The Personal Friendship of Jesus
By F. A. Allum
Influence of Contact with His Life — A Mere Idea Not Sufficient — We Need to Sense His Personal Power — The Effect of Individual on Individual
By F. A. ALLUM
Superintendent West China Mission “HENCEFORTH I call you not servants, . . . but I have called you friends.” John 15: 15. In these words, Christ uses human friendship to represent to us the close relation that exists between the believer and his Lord, and He expresses this relationship as the supreme friendship that is possible to mankind. Of course the religion of Jesus is more than a friendship, and His relation to us can never be fully stated in the terms of any friendship, however exalted, or, indeed, in the terms of any human relationship. It far transcends them all, and yet human friendship may serve to illustrate the sacred tie that binds us to our Lord. It is stated that “ideas rule the world”; but in reality those things that have been most powerful in influencing our lives have not been abstract ideas, general principles, but rather somebody. That is, the great master forces of our lives are personal rather than impersonal. Speaking of the gospel, Bishop Lightfoot says, “It is neither a dogmatic system nor an ethic code, but a person and a life.” THEY HAVE BEEN WITH JESUS
This is well illustrated in the way Christ dealt with His first disciples. When they first came to Him, He did not say: “These are My doctrines; believe them. These are My precepts; obey them.” But He said: “Follow Me,” “Come and see.” Thus He bound them to Himself. He “ordained twelve,” we read, “that they should be with Him.” Mark 3: 14. That was all, and then the wondrous power of divine love did the rest. They, “beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord,” were changed “from glory to glory,” even “into the same image.” And this was so noticeable that after the ascension of their Master, the people of Jerusalem whispered to one another, as they saw these fishermen, “They have been with Jesus.” There was that in them which only thus could be explained. The thought, in the words of another, is this: “If there is any good, if there be any spiritual enrichment, that can come into your life through human friendships, then that multiplied a hundredfold may come to you through the friendship of Jesus.” Let us inquire: What is it that our human friendships do for us? What are the fruits they yield to us? Let Bacon answer: “A principal fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce; . . . but no receipt openeth the heart but a true friend to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it in a kind of civil shrift or confession.” And this communicating of man’s thought to his friend, he says, works two utterly different effects, “for it redoubles joys, and cuteth griefs in half; for there is no man that imparteth his joys to his friend but he joyeth the more, and no man that imparteth his griefs to his friend but he grieveth the less.” POSSIBILITIES OF THIS SUPREME FRIENDSHIP
That the above is true, human experience has again and again attested. And the important question is: Can the friendship of Jesus do all that for us? Can Christ prove Himself to be a friend after this fashion? This is not a question for argument. Let us appeal to the facts of Christian experience. In that wonderful story of John G. Paton, missionary to the New Hebrides, is a chapter that reveals the possibilities of this supreme friendship. He tells of the death of his young wife and his infant child, and how with his own hands, when his heart was well-nigh breaking, he dug their grave just at the end of the house, and then he walled it up with blocks of coral, and covered the top of it with beautiful white coral, broken small. That place became to him, he says, as a sacred shrine, where during the months and years that followed, with ceaseless prayers and tears he claimed the land for God where he had buried his dead in faith and in hope. He finishes the story thus — and I want you to listen, and then tell me whether the friendship of Christ may not be a real thing: “But for Jesus and the fellowship He vouchsafed me there, I must have gone mad and died by that lonely grave; and all that is possible of sympathy through human friendship can come to a man through the friendship of Christ.” Bacon further tells us: “The first fruit of friendship is sympathy, and the second is counsel. The best preservative to keep the mind in health is the faithful admonitions of a friend.” “The best receipt — best, I say, to work, and best to take — is the admonition of a friend. It is a strange thing to behold what gross errors and extreme absurdities many, especially of the greater sort, do commit for want of a friend to tell them of them, to the great damage of both their fame and fortune.” Again I ask, Can Christ be a friend after this sort? Let us appeal to the facts of human experience. Below is an extract from one whom Henry Drummond has called one of the highest intellects that this age has known. He says: “I say frankly that more than any recognized influence of my father or of my mother upon me; more than the social influence of all the members of my father’s household; more, so far as I can trace it, than