Friendship with God (Part 1)

You are my friends if you do what I command.  John 15:14

Do you obey your bestfriend?  Most likely not.  That's not how we usually define friendships.  Why would we?  Our friends don't owe us obedience.  But we owe God our obedience, if we want to be His friends.

"That doesn't sound like friendship to me," some of you might think.  I can see why you would, if we are defining friendships among humans.  But think about who God is. 

How can a creature be friends with the Creator if he or she doesn't accept who the Creator is?

The Creator is our Maker, and thus our Master. 
Imagine it this way.

What if you could create artificial intelligence?  You gave it life, personality, and purpose--a very specific purpose.  Now if this AI wanted to be your friend, what would it have to do first and foremost?

"Well, I wouldn't make it to be a slave, which is what the Bible verse at the top sounds like.  What kind of friend just wants to tell you what to do?"

Again, think about God.  Does He really need our obedience?  Is there really anything we can add to His eternal life?

So obedience to Him must be somehow for our good.  And if we do it, we can experience friendship with Him. 

But what's the connection between us obeying God and Him befriending us?

What It Means for YOU To Be HOLY

It is written: Be holy, because I am holy.  Peter, apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ

I thought about holiness at two extremes:
1. A kind of spooky kooky weirdness, where you walk around moaning and groaning
2. A samurai warrior seriousness, where you remain silent unless ordered to speak

The first extreme involves the otherworldly nature of holiness, which is true.
The second extreme involves the dedication and focus of holiness, which is also true.

Yet what the Spirit showed me is a picture of a husband and wife talking freely and intimately.  There is something heavenly and thus otherworldly about this.  There is also a dedication and focus on each other that this man and woman have with no other person.  Their love is exclusive, set apart. They belong to each other. 

This is what it means for you to be holy.

It means an exclusive and set apart relationship with God that is the most intimate relationship you have and can have.  Who else can live in your body?  Who else is with you always, all day, everyday?  The Spirit of God is the Holy Spirit.  Your body is His temple.  You are not your own.  You are one spirit with the Lord, as a husband is one body with his wife.  This is holiness.

To experience this, you need only to believe in Jesus and enjoy the wonder of His Spirit in your body.

If you agree, pray with me:

"Holy Spirit, I honor You. You are God, and my body is Your temple.  I welcome You.  I love You.  I am one with You, both now and forever.  In the Father.  By the Son.  Amen."

Does God Have Real Feelings FOR YOU?

Jesus looked at him and loved him.  Mark 10:21a


I hated it when preachers would tell me to take John 3:16 and insert my name.  Jesus didn't say, "For God so loved Olatunde...."  Jesus wasn't talking to me.  He was talking to Nicodemus more than 2000 years ago.  But there was a young man who asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life. Jesus told the man he knew the commandments, and the young man said he'd kept them from the time he was a boy.  Something about how the young man said this made Jesus look at him...and love him. 


It was like Jesus felt a kind of tenderness towards what he saw in this young man.  But it was for this young man. Jesus looked at him.  Not me.  Not you.  Why am I harping on this?


Because God still looks at each of us, and we shouldn't have to insert our names in Bible verses any more than this young man did.  We don't do this in our relationships with our friends and the people we deeply love.  I don't do this with my children.  Sometimes my youngest daughter just tells me out of the blue, "Daddy, I think I love you."  Why does she do this?  I never know.  But I look at her and I love her.  Or it may not be anything as sentimental or touching as her spontaneously cute "I THINK I love you."  Sometimes I look at her playing to herself, talking to herself, or reading to herself.  I look at Andromeda and I love her. 


We don't feel God's look of love because we make God and the Bible the same thing.  We think God is the Bible and the Bible is God.  We think having a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" means reading about Jesus looking at a young man and loving him, and then substituting our names with that young man.  But we tell people that the story about this young man, whom Jesus looked at and loved, is a REAL story that REALLY happened in history.  Not to you or me.  To him.  Between him and Jesus.


And we tell people Jesus is alive.  He still has eyes.  He still looks and loves. 


I have felt the gaze of God on me.  I have known the listening ear who lets me tell Him my deepest longings, and He tells me His in return.  Yes.  God talks to me and I listen.  Conversation.  Is He not a person, the Person, in this "personal relationship with Jesus Christ?"


When I read the scriptures, the Spirit reads them to me and with me, being the Author and all.  There is nothing better than the Author reading His work to you and explaining how He felt when He was writing it. 


And when I'm not reading scriptures with the Spirit of Christ, and we're just talking, I feel like the only thing in this world worth having is His voice.  Conversation with Jesus. 


I know that God has real feelings for me.  That He looks at me and loves me.  I'm not inserting my name in the Bible when I say that.  Nor am I saying it because the Bible says "God is love."  I'm saying that Jesus is alive in me by His Spirit, and that He talks and listens to me just like He did with that young man that He looked at and loved.


