Jesus calls us His friends

"I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you." (John 15:15) Fr. Sergei sent us some reflections on this Sunday gospel.

Jesus calls us as His friends. A friend is the one to whom we can share all that we know or feel. Jesus our friend has revealed to us whatever His father has revealed to Him. Because of our friendship with Jesus, we are aware of the existence of a never-ending life after death, the existence of heaven, hell, etc.

As friendship is a two-way path – we can talk to Jesus about anything. He will never condemn us, criticise us or stop being our friend. Friends of this world can betray us or can even abandon us but our Jesus is a friend who never leaves us or forsakes us.

Tips to enjoy the friendship of Jesus:

1. Jesus is our best friend who fights all our battles! Our battles may be with our indecisive mindset, sickness, special children, and financial constraints, peer competition in the office, or so on. First, we need to whisper our problems to Jesus rather than anyone else. Always give the first priority to our sweet Jesus. Our battles may be long. They will be tiresome. But the fruit of the battles will be a blessing.

2. Our God loves our songs of praise and our God too sings when He is rejoicing! (Zephaniah 3:17 NIV). Our friend, Jesus Christ also sang (Matthew 26:30). Songs give excitement to our prayer time. David, the shepherd boy, thrilled Almighty God’s heart just with his beautiful songs. As David was praising God with his harp and songs, both God and David were enjoying each other! Let us start our day with personal time with God. Let us touch our God’s heart with our songs! Like King David we can sing and dance or like shepherd David we can worship with music. However, it is, God likes our songs!

3. What is the task of ‘mind’? It is to ‘think’.

We should allocate a ‘task’ to our mind. This means we should instruct our mind on ‘what it should think’. Since anyway work of the mind is to think, it will keep thinking. ‘An idle mind is the devil’s workshop’. Since it is always busy thinking, it will keep thinking more negatively which will definitely impact our life. We can never progress positively with a negative mind. Please focus your mind on the current task. If you feel the current task does not need you to concentrate, then always have a set of tasks for your mind.