I recently taught Sunday school on the topic of friendship as displayed in the life of Paul. One of the things my class learned is that friendship is an essential part of our lives. We can’t live without our friends. We can’t live without spending time with them, talking to them, sharing things with them, laughing with them, crying with them. As Christians, it is especially important to have that companionship, not only with our friends here on earth but also with our best friend and Father.
But how exactly do we have a friendship with God, the Creator of the universe, the King of Kings? It’s not unattainable. We don’t serve a “far away, out-there-God”. John 15: 7, 10, and 14 give us a clear idea of how to have a friendship with God. Particularly in verse 7, it says, “If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be given to you.” Verses 10 and 14 talk about obeying the Lords commands and doing what He asks. If we do all these things, He will hear our prayers and we can have communion with God. Now let’s go back to that word “remain”, or as it says in another version, “abide”. We need to have that unity and oneness with God, and there two ways of doing this. One is prayer and the other is reading the Word. These go hand-in-hand to have communion with God. A friendship with God can’t succeed without talking to Him on a daily basis, getting to know Him better and hearing from Him. But we also can’t get to know Him better and hear from Him if we don’t read His words in the Bible.
Last week at the NICF, I stood up and confessed that my Bible reading had been seriously lacking throughout my entire life as a Christian (which is almost all my life…that’s a long time to be lacking). Then I mentioned the commitment I’d made to read through the Bible in 90 days, a commitment that became even more intense after I announced it to the congregation and basically held myself accountable to about 200 people. But you know what? I needed that accountability, and I think many of us would say the same. I would dare to say that it’s easy for us to pray as we’re walking down the street or on the bus, or to sing praise songs in our head as we go through our day, but what about sitting down for half an hour to an hour and really diving into the Word? That’s a little more difficult, isn’t it? But how do we remain in Him and obey the commands of God if we don’t even know what they are? We need to be in the Word, reading the words of God, and meditating on them day and night. I’ve noticed this particularly this week as I went through the book of Leviticus. Though this was a tough book to get through, I learned so much about God’s commands for the Jews, what He expected of them so they could have communion with Him. It was very specific! But it was specific because it was important. It’s the same for us today. We need to read the words and see how we too can have that communion, that friendship with God.
I would encourage you to dive more into the Word on a daily basis. Go beyond reading that one verse or that one chapter a day. You don’t have to read the Bible in 90 days, but maybe He is calling you to go deeper and farther, getting to know Him in a new way. Make your friendship with the Father stronger by discovering His words that were written for you…just waiting for you.
1 comment:
Hope it's still going well. There's a different perspective to reading that quickly, I think.
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