Podcast: How Does Life Change If God Is Actually My Friend? (Mike McKinley)

April 10, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Knowing the Ruler of the Universe as Our Friend

In today’s episode, Mike McKinley talks about what it means for us as Christians to be friends of God, about the friendships that Jesus had on earth, and about what it looks like for us to lean into our friendship with God.

Friendship with God

Friendship with God

Mike McKinley

What does it mean to be friends with God? Each chapter of this book takes a key insight from John Owen’s Communion with God and clarifies it for modern readers. 

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:53 - Jesus Is My Homeboy

Matt Tully
Mike, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Mike McKinley
Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about friendship with God—how we as Christians can view God as a friend. But if I’m honest, there’s one thing that comes to my mind when I think about this topic, the idea of being friends with God, and that’s that old t-shirt that was so popular in the early to mid 90s that said, “Jesus Is My Homeboy” on it. Do you remember that shirt?

Mike McKinley
I think I saw that shirt. Yeah.

Matt Tully
Did you own that shirt?

Mike McKinley
I will not admit on a podcast to ever owning that shirt.

Matt Tully
I think this shirt illustrates maybe some of the suspicion that sometimes some of us can have when we think about the idea of being friends with God. It can kind of carry with it connotations of overfamiliarity or a lack of reverence towards God. What do you think of that? Do you resonate with that default concern?

Mike McKinley
Yeah, I really do. I was converted as a young person in a fairly large non-denominational megachurch that was really helpful in proclaiming the gospel. But it wasn’t until later in life, when I was introduced to richer biblical theology, that my understanding of God was expanded—books like “The Knowledge of the Holy” or “The Holiness of God” by R C Sproul. One of the things that really attracted me to Reformed theology, generally, but even just to the Bible was this picture of God who was much bigger than what I had thought—that explosive view of God who’s limitless, eternal, who doesn’t need me but loves me anyway, who’s holy and just. That was really attractive to me. I think it’s really attractive to a lot of people because we’re reacting to that casual “Jesus Is My Homeboy” kind of approach. I think that makes us, like you said, suspicious—that’s a good word—of anything that would encourage us to be too intimate with God, or anything that strikes of making God my peer I think maybe rightly makes us nervous. But I don’t think we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Matt Tully
Dig into that a little bit more—the fear of intimacy with God. As you look at the “Reformed” conservative landscape—the broadly Reformed landscape—out there, do you think there can tend to be a little bit of a wariness of language that would be too intimate when it comes to God, or talking about our relationship with God in those kinds of ways, because we’re worried about crossing over some line?

Mike McKinley
Yeah, I think we are in a lot of ways. And part of that I think is, again, well-founded. I remember going to a church once where they were praying for some young people that were being sent out. And for some reason the person who was praying just started laughing. He just got the giggles. And so they just kept laughing and kind of making jokes.

Matt Tully
During the prayer?

Mike McKinley
During the prayer. And I was thinking, Something’s not quite right here. And so I think those in the Reformed, conservative circles are responding to something that is out there and that is a real danger. I think it’s certainly good to emphasize the grandeur and glory and otherness of God, but a lot of the Bible actually points us towards intimacy with God, towards fellowship and communion with him. And so my fear is that being too casual with God is bad, but also leaving God so remote and so distant from us in his grandeur and holiness may be just as bad and just as spiritually damaging.

04:36 - Friendship with God in the Bible

Matt Tully
You mentioned that the Bible gives us a picture that is maybe more nuanced than even what we would say sometimes. Point us to a few key verses that you see that speak to this topic of friendship with God.

Mike McKinley
In one place you see Jesus himself had friends. If our understanding of Jesus is that he’s the image of God and he came and revealed the Father to us, it’s just amazing. What was his posture towards other people? Well, he had friends. He calls his disciples his friends. In John 11 we read about Jesus’s friends, Mary and Martha, and he calls Lazarus “our friend.” We didn’t know about them. You’re like, Wait, what? Jesus has this whole relational life off the pages of the New Testament where he’s building friendships with people. So that seems significant. He says to the disciples, You are my friends if you obey what I’ve told you to do. No longer do I call you servants, but I call you friends. So that seems significant.

Matt Tully
One response to that is, Yeah, Jesus, in his humanity, he had friends. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into how we should think about relating to God in his divinity.

Mike McKinley
Also, significantly in the Old Testament, God speaks to Moses as a man speaks to his friend. In the prophets the Lord calls Abraham “my friend.” James picks that idea up and says Abraham was a friend of God. So it does seem more than just Jesus in his incarnation. In Corinthians Paul talks about God calling us into fellowship with his Son. He talks about the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. I think that idea of communion or fellowship is meant to convey this idea of intimate relationship. So in the book that I’ve written, I decided to title what John Owen called “communion with God” as “friendship with God” because the idea of communion just sounds sort of religious and spiritual in a way that maybe is inaccessible to folks.

