Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: I ran to the deep place where nobody goes and found him waiting there. "Where have you been?" he asked me. "Well, I've been in the shallow place where everyone lives," I replied. And I knew he knew. He just wanted me to admit I'd been too busy being busy. "I'm running out," I began. "Well, of course," he said. "I haven't seen you in a while."

And he sat down on the steps of my soul in the deep place where nobody goes and smiled at me. An angel sang and a shaft of light chased away the shadows and brightened my daily day. And I smiled back. "I'm such a fool." "Shh," he said, putting his finger on my lips. And he touched my hurried heart and startled it, took a deep breath, and skidded to a near stop.

And my spirit nestled into nearness in the deep place where nobody goes. And my soul spoke then and he answered with words beyond music. Where on earth had I been while heaven waited? Such a grace. Amen.

All right, now then. As I thought about this theme, I thought, what am I going to do on the theme of friendship? I'm going to talk about God's friends, okay? And I'm going to talk about our friends. Very simple. Because as I thought about it, I thought we have to get out of this me-ism. So let's change the focus. Let's turn this back on its head and ask a question: what is God looking for in a friend?

What's he looking for? He is looking for friends. That's a concept that blows my mind anyway. That God would choose—he doesn't need anything—but he would choose not to need a friend, but to choose a friend. In fact, he said to his friends in the context in John's Gospel, when he was talking about "You're my friends. I don't call you slaves, I call you my friends." He said, "I've chosen you" in that context. "I've chosen you as a friend in order that you might go and bring forth fruit and that your fruit might remain."

So what's God looking for in a friend? He's looking for a friend that he has chosen in order that they might join him in his mission, in his redemptive plan. That we might go and find more friends to introduce to our friend so that he can be their friend. That's what he's looking for. He's looking for friends here to make friends in order that we might introduce our friends to this friend and then he can become their friends too.

And as I began to think about this, I thought, well, the easiest way is to do a great big Bible study and find out what the Bible says about God's friends. And when I began this, I just started very simply saying, does it literally use that word? Does the Bible tell me God has friends? And I was so excited to discover there are many verses—and we're going to look at some of these—where God says, "He's my friend."

So then I looked at these people and said, what did God appreciate about these people in his friendship with them? And so very simply, I'm just going to step you through this. I don't know if you've noticed how fascinated we are with the lifestyles of the rich and famous. All of us—maybe we say oh we're not, but we really are. And we want to know how much money they make, we want to know how many friends they have, how many rooms in their mansions, where they go on vacation, how much does it cost.

Do they have friends? Has that thought ever occurred to you, does this famous person have a friend? I mean, have you ever wondered what the friends of someone who's rich and famous are like? What about famous people, do they only have famous friends? Like Lady Di, was Fergie her friend? Was she her only friend? Did she keep her ordinary friends from her school days?

What about Brett Favre? Who does he play golf with? Does he stick to his football buddies when he wants a friend? Then there's Mother Teresa. What did she do if she ever took a day off scraping dying people off the streets of Calcutta and giving them a dignified death in her arms? Did she have a special sister in that group who'd come and just sit and talk, laugh, hug, touch, listen?

What brought these famous people and their friends together? When did they meet? What did they have in common? How long had they known each other? What did they do? Where did they go? What do they enjoy? What do they talk about? And on the darker side, did they ever let each other down? Fall out, make up, hurt each other, betray each other, disappoint each other?

Well, what about the most famous being of all, God? Do you ever wonder what his friends are like? I began to wonder. Does God even have friends? Is he too remote and distant? We talk of him verbally as being present. Secretly, as Lewis said, we think of him as being absent.

And so, a friend is present. You can have a long-distance friend, but somehow there has to be connection, communion, fellowship, whether it's over a distance or not. So let's start with Adam, God's lost friend. God is looking for a friend to forgive.

I think everybody would say, oh God wouldn't be wanting me as his best friend. I can imagine him wanting her or him or them, but not me. I'd be way down the list if he had to pick five. Right. Well, imagine if you're not even saved.

