Friendship with God E-Book

Mike McKinley

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Based on John Owen's Classic Text Communion with God, This Helpful Resource Answers the Question, "What Does It Mean to Be Friends with Jesus?"  In John 15, Jesus says, "I have called you friends." But what does it mean to be friends with Jesus? In the early 1650s, theologian John Owen attempted to answer this question through a series of sermons, eventually compiled as Communion with God. The book is full of truths about having fellowship with God, but Owen's work is often a struggle for modern readers to understand.  In Friendship with God, pastor Mike McKinley takes a key idea or insight from Communion with God and clarifies it for readers in each chapter, giving them practical guidance for how to develop fellowship with God—such as obeying the Father's commands, acknowledgment of sin, and prayer. Perfect for new Christians or for those without a church background, this accessible resource offers an introduction to the God who "wants you to know him and be known by him."  - Accessible: Written for a broad contemporary audience, perfect for new Christians or for those without a church background - Based on John Owen's Classic Text Communion with God: Takes Owen's work and explains the key themes to a modern audience - Examines Some Key Attributes of God: Including his Trinitarian nature, love, and grace

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“Spectacular and exhilarating, but also inaccessible—John Owen can be like that. His view of the triune God is glorious, yet reading Owen is like climbing a mountain. But just as you can take a helicopter tour to see the marvels of a mountain range, so Mike McKinley lifts us up into Owen’s thoughts with easy-to-understand explanations to see the wonders of knowing the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This book will greatly help many fellowship more fully with God, whose friendship, in Christ, is more than a brother’s. Highly recommended for all believers yearning to have a closer and richer life with each of the persons of the Trinity!”

Joel R. Beeke, President, Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary

“Probably no book has influenced my theological instincts more than John Owen’s Communion with God, but Owen is not always easy to read. Therefore, this small volume by Mike McKinley is a welcome gift. He ably conveys in an accessible and friendly way many of Owen’s key ideas from that book, inviting readers to consider the kindness of the God who desires to be in communion with us.”

Kelly M. Kapic, Professor of Theological Studies, Covenant College

“While thoughtful Christians will know that the doctrine of the Trinity is biblically true, fewer see it as the fountain of their entire Christian spirituality. But Mike McKinley ably shows how the triune God invites the believer into a deeply nuanced threefold relationship—a friendship even—with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In McKinley’s capable hands, John Owen’s original (dense!) writing on these themes opens up and breathes, inviting every reader into the Trinitarian depths.”

Brian Kay, Pastor of Christian Formation, Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church, Walnut Creek, California; author, Trinitarian Spirituality: John Owen and the Doctrine of God in Western Devotion

“John Owen’s Communion with God proves that this titan of English theology was also a sensitive pastor and guide who wanted his listeners and readers to love the triune God fervently. Yet Owen’s style is complex and can be difficult for modern readers. Enter Mike McKinley, himself a seasoned pastor, who in this short book synthesizes much of the gist of Owen’s treatise. Full of choice quotes from Owen, trenchant observations, and provocative questions, McKinley’s overview will spur you on to communion, and indeed fellowship and friendship, with God!”

Shawn D. Wright, Professor of Church History, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; coeditor, The Complete Works of John Owen

Friendship with God

Friendship with God

A Path to Deeper Fellowship with the Father, Son, and Spirit

Mike McKinley

Friendship with God: A Path to Deeper Fellowship with the Father, Son, and Spirit

Copyright © 2023 by Mike McKinley

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover image and design: Faceout Studio, Spencer Fuller

First printing 2023

Printed in Colombia

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-8415-2 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-8418-3 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-8416-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McKinley, Mike, 1975– author.

Title: Friendship with God : a path to deeper fellowship with the Father, Son, and Spirit / Mike McKinley.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022022674 (print) | LCCN 2022022675 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433584152 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781433584169 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433584183 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Owen, John, 1616–1683. Communion with the Triune God. | Spirituality—Christianity.

Classification: LCC BV4501.3 .O93 2023 (print) | LCC BV4501.3 (ebook) | DDC 248.4—dc23/eng/20221125

