God Is Our Friend Series

Martin Luther spent a major portion of his life looking for a God who liked him. He was

devoutly religious from his childhood, but religion was more a burden than a blessing, for his God

was not his friend. He knew God hated sin and demanded perfection and so he was obsessed with

trying to be perfect. As a monk he went beyond the rigorous rules of the monastery. He fasted

and prayed longer than any of the others. He denied himself the normal allotment of blankets and

almost froze to death. He punished his body and devoted every ounce of energy to being

super-spiritual.

He once wrote, "I was a good monk, and I kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say

that if ever monk got to heaven by his monkery it was I. All my brothers in the monastery who

knew me will bear me out. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils,

prayers, reading, and other work." Suicide by super-spiritually was the direction he was heading.

It sounds like such deep devotion, but in reality it was all based on fear. God was not a father he

loved and a friend he served. God was a tyrant he feared.

Luther was so obsessed with his sin that he made his confessor a nervous wreck. Others would

confess their sin in a few minutes, but he would stay for hours, and once even stayed for six hours

confessing the sin of the previous day. On and on he went for everything he did was a sin in his

eyes. He even confessed that he stayed up after the lights were to be out to read his Bible by

candlelight. That was one of his sins. Staupitz, the leader of the monastery, finally got fed up with

Luther and in anger said, "Look here, if you expect Christ to forgive you come in with something

to forgive-parricide, blasphemy, adultery, instead of all these peccadilloes. Man, God is not angry

with you, you are angry with God."

When the truth finally sunk into Luther's head and heart, and he saw that he was the problem,

he found the greatest treasure a man can find-he found God was his friend. He was a loving

Father who provided for us what we needed in order to be forgiven. We do not have to earn our

salvation, but freely receive it as His gift of love. When Luther stopped working to save himself,

and took salvation as a free gift from God by faith in Christ, he made a lot of new friends, but the

greatest of them all was God. He found a God who liked him. Luther was losing friendship on

both the earthly and heavenly level because he was blind to the fact that he was the problem.

When we are full of misconceptions and misunderstandings, we are in bondage, and only the truth

can set us free.

A prominent American writer read the book Forgive Us Our Trespasses by Lloyd C. Douglas.

She wrote to the author and said, "As I read your book I saw myself as I really was. I finished it

late at night and the next day I went out and recaptured five friendships I had lost because of my

unforgiving spirit." The truth had set her free. The fact is, most of the broken relationships in life,

and the loss of friendship with men and God, are based on our false conceptions. Like Luther, we

are often angry with God and with others, and we misinterpret this as their anger with us. If you

examine most of the conflicts you have in marriage or with children and others, you will see they

usually start with your rotten inner mood at someone else's behavior. We create God and others in

our own image when we are full of hostility and we blame them for being what we are.

The ancient world is full of myths that portray God as the foe of man. Zeus, the king of gods in

Greek mythology was so portrayed. Prometheus was a god who took pity on man and tried to

warm and cheer his life by giving him the gift of fire. Zeus became very angry because of this

grace and love expressed by Prometheus. He had him chained to a rock in the Adriatic Sea. He

was tortured with the heat and thirst of the day and the cold of the night. And then for an added

touch of sadistic pleasure he prepared a vulture to tear out his liver. Zeus was very creative in his

bitterness. He made it so the liver would keep growing back so the vulture could tear it out over

and over again. This was the picture of God that many people had, and, of course, the only