And yet, God is looking for the lost. Adam was his first friend. In fact, he was his only friend. He didn't have too many to pick from. He was all God had. God and Adam. Then he made Eve. And God in grace chose to interact as friend to friend. And this phrase that came through to me as I began to study this subject—walking, talking—comes out over and over again. Friends walk and talk. It's a lovely picture.

I've asked some of you in the course of this, what do you do with your friend? Well, "She's my walking friend," some have said. "I go walking with her." And "She's my shopping friend," and "She's my fun friend." And we have friends that sort of fall into categories sometimes, don't we? And we're never fortunate enough to get all of them wrapped up in one person.

But many, many of us here in America walk. And that's a thing I love it that Christian women do together. She's my walking friend. We walk and we talk and we talk and we walk. I have friends like that. And the picture of Adam and God in the garden is walking and talking, talking and walking.

And then, of course, one terrible day, he couldn't find them when he called for the walk. "Where are you?" This wasn't to say God didn't know where they were. He demanded an answer because, of course, we can't hide behind some tree in the garden of our wrongdoing and expect God not to see right through to our guilty hearts. "Where are you?" he said. And then, "What have you done?"

And something ruptured the friendship of God and man. How incredibly stupid of Adam and Eve. But then all sin is incredibly stupid. And sin amounts to a betrayal of trust. That's what sin is. It's a betrayal of trust. Of total dependence on God. And that's what happened in the garden. "I'll be my own God. I'll answer my own prayers. I don't need you anymore." And friends became strangers.

Worse, friends became enemies. And Adam and Eve betrayed their creator friend, God. Disappointed him, hurt him beyond belief, in fact broke his heart. Not that God didn't know this was going to happen in advance, but he didn't—if I might reverently say it—experience it until then. That moment in time that he had created. God felt it. Felt the betrayal of his friend.

It's a bit like knowing in your head that water is very cold, icy. But when you jump into it, you experience what you know. You feel it. My sister and I were brought up in our early years on a houseboat on a lake called Windermere in the English Lake District because we had been bombed out in the war. And one night that happened, my father happened to be home on leave, threw us into the back of the car and like the whole of our town Liverpool, we ran.

And there's not too many places in a country as big as Tennessee to run to that's surrounded by water. And so he took us near Scotland, up to the English Lake District. And of course, because everybody was running away from the bombs, there was nowhere to go and nowhere to stay. And so my dad had three days leave and he bought a boat, a little houseboat. And he put my mother, my sister, and myself on it, and he went back to the war.

And so here we were for the first time in my life. I remember not having to get up and run down to the shelter when the air raid sirens began. And actually could sleep in my little bunk and not hear the carnage around and sit there petrified waiting to be obliterated by a bomb. We loved it, you can imagine. I was five or six, and my sister was eight or nine. I can't remember how old we were, but that's what happens when you get older, I can't remember how old I am.

And here we were in this houseboat. Well, it was tiny, and there was nowhere to wash except the lake. And if you know anything about England, we live in the cold and the wet and the ice in winter. It was winter. And there was a thin film of ice and my mother just said, "There's nothing else for it, over you go every day before school." And we would just go and literally break that ice in the winter.

And we'd be out in a minute, you know, boom, in, out. Oh, blue. And she'd rub us down and then we'd get in the little dinghy and she'd row us to shore. She was very brave, my mom. She couldn't swim. She had an incredible fear of water, and she lived on that water with us for quite a while before we found accommodation.

And so here we were, and I remember the first day she said to my sister and me, "Go on over the side." And we looked at her and said, "You must be kidding, Mom." Well, we didn't because we weren't American, we said, "What? Excuse me?" And she said, "There's nothing for it, go on over." Now, I looked at the water and knew it was icy. I knew it all up here. But I tell you, when I jumped in it, then I knew in reality.

And that's what happened when Adam sinned to God's heart. And it says in Genesis, as the whole hellish thing began, and until there wasn't anybody but Noah and his family who knew anything of God, he saw into the hearts of man and saw that every intent of the heart was only evil all the time. And the hardest words in the Bible for me even to tell you: it grieved him at his heart he had ever made us. That's how much it hurt.

