Friendship with God

"Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you" (John 15:15)

The idea of the divine-human friendship originated with God. Had not God said first, "Ye are my friends" (John 15:14), it would be inexcusably brash for any man to say, "I am a friend of God." But since He claims us for His friends it is an act of unbelief to ignore or deny the relationship.

The more perfect our friendship with God becomes, the simpler will our lives be. Those formalities that are so necessary to keep a casual friendship alive may be dispensed with when true friends sit in each other's presence. True friends trust each other.

There is a great difference between having "company" and having a friend in the house. The friend we can treat as a member of the family, but company must be entertained.

God is not satisfied until there exists between Him and His people a relaxed informality that requires no artificial stimulation. The true friend of God may sit in His presence for long periods in silence. Complete trust needs no words of assurance. Such words have long ago been spoken and the adoring heart can safely be still before God.

I am honored, Father, to be called Your friend. May I never treat our friendship lightly. Amen 

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Only A Few Things Matter

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (Mark 8:36)

It has been suggested here before that life, for all its apparent complexities, is at bottom very simply indeed if we could only realize it. Thank God, only a few things matter. The rest are incidental and unimportant.

What really matters after all? My personal relation to God matters. That takes priority over everything else. A man may be born in a sanitary hospital, receive his education in progressive schools, rid in an air-conditioned car, sleep on a foam rubber mattress, wear synthetic clothing, eat vitamin-enriched food, read by fluorescent lights, speak across 12,000 miles of empty space to a friend on the other side of the world, lose his anxieties by taking tranquilizing pills, die without pain by the aid of some new drug and be laid to rest in a memorial park as lovely as a country garden; yet what will all this profit him if he must later rise to face in judgment a God who knows him not and whom he does not know? To come at last before the bar of eternal justice with no one to plead his cause and to be banished forever from the presence of the great Judge - is that man any better off than if he had died a naked savage in the hinterlands of Borneo?

Lord, we have so much, yet that "much" so often gets in the way of our finding the only thing that matters. Keep me uncluttered and focused on eternity, I pray. Amen

~A. W. Tozer~