Jesus famously told His disciples, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13).” Jesus demonstrated that His disciples were truly His friends when He laid down His life for them by going to the cross.
Last week I wrote about friendship with Jesus, looking at the Lord’s words in John 15:14. But what is a friend? How do we define it? The dictionary explains a friend as being “a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard,” but I would rather focus on the original language.
The Greek word that is translated as friend is philos. You may well have heard a sermon about the different kinds of love in the New Testament, where the pastor calls us to agape love, that self-sacrificing love that is a decision, not a feeling. One of the other Greek words for love is phileo, which comes from the same word translated here as friend.
This describes that brotherly kind of love. In fact, its where the city Philadelphia gets its name—the city of brotherly love. When Jesus said He calls His followers His friends, He was saying He has a tender affection for us. He did not call us as acquaintances, but friends.
Are you a friend of Jesus? Remember, this is conditional. In v.14 Jesus said the word if. You are my friends if you do what I command you.” This is not about doing enough good to go to heaven, but about being a healthy relationship with the Lord. If you do all the things your friend hates, are you really friends?
John the Baptist used this same word friend to describe the relationship of the groom and the best man (John 3:29). When a groom picks his best man, he doesn’t flip a coin or draw names out of a hat; he picks his closest companion, the one he knows he can always count on. That is the same word Jesus used to describe His disciples, and by extension, all of us today who trust in and follow Him.
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