And God felt it. He went in the water. Well, at that point, God was quite within his rights, don't you think, to say, forget it. I'll either scrunch the whole thing up and make another world, start all over again, another Adam and Eve, which actually Lewis in his first adult trilogy addresses. He has this concept that's what God does—it's a fabulous book.

But he didn't do that, did he? Knowing that the redemption of the race would be necessary, he had plans. He already had plans in place. And so God began to look for his lost friend. He didn't look for one of Adam's descendants first and say, well, I'll start with the next generation. He went after Adam. He said, "I want him back." And he was intent on winning that friendship back. On his terms, of course.

And Adam, this foolish man, became God's friend again because God forgave him. First sacrifice we have a hint at in Genesis is that God clothed them with skins. How could that be? Someone had to die for Adam and Eve to be clothed. An animal had to be given. And here God began his pictures and his symbols and his imagery. And it was all about winning his lost friend back. God's forgiven friend, Adam.

And then as I began to think forward, the stories of some of the people that God chased into his arms began to tumble off the pages. And I found that there were friends of God before Abraham, of whom it says in the Bible, he was the friend of God. So there's an obvious one. I mean, I had him on my list before I began looking for anybody else. Adam was the friend of God, so I knew I had to look at him down the road.

But there were friends of God even before Abraham. Enoch, for example. What is God looking for in a friend? God is looking for a special friend. A friend to enjoy. Not just a friend to forgive, to help, to support, to comfort, to empower—all of that—but just to enjoy. A friend for his sake. That's what he wants.

And some of you say I can't be an Abraham, I can't be a Moses, I can't be an Enoch. But couldn't you just enjoy him? That's what he's looking for. In my little reading, that's what he's looking for. "I haven't seen you in a while." Can you hear that? He loves you. He wants you close. He wants a special friend.

And Enoch was that man. A special, special friend. A friend to enjoy. Enoch, here's the picture, walked with God. They went walks together. Talk and walk. "I'll call for you in the morning," says God. And off they went, walking and talking. In fact, it's an incredible story. When Enoch had lived, Genesis 5:21, 65 years, he became the father of Methuselah, oldest man that ever lived on the earth. After he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years.

What a testimony. If this was about us, what would it say? Jill walked with God 56 days. Whatever. He walked with God 300 years! Yes! That's what he's looking for. Somebody to go walking with and enjoy and talk with. In fact, God enjoyed Enoch so much, this is how it happened. The Bible says that they were walking and talking, talking and walking, and laughing and loving and just getting deep where it really mattered and not having to say anything at all.

Because Lewis says friendship, and his little book *The Four Loves*—every one of you should read that. *Four Loves*. In his book on friendship, "Storge" is the word that the Bible uses. You don't have to talk at all when you're real friends. You've got that friendship in your marriage? Have you ever just sat in front of the fire and there's no need? Lewis says all you do is just stir the fire. You don't need to talk because the longer you live with someone, the more you know them and the better you do and they know your thoughts.

Stuart and I are at that stage. It's fantastic. He doesn't need to say it, I know what he's thinking. He doesn't need me to verbalize what I'm thinking because we know each other so well and we just get up and stir the fire and just sit. Right. Do you do that with God? That's what he wants. "I haven't seen you in a while."

And Enoch knew it. And they went early in the morning, perhaps. I don't know when this happened, but they were walking and talking, talking and walking. And I have a feeling it was in the evening because it was getting late and it was time to go home and go to bed. And God said, "You know, Enoch, why don't you come home to my house tonight?" And he was not, for God took him. That's what he's looking for. God didn't even want a night to pass without his friend. And so they just went home together.

Oh, to have a relationship with God like that. But that's what he's looking for. And there isn't a woman in this room that cannot give him that sort of friendship. It's a choice. It's a choice. Enoch pursued God. God wants to see a heart that pants after him. Not this is, "Oh boy, it's my devotional time again. Get through this. I've got a long list." To pants after him. That looks at the watch and says, "Oh, I've got to stop. I've got to get up off my knees. How can I do this? I want to stay in the deep place where nobody goes and I don't want to go back to the shallow place where everybody lives. Not yet. Not now."

