Jesus Friend of Sinners

Intro

In the Bible Christ is presented to us in many aspects—as a Judge, a Saviour, a Counsellor; as Brother, Prophet, Priest, and King. In this passage He stands forth in the light and garb of a Friend - His heart takes shape as our never-failing friend.

This was a common way to understand Christ more in past generations than today.

But if we allow the world around us in our present cultural moment to dictate to us the significance of friendship, we not only lose out on a reality vital to human flourishing at the horizontal level; we lose out, even worse, on enjoying the friend- ship of Christ at a vertical level.

But if we allow the world around us in our present cultural moment to dictate to us the significance of friendship, we not only lose out on a reality vital to human flourishing at the horizontal level; we lose out, even worse, on enjoying the friendship of Christ at a vertical level.

In Matthew 11:19 Jesus quotes his accusers as contemptibly calling him “a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” (that is, a friend of the most despicable kinds of sinners known in that culture). And as is often the case in the Gospels—such as when the demons say, “I know who you are—the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24), or when Satan himself acknowledges Christ to be “the Son of God” (Luke 4:9)—it is not his disciples but his antagonists who most clearly perceive who he is. Though the crowds call him the friend of sinners as an indictment, the label is one of unspeakable comfort for those who know themselves to be sinners. That Jesus is friend to sinners is only contemptible to those who feel themselves not to be in that category.

What does it mean that Christ is a friend to sinners? At the very least, it means that he enjoys spending time with them. It also means that they feel welcome and comfortable around him. Notice the passing line that starts off a series of parables in Luke: “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him” (Luke 15:1). The very two groups of people whom Jesus is accused of befriending in Matthew 11 are those who can’t stay away from him in Luke 15. They are at ease around him. They sense something different about him. Others hold them at arms’ length, but Jesus offers the enticing intrigue of fresh hope. What he is really doing, at bottom, is pulling them into his heart.

Consider your own relational circle.

There are some people in our lives whose name we know, but they’re really on the periphery of our affections. Others are closer to the middle, but perhaps not intimate friends.

Continuing to move toward the centre, some of us are blessed to have a particularly close friend or two, someone who really knows us and “gets” us, someone for whom it is simply a mutual delight to be in each other’s company.

To many of us, God has given a spouse as our closest earthly friend. Even walking through this brief thought experiment, of course, ignites pockets of mental pain.

Some of us are forced to acknowledge that we do not have one true friend, someone we could go to with any problem knowing we would not be turned away.

Who in our lives do we feel safe with—really safe, safe enough to open up about everything?

Here is the promise of the gospel and the message of the whole Bible: In Jesus Christ, we are given a friend who will always enjoy rather than refuse our presence.

This is a companion whose embrace of us does not strengthen or weaken depending on how clean or unclean, how attractive or revolting, how faithful or fickle, we presently are. The friendliness of his heart for us subjectively is as fixed and stable as is the declaration of his justification of us objectively.

What if you had a friend at the centre of your relationship circle, whom you knew would never raise his eyebrows at what you share with him, even the worst parts of you? All our human friendships have a limit to what they can withstand. But what if there were a friend with no limit? No ceiling on what he would put up with and still want to be with you? “All the kinds and degrees of friendship meet in Christ,” wrote Sibbes.

Consider the depiction of the risen Christ in Revelation 3. There he says (to a group of Christians who are “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked,” v. 17): “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door”—what will Christ do?—“I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (v. 20). Jesus wants to come in to you—wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, naked you—and enjoy meals together. Spend time with you. Deepen the acquaintance. With a good friend, you don’t need to constantly fill in all gaps of silence with words. You can just be warmly present together, quietly relishing each other’s company. “Mutual communion is the soul of all true friendship,” wrote Goodwin, “and a familiar converse with a friend has the greatest sweetness in it.”

We should not overly domesticate Jesus here. He is not just any friend. A few chapters earlier in Revelation we see a depiction of Christ so overwhelming to John that he falls down, immobilized (1:12–16). But neither should we dilute the human- ness, the sheer relational desire, clearly present in these words from the mouth of the risen Christ himself. He isn’t waiting for you to trigger his heart; he is already standing at the door, knocking, wanting to come in to you. What’s our job? “Our duty,” says Sibbes, “is to accept of Christ’s inviting of us. What will we do for him, if we will not feast with him?”

But not only does a true friend pursue you; he allows you to pursue him, and he opens himself up to you without holding anything back.

Have you ever noticed the particular point Jesus is making when he calls his disciples “friends” in John 15?

On the verge of going to the cross, Jesus tells them, “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” (John 15:15).

