Friendship with God

Contrary to what John Eldridge (author of Wild at Heart) and others have said, Jesus is not “wild at heart” because he tells us in Matthew 11:29, “I am gentle and lowly in heart.”

Moreover, Eldridge portrays God as “a person who takes immense risks” for “it’s not the nature of God to limit His risks and cover His bases…As with every relationship, there’s a certain amount of unpredictability…. God’s willingness to risk is just astounding…”

For us risk is possible because we don’t know how things will turn out. We are finite, ignorant unlike God. John Piper reminds us, “God can take no risks. He knows the outcome of all his choices before they happen. And since he knows the outcome of all his actions before they happen, he plans accordingly. His omniscience rules out the very possibility of taking risks.”

God therefore takes no risk in his love, because he knows everything about me, and you who are in Christ. John 21:17 confesses, “…Lord, you know everything.”

He knows all we’ve done, all we’re doing, all we’ll ever will do. He will never receive new knowledge about us that may cause him to question his determination to call us his friends (John 15:15). And for that reason, no relationship we have will ever be more secure than our relationship with him.

The late J.I. Packer wrote, “There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love for me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.”

Packer goes on:

“There is, certainly, great cause for humility in the thought that he sees all the twisted things about me that my fellow humans do not see (and I am glad!), and that he sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself (which, in all conscience, is enough). There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, he wants me as his friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given his Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose.”

“Knowing God,” [not just knowing about him], says Packer, “is a relationship calculated to thrill a man’s heart.” 

Does it thrill your heart that you, even you, are a friend of God?

 

Dave Brown
Director
Washington Area Coalition of Men's Ministries (WACMM)