We’re going to talk today about spiritual
workout partners to keep your heart young. I want you to think of a childhood friend. Hopefully this is someone that you became friends with before you were fifteen years old. I want you to think about what they’re like –
how smart they are, what their politics are, what their spiritual faith is like, what are their lifestyle choices, what is their taste in clothes and amusement and music, where they are living – everything you can think of. Now
the question is – if you met that person for the first time today – would you become friends?
I think that one of the biggest unsolved problems in American society is that we are separated and alienated from each other in our little apartments. Each society has its destructive issues, and the Yankee ingenuity upon which America is based emphasizes independence and competition. It ignores the consequence which is loneliness.
In childhood, we are much more tolerant of potential friends. I ate lunch in high school with the same group of people every day. We even sat in the same chairs at the same table. Lessee, Bob was normal and went on to Clarkson and became an electrical engineer and I lost contact with him. I think I would still like him. But Bill went on to a fundamentalist Bible college and is on his third marriage and likes guns and lives in the woods. And Steve is angry that Bush is so – liberal. Steve is still one of my close friends even though we can’t talk politics. But if we met today, who knows if any of us would choose each other as friends.
So many people find that the friendship pool decreases throughout life. For many people, its no longer a pool, its more of a puddle. My mother said last week, ‘I have outlived my friends.’
God took some adults in the Bible and created bonds of friendship where none existed. Whether you are a teen and lonely or 80 and lonely, if you need more friends, it can happen to you. It is part of God’s plan for you and we’re going to look at this Scripture today and help you get started with more spiritual workout partners to keep you young at heart.
You will live longer if you feel that there are others around you who are your friends. I had my first prayer partner when I was a freshman in college. I had never heard the term before. Someone came back from a summer leadership training and took a small group of us through his notes. It was one of those moments that lasts the rest of your life. We were crowded together in a small room in the student union and Max ready from his notebook and one of the orders was to get prayer partners going throughout our Christian group.
If you follow this message and apply it this week, your first reaction will likely be discouragement. There is no one that you see in the church who is close enough to you and all your opinions of life to be a suitable prayer partner. That is the situation of the 12 disciples that Jesus chose. Do you suppose that they chose each other? Actually, Jesus chose them and then they had to get along. Possibly James and John liked each other because they were brothers. Do all brothers like each other? Peter was impetuous and sounds like a pain in the neck. He was the one who chopped the guard’s ear off the last night. Just what you want in a close friend is someone who can be counted on to fly off the handle in a crisis. Judas must have been an experiment of Jesus and we know that he was a zealot. As my father would say, ‘Good grief, how can I be a Christian with this fool to put up with?’ Simon was a Cananean so his ways were not quite the same as the others. If you grew up in a an area without good transportation, then you know that even in the same country, there will be strong regional differences.
This was the group that Jesus assembled into the apostles. They loved each other after they were chosen, not before. And there is the secret. I believe that we have far greater capacity to develop friendships than we give ourselves credit for if we are Christians.
There is a power in prayer and Bible study together that draws people toward friendship. The biggest barrier in our church is ethnicity. Almost everyone believes that their close friends and even their mates have to come from their culture. I want to sympathize with the need to enjoy similar traditions and common language. And I feel like one of my spiritual gifts is to be a bridge in a diverse situation. So I don’t want to look at my spiritual gift and say that this should be easy for everyone. But if you are feeling lonely, then looking around the church and saying that I can only look for a friend from my cultural group reduces the friendship pool considerably. The group of leaders in Acts 6 [Acts 6:5] What they said pleased the whole community, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, together with Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch. They chose leaders intentionally to represent that Hellenist and Jewish cultures and then assumed that the working of the Holy Spirit would draw people together.
In Acts 13, [Acts 13:1] Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a member of the court of Herod the ruler, and Saul. The leadership is even more diverse with a Roman, an African, a Greek, a Roman, and a Hellenist. The Biblical pattern does not ignore our wondrous diversity, but it is not the only story working in our lives. There is more spiritual power for life out there than you are claiming.
Age is another barrier if you only look for people in your age group. Peter was married and still joined the apostles and I assume that some of the others were single.
As our leader, Max, read from his notes, I realized that I wanted to find a prayer partner. I couldn’t see anybody in the group that I liked enough and I held off for several days, but thinking about it. Fatal move. While I was thinking, someone came up to me and asked me to be their prayer partner. People, it was the last person I would have picked. He was a fundamentalist, and he always smelled of boiled eggs. Now he was the same age as I was. We were both single. He was the same race and culture. And I still wasn’t satisfied. You see how this friendship thing works. If we don’t fight it from an early age, you will go thru life straining and draining your friendship pool.
So I said yes, I’ll pray. What else can you say when someone asks you to pray? And believe me, if you want to get a friend and you use this method, you’re going to get one just like Steve did. Once you ask someone to pray with you, what other answer are they going to give other than yes? People in bars should use this question. Instead of asking somebody for their phone number and getting turned down, just go up and ask them if you could meet later in the week for a word of prayer.
Steve and I met three times a week for the next two years and we became solid friends. I have had several other prayer partners over the years and it brings a rich depth to any relationship that nothing else provides.
And so I come this morning as a witness, just like Max did in our college group 25 years ago. We all ought to have a spiritual partner. Maybe its getting together once a week. Most people can’t do three times a week. Maybe you’ll pray on the phone or even by chatting on the internet. But this is what God wants in our Christian life.
I thought about collecting names and starting a program. But there is a healthy role for each of us in ministry. I decided to come as a witness and simply say that this needs doing and it is possible. About 250 people regularly attend this church at some point during the month. That gives you plenty to choose from. And if God is speaking to your heart, then I want you to go out and ask someone. And a month from now, I want to ask and see how it worked.
