What could it mean that God “likes me”?
Discussion question for October 22, 2010.
In Bill Hybels’ book, Just Walk Across The Room, he writes that God loves you, but that he likes you, too. How do you know that God likes you? What types of things do people do when they like someone else? How has this been true in your life? What challenges your thinking when you consider this possibility?
Here’s my summary of our discussion.
We can know that God likes us. Isaiah 1:18 calls us to reason or consider together with Him. God wants to have conversation with us, and include us in a thinking process, which is something people do together when they like each other. It also says in 1 Peter 5:7 that He cares for you (each of us). Of course, the penultimate verse is John 15:16 where Jesus is talking to the disciples (and us by extension) and says that He chose us.
God does like me, and I have an open invitation to like Him back. Not everyone in the church has accepted this invitation. Many religions express the character of God in terms of His separateness and that He is unapproachable. Doctrine and beliefs are relegated to the mind and not the heart.
There is biblical precedence for friendship between man and God. Adam and Eve walked with God in the Garden of Eden. Enoch walked with God. Noah worked for God. Abraham got a promise from Him. Moses talked to God like a friend talks to a friend. These prominent examples might lead some to assume that this kind of relationship with God is rare, and worthy of publishing in the Bible. However, there are many lesser examples such as Hannah, Gideon, Elijah, Elisha, Daniel, David, Paul and so on. Between the lines we should assume that God has always had relationship with people just like us.
For those with a Catholic background there has been instruction that separates them from personal relationship with God. Similarly, many old-line denominational churches teach about the benefit of escaping hell and eternal damnation without giving equal voice to the benefits of a personal relationship with God. Partly this is due to the emphasis on evangelism during some of our prior Great Revivals, where it seemed that the end goal was to get people to say the “sinner’s prayer” rather than to make disciples of them as commanded in Matthew 28.
Each Christian, from seeker to stalwart, should seek spiritual leadership that will help them obey the commandment of Hebrews 6:1-2. (Therefore we must progress beyond the elementary instructions about Christ and move on to maturity, not laying this foundation again: repentance from dead works and faith in God, teaching about baptisms, laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.)
This progress means we move onto relationship with a God that likes us and calls us friend.