Best Friends
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
What would happen if we really knew God wanted to be with us?
It is one thing to believe that the Lord loves us in some remote, impersonal way and quite another to believe He likes us. Author Brennan Manning once said that if he sensed someone truly liked him he would lower all his defenses and expose himself emotionally to that person. He used this as an analogy to our relationship with Jesus.
When a believer is grappling with his or her sin, and the fear and shame that accompany it, it is tempting to see God as only a stern judge, maybe even an angry being who demands a perfection from us that we do not have the strength to attain. We project on to Him the disgust and self-hatred we feel towards ourselves and assume that He feels the same way about us as we do.
But what if we Christians were to dare to believe, even during such terrible moments, that Jesus Christ is our friend? We know He is to be our Lord, our King, and our Master. Unfortunately we sometimes, to our own loss, focus only on the aspects of God that set Him apart from and far above us while forgetting this same God also became one of us. For the people who bear His name it is absolutely true that Jesus is Lord, King and Master. What we so easily forget is that he is also our Friend.
Friends, real friends, want to be with us. If they are believers these people love us in the name of God but, as friends, they also like us and when we really come to know this is true we respond by removing all the walls our insecurity has built around us. We feel the joy that comes from knowing that at least one other person in the world likes us as we are, where we are, and desires to be with us. Even the ugly side of us, our struggle with sin, does not change that affection.
For some reason it is hard to imagine Jesus sitting with His disciples and just enjoying their company. We have a tendency to look at the three years they were together and imagine the time was always spent in the “serious business” of the Kingdom of God. Yet surely during those years there was also time for Jesus and the disciples to bond in the kind of friendships like-minded people living and traveling together naturally create. Over time they must have come to know one another well, to laugh as well as cry together. Think of the best church small groups of today and you might begin to get some idea of how intimate a group this must have been. Yes, there was some friction between the disciples; but that too is part of any friendship that goes beyond the surface level.
In the middle of all this was Jesus who, at the Last Supper, simply declared what the disciples must have already known to be true. He called them friends for that was truly what they had become to Him…and He was there’s as well.
Right now you, Christian, are also His friend and He is even more than that to you, whether you know it yet or not. Our Lord is also the One who both loves and likes you perfectly. Think for a time on that reality and its ramifications and let your heart be joyful. Jesus Christ is not just your friend. He is your best friend.