This is normal.  It's normal for a Father to talk to His little children, daily and constantly.  It's normal for a Husband to talk intimately with his wife.  It's normal for a Guide to stay close to the one He is guiding. And it's normal for our Heavenly Father and Brother and Comforter to look at us, and love us.


Does God have real feelings for you?
You knew the answer from the beginning, because you've felt Him look at you, and love you.


(Tell me a time when you felt Jesus look at you and love you.  I want to you to share this with me because this is what the Christian life is all about.   Share this in the Comments, through Blogger or Google plus.)

Does God REALLY Know EVERYTHING? (An Afterthought)

"You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.   Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely."  Psalms 139:2,4

The Spirit of God showed me something.  This is what I saw.

 



In college I was a music major.  My focus was music composition.  As I wrote a piece of music one day I got a glimpse of how God feels as the Creator.  There was a feeling I was trying to express in sound and music.  Something about myself I wanted to share with all who would listen.  But to do this, I needed other musicians.  If they cooperated, if they played what was in my head, then they too would join in as expressions of my unique emotions.  Through improvisation or even their own interpretations, they could add something that I didn't write....as long as they were true to what I did right...not contradicting by adding or subtracting or negating my music.

It was like that with God when He created us all.  Each of us play instruments in the orchestra of God's symphony of life. We each add through prayer and obedience a sweet variation on God's original intention...unless we sin.  Then we are like independent musicians who won't blend.  They want to be heard above the other musicians, to make their own composition.  They want solos when their part in the music hasn't come.  Or they break off from the original orchestra and seek to make their own music to rival the Original Composer. 

But all of this is still an introduction to revelation.

What I saw was in the small word "perceive" quoted in Psalms 139:2 above.

As I meditated on this verse in college, there seemed a subtle difference between "perceiving" something and "knowing" something.  Very subtle, but very real.  This is how God showed it to me.

I knew every note in whatever piece I wrote.  Every note before it was played.  Yet I listened to my music with pure joy, not anticipating what was coming next with the scientific focus of a music theorist.  I didn't simply want the notes that I wrote to be "played right," because of course I knew every note before it is played.  Do you feel what I'm saying?  As the composer I didn't listen with a technical knowledge of my own music, simply to make corrections to imperfections.  I listened for what I felt when I was inspired to write in the first place.  With anticipation, I "perceived from afar" that inspiration.

I sensed how God feels about us, how "before a word is on our tongue He knows it completely," just as before the note is played by a musician, I the composer knew it completely.  I could have sung the note before the saxophone played it...but why would I do that?  I want to hear him play it, even though I already know it, or perceive it.  I know what He will play, but I want to hear it any way. 

Like  in Genesis Chapter 2, when God brought the animals to animals to Adam "to see what Adam would name them.  And whatever Adam named them, that was the animals name."  Why did God want "to see what Adam would name them?"  How could the animals' names be completely up to Adam, as if God had to wait to see what name Adam would give?  As if He didn't "know" what Adam would name them until He did? 

Like a composer, God "knew" and didn't "know," and by know I mean present tense direct experience.  If Adam hasn't said the name, then there is nothing yet to know from experience.  Key word: EXPERIENCE.  Now God did "pre-experience" Adam naming them, "perceiving Adam's thoughts from afar; before the words, the names of each animal, was on Adam's tongue, God knew it completely,"  but experienced Adam naming them only while Adam named them.  God made the animals, so He knew the names best suited for them.  But the names of the animals were now in Adam, so much so that even God had to wait...perceiving Adam's thought from afar.

Does God REALLY Know EVERYTHING? 
Yes!  About everything...and everyone...including you.
His knowledge is vast, deep, intimate, intuitive....relational....personal.

Does God REALLY Know EVERYTHING? (Part 1)

"Then the LORD said (to Moses), "If they do not believe you or pay attention to the first miraculous sign, they may believe the second.  But if they do not believe these two signs or listen to you, take some water from the Nile and pour it on the dry ground.  The water you take from the river will become blood on the ground."  Exodus 4:8-9

Why did God give Moses these miraculous options?  Didn't God know whether the elders of Israel would believe first, second, or third miracle?  Why did God say "If they do not believe you or pay attention to the firs miraculous sing, they may believe the second?"  Which by implication God is saying the may not believe the second?  They may or may not believe these miracles.

Did God really know which miracle they would believe?

Most of the time when I read commentaries on passages like this, the commentator will go ahead and tell me that "of course God knows what's going to happen.  He's omniscient.  All knowing.  He can't NOT KNOW!  He's just going through these motions for Moses sake, just like He did when He asked Adam where He was in the Garden.  God only asks questions for our sake."

Well what about this passage,
Then the Lord said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous  that I will go down and see IF what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. IF not, I will know.”  Genesis 18:20-21, all emphasis mine.

