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You’re tired.
Not just physically; though yeah, that too.
You’re tired in your bones. In your soul.
Trying to be a steady husband, an intentional dad, a man of God… but deep down, you feel like you’re falling short. Like you’re carrying more than you know how to hold.
Dad Tired is a podcast for men who are ready to stop pretending and start healing.
Not with self-help tips or religious platitudes, but by anchoring their lives in something (and Someone) stronger.
Hosted by Jerrad Lopes, a husband, dad of four, and fellow struggler, this show is a weekly invitation to find rest for your soul, clarity for your calling, and the courage to lead your family well.
Through honest stories, biblical truth, and deep conversations you’ll be reminded:
You’re not alone. You’re not too far gone. And the man you want to be is only found in Jesus.
This isn’t about trying harder.
It’s about coming home.
Hey y'all, and welcome back to the Dad Tired podcast, and we just wanted to give a quick shout out to our friends at Missionary Flights International in Aviation Ministry, making a difference for over 60 years. Every week their iconic DC three planes lift off from Fort Pierce, Florida, carrying supplies, aid, and hope to places like Haiti, The Bahamas, and the Dominican Republic, from delivering food after disasters to flying in life-saving medical equipment.
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All right guys. Wanted to jump back in. I have been thinking for, um, I don't know, eight months or so, uh, on the biblical concept of friendship and the necessity of friendship, uh, in the Christian life and the idea in some ways that holiness. Or having a pure heart or growing in Christian maturity is growing in friendship.
Um, I'll, I'll parse this out a little bit even, but the idea that heaven is manifest friendship, total harmony, relationally. That of course the, the trinity, the persons of the Trinity, obviously we believe in one God, um, one deity, but that exist in three persons. Those persons exist and total harmony and friendship.
And if Jesus is the ultimate friend, um, beautiful friend, profound friend, then the. Logically what flows from that is if we're growing in Christ's likeness, then we are growing in friendship. And that again, holiness and friendship are actually incredibly intertwined. And to learn to live holy is to learn to be a friend.
Um, and so I wanna parse some of these ideas out with you over, uh, kind of in and out some other things we got going on over the, the next couple months I'll kind of randomly drop some of these thoughts. Um, St. Al rid of Revo. Said this, he, he wrote a book called Spiritual Friendship. Um, spiritual Friendship was a, a short book that, um, actually records some conversations he was having with other monks about the idea of friendship in the Christian life.
But he says this for what can one say about friendship? I. That is more sublime, more truthful, more useful. Then that friendship will be shown to be formed in Christ. Advanced according to Christ, and perfected by Christ's friendship is formed in Christ, advanced according to Christ, and perfected by Christ.
We talked just a bit last week about, um, what we call the Farewell Discourse in John's Gospel When Jesus is preparing for his own crucifixion and the conversation that he's having with the disciples, let not your hearts be troubled. Um, I won't leave you as orphans. I'll send the spirit. Um, peace I give to you.
There's this conversation he's having with the disciples as he prepares for his own death, and he's kind of reassuring them, asking them to take heart and take courage to not be overwhelmed or crushed by the, the account of the events that are coming on Good Friday, but the night of Jesus's betrayal, he gives us his command to friendship.
John records Russ in chapter 15, verse 12 through 14. His instruction. He said this, this is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You're my friends if you do what I command you. In the farewell discourse, he points to the themes of sacrifice and real love.
And of course, he's prepared to display real selflessness in just a few short hours as he marches towards Calvary. But. What struck me and kind of threw me down this line of thinking is, is. That he did not say. My commandment is this, that you lay down your life for your enemies. Of course, on the cross he's gonna say, father, forgive them for they know not what they do.
Of course, he teaches us to love our enemies. Romans five eight tells us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. While we were, while we had enmity with God, Jesus came to heal that division. Um. It is true that Christianity calls us to love our enemies, but it's not the thought that Jesus gives the disciples before he goes to the cross.
The thought he gives them is real love, true love. Greater love is laying down your life for your friends, and so he is looking at his friends, right? The 11. At this point, Judas has already kind of scurried to betray him. He's looking at his friends and he's saying, real love is laying your life down for.
Your friends, there's a sense in which we pour ourselves out. For those who persecute us, we pray for those who persecute us. But that again, is not what Jesus was saying in this moment. He, he did just tell the disciples in Matthew's account that it would be better for Judas if he wasn't born and he, he doesn't say.
Um, I'm going to lay down my life for the one who betrays me. He's, he's not focused on Judas as his enemy at this point. Um, Psalm 41, 9, for instance, says, even my close friend and whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me. Um, he and Jesus alludes to that psalm as he talks about Judas betrayal.