Matt Tully
But friendship, you would say, captures kind of what he was getting at?

Mike McKinley
I think so. And I think it captures in some ways, more importantly, what Paul was getting at when he says we’ve been called into fellowship with his Son.

06:56 - John Owen’s View on Friendship with God

Matt Tully
Speak a little bit more to that. The story behind this book is that it’s a distillation of a classic old book. You mentioned John Owen; tell us a little bit more about that book and about what you were trying to do in this edition.

Mike McKinley
John Owen was an English Puritan in the 1600s. In the 1650s or so he gave a series of addresses to teenagers at Oxford University that were published as a book, “Communion with God.” And the idea was how we have communion or fellowship with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It was published, I bought a copy some 300+ years later, and it sat on my shelf unread for a long time.

Matt Tully
That can be in the category of books that you’re supposed to buy it, but you maybe struggle to actually read it.

Mike McKinley
Yes. If you’re a pastor, you should probably own a copy, but most of us probably haven’t read it. If you are familiar with Owen, his writing can be daunting. Not only is it separated from time and space, but he’s unusually wordy and clumsy.

Matt Tully
Even for his own day.

Mike McKinley
Even for his own day. I had a sabbatical, and I felt personally in my own life that I wanted to grow in this sense of how do I live out a friendship or relationship with God? And I thought, Okay, this is the classic I got. I’ve got to make my way through it. And so I read it, and in many ways it changed my life. I read through it two or three times, took the men in our church through it, but it is really difficult. For a while I started hatching an idea like, I wish someone would just write these ideas down in a way that’s simpler and easier to access.

Matt Tully
So that man was you?

Mike McKinley
I tried to get a bunch of other better qualified people to do it and they didn’t want to, so eventually I thought I had to do it myself.

Matt Tully
You mentioned a relationship with God a minute ago, and that’s obviously the language that we often use as evangelicals. We’re very comfortable with the language of, How is your relationship with God doing? How is the idea of friendship with God maybe a little bit different? Or is it different? Is it the same thing that you might mean when you say “our relationship with God”?

Mike McKinley
I think the ideas are connected. Like you said, we use that word “relationship” a lot. And maybe you’ve heard It’s not a religion; it’s a relationship. I think that is a helpful picture. I think friendship is more specific. It’s a more specific kind of relationship. My relationship with God is not like my relationship with my congressman or my plumber. My relationship with God is a friendship. Other biblical imagery you could use would be a marriage. But the relationship that I have with God, in Christ, is one of friendship and all that entails in terms of mutual love and the ability to know one another and to have ongoing, daily interaction.

09:52 - Key Characteristics of Friendship with God

Matt Tully
That gets to the definition of friendship. We all would probably say we have friends. But probably some of us would admit that some friendships are deeper, more profound, more meaningful to us than others. There are different types of friendships that we all experience in our human lives. So what do you mean when we say friendship with God? What are the key characteristics of that?

Mike McKinley
I'll let Owen do the thinking here for me. He defines it, basically, as a relationship of delight where two parties communicate “of themselves” to one another and make returns. If I have a friend, I communicate myself to him. I let him know what I’m thinking, what I’m like, what’s going on inside me, and he makes a return of that. He communicates about himself, but he also interacts with what I’ve told him. He rejoices when I am rejoicing, and he encourages me, counsels me, and those kinds of things. So it’s that sort of give and take, back and forth in a relationship of love or delight. I think that’s what characterizes friendship particularly. And those things apply really well when you map them onto our relationship with God.

Matt Tully
I think people might feel a sense of, Yeah, I know that I’m supposed to be talking to God and communicating myself to him. We do that in prayer. But sometimes it feels like it isn’t a two-way street. I know I have his word and that is written for me, but it’s not as personal as I want it to be or or as my other friendships would be. So we actually very practically feel the temptation to prioritize a friendship with another human over that with God because it feels more personal. How do you think about that? Have you struggled with that kind of a sense?

