The Impact Of One Friend

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. 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. 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. These things I command you, so that you will love one another. [1]

The furies of hell hold no dread for the person who has one friend who stands with him in the time of trial. If you have a friend, a true friend, you are blessed indeed. Whenever I speak of standing in the face of opposition, of standing during time of trial, my thoughts turn almost without conscious effort to the biblical account of Elijah and his response to the trials he faced. I see the stalwart man of God standing boldly against evil that had spread throughout the nation. Anyone reading the biblical account of his lonely stand will recognise him to be a brave man, to be a courageous man!

Elijah stood alone against the entire religious establishment, thus giving pause to the nation that was on the brink of turning from God to embrace wickedness. He defied the king through lonely years and brought about a return to decency and reasonable faith. At last, however, the cost was too great even for this great man of God. The irrational threats of an enraged queen broke his spirit and he fled into the desert seeking refuge.

Look at the broken man as he lodges his complaint before the LORD His God. “The people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword, and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away” [1 KINGS 19:10]. I’m tempted to title this scene, “The Last Fundamentalist.” God’s wearied prophet seemingly cries out in anguish, “Alone! Alone, against the world!” This great man has stood athwart the nation’s rush to embrace evil, resisting every inducement to wickedness, until at last he is exhausted from bearing the burden alone. It is all well and good to smugly say, “One standing with God is a majority.” We say this when we are not under assault. However, it is much different when standing alone amid the fray.

Sometimes we are unable to see what needs to be seen because we have become so focused on the immediate problem facing us. At such a time, we truly can’t see the forest for the trees, and each of us has been there at one time or another. At such times, the immediate has so gripped us that we are incapable of believing that God is in control. That was the situation in which Elijah found himself. God had to force His servant to look away from his situation so that he could see what God alone could see. After informing the dejected man of God that He had plans for the wicked, God told him, “I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him” [1 KINGS 19:18].

Where were they? Where were those seven thousand who refused to bow before Baal? Why had they not stood with the valiant prophet? I know from experience that a man can withstand any evil, if he believes he is not alone. I know from experience that a man can resist any wickedness, if only one someone will stand with him. In the same way, I know that any one of us is susceptible to fleeing from nothing at all when we are exhausted and when we imagine ourselves alone. One friend can make all the difference in the world. Multiple people throughout the years of my service before the Lord have pledged that they will stand with me when the evil rages; the majority of those promising such have fled in an act to preserve their own hide. I don’t condemn them; I have learned to take all pledges of courage to mean little before the battle begins. I have learned that all the pledges in the world mean little when the man in the arena stands alone.

In 1910, shortly after leaving the Office of the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt delivered an address at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France. In that speech, entitled “Citizenship in a Republic,” Roosevelt said, “It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” [2]