34. God elevates us

Jesus wants us as friends:
“I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.” John, chapter 15, verse 15

We become friends if we stay close to what Jesus is teaching us. God seeks to clothe us with his presence. He speaks with his Heart:
“I will be like the dew for Israel: he shall blossom like the lily; He shall strike root like the Lebanon cedar.” Hosea, chapter 14, verse 6

God says: “I will be like the dew for Israel.” But we don’t really understand this passage. Because usually our relation with others contains conscious and unconscious blockages and we’ll say: “When you’ll become my friend, I’ll be your friend.”

Usually, we need to know the person, trust him, and then that person can enter our group of friends. This seems the norm in our way of proceeding, before welcoming and accepting friendship.

But for God, when he says: “I will be like the dew for Israel,” he does not say that he will test us to see if he will love us. God isn’t us. He doesn’t expect to create a relationship with us. He loves us immediately. God loves us unconditionally. He loves us despite our faults and sins. He loves us eternally. God is always the dew that surrounds us, he’s always present to his people, his family, he’s the perpetual love that covers us.

The more we’re hurt, the more people have let us down, the more we have experienced disappointments, the more we become trivial in choosing friends. God isn’t such a person. God will never let us down. God lifts us and loves us without any special request from us.

So, the difficulty of entering a relation with God always comes from us, because we fear some of our past supposed friends. We confuse God with people from our past. We fear God, instead of letting him love us. We block our relationship with God in a thousand ways.

We are resourceful in finding reasons and excuses for not honestly following Jesus. We cut ourselves from his love, and we terribly suffer from the lost. We cannot count the cost of refused blessings.

The new American Bible, 2011-2014
Book: A path to conversion, Normand Thomas