What is the temperature of your devotional life? God is looking for that sort of friendship from you, from every single one of you. And there isn't a list, number one, two, three, four, five. All of you are number one as far as he's concerned. Enoch, God's special friend. Job, I found, as I looked through that concordance to find the information that I was gathering for this study. I found that Job was God's hurting friend. He was a friend that needed comfort and succor and help.

And Job said about God, "My intercessor is my friend." There was the word! I got so excited. I found another friend that actually said he was God's friend. Now why? What was this friendship all about? What did God appreciate about Job? Well, he appreciated a lot of things about Job. Number one, he accepted testing. God appreciates that. Some of you have told me your stories while I've been here.

And I want to tell you God loves you so much because you have accepted the testing he's allowed to come into your life. You're trusting him. And God wants to kiss your cheek and say thank you. And Job accepted. Yes, he howled and yes, he hollered, but he accepted what God allowed.

His wife didn't. And remember, she'd lost 10 kids too. And a husband by the look of it, sitting on an ash heap outside the city. And her wealth and everything else. But she responded as an unbeliever responds. I have a series on Job, somebody was asking me that question. That's the answer, yes. And it's called *Triumph in Trouble*.

And as I tried to get hold of a very complicated book, I did get hold of one thing: that his wife responded as an unbeliever and he responded as a believer should. And what God is looking for is a right reaction to the things he allows to happen to his friends. "How could God allow this to happen to me? I'm his friend!" Well, Job said, "Shall we accept good from the hands of God and not evil?"

In other words, "I've had my hands open all my life," says God, and God has piled them with blessings and blessings. Even Satan said that, "Look at him, you've just blessed him and blessed him and blessed him." And then God has given him this trouble. And Job did not say, "I'm going to put my fist in the face of God. I will not close my hands. I will accept trouble as much as I accepted blessing. As a gift." Strange sort of gift, you say.

What's he trusting you with to respond properly to? God appreciated that about his hurting friend. And he asked for help. God loves that. Have you ever had a really good friend, human friend, and sometimes it's hard when you're a giver to receive help, right? But have you ever received help? Have you ever gone and said, "This is really hard for me to do, but I really need help." And you know what that makes you feel like if you're the one being asked? It's really neat. Oh good, she needs me, she wants me, she's asked me.

That's what God experiences. "Ask me," he says. "Just ask." In fact, Jesus said many times, "Why don't you ask? You have not because you ask not. You didn't tell me, you didn't come, I know what's going on, but ask me," he said. That was something God loved about Job. Are you hurting? You are in a wonderful position. God wants to be your very special friend. He's looking for hurting friends because he says we can grow in our friendship.

That's from God's point of view. He knows that if you let pain drive you to God instead of away from God, then you're going to be better friends at the end of it. So God appreciated that about Job. Thoroughly appreciated it.

Then of course, we go on to Abraham and he's the most obvious one, isn't he? Although Moses is a pretty big runner-up in my mind. God's courageous friend. A friend to trust. He was called God's friend. And there were many reasons I think that God appreciated Abraham. But I think he appreciated him because he put God first. He believed God, trusted, he leaned on God. God likes that in a friend. Lean. Go on. He won't fall over. Just lean.

And what God is looking for from his friends is less of this self-dependence and more of a God-dependence. And he loves that about his friends. Can you do that? It's not so hard. Just lean. And I think of Abraham and the friendship he had with God. I see this unselfishness as something God really appreciated in a friend. And I think of Abraham, what he did. He put God before his family. He put God before his wife. He put God before his children. He put God before his friends. He put God before himself.

And God really appreciates that in a friend. And he didn't have a friend in Abraham that kept coming saying "Give me, give me, give me, give me," and it was all one-sided friendship. Abraham said, "What's best for my friend, God? That's what I'm after and that's what I'm about. And if you look at my life, that's what you're going to see. I'm first. First friend. Before wife, children, family, country, money, everything." God loves that.

