Hey, this is John Ortberg. I’m really glad you’ve tuned in today. I want to talk to you about being almost friends with God. This is from a chapter in Mead’s wonderful spiritual memoir. My God and I were, were looking at passages to wisdom. And Lou actually wrote a book, uh, early in his life based on his dissertation, work on union with Christ. So he taught about how God wants to be close to us. God sends Jesus so that his spirit can actually dwell inside of us and yet lose struggle with this. And he’s a deeply honest, earthy person. Part of what I love and wanna learn from him is how do I be more honest about my faith in my life and with God. So I’m so glad you’re here to be a part of this. If you’re looking at this video right now and you’re thinking, my gosh, this lighting is terrible.
Can’t they do something about the production values. I understand. Number one, it’s not about production values. Number two, I’m still having the redness wore off from the skin cream thing and have kind of a pizza face. And you would not want it to look any clearer than it does. Um, so I’m in honesty, but not that much honesty. So, uh, here we are, this is loose me. It’s God and I, almost friends. He writes when I finally retired from fuller seminary, people ask me what I plan to do with my time. Now that I’d have a lot more of it to do things in. Sometimes I told them I was gonna develop a closer friendship with God. They usually chuckled, but I was serious. Abraham was God’s friend. That’s one of the most amazing titles in all of scripture. And if you look in the book of James, the second chapter, it talks about Abraham was called a friend of God. Jesus made friends of his disciples right before he died. Jesus said to them, I no longer call you. Servants. Servants don’t know everything that their master’s gonna do, but I’ve shared my heart with you. I’ve told you everything. Now I call you my friends.
Lou, the man who wrote the book on union with Christ writes when he is an old man in all honesty, I had never known God as a friend, not the way I know my other friends now, after seven years into retirement, God and I are still not what you would call close friends. What is taking us so long? And then he writes about the barriers that I think any of us face when it comes to this idea of friendship with God, for one thing, good friends like each other, and enjoy doing things with each other cold hash with a friend is a lot better than flame and young with a stranger. But it has to be reciprocal if I like you, but you don’t like me. We’re not likely to be friends. So if God is to be my friend, he must like me, which is just what it’s hard to believe for years.
Most of my life. In fact, I have not found it easy to think that God could like me love me. Yes, no problem. It’s much easier to love unlovable people than it is to like unlikeable people. Now there’s a sentence worth. Reflecting on. It’s easier. Love UN lovable people than it is to like unlikable people to be liked. A person has to be likable. And that’s that? Here’s something else that makes it hard to be God’s friend. He never, well, almost never talks to me from what they tell me. I gather he talks to other people, talks to them in the chummy sentiment, in the latian spiritual. My God. And I go to the fields together. We walk and talk as good friends should and do Lou rights. I walk and I talk, but God hardly ever says a word to me. He certainly talk to a lot of people in biblical times.
He also talk to people like Martin Luther, Martin Luther king, once a, a man hopelessly delusional told me that God had talked to him, told me that he was Jesus Christ. And I better addressed him with the respect he deserved, or he might resort to force, but sane as I usually am. When I am with God, I do all the talking most of the time. Now this is a very interesting topic. What does it mean to talk with God? How do you know when you talk with God? And if you’ve been part of these videos before, we’ve thought about, uh, the famous story in the old Testament, little Samuel, here’s his name called when he is just a boy and he thinks, oh, Eli’s calling him. And so he runs and eventually Eli says, next time when you hear, just say, speak Lord, your servant listens.
Because normally when we talk with another person, we have to make sounds and that’s how we can be heard, but because God is God, he doesn’t have to make any sounds. So that might be that God is guiding your thoughts, but you don’t know that it’s God. And it’s possible that Lou actually heard from God a whole lot in his life. I kind of think he did. I kind of think he did. I’m kind of not sure that it’s possible to be in union with Christ and not have all kinds of thoughts that are planted there by God. But people’s sense of that experience is very different and it’s possible that somebody might hear from God and Obama on a very regular basis and yet never actually be able to identify it. And of course it’s possible that somebody else might think they’re hearing from God all the time when in fact they’re not, but that was the barrier to Lou.
