If I am a Friend of God

I am personally challenging myself more to adhere to the call of duty as prescribed by Christ to "go" or "do."
Christ summed up the commandments into only two:

1.Love God
2.Love people

Let's take a look at John 15:12-17:

12My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. 14You are my friends if you do what I command. 15I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. 17This is my command: Love each other.

Man, I must say we have it a lot easier than those that were under the old covenant. Over 600 rules and regulations, feast days, holy days, rituals, and sacrifices. We just have the two commandments. Bless God for the two. I would have been considered a top sinner if I had to keep up with all those laws. I'd have to sacrifice three animals a day just due to forgetting.

What I noticed out of this scripture is that most people (myself included) pay attention to "Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name"

I ponder on this because the impression some of us get is to just pray and we'll have whatever we ask for. But we tend to disregard the call to duty in the surrounding scriptures. It is easy to love God, but a lot more challenging to love one another. Christ has called us friends IF we do what he has asked us to do. Well, he asked, correction, commanded us to love one another. Think about it...if someone was just wanting to be called your "friend" just so they could experience the benefits that's not true friendship. It's not a good relationship if only one of you is sacrificing, pouring out, and loving and there is no return...that's not friendship that is using, taking advantage of. There may even be traces of manipulation in there somewhere too.

If we are naming the name of Christ let's not skip over our part in this friendship with him. He did put a condition on it. We're His friends IF WE DO...

How is it our ears and eyes only see that we are his friends, but we don't take note of how can we be a good friend in return? This is not accusing everyone to have done this, but this is a challenge for us to read our bibles with the mind of doing and not just hearing. (James 1:22)

Matthew 6:33 But first be concerned about God's kingdom and his righteousness, and all of these things will be provided for you as well. (ISV)

I just want to bring to light the action we are called to. When we are concerned about the kingdom and righteousness all our needs and requests will be met. As we go and do, our prayers will be answered.

What a privilege to be called His friend and be able to partner with heaven. Our social circle is divine! What an awesome friendship to have where you are taking care of each other's business. He can trust you to get the job done, and you can trust him with all the cares of your life. We have the greatest networking system in the world all because of who our friend is IF we do whatever he has commanded us. And that is to love God and love each other.

Earth, Wind and Fire God's Original Version

We have all had days where we are wondering in our minds, “Lord why don’ you speak to me.” Sometimes it may be with regards to a specific situation and we don’t seem to hear from him. Key word being seem.

I recall the story of Elijah (1 Kings chp. 19:4-13) When he was wanting to hear a word from the Lord and he was desperate for it. The Lord passed by in a wind, then in an earthquake, then in a fire. In all of those big motions the Lord didn’t speak, but finally He spoke as a still small voice. There is much to be said concerning Elijah’s experience because we have all had the same desperation and even awaiting expectation for God to speak/perform in a huge way. I’m not going to go into all the avenues of lessons in his story. I’ll try to stick to one theme here, but I encourage you to meditate on this further.

Now the wind that passed by Elijah was no ordinary wind. It actually broke a mountain down into pieces of rocks.(1Kings 19:11) That’s the type of wind you hide from in a bomb shelter. Think about the situation. You are all alone. You’ve asked God to speak and here comes a vicious wind that’s destroying mountains, followed by an earthquake, and a fire. If you were Elijah you may have been expecting God in that too. Although winds, earthquakes, and fire haven’t passed by us we have had our expectation of how God was going to answer. We want that prayer about our finances to be answered, but God could be speaking to you to give. You don’t hear God’s instruction due to being so focused on how you think the answer should come.

Elijah’s story teaches us:

1. God speaks gently.
2. Let go of your expectation
3. Be obedient to the small things
4. Open your boundaries for what God wants to say

Number four is especially important. Too often we just want God to tell us what we want to hear and be on our way. We aren’t open to hearing from God about anything else…only what we prayed about. Self-centeredness will keep you deaf to the unction of the Holy Spirit. John 16:26 says that “[the Holy Spirit] will teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you.”

Pay close attention to the fact that he will be reminding us of things he already taught. Which means you can go back to the 4 Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) and read what Christ was teaching. Whatever He taught, the Holy Spirit will come and remind. The common theme we know about God and His character is His selflessness, self-sacrifice and love for others.  It is impossible to do the will of God and only focus on ourselves. We aren’t fulfilling His kingdom and therefore won’t be able to hear from Him. (1 John 4:11-12,20-21) Obviously there is more that concerns God other than making us millionaires. We have to open and surrender ourselves to hearing those things which is priority to the Father.

