Wednesday September 17, 2025 - Friend

 Chapter 16: Friend Day 4

Praying the Name:

Proverbs 27:6 - Faithful are the wounds of a friend, But the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.

John 11:1-6 - Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. 2 It was that Mary who anointed the Lord with fragrant oil and wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick. 3 Therefore the sisters sent to Him, saying, “Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick.” 4 When Jesus heard that, He said, “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” 5 Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. 6 So, when He heard that he was sick, He stayed two more days in the place where He was.

Father, 

    I praise You for not only being the master that we need to love and follow but as the friend that leads us and directs us to the best that we can have. I thank You for being a greater friend than anyone and loving me more than anyone else. 

    Thank You for loving me for caring about me and treating us well. I do pray that You give us a house that is not falling down and a vehicle that is going downhill. I ask You to please keep us in Your love and care. 

    Confessing to You that I do not trust You as well as I should and that I do not think of You as much as a friend who is here to be with me no matter what I go through. 

    Help me to keep the faith in You even when it seems to be all going downhill and into a pit of despair. 

    Thank You for listening, and hearing me both. 

In Jesus Name, 

    Amen 

    

    It is not hard to imagine Mary and Martha wrestling with all that was not happening in their response for their plea for help. they had counted on Jesus' friendship to save their brother, but He had let them down or so it seemed. 

    Sometimes it is like that in our lives, Jesus seems to fail the test of friendship He is not there when we need Him, He does not answer our prayers, we feel confused and disappointed and as our children step into roads of their own making as they are run over as our spouses stray, as churches split, we feel abandoned. At such times we wonder if we relate to God more as an enemy, than a friend. 

    He asks such hard things of us, surly He cannot literally mean that we take up our cross and follow Him, He cannot mean that we turn our cheeks for yet another blow, He cannot mean that the only way to life is through death but what if He does? How do we respond, how do we embrace the friendship of a man who when His own friend lay dying deliberately waited two days to be certain that His friend would die. We do the only thing that we can do; we hold on, we endure, we keep praying, and we remember how the story ends for Lazareth and presumably for us and in the midst of our journey of faith we begin to realize that we are not just making friends with a man, but with God, with someone whose thoughts are not our thoughts, and whose ways are not our ways.

    Someone once remarked that a friend is a single soul in two bodies meaning that friendship is based in a unity of mind and heart, between two people. If this is so it is we and not God who must change, before the two can become one. And this truth is at the root of our discomfort because Jesus is not only our greatest friend, and our worst enemy, He hates our sins but loves our souls. 

    Fortunately, His love is the ultimate tool He uses to overcome our sins, 

John 15:13 - Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.

    Today as You think of Jesus, let His greater love shape your response to every disappointment and to every fearful thought, let it transform you as it transformed Mary, and Martha, and Lazareth, and every single person who for the last 2000 years has been invited to call God Friend.