And that betrayal being a profound act of disloyalty, uh, especially in an ancient semantic context. The people that you share bread with, um, are people that you've trusted. You've participated in real communion and real fellowship, and Jesus has shown hospitality and friendship and loyalty to Judas and rather is betrayed and spit on.
And there's some sense in which I think the. The lingering context of Jesus giving these lines. It's, it's not, not, not perfectly the context, but there's this kind of lingering co, uh, lingering contextual moment in which Jesus has just experienced betrayal, betrayal that was even prophesied by the psalmist, that his close friend is betrayed him, and then he looks at the disciples and he says.
My command is that you lay down your life for your friends, not, and, and then in some sense, there's this, this s lingering concept. Again, not betray your friends in the way that Judas just betrayed or is going to betray me. Friendship is the aim, and what Judas is doing is, is not friendship. That is not the command, that is not greater love.
I want you to watch me. So now he's. Pivoted or, or placed his actions against Judas actions. So Judas is betraying. Judas is spitting on our fellowship, showing great disloyalty to our friendship. I am going to show you what friends do for one another as he goes to the cross to bear our burdens to be crushed, for our afflictions to wear our.
Iniquities and, and what's interesting to think about is that as Jesus is getting ready for the cross, friendship is on his mind. Friendship is on the forefront of his mind as he prepares to bleed and atone for the sins of all people. When he looks at the disciples, he commands them towards friendship.
It commands the disciples and by consequence us the, the reader, the modern reader, to embrace the idea of laying down your life for your friends. In contrast to being a person of betrayaled, or being a person consumed with your own needs, wants, desires, rather be willing to empty yourself for the sake of your friends, the people you love, the people that God brings into your life uniquely.
Beautifully intimately brings into your life for you to care for, for you to bless, for you to in some way. Um, practice for heaven as you love them with total sacrificial love. So what I've come to think about a lot and what I've really come to believe is this, holiness without friendship is not holiness at all.
If you find a holy person in history, you will find a person with long lasting friendship friendships. If you find a person who claims to be holy or claims to be a spiritual leader and they don't have real friends, people that they care for, and people that regularly care for them, check on them, send them books and call and talk through their issues.
If they, if a spiritual leader does not have friends, you can be sure that that person is not. Actually embracing Christlikeness and holiness, but rather is some kind of like narcissistic egomaniac who wants control and wants power and wants leadership, but does not want to do the hard work of being a friend.
So spiritual leaders who aren't first great friends from my perspective, are frauds. Manipulators and if you follow them long enough, that will come to the surface in due time. If you've found a man or a woman who has really walked with God for great periods of time and has been purged and sanctified and has walked through hard things and suffering, and they are elevated to a position of leadership, or they're teaching the scriptures and and leading small groups, if they are really a person that's been press by Christ, you will find someone.
Who is a really, really good friend because friendship and holiness are eternally intertwined
as, um, a local pastor. Um, I'm suspicious. I think I can own that. Like plainly, I'm a bit suspicious of. Uh, people who have risen to leadership without lots of humility and lots of love and lots of care for other people. Um, and I do think that pastors in particular, but, but Christian men, Christian fathers are either solid friends, people who love, care, have compassion for, or they are men who have narcissistic.
Desires who want to control. Friendship is a requirement for spiritual leadership in the Christian faith. It's likely that you've heard the story of St. Augustine's, um, salvation Experience and. His confessions. He describes this event. Remember he sits, um, kind of in a garden, distraught, broken, and he hears the kids singing and they're singing, take and read, take and read.
And so he grabs the Bible. He opens the Bible, and it falls to. Romans 13, 13 to 34, which is a command not to gratify the flesh, but cloth oneself with the Lord Jesus. And Augustine was cut to the heart. He gives his life to Christ. He begins to follow and walk with Jesus, obviously becomes, uh, the greatest theologian for, for centuries there.
Um, but the part that we don't talk about as much is that his friend Alius was actually with him in the garden that day. And, um, he also, so. Augustine's kind of best friend also gives his life to the Lord. Augustine said this in confessions, then putting my finger between or some other mark. I shut the book with a tranquil countenance and made it known to Alius, and he also uttered what was happening within himself, which I did not know of.
He asked to see what I had read. I showed him and he looked even further than I had read, and I did not know what followed, but it was this him. Him that is weak in the faith receive. He applied this to himself and he told me so by this admonition, he was strengthened and with a good resolving purpose entirely In keeping with his character wherein he was far different from me and far better without any unk of heart, he joined me in full commitment.
