McKinley is an engaging narrator who is conscious he’s standing on the shoulder of a giant. He’s crafted a book that is faithful, revitalising and, thankfully, trimmed of Ye Olde English. Occasionally, his preacher’s socks are showing when he drifts into overly formulaic three- and four-point chapters, but sometimes we all need little steps before walking in giant’s shoes.

Calling Jesus my friend has never sat well with me. Lord? Yes. Saviour? Yes. Prince of Peace? Yes. God? Definitely! But friend? That’s a very emotionally loaded term.
Is he like the kids I grew up with in the country, riding our bikes through fields of red dirt and purple Paterson’s curse? Or my teenage classmates who rolled their eyes at the uncool crowd?
Is he the wonderful saint who has always been willing to listen to my hurts over a warm meal? Or the distant friend who gives me the cold shoulder?
Just as some Christians struggle calling God “Father”, some of us struggle seeing Jesus as a friend. Into this space comes American Baptist pastor and author Mike McKinley’s edifying new book, Friendship with God. It’s based on the classic, Communion with God, written by 17th century English puritan John Owen. McKinley modernises Owen for the iPhone generation, respecting the source material but also adding his own reflections for those of us who perceive God as remote and distant.
Our Own Worst Enemy
As McKinley observes, people struggle with the concept of friendship with God despite the Bible’s assurances (Jn 15:13–14; 1 Cor 1:9; 1 Jn 1:3). First, it sounds too good to be true. Second, we don’t know how this friendship plays out in real life.
It’s easy to accuse God as being an absent friend, but that is blame-shifting. We’re the ones who aren’t naturally God’s friends: “we go about our lives thinking about ourselves. We focus on the things we have and the things we want to have” (9).
Ultimately, we were God’s enemies (Rom 5:10), spiritually dead (Eph 2:1), haters of God (Rom 1:30), and children of wrath (Eph 2:3) (10).
Best Friends Forever
So how did we become friends with someone like God? We couldn’t. Not by our own efforts.
Friendship with God is simply impossible—unless God himself makes it happen. He must act. He must do something to mend our relationship. All the cards are in his hands. (10)
Thankfully, God has acted. God the Father sent God the Son to die for our sins and defeat death. When God the Son ascended into heaven, God the Spirit was sent to give us new spiritual lives. God has initiated everything needed for us to be his friends.
As McKinley repeatedly points out, this God-initiated friendship then becomes a two-way street. To be in union with Jesus means we must be in communion with God. Always. He reminds us, “Because we are in Jesus and the Holy Spirit lives in us, we have a lot in common with God now.” (12). We must love the same things our friend loves, and delight in the things that please him. We do this by ongoing prayer, love, delight, obedience, and sharing in the Lord’s Supper (12). 
And amazingly, our affections need to be focussed on more than just Jesus. Any authentic friendship with God must be directed to each person of the Trinity (15).
Read More
Related Posts:

