Christ's Friendship: Its Intimacy

Dearest sisters, thank you for sending in your requests for us to care and pray through. Be encouraged. God is at work in us as a Body, and calls us to pray with and for one another. There is nothing special about those whom God has called to pray for this retreat… we just believe Him, that He is Who He says He is and really can do all He says He can do. We have a passion to see God glorified in our Body, whether you attend HFC or somewhere else. It is true that God exposes what He will for our healing (Heb 4). We have a High Priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses, our suffering, our humanity… He went through great suffering to identify with us, so that we might be identified with Him! At our greatest weakness and failure, He bids us again and again, draw near, draw near to the throne of grace… receive mercy, receive grace! He is willing and He is able to heal our hearts, our fears, our unbelief as we take Him at His word and find Him gentle, faithful and Strong. Compared to the weight of our pain, our sin, our striving, His yoke is easy and His burden is light. So take time today to meditate on His Word below. You will find rest in it, as our Friend reminds us of our position in Him and His intimacy with us.
 
The reading today is entitled, Christ’s Friendship: Its Intimacy
 
No Longer Do I Call You Servants; for the Servant Knoweth Not What His Lord Doeth: But I Have Called You Friends; for All Things That I Heard From My Father, I Have Made Known Unto You—John 15.15
 
The highest proof of true friendship, and one great source of its blessedness, is the intimacy that holds nothing back, and admits the friend to share our inmost secrets. It is a blessed thing to be Christ’s servant; His redeemed ones delight to call themselves His slaves. Christ had often spoken of the disciples as His servants. In His great love our Lord now says: “No longer do I call you servants”; with the coming of the Holy Spirit a new era was to be inaugurated. “The servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth”—he has to obey without being consulted or admitted into the secret of all his master’s plans. “But, I have called you friends, for all things I heard from my Father I have made known unto you.” Christ’s friends share with Him in all the secrets the Father has entrusted to Him.
 
Let us think what this means. When Christ spoke of keeping His Father’s commandments, He did not mean merely what was written in Holy Scripture, but those special commandments which were communicated to Him day by day, and from hour to hour. It was of these He said: “The Father loveth the Son, and showeth him all things that he doeth, and he will show him greater things.” All that Christ did was God’s working. God showed it to Christ, so that He carried out the Father’s will and purpose, not, as man often does, blindly and unintelligently, but with full understanding and approval. As one who stood in God’s counsel, He knew God’s plan. 
 
And this now is the blessedness of being Christ’s friends, that we do not, as servants, do His will without much spiritual insight into its meaning and aim, but are admitted, as an inner circle, into some knowledge of God’s more secret thoughts. From the Day of Pentecost on, by the Holy Spirit, Christ was to lead His disciples into the spiritual apprehension of the mysteries of the kingdom, of which He had hitherto spoken only by parables.
 
Friendship delights in fellowship. Friends hold council. Friends dare trust to each other what they would not for anything have others know. What is it that gives a Christian access to this holy intimacy with Jesus? That gives him the spiritual capacity for receiving the communications Christ has to make of what the Father has shown Him? “Ye are my friends if ye do what I command you.” It is loving obedience that purifies the soul. That refers not only to the commandments of the Word, but to that blessed application of the Word to our daily life, which none but our Lord Himself can give. But as these are waited for in dependence and humility, and faithfully obeyed, the soul becomes fitted for ever closer fellowship, and the daily life may become a continual experience: “I have called you friends; for all things I have heard from my Father, I have made known unto you.”
 
I have called you friends. What an unspeakable honor! What a heavenly privilege! O Saviour, speak the word with power into my soul: “I have called you My friend, whom I love, whom I trust, to whom I make known all that passes between my Father and Me.”
 
Lord, thank You for being our friend, thank You that although we would have been satisfied with salvation, You have called us into Relationship with You, a relationship that began with the forgiveness of our sin, and continues because of Your faithfulness. Lord, we would believe You that You are calling us into deeper intimacy with You. We would believe that it is far easier to walk in obedience with You, out of trust and faith and love and relationship with You, than it is to follow our own sin nature, who simply wants what it wants when it wants it. When we walk by faith in You, listening to all You are saying, as You listened to all Abba Father said when You walked this earth, we can truly believe that we will live a life that honors and pleases You in all aspects. This is our deepest desire, even if we do not yet fully understand it: Your glory Lord. When You are glorified, we have joy. You have created us this way. And O! That You would seek to glorify Yourself through ones such as us? Such joy! O thank You that You glorify Yourself not through our strengths, but through our weaknesses. O teach us, as You taught our brother Paul, to glory in our weaknesses, admitting them rather than covering them up, confessing them to and with one another with the belief of our healing and strength coming not from us, but from Your resurrection power through Your Spirit alive in us. We stumble God, but we stumble forward. O let us believe today that You truly desire intimacy with us, and it is possible to be more intimate with You as our hearts desire, through following You as You lead us by Your Spirit. For the joy set before Jesus, He endured the Cross… and we are His joy! O may we see You as our purest, truest JOY, and be willing to go where You lead, for Your glory and our joy too! O thank You that it is possible to have this joy, and You have made it plain as to how.  Abba for the sister who struggles to believe this is true, for the sister who struggles to believe that she is fully known and still, even still, so completely and fully loved… would You apply this truth Abba to her heart? Heal her heart to believe O God, teach her to fight to believe that she does not and cannot earn Your favor… she has it if she has put her faith in the finished work of Jesus. Teach her Lord to fight to believe that she has Your approval, Your hope, Your joy… and teach us to pray for and with one another, that we might strengthen each other through the power of Your Spirit in us, and all the more as we see the glorious Day approaching. In Jesus’ name, amen.