yourself in a snare. It's a warning, right? It's saying, don't be friends with people who are really angry. And that's their first response. And they tend to be prone to violence and things like that. The Bible says, don't make friends with a man or a woman filled with anger. It gives two reasons why. And it's in the second half of the verse. And the first one is, lest you learn his ways. And which comes to this point, which is quite simply that our friends always do influence us, right? Our friends influence us. If you're here, your friends probably influence, you know, what you wear. I was going through an old box of pictures the other day and, you know, you always find some outfits and you're like, what on earth? But my friends thought it was cool at the time. So I wore it. They influence what we think. They influence what we say. And the warning from Proverbs is that you will learn the ways of your friends. He's saying don't befriend someone prone to anger lest you learn their ways. And the second point is this, because not only that, but then you don't only become like your friend, you sort of go to their destination, it says, and you become entangled yourself in a snare. The Proverbs warns all the time about people who set traps for other people, and then the Lord essentially turns it back around on them. And the Bible is warning us. It's saying, don't go and let violent, angry people come into your life and influence you, because you will ultimately become like them. That's the heart of the warning, right? It's not complicated. And what the Proverbs starts very narrowly, Paul then broadens out. So Paul comes into 1 Corinthians, and he quotes from an old Greek playwright. From 1 Corinthians 1533, he says, don't be deceived. Bad company, you know how it finishes? Corrupts or ruins good morals. Which is sort of saying, another way of saying is, don't be fooled. You're weaker than you think you are. You don't pull people up typically, they tend to pull us down. And so Paul is taking a principle that the Lord has spoken about befriending, and I'm not saying acquaintances and things like that, but in the level of friendship, who you welcome into your life to influence you will in fact influence you. And Paul is saying here, and the scripture reminds us, don't let your pride be a blind spot. We're weaker than we think we are. And sometimes we find ourselves doing things we didn't think we would because our friends took us there. I want to talk to you, if you're students here, if you're a little younger, for a minute. You know which friends of yours are worth keeping. And you know that there are some friends who really are not worth being called friend in your life. And I remember growing up, and if you're the parent of a child here, you know, it's on my head a little bit as my son turned 10 this year. I remember I used to play on the streets with all of the kids on our block. We lived down right by Milburn High School on Blaine Street. And our block was filled with kids. And we would play football on the streets. We would run through all the Italian grandmas' backyards. And we'd play war. And we'd get, like, the trash can lids. And we had a great time. And that was 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th grade. And then as I got a little older, I remember 6th or 7th grade, I went over to my friend's house, and we were playing a computer game on his computer. And he said, hey, Peter, you want to help me unlock the adult level of this game? And I was like, sure, which was the wrong response. But he was my friend, and I wanted him to be my friend. I wanted him to like me. And I remember I did that, and then I walked back across the street to my house, and I knew that I shouldn't have done that. And I also started to realize that the friends of my fourth grade years couldn't be the friends of my seventh grade years, or my twelfth grade years, because I wanted to honor the Lord with my decisions, and I wanted to honor Christ with how I lived, and they didn't care at all. They just wanted to have fun. And as we decide, if you find yourself in friendships where you consistently are making compromises of your own testimony of faith to the Lord, you're not really in a friendship that's bringing life into you, and you're not bringing life into them. Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson says, a friend is someone with whom you can be sincere. I like that. If you're not being a sincere believer and Christian, if that in fact is what you are in your friendships, then they're not friendships and they're not bringing life to you. You need to make the shift from saying yes and compromising to saying You know, I'm not going to do that. And what's interesting is that it's not like you really ever really need to turn off people. Oftentimes, what simply happens is when you stop making compromising decisions within a friendship, in some ways, they leave you. I remember I said no once or twice to some friends, and they didn't ask me anymore. They knew that's not what Peter's going to do. And so I went from being a friend to being friendly. You might be