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022674

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022675

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2023-03-09 02:37:05 PM

For the McCloths

Contents

Introduction

Part 1: Communion with the Triune God

1  Saved for Communion

 2  Friendship with the Three in One

Part 2: Communion with the Father

3  A Loving Father

4  The Father’s Love and Ours

5  What the Father’s Children Do

Part 3: Communion with the Son

6  A Gracious Savior

 7  The Perfect Husband

 8  The Knowledge of Jesus

9  A True Friend’s Delight

10  Treasured

11  Costly Grace

12  Cleansing Grace

13  The Drama of Friendship

14  Looking to Him

15  In God’s Family

Part 4: Communion with the Spirit

16  What Could Be Better?

17  Walking with the Spirit of Comfort

18  Pouring Out God’s Love

19  Taught by the Spirit

20  The Spirit’s Ministry

21  He’s the Real Thing

22  The Spirit Who Stoops

23  What Not to Do

24  Worshiping the Spirit

Conclusion

General Index

Scripture Index

Introduction

Imagine if I told you that I was friends with a lot of famous people: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, and Taylor Swift (if it’s easier for you, you can insert your own list of wealthy, impressive, important, powerful people). What if I told you that I am not only friendly with those people but that they all go to great lengths to be friends with me—they come to visit me all the time, they always pick up the phone when I call, and I have an open invitation to use their vacation homes and drive their sports cars whenever I’d like? You’d think I was a really big deal, wouldn’t you? In fact, you would probably be more than a little envious of me. You might wonder what made me so special that people like that wanted to know me so well.

Well, if you are a Christian, the Bible says that the eternal God—the one who made the universe and everything in it, the God who is more holy and glorious and powerful than we can even begin to understand—that God wants you to know him and be known by him. He has gone to great lengths to make it possible for you to be his friend. He delights in your company and loves to shower you with good gifts. In fact, he plans to spend eternity blessing you far beyond what you can imagine. Just look at some of the ways the Bible describes our relationship to God:

We are called his friends (e.g., Ps. 25:4; John 15:13–14)We are in fellowship with him (e.g., 1 Cor. 1:9; 1 John 1:3)We are adopted into his family (e.g., Rom. 8:23; Eph. 1:5)We are so connected to Jesus that we are his body (e.g., 1 Cor. 12:27; Eph. 5:29–30)We are even referred to as his bride (e.g., Isa. 54:5; Rev. 19:6–9)

That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? God intends to have a close and intimate connection with us.

At this point, however, I think Christians run into one of two problems. The first is that we find it hard to believe; it’s simply too good to be true. If LeBron James left me a voicemail inviting me over to his house to shoot hoops and take a dip in his pool, I would assume that one of my buddies was playing a prank on me. There’s nothing so special about me that I’d rate an invitation like that. I’m not the kind of person who sips drinks poolside with famous people.

In an even greater way, Christians might struggle to imagine that God would actually want to be friends with us. We have been given faith to believe that he has saved us from our sin and provided us with eternal life in Christ, and honestly that’s far beyond what we have a right to expect. But the idea that he wants even more for us, that he wants to be in a close relationship with us? That all seems like a bit much.

The second difficulty that Christians run into is that it can be hard to know what it means, practically speaking, to have a friendship with God. When we become followers of Christ, someone usually gives us some sense of what to do next: go to church, avoid sin, read the Bible, and pray. That’s a really good plan, and we would all do well to follow it. But the question is, What does any of that have to do with being God’s friend? More than that, what does it even mean to have a relationship with God? Is it some kind of sense of a “spiritual” feeling? Is it an emotional experience that we are supposed to get while singing in church? Is it some new insight into God and his ways?

I know both of those struggles, in my own life and in the lives of the brothers and sisters in the church I pastor. I see it in the Christians who leave to find another church that makes them feel “more spiritual,” in those who are always looking for the new conference or program that will unlock the key insight they need to feel closer to God, in those who have grown doubtful that God could really love someone like them, in those who feel like their walk with the Lord has simply stalled out, and in the people who have settled into going through the motions, hoping that something will change someday.

If you can identify at all with either of these difficulties, I’ve written this book to introduce you to some ideas that I have found to be enormously eye-opening. To be clear, they aren’t new ideas, and they aren’t mine. They come from Communion with God, a book written by an old English pastor named John Owen.

Owen’s book started out as a series of sermons preached to teenagers at Oxford University in the early 1650s. In it, he uses the Scriptures to guide the reader into heartfelt fellowship with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is full to the brim with truths about God and practical wisdom about how we ought live in light of them. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that helped me more (except, of course, the Bible).

The problem (and the reason for this book) is that Owen can be difficult to read and understand. His language is outdated, the world that he was writing to is very different from ours, he never tires of listing out points and subpoints, and his writing style can seem overly complicated at times (he never seems to explain anything in ten words if he can explain it in fifty!). As a result, Communion with God just isn’t something that most twenty-first-century Christians are going to pick up and read.

My goal in this little book is to mine some of the most precious diamonds of Owen’s spiritual insights and make them available and applicable to you as you grow in your enjoyment of the friendship of the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I’ve tried to provide some of Owen’s most accessible and helpful quotes from the book, and if this motivates you to go read Owen on your own, you will be richly rewarded for your time and effort. It is true that some wonderful things are inevitably lost when you take a masterpiece written by a genius and let a (definite) nongenius like me shorten, rephrase, and rework it. But while some of Owen’s brilliance has certainly been lost in the process of creating this book, I do have hope that much good remains to serve you in your friendship with God.