Mike McKinley
Yeah, sure. I think that’s a normal struggle for Christians. There is work to be done in this friendship. I think that’s a really helpful distinction that Owen makes really early on in the book—a distinction between our union with God and our communion with God. Orr we might say, the fact that we are God’s friends and having a friendship with him. Owen points out our union with God is something that God has unilaterally done. He has worked—through the gift of his Son, by setting his love on us, giving us His Holy Spirit—God has united us to Christ. I can’t do anything to mess that up. I can’t add to it. I can’t take it away, because God’s done all the work there. So in that sense, every Christian experiences that union with God. When we get to talking about communion with God or friendship with God, well that’s actually a bit of a two-way street then. We actually do have a role to play there. And if we neglect it, then we’ll experience less of it. And so there is something for us to do in order to hear God’s word. So when we come to God’s word, whether that’s being preached or just reading the Bible, if you just come to it like, Yeah, this is the thing I do. The box is checked—you’re not going to experience much communion with God because you’re not really hearing him speak to you in his word. You’re not learning anything about him. You’re not learning what delights him. You’re not learning what he loves, what he’s planned for you.

Matt Tully
If you were to translate that way of thinking to a human friendship, it immediately looks so absurd. To check off a task of going to talk to your friend or have coffee with a friend—it just doesn’t fit.

Mike McKinley
And if you’ve ever experienced that where you’re talking to someone and they’re just clearly not listening and their mind is on a million other things, it’s not a close, warm, intimate feeling. But God has done his part. He’s spoken to us, he gives us his Holy Spirit, he gives us even teachers in the church that have been gifted by the Spirit to proclaim the ways and the will of the Lord. So God’s speaking to us. We do need to be, I think, attentive to listening, to reading God’s word with an eye towards knowing him better, not just to take in facts—Okay, so David was king, and then Solomon was king—but to actually learn about the ways of the Lord and to hear him speaking to us in his word. And then we speak back. That can be in corporate worship. Sometimes you hear God speak to you and you go, And can it be that I should gain an interest in my Savior’s blood? You can’t imagine, and so you’re just bursting forth with, I have to sing about this! Or sometimes God’s word just cuts you to the quick and you get on your knees and you’re just like, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I can’t believe I did that again. I can’t believe I’m still here—or whatever it is. Things happen in life and you take him for the Lord and say, Lord, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to think, but I need you right now. We are communicating ourselves to him in a myriad of ways also.

14:47 - Can I Be Friends with the Trinity?

Matt Tully
So when we think about this idea of friendship with God, I think we most often associate it with Jesus in particular. We mentioned the “Jesus Is My Homeboy” t-shirt, but it gets at maybe just a way that we tend to assume that he’s the locus of this friendship. I think of verses like Matthew 11:19, and there’s another one in Luke, where Jesus is actually described as a friend of sinners. But I think we’re probably less likely to think about friendship with relation to God the Father and the Spirit. Those two members of the Trinity, just in general, can often be a little bit less clearly defined or less easy for us to feel like we can relate to as clearly because we don’t have quite the picture that we have of Jesus. So is this idea of friendship with God something that’s equally applicable to all three members of the Trinity, or is there something unique about Jesus that we should be focused on?

Mike McKinley
Owen argues in the book, and I think he’s right, that we’re meant to have that sort of direct relationship with Father, Son, and Spirit. And, in one sense—and we’re in the mystery of the Trinity here, which is definitely where I check out and go swim in the shallow pool with the kids— you can’t think about the three without recognizing the one. There’s a sense in which distinct communion with the Spirit is inevitably going to lead you into communion with the Lord Jesus and the Father.

Matt Tully
It’s not as if we can have a relationship or a friendship with one and not another one of them.

Mike McKinley
Right. Exactly. But Owen does point out that the Bible seems to indicate that we have this direct relationship with each member of the Trinity, so we can know them, delight in them, pray to them, and praise them as individual persons.

Matt Tully
That’s helpful to think that there’s always more for us to explore in that regard. We don’t have to be just limited to thinking about Jesus in this way. We actually can think of the whole Godhead, through this lens.

Mike McKinley
Yeah. I remember that for me, when I was reading Owen, I was in church on Sunday and we were singing “His Mercy Is More.” I was up front and I was standing next to one of the other pastors in our church. The whole song goes on, “Our sins they are many, his mercy is more.” The whole idea is that as bad as your sins are, God’s mercy is even greater. I was suddenly struck as we were singing it and thought, Hold on. That is actually true. I don’t know how to describe it. I was just overwhelmed by a sense of the reality of that statement. I would’ve told you it was true. I’ve sung that song a million times. But actually, it was like, Oh, as bad as I feel about my sin, God’s mercy is greater. I leaned over to one of the other guys on staff at the church and I was like, Do you know that that’s true? And then as I was reading later that week in Owen, as he was talking about the Spirit, he was commenting on Romans 5 where Paul talks about how God has poured out his love on us in the Spirit. Owen pointed out that one of the ways we experience friendship with the Holy Spirit, or he would say communion with the Holy Spirit, is that he convinces us of God’s love for us. I was like, Oh, that’s what happened
to me.

