Gospel Friends

Trent and I were given so many amazing gifts this week! One of the churches that was planted out of Gospel City Church invited Trent to preach. We were so excited to be able to see our good friends, Stephen and Mandy Love, and to be with their community. After we had said yes to that, Gospel City Church invited Trent to preach there the following Sunday. Rather than travel back and forth to Florida, some friends graciously offered their home in Indianapolis for us to stay in. So we have 12 days with our kids, friends, and community that we have done ministry with for years. The time has been so sweet, and I am exceedingly grateful. As we have been back with our people, I’m loving the depth of the relationships. It reminded me of some words describing what our relationships are supposed to be like from my friend Bob Lepine.

"We want our relationships with one another to be Christ-centered, grace-based, intentionally intrusive, and redemptive. We want to foster an environment where it is genuinely safe to be honest with one another about who we really are and what we are really thinking, feeling, and struggling with in our lives."

Bulls-eye, right? God created us for relationships, and He models it for us in His very nature. God is 3 persons in One God. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all commune together in a perfect relationship. In John 17, Jesus says," I pray that they will be one even as we are one." God, in himself, is in relationship.

But He doesn't stop there. God has done everything possible to bring us into a relationship with Himself. Through the body of Jesus, He broke down the dividing wall of hostility and has made it possible for us to know Him through His Son, Jesus Christ. He even goes so far as to adopt us into His family, making it possible for us to call Him our Abba, Father.

We know that God is passionate about relationships because Jesus was passionate about relationships, and He is the exact image of the invisible God. (Col 1:15) When Jesus was on the earth, he had a family. He had close friends and went to their homes for dinner. He was found in crowds, among 70, with the 12 disciples. He had 3 close friends, and He had a best friend.

Because God is passionate about relationships, He calls us to be intentional about ours!

Think back to your first few pages of Scripture. Over and over in Genesis 1 and 2, we find that God created and said, "It is good." The first negative assessment in Scripture is found in Genesis 2:18 when God says, "It is not good that man should be alone." This was a perfect man in a perfect environment, and yet God still says, ‘This isn't good.’ What was missing? Relationship, Fellowship. God wanted communion like He has with His Son and with His Spirit, so He created the first human relationship.

We move on to Genesis 3 and find that sin has entered the world. Eylise Fitzpatrick describes what sin did:

When sin entered the garden, the primary consequence was a deep rupture in relationships. Adam and Eve blamed each other and feared God. They hid from Him and tried to cover their nakedness with fig leaves. . . They thought of themselves now as orphans, alienated from each other and their Father.

We still feel the pain of that rupture today. We long to connect but find it increasingly hard to make that a reality. We live in a world with more technological, second-by-second communication, and yet we find our sense of loneliness is greater. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus came to restore broken relationships. The gospel gives us the courage to live broken yet authentic lives. When we run into relational problems, which inevitably happen in a fallen world where we all sin, we don’t have to flee, fix, fight, or despair. All of the typical ways we deal with brokenness. Because of the gospel, we can humbly own our issues, asking for the Lord’s forgiveness instead of isolating ourselves.

I hope you have deep, abiding friendships. I know I long for those and desperately need them. Grateful to have these twelve days as a reminder of the sweetness of gospel relationships.