Now look at all that I emphasized and underlined in these two verses:

• God is going down TO SEE IF what He's being told about Sodom is really as bad as He's being told.  Key word: IF. 
• And IF not, because it may be as bad, and it MAY NOT BE AS BAD, GOD WILL KNOW!

Wait a minute.

Wouldn't God already know how bad things are in Sodom and Gomorrah before anyone cried out to Him about it?  Why does He need to go down and see for Himself?  Why is it only then that He will know?

Does God really know everything about Sodom and Gomorrah?
Does God really know everything about whether the elders would believe Moses' miracles?
Does God REALLY Know EVERYTHING?

(Click HERE to find out.)

Does God REALLY Know EVERYTHING? (Part 2)

"Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?" John 4:29

Do you remember the Samaritan woman, and her conversation with Jesus?  He didn't tell her "everything she ever did," at least not in the way we usually think.  Jesus did tell her about her past with 5 other men, having never met her before that moment.  He knew something about her that He only could have known by revelation from God.  But the Samaritan woman considered these secrets from her past "everything she ever did."  These secrets defined her.  And Jesus really knew them about her.

Now we come to what it means for God to really know something, or anything, or everything.

We as western or American Christians think of knowledge scientifically or informationally.  You know how you'll watch a police show and some fancy FBI profiler comes in and says to a suspect,

"We know you went to Morehouse College in 1992 and studied chemistry.  Your favorite book is 'To Kill a Mocking Bird,' and you used to stay at night in Hubert Hall reading this instead of your chemistry assignment.  Your girlfriend Jean read it with you, and you both laughed in chapter 3 paragraph 4."

You know how they overwhelm the suspect with detailed trivial knowledge about his life that seems omniscient to the suspect.  We think of God's omniscience like this.  Just plain knowledge.  He can read our minds.  God can tell us everything about everything, because He just knows everything about everything, right?

Yes.  He does.  Even like this.  But not like this at all.

You know how in the old school versions of the Bible when it talks about sex it says things like "the man knew his wife, and they had a son?"  This is how God knows everything.

God really does knows everything---intimately, intuitively, and relationally.

It's the difference between talking to an FBI profiler for the first time and him giving you specific trivial details of your life, versus talking to someone you've never met who seems to always ask you the perfect questions.  Questions you not only have been asking yourself, but that you've always wanted someone to ask you.  Or questions you didn't know you had until you heard this stranger ask them. You don't feel like he's "reading your mind," but like he's talking to you in the way you think.  Like he understands how your mind and heart work.   He draws you inside and out, and he also lets you know him inside and out.  In other words, it's not just him knowing "everything you ever did," but he also lets you know everything he's doing.  It's intimate. He penetrates you, and he allows you to penetrate him.

God does know everything, even in the scientific way we American Christians usually think of omniscience.  But He's not just an all powerful observer from eternity past.  He knows us deeply and intimately and relationally.  Go back to what I said in the first blog about Moses' miracles and Sodom and Gomorrah.

With the miracles of Moses, God thought of the elders relationally.  He knew how their minds worked, and the choices they would have to make to believe the first, or second, or third miracles of Moses.  That's why God says, "if" they don't believe the first or second miracle they may (or may not) believe the third.  It's up to them to believe, and God is not going to make that choice for them.  So though God does know which choice they will believe, it really is up to them to make the choice.  And in a sense, God doesn't "know," or intimately experience their choice until they make it.  Do you see that?

Or with Sodom and Gomorrah.  You have the evil doers in Sodom and Gomorrah. And you have those who are crying out to God about  the evil doers.  God doesn't take either side.  He doesn't ignore the outcries, nor does He immediately judge Sodom. He comes down from heaven (whatever that means) to see for Himself.  To intimately and relationally experience Sodom and Gomorrah with His own eyes, if you will.  Why do this?  Was He trying to teach Abraham a "theological lesson?"  Not from what we read.  God thought to Himself about whether He would even share with Abraham what He planned to do about Sodom.  Having considered Abraham worthy of this secret, God shared it with him.  Then Abraham interceded for Lot.  And why would Abraham need to do this?  Didn't God already plan on saving Lot?  Didn't God already know Lot needed saving?

God did.  God knew about Lot, intimately and relationally, as He knew Abraham's heart.  God knew what the elders would ultimately choose to believe...and what you will ultimately choose to believe.  But God's omniscience is not merely scientific.  It's intimate.  It's connected.  God searches you and knows you like a husband and wife search and know each other.  God's omniscience is a deep connection that doesn't just yield information.  God knows you with the eyes of deep powerful love. 

God really does know everything....about you.