And you know something? All of us can do that. It's a choice. To me, it's very simple. It's a choice. I wrote a book years ago, my second book called *Prime Rib and Apple*. And it's about all the ribs in the Bible, all the women, starting with Eve, who was obviously the prime rib. And as I looked at all the women in the Bible, I wrote a sort of creative book on what it must have been like for Sarah hanging up her chandelier in a tent, you know? It must have been hard for her. But they never realized the promises. They lived in a tent. They left a mansion, they lived in a tent. Because here they had no continuing city.

And God loves that about Abraham, his friend. Gave up two sons. Judy and I, our daughter and I wrote a book about Hagar and Ishmael and how God asked Abraham to give up two of his sons. Isaac and then Ishmael. I don't think Abraham ever knew if Ishmael ever survived the desert when he sent him out there. And God asked him to yield two of his sons. And he sat in a tent for the rest of his life. So did his children. Jacob and the others, patriarchs.

But God liked that. And I remember when I was struggling in a tiny little infinitesimal way when we were invited to come to America and immigrate in 1970 to give up a few things, like my mother. And Abraham helped me. And I remember coming here and feeling settled and writing, as I found in my diary the other day from 1970, the only way to feel settled inside when I'm unsettled outside is to plan my life living in this permanently feeling even though I'm feeling temporary. It was just a mixed-up bit, but living temporarily but feeling permanent, or living permanently knowing you're temporary.

It was a very unsettling thing to immigrate with two suitcases apiece and just give up everything. But it was a very settling thing because we were doing the right thing. And if you wish, I come from wealth. I was brought up in a castle, but I've loved my tent because I'm settled in my tent. And that's what God's looking for in a friend.

What comes first? And God looked from heaven and he said, "He's my friend. He's my friend." That's a choice. And then there's Moses, God's waiting friend. God looks like Enoch for a friend to talk to. The Lord would speak to Moses face-to-face as a man speaks to his friend. Here we get the openness, here we get the honesty, here we get the transparency that needs to be part of deep friendship.

And we find this tent of meeting, this wonderful place. And Moses would put that little tent—here we have the tent again—and he and Joshua, his servant, would go into the tent. And the pillar of fire that followed them by night and the cloud that followed them by day, the visible evidence of the invisible presence of God, the Shekinah glory, that's what it was. The visible evidence of the invisible presence of God would come down over the tent. Right.

And they would talk to God. The Bible says Moses, as a man talks to his friend, covered by this cloud. What a picture. What a picture. The dictionary definition of watching and waiting is to stay in place in readiness and expectation of, or waiting is a state of watchfulness of attitude. And I would add as a Christian to find out the will of God. People would wait for the cloud and see Moses and Joshua go in, and then they would approach the tent finally and say, "Would you ask God about this? I'm not sure what to do." And Moses would talk to God as a man. "Well, you know, there's old Jacob out here and he wants to know what to do about his cattle that are all dying off," etc., etc., etc.

And then he'd come out and give the answer. And the whole thing, I mean, it's a whole book in itself, isn't it? But just this waiting and watching came back to me as what is God looking for from me. He's wanting me to come into the tent. And the tent without the cloud you may as well not bother. Until you become conscious of the evident presence of the invisible God.

And for that you need to learn stillness. And for that you need to learn solitude. And you need to learn a little bit about meditation and what that really means scripturally. And you just need to learn about being. Come with us. Let's go to the throne room. I mean, what better blessing could you be than to take people there? To take Joshua with you. Not to experience it all and then go and find Joshua and tell him, "Now this is how you ought to pray and here's the book and here's the manual and here's the seminar." But say, "Joshua, come on. Come with me."

I was training in a restricted country in hiding with about 30 or 40 pastor's wives. They were there at great risk. And at the end of one of the sessions, a sweet, sweet young pastor's wife, a timid young woman, came up to me and sat at my feet and said, "Can I hear you pray?" Whoa. I said to the interpreter, "Why does she want to hear me pray?" And she said to the interpreter who said it to me, "Then she'll know how to do it and she'll know how to know God like you do."

Do you know what people want to know? They want to know how you know God. How do you experience the invisible God? The evident presence of the invisible God. And that's what Moses was all about. I've just been on the trip of a lifetime, actually it was my vacation, and we went with some good friends of ours and we went to Antarctica. Yes, you heard right. Don't ask. It was incredible.

