[Real Life] Love And SacrificeSample

God calls me Friend

God calls you and me friend. This happens when you come to a place in your life where you realize you don’t have a relationship with God through Christ, so you ask Jesus to forgive your sins and wash you clean. The Holy Spirit, who is part of the Trinity, comes and lives in your heart. Then you get to be called a friend.

We might understand being ‘servants’, but do we really gravitate to being ‘friends’? We are more comfortable with the concept of being servants of Christ than friends of Christ. Please receive this: God not only loves you, He likes you. He is and wants to be your friend. 

There is no better friend than Jesus Christ. He is the best friend you could ever have, and you discover it the most when you lack friends the most. Will you, student, sit at home on a Friday night because everybody else is doing something that will not honor God? But you choose to stay at home and say, “Jesus, You’re better.” If you do that, you’ll find in Him a friend. How do I know? Because I did it many times in high school and college. If you choose Jesus to be your friend, know He is the best friend you could have. He doesn’t have you just as a servant, but as a friend as well. Friends are fully known and fully loved. He knows you fully and loves you fully. 

Jesus doesn’t owe us anything, He chose us and wants us as His friends. I experience His great love—Agape love—because I am His friend. Now, the greatest thing I can do is to serve Him. Friendship does not negate service, it empowers it. A friendship with God allows me to serve in a way that I can truly abide. I am not serving to earn His love or please Him to gain some kind of benefit. We are already friends, so I am completely secure in my relationship with Him and now I serve from it—that is abiding in Jesus. 

I want to sacrifice in my friendship with my wife, so I can show God’s love in the way I serve her. God is not asking what you can do for Him because that will simply accomplish nothing. God wants you to see what He can accomplish through you, by the power of the Holy Spirit who inhabits you, because that will accomplish lasting fruit.