February 23, 2020, | Pastor Nathan Elms 1st Church CLT
Progress only begins when we perceive our incompleteness…
The Greek philosophers gave us five loves, the bible only accepts four of them:
• Storge: Affection Love
• Phileo: Friendship Love (today)
• Eros: Romantic Love.
• Agape: Divine Love.
What is the fifth?
Epithumia: lust, desire. (the bible does not accept this as love)
In this series we are going to talk about Phileo…
We need real friendship … which is much more meaningful than common interests.
We need real friendship … which is much more meaningful than common interests.
Beautiful picture of spiritual friendship: When the apostle Paul was writing his last letter, just before his execution in Rome, he described his situation to Timothy.
“Only Luke is with me” (2 Timothy 4:11). (Luke probably cared for Paul in prison since ancient prisons usually did not really feed inmates.)
That statement hints at the close friendship between Luke and Paul.
Luke was born a Greek in Antioch and became a physician before being converted. After his conversion we know that he joined Paul, Silas and Timothy in Troas on Paul’s second missionary journey. In the book of Acts Luke described being shipwrecked with Paul on the island of Malta. The book of Acts ends with Paul being jailed in Rome with his friend Timothy close at hand.
After Paul’s death, Luke went home to Greece where he wrote his two-volume history of Jesus and the early church—the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts. His second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, is mostly about Paul’s missionary journeys. In four passages, Luke includes himself in the story, using the pronoun “we” to narrate various events. Paul never had a better friend.
It’s easy to overlook the importance of having a friend who isn’t in your life to compete with you, but is there to help complete you.
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Reasons you need to connect with friends:
Number one: It’s safer. It’s safer when you walk with others through life. There’s safety in numbers. It’s a whole lot less risky. Ecc 4:10 But woe to him who is alone when he falls, For he has no one to help him up.
Second, support changes everything. It keeps you from giving up. When other people are walking with you, they keep you going. There’s an old Zambian proverb, ‘When you run alone, you run fast. But when you run together, you run far.’ The life that you live is not a 50-yard dash, it is a marathon and you want to run far.
Have you ever seen geese flying in V-formation? The reason they do that is that they can fly farther in that formation because it creates an updraft and they don’t get as tired when they fly together. And when we fly, when we walk, when we run through life together, we’re a whole lot less tired. It’s safer. It’s supportive.