Matt Tully
You had just experienced that.

Mike McKinley
But I wouldn’t have known to think, That was the Holy Spirit working in me, convincing me that God the Father loves me. In that moment where I was overwhelmed and then just expressed it, that was actually communion with the Spirit. We tend to think of it in very static terms like, when you’re in the Spirit then you’re running around, waving your hands. Or, you fall into this mystical trance. But actually, the Scriptures say it’s when you’re convinced of the Father’s love for you, that’s when you’re experiencing the ministry of the Spirit in you and you’re communing with him.

Matt Tully
I think that can be really encouraging because we can sometimes think that the ultimate expression of some of this relationship with God that we enjoy (and all three members of the Trinity) has to be these big, remarkable, life-changing events. We maybe downplay the significance of the seemingly more mundane moments where we do feel a conviction over sin or we feel a closeness to God, a sweetness of our forgiveness in him. We can just think of those things as cool, but I don’t know, kind of mundane. But actually, maybe that is all the evidence of this really amazing relationship that we enjoy.

Mike McKinley
Exactly. Owen talks about the returns that we make to God—he communicates himself to us and we make returns to him. Owen talks about it in terms of the forms that he accepts and institutes. And so there’s something in, I don’t know if it’s just being an American or a westerner or a modern person, but there’s something in us that wants a new trick, a new tip, a new way, and if we’re just doing things the way we’ve always done them, then something’s wrong. But the reality is that it is in those things. It’s in reading the Bible and prayer and obedience and fellowship in the church and hearing God’s word preached and taking the Lord’s supper, and singing praises to God. Those are the ways he’s instituted and approves, and he’s given us those things. We actually don’t have to be all that creative. He said, Here’s what you need to do. We just need to do it.

20:04 - Pitfalls to Avoid

Matt Tully
Are there any limits to how far we can take this idea of being friends with God? Are there pitfalls that we would want to avoid as we think about this?

Mike McKinley
I’m sure that we could overcorrect. There are a lot of truths you have to hold in tension. God is incredibly holy and also very loving. God is so other than I am but also very near and intimate. So I’m sure you could pull things apart and fail to hold things in tension. And I’m sure that if you speak about friendship with God and God’s love in a way that in any way diminishes his holiness, diminishes his grandeur, that would obviously be unhelpful and wouldn’t be spiritually profitable to pursue friendship with God in that way. But it does seem like Scripture isn’t concerned about the idea that God’s love for us and his mercy towards us, and even his delight in us, will in any way diminish his holiness or his grandeur.

21:07 - Practical Strategies

Matt Tully
What are some practical strategies? We’ve talked about reading the Bible, going to church, being part of a worshiping community. Are there other practical advice or tips that you would give to somebody who’s thinking, If I’m honest, I don’t feel that closeness necessarily. I struggle to feel like that. But they want that to change. What would you say to that person?

Mike McKinley
I think probably every Christian feels that way at some point in time. I think sometimes the hurdle can just be not knowing where to start or how to start or if it’s okay to start.

Matt Tully
It feels overwhelming.

Mike McKinley
Yeah, which I get. And so I think in one sense, there is work for us to do in our communion with God or friendship with God, but I wouldn’t want to make the mistake of thinking this really heavy weight and burden to get it right falls on me, and I’ve got to figure out how to thread this really small needle really well. But the fact is, God has done everything necessary for us to be his friends—in Christ’s death and resurrection and ascension and his being seated and his advocating for us in heaven. All of that has been done for us, and so God wants you to come to him. You don’t have to clean up your act. You don’t have to figure out what to say. Just go to him. Open the Bible, read about God’s love for you, and then pour out your heart to him. Start there, assuming, again, that you’re doing the other things like being part of a church and doing those sorts of things. If you’re living in intentional, open, flagrant sin, that’s going to disrupt your communion with God. There’s no doubt about that. And so maybe you need to start by repenting of some things. Living in that flagrant, open sin—this will be my caveat that will make the Reformed folks happy—if you are living in that open sin, it could actually put in doubt whether or not you really are united to Christ. You can’t lose that union with Christ, but it could cause you to question whether you ever really were to begin with. But if you’re looking at pornography or if you are holding resentment and unforgiveness in your heart towards your brother, or a whole host of things like that, you are going to feel distant from God. There's no way around that. That’s actually God’s gift to you so that you’ll feel that distance and repent and come back to him.

Matt Tully
One question I think people can have with that example in mind is, What does repentance look like? What’s the difference between repentance and cleaning up your act, so to speak?

