The more I mull the word “friend,” the more I wonder whether it’s so familiar to us that we’ve lost a sense of how powerful this word (not to mention this relationship) is when we use it for Jesus.
In John 15, Jesus called us “friends.” And it’s shocking how intimate that is. Love is a component of friendship as far as Jesus is concerned. Jesus says that we are to love one another as he has loved us. Jesus redefines who our friends are. Everyone is to be our friend.
Everyone. People we don’t like. People who aren’t like us. People at the borders. People at the margins. People who don’t fit into boxes, and certainly not our boxes. We are to be friends with everyone.
This message is excerpted from “Not just friends” by Anna Madsen in the March 2019 issue of Gather magazine.Today we remember Helena, mother of Constantine, who died around 330.
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