all social influences of every kind, Christ has had the formation of my mind and my disposition. My hidden ideals of what was beautiful I have drawn from Christ. My thoughts of what is manly and noble and pure have almost all of them arisen from the Lord Jesus Christ. “Many men have educated themselves by reading Plutarch’s lives of the ancient worthies, and setting before themselves one and another of these that in different ages have achieved celebrity, and they have recognized the great power of these men upon themselves. Now I do not perceive that any poet or philosopher or reformer or general or any other great man ever has dwelt in my imagination and my thought as the simple Jesus has. For more than twenty-five years I have gone instinctively to Christ to draw a measure and rule for everything wherever there has been a necessity for it. I have sought, and at last almost spontaneously, to throw myself on the companionship of Christ; and early, in my imagination, I could see Him standing and looking quietly and lovingly upon me. “There seemed almost to drop from His face an influence upon me that suggested what was the right thing in the controlling of passion, in the subduing of pride, in the overcoming of selfishness; and it is from Christ manifested to my inward eye that I have consciously derived more ideals, more models, more influence, than from any human character whatsoever.” After enumerating the above-mentioned fruit of friendship, Bacon finally gives the following remarks that are well worthy of our attention. “I mean,” he says, “aid and bearing a part on all actions and occasions. Here the best way to represent to life the manifold use of friendship is to cast and see how many things there are which a man can not do for himself, and then it will appear that it was a sparing speech of the ancients, to say that a friend is another himself, for that a friend is far more than himself.” That thought applied to the friendship of Christ suggests the power to become like Christ; for we become, in disposition at least, like our friends. This is clearly shown in a touching incident related in the biography of the famous Brighton preacher, Frederick William Robertson. The biographer was collecting material for his biography; and he went into one of the shops of Brighton where Robertson used to do his business, and asked the man about Robertson’s whole personal influence over him. The shopkeeper said, “Come”; and he took him into a small room behind the shop, and there upon the wall he pointed him to a portrait of the great preacher, and said, “If ever there in the shop I am tempted to meanness or baseness or trickery, I come back here and look in that man’s face, and, sir, I can not do it.” With those pure, searching eyes upon him, he could not “do this great wickedness, and sin against God.” HIS INSPIRING PRESENCE BROUGHT SUCCESS
All this is but the faintest image and the poorest parable of what Jesus Christ can be to them that put their trust in Him and make Him their real friend. Here are the words of another living man who speaks of the truthfulness of the above statement. He says: “I can only speak my own experience. I am not talking theology or philosophy. I know what I am saying; and I can point to the places where I should have fallen if I had not been able to rely for guidance upon something better than a commandment or deduction, but the pure, calm, heroic image of Jesus confronted me, and I succeeded. I have no doubt as to what He would have done. Through Him I did not doubt what I ought to do.”471 The friendship of Christ will never fail us. As for human friends, the following lines tell us how unstable they sometimes are: “Go search for friends.
You’re sure to find some
Who charm by being new;
But years must pass,
And troubles come,
Ere you can prove them true.” We remember the wail of the psalmist, “Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me.” And again: “It was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: . . . but it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company.” Ps. 41:9; 55:12-14. Such broken friendships strew many lives. But the friendship of Jesus will never fail us. “Love Him,” says Thomas a Kempis, “love Him, and keep Him for thy friend who, when all go away, will not reproach thee, nor suffer thee to perish at the last.” How can we make the friendship of Christ our own? How can it be truly realized? The answer to this question is found in the text at the beginning of this article. “Henceforth,” says Christ, “I call you not servants.” You see we take Him first as our Master, and then He takes us as His friends; and so, as some one has said, “through the door of discipleship, we enter into friendship.” Thus we can not realize the full, real friendship of Christ until we are willing to yield all to Him. “Ye are My friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.” John 15:14. It was thus that Abraham became the “friend of God.” See James 2:20-23. And Jesus, this Friend of all friends, has given His life for His friends. Then let us yield all to Him. O that from our hearts the cry might go up: “Nay, but I yield, I yield.
I can hold out no more.
I sink, by dying loved compelled,
And own Thee conqueror.”