How we ought to commend the bargain of free grace! and to hold out the excellency of the blood of sprinkling! This should also mightily encourage the believer to step forward.
The Excellence of Christ’s Blood
It produces such noble effects
Noble and notable effects come by it, i.e., all the great things contained in the promises – pardon of sin, grace to subdue sin, friendship and peace with God, fellowship with Him, conformity to Him, the hope of heaven and glory, the sweet serenity, tranquillity and peace of the conscience. The blood of Christ is a “hiding place from the wind and rain, and a covert from the storm,” just like “the shadow of a great rock in the midst of a weary land.” When the soul sorely beaten with a storm of accusations and apprehensions of wrath comes under the shadow and shelter of this blood, the soul presently finds ease and repose. What shall I say? what can I say? words here may be swallowed up! From the blood of Christ proceeds all the glorious privileges of the people of God – possessed and expected, in hand and in hope.
It procures these things for sinners
The blood of Christ has procured these things to sinners – to those who had an unclean and polluted conscience. Who is it, may I ask, that may draw near to God with full assurance of faith? Not those who never had an evil conscience, but those who do have an evil conscience, that flee to Christ’s blood, and get their conscience sprinkled with it. Those who had their consciences defiled with dead works, who come to the blood, get their consciences purged from dead works.
It is Christ Himself who provides these blessings
The excellency and efficacy of the blood of sprinkling shines forth in the tenderness of the person who applies the remedy to such a loathsome sickness. This disease is utterly incurable if the attempt is made by any hand other than Christ’s. “Having (says the apostle) such an high priest over the house of God, let us draw near.” The physician is Jesus Christ Himself. His blood is the cure, and He is also the one who applies the cure, and O! how very tender, dexterous and sympathizing He is! He even excels in such cures to admiration. He is a high priest who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and higher than the heavens. He is holy and harmless Himself, He loves these qualities, and He is able and willing to work them in those who come to Him. And such a high priest became us. He is “one that hath compassion on the ignorant, and such as are out of the way; who was in all points tempted as we, yet without sin,” so that from His own experience He may the more kindly and strongly sympathize with His people, and succour them in all their temptations. He is a high priest who is “touched with the feeling of their infirmities.” The aching of the least finger or toe in His mystical body throbs up, as it were, to His very heart.
It is so freely applied
The excellency and efficacy of the blood is made apparent in the exceeding great freeness of how He applies the cure. No more is required but to come and receive it – to come, however unclean, and be sprinkled with His blood – to confess the debt of guilt, and get the certificate that it has been paid off, by virtue of how He has paid it. If there is any pollution in the conscience, any challenge, or sore, whatever it may be, He supplies the remedy and cure freely and frankly.
The Urgent Necessity of Christ’s Blood
If the blood of sprinkling is so virtuous and efficacious, for one thing, it gives an encouragement to the guilty to flee to this blood. For another thing, it shows the necessity of making use of it. This is a very pressing and vehemently urgent necessity.
Read More

Fool #1: Denies God
The most egregious and deadly form of foolishness is defined by the psalmist in Psalm 14:1: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” Those who deny the existence of God are, according to Scripture, the ultimate fools. After all, what could be more foolish than rejecting the God who made you and everything else?
The opening of Psalm 14 gives us the heavenly perspective on the nature of humanity. It speaks not only of the heart of the atheist but ultimately of all of us. All people (except Christ) are born with hearts that declare that there is no God. In the Hebrew mind, the heart was not the muscle that pumps blood through our circulatory system. Instead, it represented the very seat of human understanding. We moderns tend to divide mind and heart, but this was not so for the ancient Hebrew. To say in one’s heart that there is no God is to say with one’s entire emotional, psychological, and rational faculties that there is no God.
The Scriptures tell us that we are all born with hearts that say that there is no God. For example, consider Romans 3:10–11, “As it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God.’” The Apostle Paul, drawing on the Old Testament, makes a universal declaration about the nature of humanity apart from God’s redeeming grace, and what he says, essentially, is that we are all born saying in our hearts, “There is no God.” In other words, we are all born fools.
In Reformed theology, we refer to this phenomenon as total depravity or, as R.C. Sproul put it, radical corruption. This idea does not mean that humanity is as bad as it could be or is incapable of doing any kind of good for others. Instead, it refers to a radical corruption of our minds, hearts, and wills that renders sinners incapable of self-help when it comes to knowing God and receiving His salvation. In other words, without God’s intervening grace, we are doomed to continue to say in our hearts, “There is no God.”
Our radical corruption began when our first parents foolishly chose to disobey God in the garden. In essence, through their act of disobedience, they said in their hearts, “There is no God.” Human history is merely a chronicle of the repetition of that foolishness in subsequent generations. We see it all around us. Our culture is not just saying in its heart that there is no God; it is screaming it from the rooftops and encoding it in social policies. This is an alarming and perilous trend. As we know from Scripture, foolishness does not end well. But as we appropriately critique our culture for its foolish rejection of God, let us not forget that we too were born fools.
Fool #2: Despises God
A second type of fool that we encounter in Scripture is the fool who despises the prerogatives, privileges, and gifts of God. Whereas the first type of fool is generally found outside the visible church, this second type of fool can also reside within its ranks. This type of fool is described in Hebrews 6:4–6:
For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt.
This type of fool has “been enlightened,” “tasted the heavenly gift,” “shared in the Holy Spirit,” and “tasted the goodness of the word of God,” but despite having been exposed to these benefits and blessings, he has chosen to reject them.