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A Tender Friend Is Knocking at the Door, and We Only Have One Job
Friend to Sinners
One category in which to think about the heart of Christ is that of friendship. His heart binds him to us as our never-failing friend.
What kind of person does Jesus enjoy befriending? We find out when we hear his enemies making fun of him. They ridicule him as “a friend of tax collectors and sinners!”—that is, a friend of the most horrible kinds of people we can think of (Matt. 11:19).
The crowds call him this as an accusation. But for those of us who know ourselves to be sinners, the label “friend of sinners” is a deep comfort.
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 avoid them. But Jesus offers them the surprise of welcome. Of friendship.
The Heart of Jesus
Dane Ortlund
Featuring short, easy-to-read chapters and helpful explanations, this simplified edition of Gentle and Lowly takes readers into the depths of Christ’s tender heart for sinners and sufferers.
What he is really doing, at bottom, is pulling them into his heart.
Consider your own relationships.
The line of who your friends are could be drawn in varying places, like circles getting smaller and smaller on a dartboard, narrowing in to a bull’s-eye. There are some people in our lives whose names we know, but they’re not friends. Others are closer to the middle; we hang out sometimes, and we like them, but we don’t have deep affection for them. Continuing to move toward the center, some of us are blessed to have a particularly close friend or two, someone who really knows us and “gets” us. It might be a husband or wife who is our closest earthly friend. If you’re too young to be married, maybe you have a best friend, someone you just love being with every chance you get.
Even walking through this brief thought experiment, of course, is painful for many of us. We realize 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 anything? For many of us, the answer, sadly, is no one.
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 ugly, how obedient or disobedient, we presently are.
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Won’t most of us admit that even with our best friends, we don’t feel fully comfortable divulging everything about our lives? We like them, and even love them, and go on vacation with them, and sing their praises to others—but we don’t really, at the deepest heart level, entrust ourselves to them.
But what if you had a friend at the center of the bull’s-eye of your relationship circle, whom you knew would never raise his eyebrows at what you shared with him? Even the worst parts of you?
All our human friendships have a limit to what they can handle. 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?
Consider Jesus in Revelation 3. There he says to a group of Christians who are “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked” (Rev. 3:17): “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door”—what will Jesus do?—“I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20).
Jesus wants to be with you. He wants to come in to you— wretched, pitiable, poor you—and enjoy meals together. Spend time with you. Deepen the relationship. He enjoys your presence, as you are.
In Jesus Christ, we are given a friend who will always enjoy rather than refuse our presence.
We should not overly domesticate Jesus here. He is not just any friend. A few chapters earlier in Revelation we see a portrayal of Christ so overwhelming to John that he falls down, unable to move (Rev. 1:12–17). He is a majestic Lord.
But we need to draw strength and comfort from his posture in Revelation 3 and see his desire to spend time with us. He isn’t waiting for you to trigger his heart. He is already standing at the door, knocking, wanting to come in to you.
Let Christ In
What’s our job?
It is to let him in. Let him be that friend you deeply desire. Jesus tells us, “You are my friends” (John 15:15). We did not fill out a “friendship with Jesus” application, and now await his answer. He himself created the friendship. He is walking with us through our difficult lives.
Jonathan Edwards preached that the whole reason Jesus came down from heaven and walked this earth was “that he might be near to you and might be your companion.”1 Companion is another word for friend, but it specifically speaks of 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 companion.
Jesus Christ’s heart for us means that he will be our never-failing friend no matter what friends we do or do not enjoy on earth. He offers us a friendship that gets underneath the pain of our loneliness. While that pain does not go away, we can still rejoice our way through our loneliness, because we have Jesus. He walks with us through every moment.
He knows the pain of being betrayed by a friend, but he will never betray us. He will not even so much as coolly welcome us. That is not who he is. That is not his heart.
Notes:
- Jonathan Edwards, “The Spirit of the True Saints Is a Spirit of Divine Love,” in The Glory and Honor of God: Volume 2 of the Previously Unpublished Sermons of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Michael McMullen (Nashville, TN: Broadman, 2004), 339.
This article is adapted from The Heart of Jesus: How He Really Feels about You by Dane Ortlund.
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