Pathos and pain are a part of friendship.

Steve Brown:
Pathos and pain are a part of friendship. Let’s talk about it on this edition of Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
This is Key Life, here to let Christians know that God isn’t mad at them. Keep listening and you’ll hear that because of what Jesus has done, you’re welcomed home into the family of God because of his radical grace, free from the penalties of sin, and never alone in your suffering.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. We’re talking about friendship and we’re talking about it from the 2nd chapter of Philippians, which is a part of our study of Philippians. And we’re looking at Philippians 2:19 through 30. And we’re looking at this passage through the glass of friendship because we’re able to see something about the apostle Paul that you can’t see in some other passages in Philippians, or say in Romans. When he’s teaching, when he’s giving the great truths of the Christian faith, when he’s proving to be the leader that changed the world. But here, you see the soft side of the apostle Paul as he speaks of his friends. Now, if you were listening yesterday, I talked about the importance of praise and friendship. If you’ve got a friend, don’t just be glad for their friendship, sometimes tell them why you’re glad for their friendship. Tell them what is so good about them, what you love about them. That begins to bond friendship in a way that nothing else will. If you were listening yesterday, I ended by telling you about a professor and I didn’t have time to tell you the whole story, but I have a professor friend in seminary who watches his students and knows them and some of them have horrible feelings of inferiority and feeling that they are a wet shaggy dog shaking himself at the Miss America pageant. And he picks those out. And then sometimes, and it’s a common thing that he does in his classes, he’ll pick a student and he’ll put that student in front of the entire class. And he will say to the class for the next 15 minutes, I want you to tell Joe, or Jim, or Sarah, or whoever’s sitting in that chair, I want you to tell them what you admire about them. I want you to tell them what you think is cool about them. I want you to tell Joe or Sarah or Bill, I want you to tell them why you like being their friend. He told me that you would be amazed at the change that would take place in the relationships that were going on in the seminary. And so, praise is a very important part of friendship. Okay, let’s go and move to something else. This is five, I want you to note not only the philanthropy and the particularity and the proving and the praise of friendship. I want you to note the pathos, the sadness, the tears of friendship, Philippians 2:27b.

But God had mercy on him, and not on him only but also on me, to spare me

here he comes

sorrow upon sorrow.

And then at the 28th verse.

So that when you see him again, you may also be glad and I will have less anxiety.

C.S. Lewis once said if you want to have a peaceful life, encase yourself in concrete and don’t love anything. And your heart will become concrete and nothing will penetrate it. Listen, if you’re going to have friends, the kind of Christian friends that the apostle Paul talks about here, don’t expect that you’re going to stand around the campfire and sing Kumbaya for the rest of your life, or that you’re gonna join hands and walk off in the sunset together. It doesn’t work that way. Friendship presupposes pathos. Let me say that again, friendship presupposes pathos. That’s because we live in a fallen world. And that’s because bad things happen. And that’s because friends share those bad things with each other. I think of friends in my life, when you’re as old as I am, a lot of names come to mind. And in some of those cases, I sat beside the deathbed of my friend and tasted the salt of their tears and mixed my tears with their tears. Sometimes I’ve walked through the loss that my friends have experienced and they have walked through the loss that I have experienced. Sometimes my heart was broken. Sometimes I’ve wept with my friends. And do you know why? Because friendship presupposes pathos. The president of Key Life, who is my boss, by the way, Dr. George Bingham is maybe one of the closest friends I’ve ever had in my life. His wife, Ruth, was the director of Christian education at a church I once served, and George was an elder in that particular church. And that was nice, I mean, we were good acquaintances and becoming friendship. And then when, when Ruth and George’s first son was born, I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow, Matthew. That was the place where the friendship bonded. Matthew died and George and I, and Ruth died a little bit. And the friendship is forever. You think about that. Amen.

Well, it’s Wednesday and sometimes on Wednesdays, I take a little bit of time to answer one or two questions. As you know, Pete will be in on Friday and we’ll spend the entire, as always, the entire broadcast on Friday, just answering questions. And by the way, we love your questions. They make us think, they make us search the Scriptures, they make us look for right answers in everything that we know. And that’s good for us. So, feel free to ask your question. You can do that by calling 1-800-KEY-LIFE and you can do that 24 7. Just follow instructions and record your question and sometimes we put your voice on the air. Or you can write to

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Let me turn to one or two of these questions. This is an e-mail, it says. Steve, is it normal to struggle with doubt and assurance of my salvation? And if it is, what can I do about it? Well, first, yes. And secondly, nothing. Well, that’s not enough. Yes, it’s normal to doubt. There are a lot of different kinds of doubt. One doubt says, I will not believe. And the other doubt with Thomas says, I do believe, help my unbelief. And that second kind of doubt is pleasing to God. And if you’ll take the time to begin to do research, to read books of apologetics, that means the defense of the Christian faith, intellectually you can deal with all of that. I probably know more about religion than hardly anybody listening to this broadcast. And those are facts. And the Christian faith is as rational as any worldview that has ever been spoken. And the more you study it, the more factual it becomes, the more real it becomes, the more often it becomes the only alternative to a thinking, rational person. The Christian faith fits with reality, and if you’re willing to do the research you can find that, but you have a slightly different question, you talk about assurance. Now, there are two ways to help that. And the first is, you can remember the day when you first came to Christ, where you gave as much of yourself as you knew, to as much of him that you knew. And he promised at that point you were his, and he never lies. And if you haven’t done that, do it. Get a date, hammer it down, and refer to that date every time you doubt whether you belong to him. The truth is, God’s promises are absolute, and he never lies, and he wouldn’t lie about something that important. And so, that’s one way you deal with assurance. But there’s another way, and I kind of like this one very much. Why would you ask? Why would it even bother you? Why would you want to be assured? Where does that come from? And so, there is a measurement for assurance, and it is this. You would not even care about assurance if you didn’t already belong to Christ. And I would add to that, if you didn’t really want to be better than you are. I have never met a Christian who couldn’t say that. That I have this question, I don’t know where it came from, maybe Jesus. And I want to be better than I am. And I have no idea where that came from. And so, that’s how you find assurance. Will there be moments when you don’t have it? Yeah, but they’ll get less and less. And pretty soon you’ll be a spiritual giant like me. If you believe that you’ll believe anything. Hey, Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.