Remember Who We Are #6

In John 15, as Jesus spoke to His disciples on the night before the cross, he said:

13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 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. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.

Jesus said a lot of things that night that shook his disciples up, but verse 15 must have taken them back: I call you friends. As a friend, He was willing to do anything for them, including give up His life for them, and for us. As a friend, He was also asking them to do something: obey God, check in with God, become the people He was investing in them to be. Friendship with Christ, and therefore with the Father, is not something that should puff up our heads or give us a free pass on sin; It should move us to serve Him, as He has served us.