A Deepening Friendship With God

Look at how much encouragement you’ve found in your relationship with the Anointed One! You are filled to overflowing with his comforting love. You have experienced a deepening friendship with the Holy Spirit and have felt his tender affection and mercy. Philippians 2:1 (The Passion Translation, TPT) emphasis mine

There is certainly a lot going on in this verse, so let’s look at it closely to see what God is saying.

God wants us to see and know that through our relationship with Jesus we find encouragement. No matter what, the greatest person to know is Jesus. In this passage, we can define relationship as how Jesus relates with us and how we relate to Him. He relates to us with encouragement, comfort and love. The more we realize how much the Lord loves us, the more we will want to know Him by spending time with Him. As we deepen our personal relationship with the Lord, we are filled to overflowing with His encouragement, comfort and love. He lets us know that He cares for us and accepts us. When we experience a deepening friendship with God, we personally feel and experience all that He is: loving, faithful, just, merciful, understanding, and so on.

As our friendship with God deepens more and more, we reach the place where nothing shakes us because we have received of His love. Even when everything around us is being destroyed, we are kept safe and secure in God’s comforting love. And at times when we can’t feel God, we know that God is still with us, loving us, because of the depth of our relationship with Him. God will take us deeper into Him as we spend time in His Word and His Presence, releasing to us His Provision, and His Revelation. He reveals Who He is and then He demonstrates it through His provision in our lives.

I would venture to say that the deepest human need is to be loved. The Lord put that need in each person. God wants to be the One we go to for the touch we need- His tender affection, love, and mercy. As He gives of Himself to us, He is drawing us closer and closer. As we come to Him daily, depending on Him moment by moment, our relationship with the Lord flourishes. We are filled to overflowing with Him, where we experience a deep friendship with Him, feeling and knowing God, trusting Him in all things for all things. Our desire is to enjoy the Lord, and for Him to enjoy us. After all, God desires us more than anything.