Friendship with God
A friend comes when all others leave
JACKIE ROBINSON was the first African American to play baseball in the major leagues. Breaking baseball’s color barrier, he faced hostile crowds in every stadium. While playing one day in his home stadium of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, he committed an error. The fans began to jeer him. He stood at second base, humiliated, while the crowd booed. Then, without saying a word, shortstop Pee Wee Reese went over and stood next to Jackie. He put his arm around him and faced the crowd. Suddenly the fans grew quiet. Robinson later said that that arm around his shoulder saved his career.
Most of us want and need that kind of friend. One who stands with you – even after you screw up a play in your life.
That is the kind of friend God wants to be in your life.
That is the kind of friend that a man named Abraham had in the creator God.
A friend of God
James 2:23
“…Abraham believed God, and God accepted Abraham’s faith, and that faith made him right with God.” d And Abraham was called God’s friend.
I want to point out that the great, almighty, ever-present and all-powerful, all-knowing God himself calls Abraham his friend.
This was not Abraham’s assessment of his relationship with God, nor is it how he thought about God.
This is God’s assessment of His relationship with a little unimportant man named Abraham.
“Friend” is a very interesting description of a relationship between a man and God. It is an intimate idea and it conveys a sense of closeness, trust, and comradeship.
Is such a relationship possible? Can we enjoy that same kind of relationship with God?
The answers are yes and yes! Let me show you what it takes – The apostle John – who just happened to be Jesus best and closest friend on this earth – puts it this way…
Friendship is about Love
John 15:13
The greatest love a person can show is to die for his friends.
Our very best friends are those who we trust with our most important and secret selves. They know us. They understand us. They love us anyway.
That’s why marriage is one of the images of our relationship with God. The basis of a good marriage is not physical compatibility. It isn’t shared goals. It isn’t even the same political leanings. The basis of a good marriage is friendship. And friendship begins with trust.
My wife Donna is my friend. She could hurt me more than anyone else in this world. She has chosen to trust me and be my friend. She has chosen to give her life for me and I am indebted to her.
Jesus has wants that kind of friendship with you. He has trusted you with his life so you will trust him with his.
True friends support each other. True friends sacrifice for each other. True friends are dependable – they’re always there when needed. True friends will die for you if that is what is required. Soldiers in battle have given their lives for their buddies.
Jesus died for you. He is your friend.
Friendship is about Confidence
John 15:15
I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know what his master is doing. But I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything I heard from my Father.
Friends confide in one another, and Christ considers us to be such good friends of his that he is able to confide in us and share all the plans, hopes, and dreams He and the Father have for us.
Depending on the degree of our friendship with others, we tend to hold back certain information. There are very few people we share everything with. Only our closest friends get that kind of treatment.
But Christ is demonstrating here that he considers us his closest and most sympathetic friends. He says that all that he has heard from the Father, he has made known to us. He holds nothing back from us at all but instead he extends to us the deeps and most intimate confidences.
Just as God through Christ extends friendship to us through His willingness to confide in us, so we must return that friendship to Him by confiding in Him. We are to spend time talking to Him, pouring out our hearts to Him, and telling Him of our every need and desire.
Friendship with God
“…I call you friends…”
There are essentially two views about human kind. One sees us as mere animals. If there is a God he is either unable to intervene in the affairs of man or he is unwilling to do so because he doesn’t care.
The TV news program 20/20 once had a segment on baby chicks that were packaged and marketed. These tiny chicks traveled on conveyer belts past workers who selected them to fit into a box to be shipped out and sold. The chicks were chosen by sex, size, general appearance. But some were not chosen. The cameras followed these baby chicks as they slipped by the workers and fell off the end of the conveyer belt… to die. That’s the way of this world. If you don’t fit into the box, you’re rejected and left to die.
There is a second view. This view that Jesus brings us – not simply with words – but with his own life. We are not simply soul-less animals to be sorted through by the fate filled moments of time only to ultimately be dumped at the end of a conveyor belt called time.
No! God proclaims to us that we are much more. We are his children. He loves us deeply and irrevocably. God wants to be your friend.
Seek him out today… return his love and begin today to confide in him as he has already poured out his love and his confidence in you.
