Friends of God

Meditations on

Staying In the Grace for Today 

April 23, 2025

Friends of God

I no longer call you slaves, because a master doesn’t confide in his slaves.

Now you are my friends, since I have told you everything the Father told me.

John 15:15 

So now we can rejoice in our wonderful new relationship with God

because our Lord Jesus Christ has made us friends of God.

Romans 5:11 

I have written often on this passage from Hebrews 12:28-29,

“Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for indeed our God is a consuming fire.”

To help me order my life in reverence and awe of God, I often affirm in my prayers

that I am not my own; I belong to God. By creation and redemption, I belong to God. This thought helps me realize the life in Christ I am seeking as my way of life is not a self-improvement program – it is NEW LIFE!

This new life is expressed in terms of a total change in identity. The Christians in the Middle Ages understood this. When a person came for baptism, they were given a new name – usually from the Bible – and thus came the tradition of referring to your first name as your Christian name. When we come to God through faith in Christ, God accepts all that we have to offer, which is nothing other than our sinful nature. But because we have a desire for forgiveness, God accepts us and then exchanges our old sinful nature with new life in Christ.

In this new life in Christ, we, like Jesus, become the beloved child of God, with whom God is delighted and upon whom God’s favor rests. In this new identity, Christ becomes our life. Because Christ is our life, God, our Father, declares that we have right standing with Him, just like Jesus. He further attests that this right standing, since it was given to us as a gift, is not based on our behavior. We are not his new creation because of what we did, or we are doing, or what we have refrained from doing. Rather, we are His children because of what He has done in uniting us to Christ in His death, burial, resurrection, and enthronement. And for all eternity.

My Takeaway: As God’s new creation, we have become friends of God. I want this truth to be embedded deeply within me and influence every thought and deed in my life.

Sē’lah

My book on prayer,

First Think, Then Pray

is now available on Amazon Kindle.

 

(Selah is a word that appears in the Book of Psalms that I often use as the Complimentary Closing in my correspondence. Its meaning, as I use the word, is to pause and think about these things.)

 

These meditations are written by Alex M. Knight as he seeks the life in Christ as his way of life.  The meditations are published on the BLOG, http://seekingthelifeinchrist.blogspot.com/ and they are also distributed on the Constant Contact email server. You may subscribe to this email service by sending an email to: amkrom812@gmail.com.

 

Copyright © 2025 by Alex M. Knight

 

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.