In other words. This narrative of Augustine giving his life to the Lord when he hears kids say, take and read the full narrative, is that his closest friend was sitting with him and that God was also convicting and stirring his closest friend's heart. And when Augustine begins to kind of weep and respond to the authority and the text of scripture, Augustine then takes the word and hands it to his closest friend who reads it and also surrenders.
To the Lord, and what we see when we consider this closely is that God doesn't just redeem Augustine that day. He redeemed a pair of friends, and those friends were friends for the rest of their lives and wrote and talked and prayed for one another and cared for one another. You see, in Augustine not just a great theologian, but a great friend.
Anyone who is filled with ambition to sincerely know God will in time find people who are also on that journey. Kind of if you think of the pilgrimage imagery, journeying towards the heavenly city, and you'll learn this friendship in some way. Friendship is the journey itself. Heaven will be the fullest expression of joy and peace in life.
And communion and friendship. Of course, Christ Jesus being the superior, um, the most beautiful majestic friend of all, but he will invite us into real. Fellowship, real friendship preparation, Christ preparing us for that final banquet when we will sit across from people, from every tribe, every nation, every tongue, and have real love in our hearts for Christ and for them.
When we will see our friends look on Jesus and love Jesus and their experience will with Christ is kind of like when you see a good movie and you've gotta tell your. Best friends about it. You gotta go see this movie. Heaven will be that. It will be your friends and looking on Christ and saying, this is wonderful.
Do you see it? Can you see it? There's a shared encounter experience, revelation of the beauty and the majesty of Jesus in heaven as we really learned friendship,
my. My journey towards Christ and feeling called to Christ. Um. Began with me carrying a bit of like hyper individualism. In, in the western world, we are a bit more individual individualistic than other cultures. And so we think about us and we think about my purity and my holiness. We don't think naturally about the communion, the communion of saints, the community.
And I can remember, um, in my own spiritual immaturity thinking that in order to rise in Christian sanctification, I needed to beat. Those around me. I need to compete with those around me. I need to read harder, pray longer, fast, longer. And those concepts actually led me to a highly, um, I. A highly, uh, segregated, uh, um, selfish, um, isolated position.
And in my isolation, I, I was again watching other saints and trying to do more than them. And it took some time before I realized that the Christian life is not watching other saints and trying to outrun them. It's joining other saints locking arms with them crying when they cry. Celebrating when they celebrate.
When a Christian brother has a newborn baby and you hold that baby and you say, how beautiful, man, like, what a good job you guys did. I'm entering into the joy of a fellow saying, appreciating with him God's good gift, his mercies that are lavished upon us. And those moments are shaping my heart and preparing my heart to look more.
Like Jesus, the medicine for me to escape isolation and to escape co competitive, self-centered Christian thinking. For me, the medicine was friendship. The healing balm to my selfish gain and desire for power and to lead was provided by God's kind of sovereign, gracious gifts to me. Which were friends that wanted to look like Jesus too, friends who wanted to live life faithful to Jesus too.
And when I spiraled in my own kind of mental health issues and darkness and my own kind of. Selfish, conceited thinking. God gave me people to sit with me and say, dude, it's just about the cross. It's just about God's glory. Lean back and enjoy God again. I realize now that I could not come to holiness or purity or Christ's likeness.
I could not without friends. Talking me through issues, praying with me when I'm broken. When I'm struggling with sin, I need accountability. Friends who call and just say, what's going on? And where's your heart? And I actually could not arrive as if any of us have arrived, but I couldn't advance into Christian maturity without God's good gift of friendship.
If my contention is right that the image of selfless love is fully expressed in friendship and should be readily available to us as we approach the scripture, as we think about New Testament Christianity, and as we talk more, I want you to see. Again, that to in, in some sense, of course, Jesus is raising up apostles with a mission and a purpose and a work.
There's a vocation there that they're gonna fulfill. But in another way, Jesus as Peter James and John, who just do life with him and who Jesus really loves. And on the cross, for instance, when he looks at Mary and he looks at John and he says, woman, behold your son, son, behold your mother, he is the the most, hm.
From Jesus Jesus's perspective as a, as a natural son on the cross, how concerned would he have been for Mary, who's clearly already widowed? And he looks at John and he kinda says, this is the most precious thing to me, John. And John, I trust you with this. And so what you see in the narrative of the scripture, and I could just keep playing this out again and again and again, is that relationships really matter.
And you can't excel in the Christian life without excelling in friendship if you do not have what, what Albert calls spiritual friends. And we can talk more about the way he delineated between like natural friends. I. Um, friends you work with or friends that you share hobby with, and versus friends who are on a, a, a deep and lifelong journey with you to know Christ, make him known, be formed in his image.
