January 23

“No longer do I call you servants . . . I have called you friends.” — John 15:15

If we ask, “What is the best that Christ’s friendship can be to any soul?” We may answer, “It is shelter, comfort, rest, inmost refreshment, guidance, and far more. Christ is an atmosphere about us–an atmosphere of love, warm with all tender influences, all healthful inspirations, all holy impulses. Christ comes into all our life–as our friend—so really, so fully, that he becomes “an unconscious part of every true beat of our heart.” As the summer sunbeams enter into the flowers, and reappear in their lovely hues and sweet fragrance–so does Christ enter into the lives of his people, and permeate and transform them, until they become like him in spirit, in character, in disposition, in every feature. “Christ, who is our life.” Colossians 3:4. “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Colossians 1:27. “Until Christ is formed in you.” Galatians 4:19

We know what Christ’s friendship was to his disciples. He found them crude–and left them refined. He found Matthew a publican, unjust, grasping, an outcast–and made him an apostle, then a writer of a Gospel. He found Peter profane, rough in manner, impetuous–and made him an eloquent preacher, a man of marvelous power, whose influence lives today wherever the Christian church has gone. He found John a son of thunder, with a strong, fiery temper–and made him the apostle of love, the human embodiment of all the sweet, gentle, tender graces of his own life. The friendship of Christ, can do the same for us!