Is there anything in this life as wonderful as a faithful
friend? When we find a true friend we
have found a great treasure. I am
fortunate to count not a few such people in my life over the years and I am truly
grateful that the Lord has provided some of those for the journey. This life is difficult, even Jesus knew the
sting of betrayal and abandonment in His hour of need and with Peter on the
beach afterwards we see the need of forgiveness and reconciliation. We do have to be careful who we trust and
whose advice we trust in this life, we are weak and we are sinful. All of us have the propensity to save our own
skin and to trade up and away when times are tough. It is easier to rejoice with those who
rejoice than to weep with those who weep.
The best advice on having great friends is to be a great friend, a
faithful person.
We are sent just as the disciples are sent and what a
wonderful thing to find a person of peace when we are sent. Rejection is a difficult thing but Jesus
promised that we would find it, we will find persecution and hatred just as He
did if we are proclaiming Him. We are
adjusting to the new way of the world in the west, a way that rejects absolute
truth and the exclusive claims of the church to Jesus as the Way, the Truth and
the Life and that there is only one way to eternal life. Those truths have become unpalatable to the
world we live in today that celebrates coexistence, diversity and
tolerance. Those truths feel like the
opposite but they are not, they are a gracious invitation that some
reject. They actually need us to be
faithful to those truths, that Truth, if they are to have hope.
Jesus promised that if we stand with Him, confess Him before
men, He will faithfully stand with us, confess us before the Father as His
brothers and sisters, the redeemed. Here
we see the faithful ones who have come through tribulation and washed their
robes white in His blood. They are the
ones who didn't deny Him to their own death.
As I write there are some in northern Iraq in particular who are being
called upon to deny Jesus and accept the false religion of Mohammed. We are fortunate that we aren't being forced
at the end of a gun to deny Jesus but we are all placed in situations on a
regular basis where we are called on to deny Him. When we choose to go with the
crowd morally and ethically, to fit in rather than stand out, we make our
choices. The temptation to deny our
affiliation with Jesus comes in many forms, some more subtle than others but
there is no practical difference. Jesus was
and is a faithful friend, He deserves faithfulness in return.
No comments:
Post a Comment