Listen

“You are my friends if you do what I command you. I don’t call you servants any longer, because servants don’t know what their master is doing. Instead, I call you friends, because everything I heard from my Father I have made known to you.”

John 15:14-15

Think

My wife’s uncle worked at a pickle packing plant when he was a teenager. The word was that he never ate a pickle after that summer. This is what seeing behind the scenes does to many of us. The ways we romanticize filming a sitcom, planning a worship service, passing a piece of legislation, building a skyscraper, or even eating a pickle are challenged when we see all that happens behind the scenes.

Jesus did a cool and generous thing. He rolled back the curtain on what love looked like as it was being lived and then said, “Go, and do likewise.” And as messed up as the world was then and is now, and as messed up as people were then (and are now), Jesus’ love has always pulled people in. It doesn’t turn us away from wanting to live it.

How hard do you have to look to see what Jesus’ love might look like in your daily living? Don’t you want to live in it?

Byron Vance

Pray

Jesus, so much around us looks so much messier behind the closed door, when no one is looking. Your love has always been the same. Thank you for showing that love, sharing that love, giving that love. Give me the desire to do the same. Amen.

Go

Go into your day knowing that even though God knows all about us, God still chooses to be our friend.

Be a friend of God today.