Becoming Friends with God , livre ebook

Becoming Friends with God
A Devotional Invitation to Intimacy with God
Leith Anderson
© 2001 Leith Anderson
Published by Bethany House Publishers 11400 Hampshire Avenue South Bloomington, Minnesota 55438 www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan. www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-6265-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Scripture quotations labeled RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Cover design by David Carlson
The internet addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in this book are accurate at the time of publication. They are provided as a resource. Baker Publishing Group does not endorse them or vouch for their content or permanence.
Elaine Larson
Faithful assistant, valued colleague, friend of God.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
First Words
Part One Beyond Acquaintance
1 God Is Knowable
2 Who Jesus Is
3 Invitation to a Miracle
4 Twice Born
5 Boastworthy Belivers
6 Faith Matters
Part Two Relational Responsibilities
7 What Is Prayer?
8 Teach Us to Pray
9 No Answer
10 Response to a Message
11 Worthy of His Call
12 Pharisee and Publican
Part Three Communication and Communion
13 Loving Ourselves
14 The Sharing Life
15 Imperfect People
16 Walking the Walk
17 Loving Our Neighbor
18 Christ at Work
Part Four Amity and Enmity
19 Holy and Separate
20 A Suffering World
21 The Hypocritical Christian
22 Jesus and Satan
23 Possessed
24 The Way to Heaven
25 The Way to Hell
Part Five The Perfect Friend
26 The Servant Lord
27 In the Presence of Glory
28 The Gift of Peace
29 The Curing Touch
30 Born to Win
31 Loved by God

About the Author
Books by Leith Anderson
Back Cover
First Words
Dear Friend,
Thank you for letting me call you friend. It is a special word. It speaks of a special relationship. Friendship is based on sharing something in common. The reason I think we are friends is that we both want to be friends with God.
When our daughter started school she wasn’t concerned about the teacher, room number, or academic content she just wanted to have a special friend in her class. It reminded me of my grade-school years every June we received our classroom assignment for the next September and immediately compared assignments with our best friends to make sure we were all in the same homeroom. Friends are a most important part of life.
Unfortunately, not all of our friendships are lasting and satisfying. Friends move away. Friends can be fickle. Sometimes a friend dies and leaves a hole in our soul. Not even the best of friendships will ever be perfect.
I remember my wife’s mother saying that when she was growing up she never really had a best friend until she met Jesus. Jesus became her Savior and Lord, but he also became her friend. He is an extraordinary friend, better than any other. He’s always there for us. He knows us better than anyone else. His friendship lasts beyond this life and into eternity. Jesus is God and there is nothing better than having God as your eternal friend.
The chapters ahead are about becoming friends with God . They are not intended to be a theology book, although they do present Christian truths. They are not intended to retell all the stories of the Bible, although they include lots of Bible stories. These pages unfold as our best friendships do with ideas, stories, conversations, and a deepening relationship.
Our friendship with God begins by meeting him and getting to know him as a person. This is much more than knowing about God as we know about famous celebrities. Some of us feel like we are good buddies with politicians, musicians, movie stars, athletes, and television characters. We feel like friends because we’ve observed them from a distance. But they don’t know us. Even if we’ve actually met one of them, it’s unlikely that our name would be remembered or we would be counted as important in that celebrity’s life. At most, this is not a friend but an acquaintance.
We want to be more than acquainted with God; we want to be best friends. That’s why we begin at the beginning Beyond Acquaintance. Here is the opportunity to be sure that you and I have a personal relationship with God that can deepen into a fulfilling friendship.
Once our friendship is firmly established we discover that all good relationships come with responsibilities Relational Responsibilities. God has responsibilities to us and we have responsibilities to God. I suppose this could be compared with the watering, weeding, and fertilizing of a garden to make sure that the flowers and vegetables will grow strong. But relationships aren’t like plants. We have to work and play to make a relationship all that it can be. If you have a lifelong friend from your growing-up years, you probably have grown that lasting friendship with long phone calls, exchanged birthday cards, and shared laughter, tears, parties, and tragedies. You both feel responsible to make the relationship strong, and that’s the way it should be. Well, it’s the same in our friendship with God there are delightful and important relationship responsibilities that we don’t want to neglect.
The third section to our friendship journey focuses on Communication and Communion, but let’s be careful not to misunderstand. Friendships are not like mathematical formulas or the step-by-step assembly instructions that come with children’s toys. Relationships have ups and downs, delights and difficulties, good days and bad days. That’s why communication is so very important to every relationship. If we don’t communicate on the same frequency, our friendship will never develop. In other words, communication is part of every day of our friendship with God it’s not like we get acquainted, learn our responsibilities, and then start communicating. They’re all mixed up and blended together.
When communication gets wonderfully good, it becomes communion. Communion is like a connection of the souls. It’s deeper and better and stronger than just about anything words can describe. The closest human examples are lifelong best friends, soul mates, identical twins, or the best of marriages. Actually, communion with God is more and better than all of these best examples put together. That’s one of the reasons why becoming friends with God can and should be the most satisfying relationship of our lives.
Next to last in our talks together are pages about Amity and Enmity the best and worst of what a friendship can become. Of course, we never want to have a falling-out with God that will strain and alienate our relationship. The good news is that we can have a supernatural love relationship with God that can endure everything from birth to death, victory to defeat, and happiness to horror. Only the very best and deepest friendships can survive and thrive through every circumstance of our lives.
Our last conversations focus on a lofty promise about the Perfect Friend. This description belongs to God alone. No matter how good it gets with a parent, child, husband, wife, neighbor, or teammate, none of them is perfect. Everyone will disappoint us more than once. And we all know how much it hurts to be disappointed by a friend. That’s why we need God and that’s why we want to be friends with God he will never fail us, will never break up, will never be less than the best. No wonder we want God to be our very best friend.
Thank you again for sharing the journey. Read a chapter at a time. Read them all at once. Skip around. This book is not about the book…it is about becoming friends with God.
May your best friend be God himself!
Friends together with God,
Leith Anderson
“Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called God’s friend.
James 2:23
Part One
Beyond Acquaintance
One
God Is Knowable
God is great; God is good; God is holy; God is love that is very good news if we personally know God. If we don’t, then it isn’t good news at all. This is not a minor matter. Actually it could not be more important, this whole business of knowing God.
The problem is that God is beyond our comprehension. The Bible says in Psalm 145:3, “Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom.” The greatness of God is deeper than the deepest ocean it is beyond our ability to comprehend. Psalm 147:5 says, “Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit.” God is infinite; there is no limit to the understanding of God. But we are finite, we have all kinds of limits, and therefore we cannot fully comprehend him.
I remember when I brought our first computer home one Christmas. I set it up right there in the living room the monitor, the keyboard, and the printer. It was a wonderful event! By today’s standards that computer would be considered primitive. You had to put in the program that you wanted to use on very large floppy disks for there was no hard drive. Suppose you bought the latest Windows program on CD-ROM. When you tried to install it on that old computer, you’d find that