saying to yourself, well, what about those folks whose lives are a mess who really need me in their life? There are people whom you will be called from the Lord to minister into who, yeah, you know what? They may be a wrathful person. They may be caught up with an addiction. They may have a tremendous sin in their life. And my encouragement to you is not to ignore them, right? But to go and follow the Lord's call into ministry and care and love. But you need to kind of go wisely. There's a scripture in the New Testament that warns us when we help another person with their sin, be careful if we join them in it. You know, to go with the power of the spirit and to remember that sometimes friendships have to run one way more than two way for them to be healthy. That's normal. There's a woman we're working with in our church and my friendship with her needs to be very one way. It needs to be very pastoral right now. Because right now, she doesn't bring, she has tremendous needs, and the Lord has called us into her life, but she's not ready to really, if you will, bring life back into the people she meets. Our prayer is that she gets there. But by and large, when you think of your friendships, the Bible is saying, choose them carefully. They can be an amazing gift to you. Now, according to Facebook, I have 487 friends. So I'm really, really cool. Apparently because I paid all my old high school classmates to friend me. And it's an interesting assortment. It's kind of a mixed bag of nuts. I've got some old friends from college. I've got some pastoral friends. I've got some radical lesbian lawyer friends. I've got some this activist and that activist and some old professors. And it really is funny how. We live in a different world where almost everyone we accrue along the way is somehow still digitally present, for better or for worse. And some feeds I've learned to turn off. I'm like, I don't care what they say anymore. But I haven't kind of removed them from the list. And out of all those, though, data suggests that we can actually only really have 150 real friends. And if you think of your friends as like a pyramid, you know, if you kind of threw all their names and you sort of shaped them into a triangle, You know, at the top of the triangle, if those are your most important friends, generally we have about one to five. We have about one to five really close friends. Some of us just need one or two. We don't really have room for more than that. And I want to ask you a question, which is, who's at the top of your pyramid? Because remember, friendship may matter more than you realize. God has given us his will and his desire that we have friends. What makes up the person at the very top? What kind of people have you welcomed into your life at the level of influence so that they actually breathe life into you? And as you think of yourself in terms of whose pyramid are you at the top of, are you bringing life and are you bringing encouragement and joy into their life? You know, what's funny is this. I had shared this sermon with our congregation only like three weeks ago. And I really wanted to share it again here. And as I went back through it and I hit this section, It really hit me because in between when I preached it, then and today, I sort of lived it out in a way that I found very surprising. You know what kind of person I want at the top of my pyramid? It's someone who will wound me for the right reasons. It's someone who will wound me for the right reasons. And it's someone who will pick me up when I fall. You need friends at the top, friends who are in your life that are honest with you, that are loyal to you, that are loving of you. Honesty, Proverbs 27.6 says faithful, remember how it goes? Faithful are the wounds of a friend. You know, a lot of folks wound us for the wrong reasons. But the wounds of a friend, it says, are faithful. I was sitting at church just this past week, and I count my senior pastor has been a mentor to me very much as a friend. And we were talking about one of our mutual friends who was going through a pretty dark time, who's also a member of our church. And he looked at me dead in the eye, and he said, I'm going to tell you this. He said, you have failed that man. He said, you have failed him. And he says, listen to me. You need to give more to him. You need to do whatever it takes. He's a recovering alcoholic. He's been sober for a number of years. And he says, listen, if he takes one sip of alcohol, he's done. Did I want to hear that I had failed someone in our church? No. Was it true? Yes. Did I need to hear it? I did need to hear it. I needed him to kick my butt a little bit. I needed him to say, you are not doing what you need to do as a friend, as a pastor to this man. He wounded me for the right reasons. And it stung, because I'm prideful, and I didn't want it. But I knew enough to say, OK, don't reply, don't defend, don't react, just listen, receive, pray, and go. Do you have people like that in your life? Because you need someone like that in your life. You need someone who you let tell you the dead honest truth and not until