Is God Your Friend?
Is God Your Friend? Have you ever considered that maturing as a Christian involves returning to friendship with God? The way God is often talked about (from a strict father to a cheery grandfather) often means many of you end up with an insecure attachment to God after years of being a believer. This directly contradicts an important New Testament teaching that is best exemplified by the relationship Abraham developed with God. Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness—and he was called a friend of God (James 2:23).
As you walk with God and learn to distinguish and trust His voice you move back to a place of friendship with Him. The confusing part of this maturing process is that it involves going through difficulty that might make you feel like God is not pleased with you. Paul’s letter to the Romans is full of rich theology. After explaining justification by faith in Chapters 1-4 he turns his attention to sanctification or the way we mature as Christians. He begins his thoughts by noting three gifts you are given when you are justified (come to faith in Christ). He says, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God,” (Romans 5:1-2). In essence, he says your hatred of God and His displeasure has been silenced (peace), you have permission to fail (grace), and your future is secure because God will accomplish exactly what He promised to accomplish (confidence). These three gifts (peace, grace, and confidence) are the gifts you will need to navigate your journey back to friendship with God.
He then outlines the normal process of sanctification. He writes, Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope (Romans 5:3-5). Because maturing as a believer in a fallen world means you will go through difficulty, he says returning to friendship with God begins with welcoming suffering and learning how to suffer well. As you do, you grow endurance and endurance leads to deep character and deep character produces hope. Somehow this character and hope, revolves around returning to a place of friendship with God. When you are filled with hope you are able to see God’s goodness no matter where you look in this world and you see this world through His perspective because you have become friends. Even though the world is fallen and alienated from God, there is something about suffering well that leads you back to the ‘garden’ where friendship with God becomes a more normative experience.
The process of sanctification and the gifts you are given to navigate it are the means by which you return to friendship with God. You must accept you will suffer in this world and that usually has nothing to do with your ‘performance’ and never has anything to do with your standing before God. YOU ARE AT PEACE WITH HIM. Consider Peter’s words, Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you (1 Peter 4:12). It is thinking that difficulty is strange, that you can do something to prevent it, or that it is a result of your bad behavior that often sabotages your growing friendship with God.
You must aim to be more at rest in difficulty and stop listening to lies that you should not struggle and if you do, you are doing something wrong or God is displeased. You must remember that you will regularly experience Christian trials. These trials are not pass or fail. Instead, they will help you see that you are full of stuff you don’t like and want gone. I began to walk meaningfully with the Lord during my freshman year at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. My four years there and the six years I worked in the merchant marine were a Christian trial. Because I had been successful in academics and sports prior to entering the Academy, I was full of pride, self-righteousness, self-reliance, and fear. I thought the only reason I had something good going on in my life was due to my effort and determination. Spending ten years doing something I was not good at, no matter how hard I worked, began to disarm what was ugly inside me and helped me to trust others and see the value in deeper qualities like interdependence, love, humility and trust.
As I journeyed those ten years peace, grace and confidence became beacons of strength. I remember driving out to Jones Beach on Long Island with my date for June Weekend my freshman year. (It was a festive weekend at the Academy that included a military ball). We got a flat tire and I freaked out and started wondering what I did wrong and why God did not like me. Up until that point I never had such thoughts. It was my new relationship with the Lord and believing that He loved me that gave the evil one an opportunity to begin lying to me about His love for me. I now had a new battle on my hands. I had to confront lies aimed to reinforce beliefs that if something went wrong either my behavior or God’s displeasure were at the center of what happened. As those feelings came out, I began to hear another voice that got louder and louder through the years. That voice kept saying, “This is not about your performance it is about your heart. I want you to see that I am for you and with you but you are filled with flesh that will lie to you about my love for you. You need to go through things that will cause you to question me and as we relate through them you will take ownership of what I did for you. We are at peace. You are not alienated from me. I take deep pleasure in who you are.” I can’t tell you how many times over decades I strained to hear and remember those words. I am grateful because now I believe them with some regularity.
It was in those years, too, where I started realizing that I couldn’t get everything right. As I began to cultivate my relationship with the Lord it became clear that, “I was not fulfilling the law.” Having a deeper recognition of right and wrong meant that I began to see I was wrong. In addition, because I was not achieving well academically or athletically I had nothing to hide behind. This was a gift. With a light shining on my inadequacy I needed something I couldn’t produce. Grace. I needed to hear I didn’t and couldn’t get it right, but I had someone I could run to who would embrace me like a dad after a game telling me he was honored to be my dad and pleased that I was playing the game. Through grace, I began to see God looked at my heart and not my performance and was simply pleased I was out practicing, competing and in the process of growing up. His grace said “slow down and relax,” this is a long process.
In some ways to me the last gift was most important of all. I take things too seriously and can be overly responsible. As I began to accept I was at peace with God and that all I had to do was keep practicing at loving others I began to get caught up in God’s glory. I began to recognize that God knew where He was going and was confident He was going to accomplish what He set out to do. I was now on His train heading toward a destination I was neither good enough to attain nor bad enough to prevent. Even though it seemed everything I thought I had built in my own strength was crumbling there was a growing sense underneath that the crumbling was necessary. Even though I couldn’t grab a hold of it and contain it, that confident voice that kept proclaiming peace and grace to me guided me into a future that I could not reach on my own. At times it began to feel like my future was coming after me and I didn’t have to go find it or secure it.
The reality is that you are going to suffer. You cannot change this. Difficulty is what raises the questions God silences through the peace, grace and confidence you were given when you entered His family. In fact, the Gospel of Luke records Jesus addressing those who were wondering about some religious worshippers who were unjustly murdered by Pilate and some others who were killed by a natural disaster. In both events the deaths were unjust. Jesus’ listeners were wondering if the people suffered because of their sin. As Jesus addresses them he wants to expose their self-reliant tendency to explain why suffering happens so they can avoid it. He asks them, Were they worse sinners than you? Is this why that happened? Unless you keep turning from sin you will also perish! (Luke 13: 1-5). Instead of making a connection between the suffering and their behavior, he says suffering in this world is an opportunity for you to see your unbelief and sin and turn toward God for comfort. The fallenness of this world is a reminder to turn toward your Friend remembering that you are at peace with him.
No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you (John 15:15). You are friends with God and he is reconciling you back to the friendship you once knew with him (2 Corinthians 5). Reconciliation involves a change from a condition of hatred and disconnection to one of harmony and fellowship. I remember a season in my Christian life where I thought I was getting soft on sin. The truth was I was not feeling as condemned or hated for it and was actually growing more strength, awareness and presence to stand up to it and turn away from it. Satan knew that if my friendship with God increased, my power to overcome sin would grow. Therefore, he kept trying to drag me back to a place where alienation, tension, and despair ruled the day and God seemed like a distant and angry father.
As a believer you are God’s friend. My prayer is that the peace, grace, and confidence you were given at conversion will be gifts that you open up again and again in difficulty as reminders that you are God’s friend. Paul ends his thoughts on the sanctification process by writing, but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life (Romans 5:6-11). He says if God came after you when you were alienated from him, how much more now that you are his friends will that friendship grow. Jesus is intervening for you and drawing you back to friendship with God. Continue to long for more rest with God and celebrate your growing friendship with him. It is something you are going to end up enjoying for a long time…