When You've Loved Until The Very End

Before the Passover celebration, Jesus knew that his hour had come to leave this world and return to his Father. He had loved his disciples during his ministry on earth, and now he loved them to the very end.  John 13:1

When you've loved until the very end, Jesus understands how you feel.  He understands giving yourself to those who will later betray you and forsake you.

He understands how you feel, because you've made Him feel the same way.  So have I. 

How many times have we betrayed the love of God for someone who could care less about us?  After all, has anyone died for us when we were at our worst?  Yes.  Only One.  Perfectly Innocent, dying for the perfectly guilty:  You and Me.

How many times has God served us and given us good things, in addition to Himself, only for us to argue about our greatness, making Him foolish promises?

When you've loved until the very end, forsaken by a friend, hoping for a response and getting none, Jesus understands how you feel.  Many times you've ignored Him after He's waited for a response from you.  So have I.

But in our rejection and depression, He doesn't say, "I told you so."  He cries with us and for us, because when you experience rejection, He's being rejected again, in you, and with you.

Feel His love and understanding, knowing that nothing you feel goes unfelt by Him.  It's been done to Him, and is being done to Him in you.

When you've loved until the very end, Jesus understands, because He loves you to the very end.

God's Greatest Promise TO YOU

"Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you."

James 4:8

 

Through prayer you can be as close to God as you want to be. 

 

This happens when you pray in three ways:

1. Honestly.
2. Deliberately.
3. Secretly.

PRAY HONESTLY

 

It is written, "The LORD is near to all who call on Him; to all who call in Him in truth." 

Psalms 145:18. 

The word of God also says that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.  It is impossible for light and darkness to be intimate.  In God there is no hiding, so to be close to Him, you must be completely vulnerable. 

 

PRAY DELIBERATELY

 

It is written again,  "The LORD is with you when you are with him."  2 Chronicles 5:2 

Because God is everywhere, if you deliberately acknowledge His presence, wherever you are, He will deliberately acknowledge yours, as Jesus says in the next way to pray.

 

PRAY SECRETLY

It is written once again, "But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you." 

Matthew 6:6 

Intimacy assumes secrecy.  When you pray to God alone and for God alone to hear, He will honor your expression of intimacy by being intimate with you. 

I once spent time alone with God when my roommate was away.  I told God my deepest fears about the future, and I wanted Him to sit with me and comfort me.  I felt Him with me as I sat on my bed, until my roommate came home.  My roommate's presence was clearly an interruption, because I didn't sense God until he left. And I missed Him.

 

I felt God with me that day because of these three things:

1. I prayed honestly.
2. I prayed deliberately.
3. I prayed secretly.

If you believe in Jesus, and you do these three things, you will experience God's greatest promise to you:

 

You can be as close to God as you want to be!

 



God and Yusef's Accident (Another True Story)

Yusef laughed and joked and talked, not seeing the car coming towards me;  the car hit us on my side, totaling Yusef's car.

I sat at the table in my apartment.  Yusef sat on my couch, looking off in silence.

"God, how can I encourage Yusef?"

"Take him to the neighborhood you like to go to with the big beautiful houses.  Take him at night, playing jazz music."

This didn't seem like something Yusef would like at all, let alone something that would encourage him.  He seemed like a tough guy kind of guy. 

I felt a choice in me.  Perfect freedom and liberty:
Listen to the Spirit.  Ignore the Spirit.

I listened.

Night came.  I took Yusef for a drive, in the neighborhood with big beautiful houses that I liked, listening to jazz.

"Why are you doing this?" Yusef asked.

"No reason," I responded, embarrassed.

"I used to do this all the time!  I used to go driving at night in neighborhoods with big houses, listening to jazz.  But I never thought anyone would want to do that with me."

"The Spirit told me to do it."

We continued to drive and talk.

I felt honored by God, who revealed these secrets to me:

• He was with Yusef all those nights when Yusef drove.
• He was with Yusef during the accident. 
• He was with Yusef right now.

If I hadn't listened to the Spirit, I wouldn't have received this honor.
I wouldn't have encouraged my brother.
I wouldn't have come to know the beautiful presence of God.
In Yusef's life.
And in mine.

Where and How To MEET GOD

But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly.  Matthew 6:6 NKJV

Two words guarantee intimacy with God.
Two words guarantee you will meet God directly:

1. Secret
2. Prayer

Where is God?
He is in "the secret place."

What is He doing there?
Listening to those in secret prayer.

Where is the secret place?
Wherever no one but God can hear you.

• Alone in a room, any room, behind a closed door.
• Alone in your mind, any time, behind a closed mouth.

The Lord Jesus promises God's open reward for those who meet God secretly.

What open reward does He promise?

The same reward promised throughout scripture:

• If you are intimate with God, He will be intimate with you!
• If you share your secrets with God, He will share His secrets with you!
• If you reveal yourself to God, He will reveal Himself to you!

 (Image from epitomic.blogspot.com)