Lent Book: https://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/an-ocean-of-grace
My jottings:
(Comments welcome)
Ocean of Grace (14): TUESDAY – Such a
Soul-Friend (p52ff)
What makes a true friend?
What might a good friend do for us?
Do you think of Jesus as your friend?
What do you value in his friendship?
What are our needs / desires? What do we seek?
How does Jesus fulfil these needs or desires,
or the real needs and desires of which they are distortions?
Does the friendship of Jesus make the “things
of the world” grow strangely dim? What are luxury or plaudits (or…) compared to
the firm friendship of the King of Kings?
It makes sense, of course, that Jesus should
be a friend of sinners because he has come for the sake of sinners, to do for
them what they most need. He is indeed a friend to us in our need! As we have
previously seen, all of us are sin-sick, but Jesus, the Saviour of Sinners,
will seem useless and irrelevant to those who claim they are already righteous
and healthy without him, as they will think they have no need of this doctor.
(See further Luke 5:32)
Jesus is falsely accused of being a glutton
and a drunkard. His ministry was characterised by joy rather than fasting. He
was the bridegroom with the wedding guest (Mark 2:19). It is striking how
frequently in the gospels Jesus is at meals or parties, or how much of his
teaching is about food and drink or banquets and weddings. Heaven is often
pictured as a wedding party. (The Lord’s Supper is a foretaste of the Wedding
Supper of the Lamb).
Once again, the extract shows how Jesus
perfectly meets our need. Our desires are fallen and distorted and often
misdirected. We do not really know what would make for our true and lasting
happiness and we so easily become addicted to God-substitutes, idols which we
hope will make us secure or happy or powerful or popular or…. But we were made
for friendship with Jesus so all our true God-given desires find their ultimate
satisfaction in him: in him is honour and glory and power and love and
satisfaction and rest and security and peace and joy and…
Only Jesus can really satisfy. With Jesus the
Lord as our Shepherd we shall not be in real or ultimate want (Psalm 23).
If we are to be friends of Jesus, likely we
will experience the enmity of the world. As he warns his disciples, the world
will hate us as it hated him. James 4:4 tells us: “friendship with the world means enmity against
God. Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of
the world becomes an enemy of God.” Jesus is the friend of sinners
but he is no friend to sin. To choose the friendship of Jesus means to turn our
back of the world in the sense of God-less Christ-rejecting society.
With the friendship of Jesus we can cope with
insults, slights and opposition. God plus one is a majority!
Jesus is our friend who loves us and lays down
his life for us (John 15:13). He goes on to say to his disciples: “I 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.” (Abraham too is called a friend of God in James 2:23). The
prophets too are like friends of God since he reveals his purposes to them
(Amos 3:7; see also Jeremiah 23:18, 23) – they know their master’s business. Jesus
has made us his friend by making God and his plans and purposes known to us. Of
course we still have many questions and uncertainties, but in Christ we know
who we are, what we are made for and where we are going.
Hymn: What a Friend We Have in Jesus
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SCorW9r_Is
Words etc.: https://www.hymnal.net/en/hymn/h/789
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