It has been my earnest prayer that this book will be helpful to you. Or, as John Owen put it in the preface to Communion, “know only that the whole of it has been recommended to the grace of God in many supplications, for its usefulness unto them that are interested in the good things mentioned therein.”1 (See, I told you he was wordy!)

On that note, let’s get started.

1  All citations from Owen’s original work, Communion with God, are taken from a helpful contemporary edition, Communion with the Triune God, ed. Kelly M. Kapic and Justin Taylor (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), 86.

Part 1

Communion with the Triune God

1

Saved for Communion

Friendships form when two people value each other, care about each other, and want to spend time together. If only one person in a relationship cares about the other and wants to spend time together, you don’t have a friendship—you just have an awkward, uncomfortable situation. If you’ve ever been in a relationship like that, where you cared more and gave more of yourself than the other person, you know how painful it can be. Friendship is meant to be a two-way street; otherwise it’s not really friendship.

And that raises a problem for us when it comes to our fellowship with God, because we aren’t naturally his friends. We aren’t born loving God and his ways; we don’t wake up every morning thinking of him and wanting to know him and please him and spend time with him. Instead, we go about our lives thinking about ourselves. We focus on the things we have and the things we want to have. We mistreat other people, tell lies, and squander the talents and opportunities God has given us. We take the things God has given to us and use them to make other things more important than he is. I don’t even have to know you to know that all of that is true of you, because it’s true of all of us.

As a result, the Bible describes human beings as God’s enemies (Rom. 5:10), as being spiritually “dead” (Eph. 2:1), “haters of God” (Rom. 1:30), and “children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3). That’s about as far away from friendship with God as we could possibly be! So the first question we must answer is this: How can people like us become friends with someone like God? We have offended him and rejected him. We’ve made ourselves his opponents. How could we possibly be his friend, even if we wanted to?

The answer to that question seems clear: we can’t! It is impossible for you and me to be in a good relationship with God, just like a criminal can’t enjoy the company of a police officer, and the employee who has been embezzling money from his company doesn’t look forward to a long, leisurely dinner with his boss. Friendship with God is simply impossible—unless God himself makes it happen. He must act. He must do something to mend our relationship. All the cards are in his hands. He is the judge; we are the condemned. He is the king; we are the traitors. He is the faithful spouse; we are the cheaters. If God doesn’t break through our rebellion and hatred and do something to restore us to him, we are lost.

The message of Christianity is that this is exactly what our God has done for us. In his great love for people like you and me, God the Father sent his Son to become a man, to die for our sins on the cross, and to rise from the dead in victory over everything that keeps us from being in a good relationship with him. When the risen Jesus ascended into heaven, he sent God the Holy Spirit to give us new spiritual lives and comfort and help us. God has done everything that needed to be done for us to be his friends. Jesus removed the sin and guilt of everyone who puts their trust in him, so now we are welcomed into the family. We are now spiritually united to Jesus, and what he has is now ours as well. Jesus is holy, so we are considered holy in God’s sight. Jesus is pleasing to God, so we are pleasing to him as well.

And here’s the thing you must understand, or else everything is going to get off track: you can’t mess that up. Because you didn’t do anything to make yourself God’s friend, you can’t do anything to break that relationship. If you have put your faith in Jesus, you are spiritually connected to him. Your status before God doesn’t depend on your performance or work or obedience; it depends on Jesus, and he did everything perfectly in order to make you God’s friend. Nothing can ever separate you from God’s love in Christ (Rom. 8:38–39). Once he has made you his friend through faith in Jesus, you can never be his enemy again.

It is important to be crystal clear on this fact: our status as God’s friends has nothing to do with anything good or bad that we do. It comes to us as a gift, not because we have obeyed God and loved him, but because he chose to love us. God has done all the work. He thought of the idea, he did everything that needed to be done, and he paid every price that needed to be paid. We contribute nothing to the process; we simply receive our new identity as God’s friends through faith in Christ.

Because this is true, when we talk about friendship with God in this book (or, to use John Owen’s word, our communion with God) we are talking about something different from that new status we have in Christ. We are talking instead about our daily awareness, experience, and enjoyment of that new status. This is the part where we come in, where we play a role and have work to do. Our union with God is a gift we are given; we don’t do anything except receive it by faith. Our communion with God, however, is like any other friendship; it is an active, two-way relationship.