Mike McKinley
That’s a good question. It’s a big question. I think repentance does, in some ways, involve cleaning up your act. Repentance is not less than sorrow for your sin and a resolve to put it away, to turn your back on it and go in the other direction, and then the actual act of doing that. You really haven’t repented until you’ve started moving in the opposite direction from your sin. If someone comes into my office and they want to be done with a sin that’s particularly besetting them—maybe they confess it, they’re distraught, and they want to change—maybe there’s some obvious steps that they can take to begin to do that. I don’t expect that anyone’s going to do it perfectly, but you can do it truly. And if that person’s not willing to take those steps, then I’m not sure what they mean by repentance. Let’s say a man comes in and says, I’ve been mistreating my wife. I’m ashamed and I want to do something different. We sit down and we say here are some things we can do: we need to start counseling. If he’s like, Ah, I’m not doing that, I’m not entirely sure what you mean by repentant. If, again, somebody’s addicted to drugs, let me delete your dealer’s name out of your phone. Uh, I don’t know. You feel bad. You feel guilty. You’re not repentant.

25:23 - God Really Does Love You

Matt Tully
That’s really helpful. At one point in the book you reflect on this idea of what it means to be a friend with God and how that relates to how we view him. There is a section that I want to read that was just really impactful, and I want to hear you speak more about it. You write,

Think for a second about what it is like to sit down and spend time with a good friend. You aren’t constantly worried about what you are going to talk about and whether you might accidentally offend him by saying the wrong thing. You are not concerned that he will reject you if you share your weaknesses, fears, and failures . . . . There’s no concern that he might be harboring a grudge or secretly merely tolerating you.

I thought that was such a powerful thing. That is true of how we think about our friends. If we had a friend that we felt those ways towards, that wouldn’t be a very good friend, that wouldn’t be a very strong friendship, and we probably wouldn’t persevere in that very long. And yet my guess is that is exactly how so many of us, at times, feel about God. We feel nervous to talk to him. We feel like we’ve got to fix everything about us first. We feel very tentative and hesitant. We sometimes even feel like he is probably just low-level annoyed with us at all of our shortcomings. How do we get out of that? How do we change that feeling that we so often have about God, largely due to the way we perceive our own sinfulness and our own weakness?

Mike McKinley
I think you’ve put your finger on something because I think we do lack joy in our relationship with God, or in our friendship with God, because I think we do feel that way. No one likes to be merely tolerated, or if you have a sense that people don’t like you, you wouldn’t want to spend time with those people. And so I think that does put a lot of damper on our sense of joy and delight in the Lord. And so in terms of how you fix that, all you can do is believe what God has said. Actually apply yourself. In the first third of the book, I’m basically just trying to convince Christians that God the Father loves them. And actually, a shockingly large part of the New Testament is devoted to that. And so I think we need to hear that often and we need to actually work to believe it.

Matt Tully
Does that ring true to your experience as a pastor? How many of your conversations would you say are in some way connected to trying to help Christians believe that God really does love them?

Mike McKinley
An incredibly high percentage of them, and even ones that would intellectually say it. At the root of most people’s sin problems and inability to change is this actual sense that God doesn’t love them. And so there’s anxiety, impatience, weakness, fear, and anger there that wouldn’t be there if they were really convinced that God loved them the way that he does and that he was going to take care of them the way that he’s promised to. And so to make it my goal as a Christian to really believe that God the Father loves me. And that love comes to us in Christ. And Christ is the ultimate demonstration. It’s interesting; in 1 John when he says, “God is love,” he’s talking specifically about God the Father, because he then says, “who sent his son as a propitiation for our sins.” There’s only one person of the Trinity who has a Son to send, and that’s the Father. So God is love. God so loved the world that he sent his Son. It’s the love of the Father that sent the Son. And so when I look at Christ, I see the love of God the Father most clearly. Owen has this great picture. He says basically that God is the fountain of love , and Jesus is the stream. So if you’re drinking from a stream of cool, cold water, that water you’re drinking actually has its source far away in a spring. But you need a stream to actually carry it to you. And so the Father, in Owen’s illustration, is this source of love, and Jesus is the stream that actually brings it right to us. Again, what you said earlier about Jesus being our homeboy and how Jesus just seems more accessible to us, Jesus actually is showing us most clearly how much the Father loves us.

Matt Tully
There’s a certain truth to that. Jesus is the fullest revelation of God that we have.

Mike McKinley
Yes.

Matt Tully
That’s beautiful. Mike, thank you so much for helping us to think more deeply about this and pursue friendship with God in a way that maybe we haven’t before.

Mike McKinley
It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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