Jesus’s friends are those to whom he has opened up his deepest purposes. Jesus says that he does not channel over to his disciples some of what the Father has told him; he tells them everything. There is nothing held back. He lets them completely in. Jesus’s friends are welcome to come to him. Jonathan Edwards preached:

“God in Christ allows such little, poor creatures as you are to come to him, to love communion with him, and to maintain a communication of love with him. You may go to God and tell him how you love him and open your heart and he will accept of it. . . . He is come down from heaven and has taken upon him the human nature in purpose, that he might be near to you and might be, as it were, your companion”

Companion is another word for friend, but it specifically connotes the idea of someone who goes with you on a journey. As we make our pilgrimage through this wide wilderness of a world, we have a steady, constant friend.

The heart of Christ not only heals our feelings of rejection with his embrace, and not only corrects our sense of his harshness with a view of his gentleness, and not only changes our assumption of his aloofness into an awareness of his sympathy with us, but it also heals our aloneness with his sheer companionship.

Richard Sibbes reflects on what it means that Jesus Christ is our friend. Particularly striking is the common theme as he draws out several facets of the friendship of Christ to his people. That common theme is mutuality; in other words, friendship is a two-way relationship of joy, comfort, and openness, that of peers, as distinct from a one-way relationship, such as in that of king to subject or parent to child. To be sure, Christ is indeed our ruler, our authority, the one to whom all allegiance and obedience are reverently due.

Sibbes reminds us of that explicitly as he reflects on the friendship of Christ (“As he is our friend, so he is our king.”). But equally, and perhaps less obvious or intuitive to us, the condescension of God in the person of his Son means that he approaches us on our own terms and befriends us for both his and our mutual delight. Consider the way Sibbes speaks of Christ’s friendship with us:

“In friendship there is a mutual consent, a union of judgment and affections.

There is a mutual sympathy in the good and ill one of another. . . .

There is liberty which is the life of friendship;

there is a free intercourse between friends, a free opening of secrets.

So here Christ opens his secrets to us, and we to him. . . .

In friendship, there is mutual solace and comfort one in another.

Christ delights himself in his love to the church, and his church delights herself in her love to Christ. . . . In friendship there is a mutual honour and respect one of another.”

Do you see the common strand? Notice the word “mutual” or the phrase “one another” throughout these various facets of Christ’s friendship. The point is that he is with us, as one of us, sharing in our life and experience, and the love and comfort that are mutually enjoyed between friends are likewise enjoyed between Christ and us.

In short, he relates to us as a person. Jesus is not the idea of friendship, abstractly; he is an actual friend.

A friend of publicans and sinners:—

I. OUR LORD PROVED HIMSELF IN HIS OWN TIME TO BE THE FRIEND OF SINNERS.

1. He came among them.

2. He sought their good by His ministry.

3. He showed His patience toward them by the contradiction He endured from them.

II. WHAT CHRIST IS DOING NOW FOR SINNERS. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

I. CHRIST A FRIEND. In a friend we anticipate finding sincere attachment, affectionate concern to promote our welfare, freedom in fellowship and communication, unflinching fidelity.

II. THE DUTY WE OWE TO HIM. Friendliness, gratitude, fellowship, integrity, constancy,

III. THE ADVANTAGES RESULTING FROM THE PERFORMANCE OF IT. The friendship of Christ affords rich consolation, exhaustless supplies, requisite instruction, eternal inheritance. Address the enemies of Christ, the undecided, and His friends

I. CONSTANCY.

II. IMPARTIALITY. Not a friend only to the good.

III. SYMPATHY.

IV. THE SPIRIT OF HELPFULNESS. Christ was the friend of those who were morally all wrong. It is to those whose lives have been a failure, whose natures, spiritually considered, are all in ruins, that Jesus comes in the spirit of friendly assistance. (W. H. H. Murray.)

he angel told Joseph, “You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). As Jesus himself put it, “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). He came to rescue sinners, people like us.

When he came to seek and save that which was lost, he didn’t come garbed in special protective clothing, like a scientist suited up to handle bubonic plague samples in a laboratory.

At the beginning of his life, Jesus came into this world naked, unprotected, not separated from sinners but descended from a long line of them.

During his lifetime, he was likewise surrounded by sinners. This was the way that people knew Jesus: as the friend of tax collectors and sinners (Matt. 11:19). If he kept shocking company while he was alive, Jesus also kept scandalous company when he died. He was flanked by two thieves at his crucifixion (Matt. 27:38).

Thus Jesus went out of this world the same way he had arrived, naked and unprotected.

Why would the Lord of the universe expose himself to such pain and humiliation? It is because that is how he would save sinners.