you actually ask it from them. None of us can ask it too often, but there have to be times when you sit down and you can just tell someone, how am I doing? Where can I grow in the Lord? You see me better than I see me. What do you see? That's a scary question, because we know kind of, sort of, what we don't want other people to know. But we also kind of know that they kind of know what we know. You need a friend like that in your life. That's God's will for you, that you have a friend whose wounds are faithful. That you have a friend who is loyal. A man of many companions, it says, may come to ruin, But there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. That's Proverbs 18, 24. You know, I read that verse and I was just like, we live in an age of many companions. 487 random feeds. You know how much time I could waste on Facebook and Instagram? And it's just that. Some of it's nice, but even the nice stuff is sort of time wasted in some way. But what if I spent lots of my time there? You know, will the many companions be the ones that I call when I need help? You know, the Bible is saying, it's saying, watch out. A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there's a friend who sticks closer than a brother. That's the friend you call when you feel like things are falling apart in your marriage or at your job, the health of your children. You don't reach out to your many scattered random friends. Who's the person in your life who you can pick up the phone and say, I need help and I need it now? You know, red alert. And my challenge for you is that you find at least one person, and I would pray that it would be someone in this body, that you stick closer to a brother. One person in this body, is there someone here whom you're there, you're sticking with them, you're closer than their own family, because God has laid on your heart a desire for them, a love for them, a passion for their life, so that when you have someone who you think, you know what, no matter what happens to them, I'm with them, I'm bringing them to the Lord, I'm bringing them to my Savior. Sometimes we need our friends to say, come on, let's pray together, because we can't pray about something anymore. Or we need our friends to remind us of God's glory and His grace and His power that He's pulled us, it says, out of the kingdom of darkness and put us into the kingdom of light. And I feel like the Lord's challenge for us and for you as a church is to say, you know what? I'm going to at least pray that God lays one person on my heart from this church and this community, and I'm going to stick closer to a brother. Because you do know it's a cost, right? That is a sacrificial act of love, because it will cost you your time. You may not be able to do this because your friend needs you at that moment. Love is always a cost. But isn't that what Christ did for us? He said, I'm going to show you what friendship looks like. Before his disciples even still really knew what was about to happen, he laid out to them I'm going to lay down my life for you. Are you willing to lay down your life for others in this place? That is a very attractive thing in a church body, when you come in and you know there's real friends there. A friend loves at all times, says Proverbs 17, 17. And I'll just say that the warning for me at least was to remember that I don't want to use my friends, I want to love my friends. I don't just want to call them when I'm sad, I want to call them when they're sad. I don't just want to call them when I have some exciting news to share, I want to call them when I know they have something exciting to share. And in the church sometimes I've dealt with having to, you know, certain things need to be done. The floor needs to be swept. The plates need to be set out. Things need to be collected, or organized, or printed, or thumbtacked to the wall, or however small or big it may be. And so you work together as a church. But my encouragement is that if people don't live up to your expectations, and they may not do the thing you want them to do, that if you feel like you're growing bitter toward them, or upset, and feel like, ah, I wish they would just do this, or this, or this, careful that you're not just trying to use people to get something done. You know, but be there to love them richly and to love them deeply too, even as you work together. I want to take us now to the second part of John 15, 13 to 16. Up to this point, you could say I've been preaching the law. I've been preaching God's will for us in friendships. It's important. It's truthful. It's powerful. It does matter in our lives. They are an amazing gift to us. And yet, even in friendship, we find that we fail. We mess it up. We hurt people we don't want to hurt. We're disappointed. Friendships are often a rich thing, but a lot of times, too, it's where we get hurt the most. You know what I mean? It's often the betrayal of a friend that stings far worse. then the pain an enemy might throw our way. And so as we hear sort of God's will for friendship, it reminds us that we don't do anything perfectly. We yearn for these