And then he writes maybe the biggest one is to be friends. Usually you have to be roughly the same status as somebody else. Uh, it’s rare to have a real high status person, a real low status person develop an intimate friendship. And he would talk about how, when he was a graduate student in Oxford, he endorsed, stayed in the home of a Cockney woman named Mrs. A and he would say it with his attempt at a Cockney accent. Lou had the worst Cockney accent in the history of the world, except for Dick van Dyke and Mary Poppins. If you ever saw that Dick was the worst Lou number two, but he would talk about how he would try to do things to help out for Mrs. ARS. He would, uh, put coal into the stove. That’s how they, he did the place up and she would not have it. He was upstairs. That meant he was a gentleman. She was downstairs and they were not to meet his friends. And Lou would say, you know how, uh, if you’ve ever seen Downton Abby or, or the old PBS series upstairs, downstairs, that notion of a rigid divide between the upstairs people and the downstairs people, if that’s true at the human level, then God is like on the 1000 penthouse floor. And I’m way, way down in the basement.
And yet one of the great teachings of scripture is the incarnation that in Jesus Christ, Lou came to my church in Chicago. One time when he told this story in Jesus, God has come all the way down to the basement with me. And he brought his jams and he brought his toothbrush and he’s come to stays, come to stay. People just went crazy here. That Lou said, what does help him trust a bit that God really does want to be? His friend is he names some friends in his life. And he said they found something in lieu worth, being friends with.
And I thought about my friends, part of why I’m really glad to be talking with you today is I’m in Montana. I was at a church yesterday in Charlotte and preached for the first time in over a year. And I was very meaningful to me. I was so grateful to be able to do that. And now I I’m waiting for four people that I have known for over 40 years. We get together every year, we went to college together and we’re gonna go rafting on the Lewis and Clark trail. See the white cliffs on the Missouri river. And I think about Chuck, who will be one of them? Chuck was my first friend. I didn’t really know. I didn’t even know that I didn’t have a friend until one day. All of a sudden we just became best friends and it just happened like that. And then Kevin, Kevin too, I knew way back in Rockford, Illinois, we would hang out with Kevin. He just has this amazing gift for intimacy and charm. And, uh, girls loved love them. We hung around Kevin, just cuz we wanted to get the castoffs that he discarded. And he still brings that gift for intimacy and Tommy. Tommy’s the kind of guy that makes any group of people way better. If he’s just simply a part of it, he brings a kind of wisdom and a kind of non-competitive empathy and presence.
And then mark, mark is brilliant. He’s a philosopher. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. And he has this really humble spirit where he would never, ever, ever use how smart he is to make somebody feel bad, just the opposite. And over the years, I’ve come to think how lucky I am that they’re my friends. I can’t believe that they would want to be friends.
And Lou writes about that and that that’s what kind of helps him in the friendship journey with God. So I want Lou to have the last word today. We’re to hear more from Lou tomorrow, by the way, I was planning on being done with Lou tomorrow. I’m gonna tell you this journey that he’s had to figure out, what does he really believe? What’s the foundation that was gonna come tomorrow. It’s not gonna be tomorrow. This book is too good. There’s too much great stuff. And I can’t let go. I’m just finding this way too meaningful. So we’re gonna go a little bit longer with Lou, but we’ll talk, we’ll hear more from him tomorrow. Today. Cherish your friends. Thank God for the gift of friendship. Be a friend to somebody, let somebody know you’ll love ’em and that you care about them and reflect on the fact that Jesus wants to be your friend hard as that is for us to believe. And then, uh, Lucas, the last word on the subject, he says about people that became his friends. These are people who on anybody’s scale of values are very rich and admirable qualities. If God does not admire them, I think you should take a second look. And if admirable persons like that see something in me to admire, I have to believe that God admires me too. If this were not true, Jesus would not have called me his friend.
I am still more comfortable kneeling before the Lord, my maker than I am looking him straight in the eye and calling in my friend. But I am well on the way to really believing that he wants to be my friend, not instead of, but besides being my maker and my Redeemer, this mustard seed of faith keeps me hobbling on shaky legs, into a friendship with God. Keep hobbling on shaky legs toward your friend. And I’ll see you tomorrow.