You, you have to find men. Who are on that mission to know Christ and make 'em known, be shaped, informed in his image, and you have to lock arms with them and have them carry you forward in your frustrating seasons. When you're emotional, when you're tired, when you're sick, when you're stuck in sin, those friends that you lay your life down for in seasons will also lay their lives down for you.
And, and, and again, you're, you're practicing for heaven, you're. Preparing your hearts as you at times have to have hard conversations with a friend, brother, I know that the way that you're living right now doesn't fully reflect the call of Christ on your life, and so at times, you know the iron sharpens iron.
I've gotta look people in the face and have hard conversations, but yet still find unity and love and comradery. I'm practicing for heaven and all of that. I'm practicing and preparing my heart for the full and glorious. Expression of God's holiness and love and. So I'll open up these concepts a bit more for you, but I wanted to just draw out firstly that again, John 15, 12 through 14.
This is a command. This Jesus says this, this isn't Caleb Jesus. This is my commandment that you love one another. Okay? The contextually here, the one another would. For at least for the disciples, the original audience, hearing this message, love one another would be the disciples. Loving the disciples as I have loved you.
Greater love has no one than this, that someone laid down his life for his friends. You are my friends. Jesus says, you're my friends. If you do what I command you. What have you commanded me to do? Jesus. To love one another. Love my friends as I have loved you. And then Jesus says, greater love is no one than this.
Lay down your life for your friends. You're my friend. If you do what I command you to do. There is a command, a biblical exhortation. The voice of the incarnate word of God looks at the disciples and says this, love your friends. Lay down your life. For your friends, you are my friend. If you learn to fulfill this command, you learn friendship.
Then you've learned me, you've learned fellowship with me. And I just wanna say like off the cuff, like I don't think we've explored these themes nearly enough in our modern Western Christian culture. I don't think we've explored the themes of unity and fellowship and sacrifice and really loving and serving, praying for friends, for brothers, and, and, um.
Thanking God for the gift of men to walk with me, to carry me to journey with me forward. And so the first thing I wanna say is I kind of introduce this topic, this command from Christ towards the disciples to be friends. I. To lay down to sacrifice for the sake of friendship. Not like Judas who is concerned with his own wealth and comfort, but like Christ who's gonna go to the cross for the sake of the redemption of those he loves.
We don't wanna be Judas, like we wanna be Christlike as we wear that. The first thing I wanna say again is just like, man, you need friends. And sometimes that takes embracing the awkwardness of going to another brother and saying, dude, do you want to get coffee sometime? Or saying you wanna get on a boat and fish, or picking up the phone and calling and saying, man, I just had you on my heart and wanted to hear what was going on in your life.
Wanted to hear if there was anything I could do for you. If there's any way I could kind of serve you, like what do you need? What would bless you? Um, for some of us, the first step is crossing that awkward boundary of being an isolated man who's only concerned with kind of comfort and being left alone, which I get, okay, if anybody gets wanting to be left alone, I get that.
But there is a command from Christ to cross out of that isolation and to start looking with my eyes at the men around me and wondering do they have friends? And acknowledging I need friends and remembering that Christ commanded me to lay my life down for men like them. So the first thing I would say again is like if you can't honestly look yourself in the mirror and say, I know exactly.
Who my spiritual friends are the people that God has placed in my life to sh to help carry me and shape me, and lead me and walk with me towards, towards heaven, towards eternity. If you don't know who those people are, I would say take the next week and explore that. I. Get a journal out and maybe process before the Lord, why have I retreated to isolation?
Why do I do life alone? Why is it so stinking awkward to be honest with another man? I would explore that and then my big challenge for you would be to pick up the phone and make a call. Make a lunch state. Look someone in the face and say, how are you? What's going on in your life? And, and then let them look you in the face and ask the same questions and be honest.
Intimacy and friendship is, again, in some way heaven itself. Um, not perfectly. I'm not trying to make a, like a radical statement here, but, but heaven will be total intimacy with people we love and people who love us as we jointly and communion celebrate Christ. Alright. I know that's a different thought and maybe a thought that you haven't pondered much, but I, but I, but I want you guys to grow in holiness and I think that requires, it demands.
That you fulfill the command to grow in friendship. Alright. I love you all. Bless you, Lord. I ask in Jesus name that every brother listening, every mom that just popped in listening, Lord, that they would experience your grace. Experience. True fellowship, no real friendship in Christ, in communion. And we ask in Jesus name that we would kind of.
Exit isolation and self-centered living and begin to walk in the communion of the saints. We love you Jesus. You are beautiful, glorious, wonderful in all your ways. There's no one like you. It's in your name that we pray. Alright brothers. Amen.