He could not save them by staying at a safe distance from them, but only by coming alongside them and identifying with them. In order to save them, Jesus had to be their friend and ultimately perform the greatest act of friendship there is: laying down his life for them.

Jesus gave up his life and went down into death, so that he might pay the price that their sins had earned. Our sins have paid our admission price into eternal separation from God; in one word, hell.

Another way to think of it is that we, with the wages of our sin, have purchased a travel ticket to hell. What Jesus did on the cross was to take that ticket right out of our hands. Instead, he gave us the ticket that he had earned by his righteous life, a ticket that will admit the bearer into God’s presence. He switched places with us, going where we deserved to go, while sending us to the destination he had merited.

The love of Jesus is thus far greater even than the love of Ruth for Naomi. He left his place in heaven, not just the greener fields of Moab. He left intimate fellowship with the Father for the pain of this fallen world.

I don’t if you ever had to go into one of those portacabin toilets

Jesus didn’t merely risk his reputation for us; he bore being made of no reputation, despised and rejected by men. At the moment of his greatest pain and rejection on the cross, however, there was no nearer redeemer to rescue him. There was only the darkness closing around him on the cross, as he cried out in the agony of the pains of hell, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).

What awesome love Jesus demonstrated for us on the cross! Truly, it was amazing love because it was shown not to the lovely but to the very unlovely—to sinners.

In Jesus, God’s love came to people like us, those who have repeatedly said and thought and done things that we ought not to have said or thought or done. Some of our sins are large and some relatively small, but each and every one of them would be enough to condemn us for all eternity.

Do you know that love of Jesus today? Do you know the love that still reaches out to outsiders like the love of Boaz reached to Ruth? Then praise God for it! There are many around us who don’t know that love yet.

They are still trying to earn their own passage to heaven, still trying to switch the destination on their tickets through their own merits. They still think that somehow they can be good enough, or that God’s standards will in the end prove to be flexible enough to let them in. It is a terrible delusion.

Their very religious acts will testify against them, because they were done to justify themselves and build up their own image, not to glorify God. When such people are doing well in trying to live a good life, their efforts leave them secretly a little impressed at how wonderful they are. When they are struggling, their failing efforts leave them angry and despairing. Either way, though, their eyes are fixed on themselves as their only hope in life and death.

There is no room in Jesus’ kingdom for people who are impressed with themselves, or whose eyes are fixed on their own efforts.

People who have the world all figured out and computed, with their little lives controlled and organized, find no place in God’s plan, just as he has no place in their calculations. The door to God’s kingdom is open only to those who know they have nothing to offer God. It is open only to sinners that know their state, to those desperate enough to try anything, like Tamar, to those who have utterly despaired of making any sense out of life, like Naomi. It is open to those like some in the early church in Corinth: former idolaters, fornicators, prostitutes, homosexuals, thieves, slanderers, and drunkards (1 Cor. 6:9–11). These are the people whom God welcomes through Christ, for he is the friend of sinners. Whoever you are, no matter what you have done, there is room for you to kneel at the foot of the cross.

God doesn’t leave us as he found us, to be sure. When we open our hearts to God, we will discover that he has already been at work in our lives, and he will continue to be at work in us until we are unrecognisable changed. God’s grace has enormous transforming power. Yet that grace works only in the lives of those whose eyes are opened to the desperateness of their need for salvation, who know that they can do nothing except cling to Christ.

Oh Jesus, friend of sinners

Open our eyes to world at the end of our pointing fingers

Let our hearts be led by mercy

Help us reach with open hearts and open doors

Oh Jesus, friend of sinners, break our hearts for what breaks yours

Jesus, friend of sinners, we have strayed so far away We cut down people in your name but the sword was never ours to swing Jesus, friend of sinners, the truth's become so hard to see The world is on their way to You but they're tripping over me Always looking around but never looking up I'm so double minded A plank eyed saint with dirty hands and a heart divided

Jesus, friend of sinners, the one who's writing in the sand Make the righteous turn away and the stones fall from their hands Help us to remember we are all the least of these Let the memory of Your mercy bring Your people to their knees No one knows what we're for only against when we judge the wounded What if we put down our signs crossed over the lines and loved like You did

You love every lost cause; you reach for the outcast For the leper and the lame; they're the reason that You came Lord I was that lost cause and I was that outcast But you died for sinners just like me, a grateful leper at Your feet

Oh Jesus, friend of sinners Open our eyes to world at the end of our pointing fingers Let our hearts be led by mercy Help us reach with open hearts and open doors Oh Jesus, friend of sinners, break our hearts for what breaks Yours