Jesus Longs to be Your Friend! Will You Respond?

Jesus washing the feet of His friends. "Love one
another as I have loved you." John 13:34

Do you believe it? Can the Lord of the Universe, the Word through Whom everything was made really want to be your and my friend? That's like me wanting to be bosom buddies with one of the bees in our six colonies. No, it's like me wanting to be an intimate friend of every one of the bees (150,000+) in our six colonies. Only that's a bad analogy because I'm less than a bee to Almighty God. So can you believe it? Can I?

I hope so because it's true. Jesus knows you and me with all our sins and faults and flaws and, yes, He wants to come and dwell in intimate union with each one of us. What a thought! Does it make your heart sing? I thrill just to think of it!

A few days ago I did a post reflecting on Robert Hugh Benson's, The Friendship of Christ. Let's look at a few more of his thoughts that they might enrich our relationship with Jesus. He tells us that, while this friendship in some ways is comparable to that between two human individuals, it is totally different because, "A single individualistic friendship with Him...does not exhaust His capacities." Our energies might be exhausted by intimate friendships with two or three outside our families, but Christ "is not merely A Man; He is The Son...the Eternal Word by whom all things were made and are sustained."

On Friendship: from Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson

Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson, a convert from Anglicanism and the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a wonderful little pamphlet in 1912 titled, The Friendship of Christ. I'm blessed to have a copy. It's an especially significant little booklet in the Facebook age when people revel in their thousands of "friends" many of whom they've never met "face to face" and never will. This is how words are stripped of meaning. But that's a subject for another day.

Be a little child in Christ's presence;
It's the quickest way to His heart!

Real friendship, according to Benson, is "this mysterious thing...as mighty as it is mysterious." And part of that mighty mystery is that:

It is bound to rise, so far as it is true to the laws of its own development, to a pitch of passion far beyond that of ordinary relations between the sexes. Since it is independent of those physical elements necessary to a love between husband and wife, it can rise mysteriously higher in certain respects, than the plane which those elements sustain. It seeks to win nothing, to produce nothing -- but to sacrifice all.

Have you ever had a friendship like that -- a person you would call a "kindred spirit" or, as Anne of Green Gables described, a "bosom friend." This is no casual acquaintance, but a friend of the heart, one whom you would trust implicitly with your deepest secrets.