Friendship
With God
By
Pastor Jack Hayford
We can come
to know friendship with God, not only through salvation
in Jesus Christ, but in our day-by-day experience. We
must start, of course, by coming to Christ and receiving
His salvation. But we can also learn to walk with God
in friendship, in relationship. This is established
not only on the basis that you've been born again, but
because you've come to walk with Him. Jesus had walked
with his disciples for three years when one day He said
to them, "No longer do I call you servants... but
I have called you friends" (John 15:15). The Lord
Jesus calls us to walk with Him in that relationship,
but everything in us—everything about our lives—rebels
against it. Three primary things work against the possibility
of our having a confident relationship with God:
1) The absence
of a role model.
Many who read
this have had no one in their formative years to model how a person
in a confident relationship with God should live. Many authority
figures have failed. Fathers or pastors who violated their trust
left many with a negative impact rather than a positive role model.
Or possibly
there were models but you weren't close enough with them to really
observe their character. We haven't had that confident walk with
God demonstrated to us; thus we don't know how to respond to life's
situations from within that framework. A boy's dad can stand beside
him and say, "Son, when you go to the plate, put your feet
about this far apart, and scoot your hands down the bat about two
or three inches. You'll be able to manage it better when you swing.
That's good. Now don't shift your weight too soon. That's it."
That's a coach, a role model. Someone who shows you how it's done.
When that kid goes to the plate, he is going to feel more confident
because there was someone to model the way he should position himself
when playing baseball.
Most of us
weren't called to baseball, but to a vital relationship with God.
But few of us have had good role models.
2) The presence
of corruption.
Our work places
vary from sophisticated to crude, but either way we can be surrounded
by the lewd, the corrupt, and the foul. The pornographic, the obscene,
and the suggestive permeate the work place. The air is blue with
profanity, and the innuendo is ever present. The rest room walls
are scrawled with filth.
Everything
about life is surrounded by corruption, and it works against your
being a person who walks with God. You feel like Isaiah who said,
"I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a
people of unclean lips" (Isaiah 6:5). You feel that sense of
unworthiness and inadequacy, and it effects your ability to walk
with God.
3) The consciousness
of our own failures.
There is not
one of us who has not sinned. Our sins may have been
very private or very public, but shortcomings and failures
have crawled into our flesh. The impact of those things—once
they lay hold of your mind—is so telling, so pervasive.
You may have repented and received forgiveness, but
you find that you still can't cleanse your mind of the
recollection of those scenes that have riveted themselves
into place. And because of that, there is a lack of
conviction in your own assurance toward God.
Friendship
with God is the starting place. You want to be able to walk into
his presence with holy hands. You may say, "you haven't seen
what my hands have done; what they have touched. There is nothing
holy about my hands." But there is good news for each of us.
We are called to friendship with God by the One who Himself had
His arms stretched out and His hands nailed through in order that
our hands might be cleansed by His blood. And there is not one of
us who can't put our hands in front of us right now and say, "Because
of Jesus, these can be holy hands."
So lift your
hands with me and praise the Lord for the confidence of forgiven
sin and the assurance that we can walk before the Lord in holiness.
Praise God and thank Him for that promise. Hallelujah! Friendship
with God is a viable option. A possibility we can walk into with
real confidence. God wants it. He has ordained it and Jesus paid
the price for it. |
Jack
Hayford Ministries
14800 Sherman Way, Van Nuys, CA 91405-2233