(THIS WEEK: Control.)
If you were young and allowed to choose from a host of candidates as to who would be your friends for life, whom would you have chosen?
Picture a buffet of options…like a dating service for friends. You’d be able to look up by their skin color, height and weight, popularity ranking, intelligence, creativity, compatibility, social standing, connections and on and on. Perhaps you’d be able to select the top 100.
Now, review who God placed in your life instead.
Why, oh why, does He never do things the way we would do them?
We have some control over the “birds of a feather flocking together” scenario, but we don’t have a lot of say as to where we are born, when we are born and where we spend the bulk of our years. From military brats to the kids who never leave their hometown, life has a way of floating us down a river and our shipmates seem a little serendipitous when you consider that dating service for friends contains seven billion candidates.
It brings us to the obvious question for the faith-filled? “How does Jesus select His besties?” Peter and John weren’t exactly in Israel’s highest standing. And what about me? How could it be that He would choose me?
Jesus is very much in control of His friends and the thorny answer to this trick question is that Peter and John and all of the disciples to this day chose to follow Him…to see where He laid His head.
The Apostle John ended up laying His head on the breast of Jesus. Perhaps there’s a clue here somewhere.
PORTAL TO HEAVEN: We love because He first loved us. The way Jesus picked friends is to let them pick him. If we want to be a good friend, we must let go of our control over friends and introduce Jesus to others. Following Jesus’ example, the “friends” we end up with will surely be as unexpected as the friends God put in our lives since our birth.
Then He said to them, ‘Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.’..The righteous is a guide to his neighbor, But the way of the wicked leads them astray…’How beautiful are the feet of messengers who bring good news!’
Matthew 4:19 (NKJV), Proverbs 12:26 (NASB), Romans 10:15