relationships. We yearn for this richness. We don't want to live isolated lives away from each other. We have this relational desire. We want to be together. And yet we can't do it the way we want to do it. And people can't fill all the needs we want to fill. And so friendship functions like a clue to the Lord that says, where do these desires come from? They come from the fact that I'm made in the image of God, but they also come from the fact that I'm born a broken and sinful man. And so I have these eternal idealistic desires, and I have this failed Peter Dorfler, and you have your failures too. And they meet together, and Jesus says, given that, you need me. And I have come, and I call you my friend. He said, greater love, right? Back to John 15. Greater love is knowing than this that someone lays down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants for the servant does not know what his master is doing. But I've called you friends for all that I have heard from my father I have made known to you. He was saying to them, I'm about to show you how much I love you. Not as my servants, not as my disciples. He says, but as my friends. You are also a friend of Christ if you're following him faithfully. Isn't that amazing? You're a friend, the son of God would call you a friend. The Son of God looks at us, messes, warts, bruises and all, and He says, I have no greater love for you. This is the greatest love I can pour out into your life, is to lay down my life for yours, that your sins can be washed free, that you can enter the family of God as a friend, as a child of God, That is an amazing thing. And sometimes we just have to back up and sort of forget everything we've heard and somehow hear it fresh, that the God who made the universe, who has shaped it, who has formed it, looks down and says, I have the greatest love for you possible. I lay down my life for you. I call you my friends. I call you to follow me. to obey me, to listen to me, to love me. You have an amazing gift to offer people as their friend, which is knowledge of the Son of God, and therefore knowledge of God the Father. Jesus said this, right? He says, all I have heard from my Father, I have made known to you. We live in an information age. We live in an information economy. And Jesus is saying, you can't get this information anywhere but me. He says, no one knows the father but the son and that whom the son chooses to reveal him. Jesus Christ has chosen to reveal the nature of father God to you. He says, all that I have heard from the Father I've made known to you, not a small sliver, but he's given you all of it. And our job is to turn around and share what we know of the Father and the Son, to share the experiences of living with the Spirit so that we can actually be friends who breathe life into other people. Researchers studied a group of students at UVA. Took about 40 of them to the base of a steep hill. And they gave them backpacks. And they weighted the backpacks down. And they asked them to estimate the steepness of the hill. And they had arranged it so that some people were near their friends and others were not. And it said that The students who stood with their friends gave lower estimates of the steepness of the hill. Interesting. And get this. And the longer the friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared. The longer the friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared. who you have at the top of your pyramid really does matter. Because you will hit hill after hill after hill. And you don't want to walk them alone. You want someone who you can stand next to and you go, we can take that hill. We could do it. It's not that steep. We've been past the other one. Let's do this one. And when Christ Jesus is the foremost friend at the top of your pyramid. The gospel promises this, there is no hill too steep. There is no hill you can't climb with Christ. In fact, he has already gone before you. And it says, all things work to good for those who've been called, who've been chosen by God so that you're formed into his son. It's my encouragement to you today. Let's close in prayer. Lord God, we thank you for the friends in our life, for your teaching on it. But Lord, most of all, we thank you for Jesus Christ. Lord, he calls us his friend. Thank you for the body and blood given for us. And Father, I pray that you would work a desire in our hearts, Lord, a holy hunger to be a deep, life-breathing, spirit-filled friend, Lord, to one, at least one, stick closer to a brother, a friend, Lord, within this church. And Jesus, I pray that as we see the hills of this life, the hills we are gonna have to get back and start climbing maybe right after we get out of here, Monday, Whenever it comes, O Lord, around the bend, Lord, may we know that there is no hill too steep to climb when Jesus Christ has called us his friend. Lord, in your matchless name we pray. Amen. You know, they asked me if I wanted to request we sing any songs. I said, well, we have to sing Jesus, What a Friend for Sinners. So let's turn to that. I don't have the number in front of me, but you've got it.