We shouldn’t be so self absorbed that all we want to hear is what concerns us. Of course we do pray for our selves, family, finances etc. This is not condemnation for praying for our situation (far from it). This is a challenge to open our ears to (a) how we hear God (b) His response. As we open our hearts to be like Christ we’ll hear from heaven more frequently, but we can’t put boundaries on what we’re willing to hear. Putting a limit on what you want to listen to is the same as saying I don’t want to hear anything else. For example: You may have limits on what you watch on tv. “I’ll only watch cartoons and that is my limit.” You are saying I don’t want to watch reality shows or the history channel. Or “I only listen to Christian music.” Is the same as saying I don’t listen to rap. I only want to hear from God concerning me, is the same as saying, “Don’t speak to me concerning anything/anyone else but me.” Pretty blunt but true. The Holy Spirit has so much more to speak to us about, but we’ll never hear him if we filter Him through what it is we want to hear.

Let’s open our ears and be prepared in our obedience to His response. This is a part how we live out the will of God in our lives.

Character of a Christian

Don't allow one failure to take you away from God.

Christians have yet to learn the character of a Christian. We think/hear that once you become a Christian your finances are in order, your debt magically disappears, you get the job you've always wanted, your kids behave, your marriage is perfect, or you'll find the right mate, your car doesn't brake down, perfect health, no car accidents, your never angry/frustrated, your family members live forever. When you put it all together like that it doesn’t sound realistic but yet this is the thinking of most Christians (I can speak for Americans anyway). Without words we make a statement as if to say “We believe God is here to serve us and if we claim Him as our God he should always deliver us and serve us on an as-needed basis.”

What we lack is character. We don’t understand patience, diligence, perseverance, strength, endurance, wisdom..

The Lord revealed this to me through my own little moment of self-pity. I couldn’t understand why it seemed as if I was doing what I knew but yet and still not seeing the results I wanted. Like a little brat, I started to question God’s word and not stand on it. I started to allow my questions to turn into a downward spiral of doubts. That is a slippery pit to try to climb out of on your own. I went into a mini-depression because I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why I kept failing at this.

After my tantrum of about 2 weeks, the Holy Spirit opened up scriptures to me to show me that I was lacking in character (fruit of the spirit). I lacked diligence; I lacked patience, and perseverance. The Holy Spirit took me on a study of those 3 things. I looked up definitions. And without having to search for them, my bible continued to land on scripture related to the subject without my help.

The Holy Spirit was teaching me that I can’t let failure stop me. I must continue because Hebrews 10:6 says He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. So just because it hasn’t happened when I wanted it to if I am diligent the reward WILL come.

I began to look at the Hall of Fame of Faith in Hebrews 11 but particularly 11:32-40. The extent that people went to for believing/trusting in God and yet and still some did not even receive the promise. (Hebrews 11:39)

As I continued reading Hebrews 12 I see the same theme of patience and endurance. And then rebukes saying “ Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.” Heb. 12:4 Yes, he just said we haven’t gone through anything for the gospel’s sake and here we are giving up because the job we wanted fell threw. We have to learn how to deal with disappointments even after we’ve prayed. Don’t stop there.

We have to build a character so strong in us that we will not be moved whether we see things change or not. This is the type of character that makes strong soldiers in Christ. Christ is trying to mold us to be undefeatable, unstoppable, victorious champions like him. Champions don’t give up when they see things aren’t going their way. They keep going. It’s okay to analyze the failure just enough to not make the same mistakes, but we mustn’t allow those things to paralyze our trust in God’s word. Do you know how easy it would be to defeat you if everytime something didn’t go your way you retreated! You’d be considered a punk in anybody’s book. We have to build a stamina not to be moved…stand there and fight through the emotions. Emotions lie anyway so let God’s word be true!

God isn’t causing bad things in your life to teach you a lesson, but he is using the things in your life as a lesson and there is a big difference between the two. If you believe that God is causing bad things to happen just to teach you, you will begin to accept what in reality is the enemy’s fiery dart. You won’t fight what you accept. Just as the darkness is separate from the light and cannot co-dwell, so are the roles of God and Satan. Being able to identify one from the other is imperative to your Christian journey. But I digress.

I encourage you too; look up the definitions of patience, perseverance, diligence and endurance. Learn to be undefeatable. Discover the attributes of the elder patrons who gave their life having not gotten their desires. What was it that made them so strong in their faith despite the mishaps of life? We must learn the character of a Christian, learn the character of Christ, learn the character of a Champion.