Here’s how Owen explained what it means to have this kind of back-and-forth friendship with God: “Our communion, then, with God consists in his communication of himself unto us, with our return unto him of that which he requires and accepts, flowing from that union which in Jesus Christ we have with him.”1

In that last phrase, Owen says that our communion flows from our union with Jesus. Or, we might say, we have a friendship with God because we have been made his friends in Jesus. Because we are in Jesus and the Holy Spirit lives in us, we have a lot in common with God now. Like any friendship, we love the same things our friend loves, and we delight in the things that please him.

This communion is a two-way street. God (in Owen’s words) communicates of himself unto us. Like a friend, he talks to us and reveals himself to us and shows us who he is and what makes him tick. And like any friend, Christians are able to “return” something to God. He has given us some specific ways to communicate our friendship back to him, things like prayer, love, delight, obedience, and participation in the Lord’s Supper. Owen calls them “that which he requires and accepts,” and our role in the friendship is to pursue intimacy with God, knowledge of God, and love for God through those means. But that’s a subject we will unpack more in future chapters. For now, the incredible news is that God wants you to experience friendship (or fellowship, or communion) with him.

In order for us to have a genuine friendship with God, we need to hold two truths in tension. The first is that God is incredibly holy and powerful. He is “a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29) and a glorious King (Ps. 24:8); he is so mighty and beautiful that you would never think of getting anywhere near him. In fact, when people in the Bible do get anywhere near him, they tend to freak out (e.g., Ex. 19:16; Isa. 6:5; Luke 5:8). You would never dare to approach someone like him in friendship unless you were sure that he wanted you to. You’d be far too terrified to get close to anyone so mighty and pure, unless you were 100 percent confident that he loves you, delights in you, and is smiling on you.

The amazing discovery of the gospel, the good news that we would never dare to believe if God hadn’t said it, is that when we draw near to God, we find not anger at our failures and sins but sympathy, mercy, and grace to help us in our time of need (Heb. 4:15–16). That’s the second of the two truths we must hold together.

Think for a second about what it is like to sit down and spend time with a good friend. You aren’t constantly worried about what you are going to talk about and whether you might accidentally offend him by saying the wrong thing. You are not concerned that he will reject you if you share your weaknesses, fears, and failures; in fact, you share those things with him in the confidence that he will help you bear those burdens. There’s no concern that he might be harboring a grudge or secretly merely tolerating you. There’s an ease, a comfort, and a boldness in true friendship. Both parties know that the other one loves them. God has given you friends like that on earth so that you will have a small taste of what it means to have a relationship with him, so that you will have some pale experience of what it is like to have a perfect friend like him.

A one-sided relationship isn’t much of a friendship. We might be tempted to think that people like us could never love and be loved by a holy God. But perhaps we could say that the very first step toward enjoying friendship with God is to realize that he wants you to be his friend.

1  John Owen, Communion with the Triune God, ed. Kelly M. Kapic and Justin Taylor (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), 94. Unless otherwise noted, all emphases in Owen quotations are original.

2

Friendship with the Three in One

When you think about God, what images come to your mind? Do you think of him as a great king? A mighty creator? A righteous judge? A loving protector? All those things are true and easily demonstrated from the Bible, but none of those conceptions of God is uniquely Christian; a Muslim or Jewish or Mormon friend would probably agree with all of them.

As we think about friendship with God, we want to make sure that we are pursuing a relationship with the God of the Bible, the true God who really exists. And that means our communion is with the triune God. The Bible teaches us that the one true God exists eternally in three fully divine persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Since that is the case, any real relationship with God must be carried on directly and distinctly with each of those three persons. That is to say, Christians can and must have direct fellowship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit.

You cannot be friends with someone unless you know him, and to know God is to know him as three persons in one. You can’t accurately conceive of God without thinking of the three persons, and to think about each of the three persons inevitably brings you back to thinking about the unity of God. To help make this point, Owen refers to the words of one of the ancient church fathers, Gregory of Nazianzus, saying: “No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One.”1

I want to show you from the Bible that this is true, because if it is, then there is hardly anything more important that we could say on the topic of friendship with God. Remember that we have already seen, in the previous chapter, that communion with God consists in his communication of himself to us and our response to him through the means that he has established. Just like our human friendships depend on our being willing to let ourselves be known, so our relationship with God depends on his willingness to let us know what he is like, what pleases him, and what he is doing in the world.

And when we turn to the Scriptures, we see that each person of the Trinity communicates directly with us in just that way. Owen demonstrates this truth using the promise that Jesus makes in John’s Gospel: “It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God’” (John 6:45). According to Owen, that idea of being taught by God is right at the heart of friendship with him. He writes, “The teaching of God is the real communication of all and every particular emanation from himself unto the saints whereof they are made partakers.”2