The Importance of a Friend!

We all have bad days. I know this. I have been there, done that, and had a kid throw up on the tee-shirt. I never want to be accused of living with my head in the clouds and my feet not planted in reality. (I just know in whom I have believed and know that He is able to do above and beyond all I could ask or think and am persuaded that He is good, and He is God. In Him is the final authority for all things and therefore my reality! - MAN! What a mash up of scripture, but so true!) 

As a matter of circumstance, (I say circumstance not fact, because the fact is that I should not be moved so easily by the things that beset me) I had a bad day yesterday: a really bad day. That is until I talked with a friend.

The type of friends you have in your life is extremely important. They can lead you to death or to life. Let’s look at Job 16:20. Job’s friends laughed at him when he was in his weakest emotional, physical and financial state all because He chose to trust in God. If he had followed his friend’s horrible advice, he would have cursed God and died a spiritual death (because God would not allow him to die in the natural at this time). Not the kind of friends I want to surround myself with.

Proverbs 11:30 says “A wise person wins friends.” And Proverbs 12:26 says “godly friends give good advice to one another” and that the “wicked lead them away”.

1 Thessalonians 5:11 (Amplified) says

Therefore encourage (admonish, exhort) one another and edify (strengthen and build up) one another, just as you are doing.  

Edify in the Strong’s Concordance (3618) is build a house, build up from the foundation, establish, to promote growth, wisdom and grace in one another. Encourage (Comfort in the King James Strong’s 3870) means to call to one’s side to speak to with the intent to edify, to exhort, to comfort, to instruct.

These are the traits of a real friend. They promote growth in us. They challenge us when we are wrong to repent, to dig into the word, and to question why we believe the way we believe. A real friend, when they see us do wrong, does not turn a blind eye, but calls us on it. 2 Corinthians 13:11 says “be joyful, grow to maturity, encourage one another, live in harmony and peace, THEN the God of love and peace will be with you.” Having Godly friends that encourage you is a sign of growth and maturity in us. It teaches us to walk in harmony and peace.

Colossians 3:16 says we are supposed to teach one another and admonish one another in psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, and singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. Look, I don’t expect your life to be filled with your friends bursting into song like the Christian version of “Glee” (For me that would be fine, but I am weird as my friends know and tell me - often) but I believe that God expects us to encourage one another by worshipping together, sharing our personal revelations and urging one another to acts of faith.

Despite the many times I have been accused of this, I do not know it all, and I need someone to teach me. So today, in the midst of my “bad” day, I went to a friend. She understood my frustrations and she even let me ramble for a while about my “problems”, but then she cut me off, and was a godly friend. She admonished me to love, to understand, to pray, and to reclaim the territory I gave the enemy today in my wrongdoing. She instructed, she admonished, and she loved.

By the time I left, I was laughing, full of the Joy of the Lord, and ready to face today. She inspired this post. If the JOY of the Lord is our strength, then good friends are the “work-out partners” that help us ‘bulk up’ in our faith.

To have a friend, we must be friendly. Be a godly friend, and you will find godly friends.  

Be blessed and be a blessing, and remember that friend is a noun! 

Self Help 101? No thank you!

Have you ever gotten in your own way before? It is easy to answer this question but hard to answer the next one; Why? Why do we get in our own way?

Just throwing this out there, but it may be because we try to do things on our own.  I don’t know about you, but I get tired of trying to be everything I am “supposed” to be all of the time. I get wrapped up in the peer pressure of the church and of the world and both can be dangerous things. We need to stop comparing ourselves to one another and JUST FOLLOW CHRIST!

Whoa, you say, there is no peer pressure in the church….to that I ask where do you go to church, because I want to go there.  Look, people are people, no matter where they are, everyone is broken: otherwise we wouldn’t need Jesus!

I have always considered myself to be a bit of a black sheep when it came to everything, my family, my church, my life in Christ. This negative view of myself has allowed me to wrongly excuse my poor choices in life and only in the light of Christ do I begin to see this stronghold for what it is: it is a lie.

2 Corinthians 10:4 (NLT)

We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. 

I am the righteousness of God in Christ, I am the head and not the tail, I rejoice because God is not a respecter of persons and He has plans for me. These words, ones written in the Bible, must become my ammunition in my battle against lies. These words must become my words, they must build my faith. They must carry more weight in my life than the lies I believed because someone of authority once told me a falsehood.

You are not worthless, you are not forgotten, you are not just like your deadbeat father, or destined to be a failure. Whoever told you these lies, well, they are wrong!  And it is time to get free of the strongholds these lies created in you.

One of the lies I have believed is that I have to always “be” a certain way now that I am a Christian. While it is true we strive for the “high Calling” of God perfection is not an option for me, because I am human. Here is another lie: I grew up thinking I was constantly a disappointment to God because the other people in my life seemed to be disappointed in me so often. If it was so impossible to please my dad, how could I ever please God?  The truth is I do not frustrate the grace of God. The truth is God loves me, and His grace is enough. The truth is God sings over me, HE is not waiting with a big stick to knock me over the head whenever I fall short.

We need to grab those things that exalt themselves higher than God in our lives, those lies we believe because our parents always said, or because we always thought a certain way, and bring them down! Pull down those strongholds by building up our faith. Asserting who we are in Christ is the only way to become free of the lies about ourselves that we believed until now. This will allow us to get out of our own way, and become more like Christ and less like that black sheep. After all, we are HIS sheep and we follow HIS voice!

This is not what I intended to write today. This is not what I studied last night and it is not where I thought God wanted to go when I first sat down at this keyboard. But I know that this is the only thing I could say right now. It was like a groaning in my spirit. I have believed so many lies before, I still struggle with the walls these lies erected between me and God. I want them torn down! I want to live in the freedom of God’s grace. I want to know the truth because it is not just truth that sets me free, BUT THE TRUTH I KNOW that sets me free. Don’t you want the same? Doesn’t your spirit cry out in the wilderness for more of God? 

Be blessed and be a blessing and remember that breakthrough is a VERB!