My Friends

Do the well need a doctor? Does the one who sees need a surgeon? Does the one who is laughing need to be cheered? 

I come to those who have not. Who are in debt. Who have need. I come to those who aren't pretty and polished and put together. I come to those broken and lost. I come to those who are like unfinished puzzles and need clarity to see the whole picture, to see what I see. 

I come to set captives free! I set them free from worldly philosophies that have enslaved them. I set them free from religion and boxed-in thinking. I set them free from fearing man, pleasing man. 

They do not know love so they do not yet know how to love. So, I teach them love. True love. Not love based on man's definitions. I teach them My love, the love that can only be seen, heard and felt from My Kingdom. I come to set them free in this love! I immerse them in this love. I baptize them in this love. I drench them so they are soaked through and through and then forever changed in this love. They are so saturated, they can not go back to how they were. Just as a cucumber can be changed into a pickle and never go back to its original state, so I saturate those that come to Me. I change them from the inside out. And they will never be the same. Once they see the light, they can never unsee it.

And this is My promise to them: I will never leave them nor forsake them. Though the world may have called them trash, though the world may have let them down, I will not. I call them friends. These are My friends. The ones on the fringe. The ones others condemn, abandon and refuse to accept. These are My friends. I have purchased them with My very own blood. I call them Mine. 

I call them Mine.

Then Jesus went out to the lakeshore again and taught the crowds that were coming to him. As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at his tax collector’s booth. “Follow me and be my disciple,” Jesus said to him. So Levi got up and followed him. 

Later, Levi invited Jesus and his disciples to his home as dinner guests, along with many tax collectors and other disreputable sinners. (There were many people of this kind among Jesus’ followers.) But when the teachers of religious law who were Pharisees saw him eating with tax collectors and other sinners, they asked his disciples, “Why does he eat with such scum?” 

When Jesus heard this, he told them, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor—sick people do. I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners.”

‭‭Mark‬ ‭2‬:‭13‬-‭17‬ ‭NLT‬‬

https://bible.com/bible/116/mrk.2.13-17.NLT

So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know him now! This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! 

And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.

‭‭2 Corinthians‬ ‭5‬:‭16‬-‭21‬ ‭NLT‬‬

https://bible.com/bible/116/2co.5.16-21.NLT

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