We haven't had a vacation for many years actually, and certainly never a vacation like this. But we had experts on that expedition. And one of them was an expert in fishing, deep-sea fishing. And he loves getting to the bottom of an ocean somewhere in the world and finding sharks. It's his thing. And he had the most incredible film and video of himself doing this.

And he said, "I used to get down there and get so excited, and then I would swim and swim and swim and I'd chase and I'd look and I'd go, and I couldn't wait. And yes, was that a shark's tail? After it!" Yeah, I mean he's crazy, yes, but anyway. And then he said I'd find just one, and sometimes it didn't want to be interested in me and I couldn't see him face-to-face, you know, and all of this. And so that was a lost day.

"And one day," he said, "I went down with a real expert. You think I'm an expert, I went down with the expert in the world on shark fishing. And I expected to see more sharks and to get more pictures and more information than I'd ever had in my life with this expert. But to my absolute amazement," he said, "we dove very, very deep in a shark-infested place. And I couldn't see any sharks and I thought, goodness me, they're really hiding today, we're going to have to chase them down."

And the man got hold of him, because they couldn't communicate, and sat him on a stone on the bottom of the ocean. Just sat him down. And then he sat down on another stone. So he sat there and he thought, well, how long is this going to go on, you know? And there were no fish and everything. And then he said after a long time when everything was still and everything was quiet, there was a little movement here and a little movement there, and they suddenly found themselves surrounded by sharks.

And his eyes light up. Really crazy. And here he is sitting on the bottom of the ocean with these sharks. And he said one came right up to my mask and opened its mouth and it seemed to say to me, "Was that too hard? Was this too hard? Just stay still and I'll find you. I'll find you." And then he repeated it with an experience with an albatross. Same thing. And in the end the bird pecked his glasses.

And he said it seemed to me the bird said, "Was this too hard?" And how long he'd sat there until that bird had come that close was a long time. And to me, it just gave me a little illustration. God wants us to sit there. Not to chase after him. "I've got to read this and I've got to do that, and I'll try this sort of formula in prayer and I'll do this little thing and I'll do that." No, just sit. Just sit. Just wait. Wait until the cloud comes. Just wait. And God will come so close and he'll say, "Is that too hard? Is that too hard?"

Moses talked to God as friend to friend. And then, of course, we could go into the New Testament, which I don't have time to do at this point. That's a whole other sermon, I can see that. But Jesus, of course, said, "I count you my friends." Looked at these 12 men that had been through hell and high water together and were going to go through a lot more trouble and trial in the redemption of the world. And he says, "You're my friends. You're my friends." And those were the friends, if you remember, that betrayed him, right?

But when I look at the Old Testament, which is my favorite part of the Bible as you'll notice if you read any of my books, I live in the Old Testament. But I see so many friends. And as I finished my particular study of this, I sit there as I always do and said, "What's my takeaway?" You always need to ask yourself that when you've finished your quiet time. What's your takeaway? What are you taking away?

I took away something from each of those people, actually. And then God says, "No, no, just—just one." That's another little hint: don't take away 20 things. Say to God, "What's the one thing?" It's too hard for us. You take 20 things, you'll never do anything with it. Just take the one thing and sit there long enough until you've got it.

And for each it will be different, right? That's the miracle of the Bible, that the Word of God speaks here to this and there to that, all from the same verse, right? And the takeaway from one verse isn't my takeaway and your takeaway, it's somebody else's takeaway. And that's the exciting part. What's the takeaway? And I would have to say personally for me, I have to come back to the—to my little funny picture of the sharks, actually, because it's so vivid in my mind at this point. And I just want to sit, I just want to stay, I want to learn stillness, I want to learn solitude. I am not half started at the depth I'm after in my love relationship with my friend. I'm not half started. And I'm nearly finished. Look at me. And I want more time because I want to go deeper and deeper and deeper with God. Pray with me.

Lord Jesus, thank you. Thank you for being our friend. Don't let us escape the blessing. Chase us with the thoughts that you have blessed us with. We love you, Lord, and thank you. Thank you that you chose to chase down your lost friends and make them your best friends. What grace. In Jesus' name, Amen.