Maybe I should do it.

You should do this because I keep messing it up.

This is like our 57th take.

Howdy, Pastor Mark Driscoe here with my wife and best friend, Grace.

And I want to thank all of you through Mark Driscoll Ministries

who give any amount, who pray at any time, or encourage with any email or social media post. We've got a brand new sermon series. Real Marriage, it's six keys to unlocking all of your relationships, including your marriage that we're teaching right here at the trendy church. I'm preaching. We're doing Q&A. And we'll give it all the way through mark driscoll.org. So thanks a bunch for helping us out. All right. How many of you are on social media? You're on social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook? How many, how many collective, total friends do you have? How many of you are in the dozens? How many of you were in the hundreds of friends? How many of you were in the thousands or tens of thousands? Those are your friends. Okay, now brace yourself, right? Little heart funeral here. I'm going to give you a little bit of bad news. I don't think they're all your friends. Okay, I don't think they're all your friends. I don't think like when your birthday comes, you'll be like, I totaled them all up and I call Costco. How big of a sheet cake do I need for my 3,127 friends? It's my birthday. I know they all love me. Oh, and we need ice cream and plates,

and I'll come pick it up. How big of a she cake do I need? They're not all your friends, right? They're not. When you're moving, they're not all going to get the other end of the couch and haul it out of your apartment. They're not all your friends. They're just not. If you break down at 3 o'clock in the morning because you blew a tire and you need somebody to come pick you up.

You can't be like, we'll just pick any one of my random social media friends.

I'm sure they'll come get me after all. at three o'clock in the morning because you blew a tire and you need somebody to come pick you up. You can't be like, we'll just pick any one

of my random social media friends. I'm sure they'll come get me after all. They're my friend and they publicly declared it by liking me in the presence of others digitally. They're not all your friends, right? But here's what we've done. We've taken the word friendship and the concept friendship and we've sort of applied it to any and all relationships.

And let me just

submit to you that a true friendship takes more commitment than this. Right? How many of you,

it takes more than that to have a real friendship. You're like, well, we're friends. I move my

thumb once. We're friends. So a real friendship takes more than that. We have a whole host of

relationships, not all of which are friendships. So today I want to talk a little bit about friendship. And it starts with the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is one God, three persons, father, son, and spirit. What that means is that our God is a friend group, right? That God is loving and has relationship. God made us in his image and likeness to have relationship. We are

relational beings by nature. And then the second member of the Trinity, God the Holy Spirit,

enters into human history, and he doesn't have a wife and he doesn't have kids, but he picks 12

friends. We call them disciples. That's Jesus' friend group. And one's a total dud, amen? You know, what that tells you is you're going to have at least one dud in your friend group. And it can't, and they couldn't blame it on Jesus. Some of you've had friendships go bad, and maybe it was your fault, but maybe it wasn't your fault. Well, Jesus and Judas, it couldn't have been, well, we didn't get along. it was one of our faults. It could have been either. I'm not sure which. Jesus was a perfect friend, was a perfect friend to Judas and didn't have a good friendship with Judas because Judas wasn't a good friend. A friendship takes two people. And Jesus did have three friends that were his nearest and dearest friends, Peter, James, and John. They were with him in special

sacred moments when other people didn't have access. So just looking at the example of Jesus,

we need a relationship with God as he rules in heaven. We need relationships with those who are around

us. We can accept that some of our relationships will not end well. And in addition

to a larger group of friends, we have those that we pull closest to us, those who are friends that

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