This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

You can read all the man­u­als on prayer and lis­ten to other peo­ple pray, but until you begin to pray your­self you will never under­stand prayer. It’s like rid­ing a bicy­cle or swim­ming: You learn by doing. Luis Palau

This is what we are after, isn’t it? We want change for our lives. How­ever, we want the real thing as well. Be entirely hon­est with your­self, are you the same per­son you were a year ago? Five years ago? Forty years ago? This might pos­si­bly be the great­est dan­ger in being a Christian—not truly mak­ing strides in our lives.

Along these lines, I once heard a pas­tor say this, Trust this Jesus—this all you need to do. Maybe he mis­spoke, but that was com­pletely an untrue state­ment. This is what so many peo­ple are told when they come to faith and it only gives them per­mis­sion to con­tinue to be the bro­ken indi­vid­u­als they are, not grow­ing and not chang­ing into the incred­i­ble peo­ple they were meant to be. Being in rela­tion­ship with Jesus goes way beyond just trust­ing. So really dwell on this question—are you any dif­fer­ent than you used to be?

• Is anger always at your side and comes out when­ever it wants?
• What about the inabil­ity to over­come the con­tin­ual depres­sion and joylessness?
• Or the art you’ve acquired to being com­mit­ted to absolutely noth­ing or anyone?
• Or the per­pet­ual lying and half-truths?
• Or the end­less rela­tion­ships you’ve had that go about an inch deep?
• Or wast­ing your life away with pro­cras­ti­na­tion or laziness?
• Or the past that always stands between you and where you want to go?
• Or how you allow shop­ping or sex (or any­thing else other than God) make you feel secure and happy?

We could go on and on with these kinds of exam­ples. This would be a great time to take a moral inven­tory and really look at your life. Again, being a Chris­t­ian on one level is about con­stant change. Are you a sin­ner? Of course you are. Just like me. And this is exactly why God is always at us to become more, more in terms of who He desires us to be—more whole today, sin­ning less tomor­row, and becom­ing just a lit­tle bit more like Jesus. Let’s make no bones about it, this is no sim­ple or easy task, but this is what we must be after—we need to every­day become dif­fer­ent peo­ple than who we were from the pre­vi­ous day.

This is why change hap­pens in large part because we do some­thing to bring about that change. This reminds me of a story. The very first client I ever had came into my office, sat in the chair and demanded in no uncer­tain terms that she didn’t think she was going to get very much out of this “coun­sel­ing thing.” I think I might have sur­prised her, because I agreed with her. I said to her that she was prob­a­bly right—in a cer­tain way. I explained to her that this time that we shared together was most likely going to only make a small impact on her life. What she did out­side of the time that we met—this was what was going to make all the dif­fer­ence. It’s exactly the same here. Sim­ply learn­ing about the dif­fer­ent stages of the Chris­t­ian walk will do absolutely noth­ing for you. Knowl­edge is just knowl­edge unless it’s applied to one’s life. Too often books or things we read just become infor­ma­tion to us and not much else. God wants us to have more than the facts. Again, every­thing will depend on what you do with the infor­ma­tion that you obtain.

Let me make one final word at this point. Through­out this writ­ing I am going to be label­ing these three dis­tinct rela­tion­ships that we can have with God; they are unique words which have dis­tinct mean­ings: believer, ser­vant and friend. Unique to this is that most often when read­ing a Chris­t­ian book or blog, the use of the words believer and ser­vant are usu­ally pos­i­tive ones. I fully agree that these can be good terms to char­ac­ter­ize a per­son who is a Chris­t­ian. How­ever, for the pur­pose of this blog, they most often will be used as neg­a­tive terms. In the end, God wants us to be his friend, not just a believer and not just a ser­vant.  As Jesus clearly shows he wants more from us and as he directly says I no longer call you ser­vants, instead I have called you friend. (John 15:15) Let me end this sec­tion by briefly offer­ing def­i­n­i­tions to these dis­tinc­tions that hope­fully will fill in your under­stand­ing of what we will be talk­ing about through­out the blog. In the fol­low­ing posts, we will fully explore what each of these are all about:

• Believer: A per­son who just believes in God, but does not actively fol­low him. “Believ­ing” in this case is sim­ply giv­ing men­tal assent to a reli­gion or creed—this is the per­son who has very lit­tle con­vic­tion about what it means to be a fol­lower of Jesus Christ. Often­times, these are peo­ple who have grown up in a church (Catholic or Protes­tant), but have never fully given their lives over to God and applied the scrip­tures to their lives. A term you may have heard that would apply here is “nom­i­nal Chris­t­ian.” A nom­i­nal Chris­t­ian is one who says that they are a Chris­t­ian, but rarely goes to church or is some­one who selects “Chris­tian­ity” as their reli­gion, but would also say they are “non-practicing.” Exam­ples of char­ac­ters in the Bible who would be char­ac­ter­ized as believ­ers would be: Esau, Saul, Solomon (toward the end of his life), Ahab, and Judas.
• Ser­vant: A per­son who has gone beyond just believ­ing in Jesus, but bases much of their rela­tion­ship with God on rules and reg­u­la­tions. This per­son may know a tremen­dous amount of “stuff” about God, but prac­ti­cally speak­ing, does not know Him per­son­ally and has not gen­uinely expe­ri­enced three impor­tant aspects; these would be grace, gen­uine self-forgiveness and per­sonal heal­ing for trou­ble spots in their lives (e.g., anger, sex­ual addic­tions, depres­sion, etc.). These peo­ple are eas­ily bound by legal­ism, because they have not expe­ri­enced this grace and free­dom. Peo­ple caught in this phase of faith often use reli­gion to their ben­e­fit, are very adept at hid­ing prob­lems in their lives, and yes, some­times are even lead­ers in the church. The two clear­est exam­ples of this type of per­son would be the reli­gious lead­ers, the Phar­isees that Jesus would often chal­lenge and con­front and as we will explore in detail in the blog, the char­ac­ter of Peter that we read about in the gospels (before Jesus’ resurrection).
• Friend: A per­son who has under­gone a trans­for­ma­tion and is begin­ning to know heal­ing, matu­rity and the free­dom of fol­low­ing Christ. This per­son can gen­uinely say, I know grace. This per­son is begin­ning to hear the voice of the One they fol­low (John 10:27) and gra­ciously encour­ages oth­ers to do like­wise. This per­son looks care­fully in the mir­ror at their lives and seeks out heal­ing for the wounds that have occurred to them and the bro­ken­ness that they have brought into their lives. Those who have become friends of Jesus are not bound by rules and reg­u­la­tions, but through the Spirit live lives which are char­ac­ter­ized by the fruit of the Spirit (Gala­tians 5:22–23). Those that we find in the Bible that we would char­ac­ter­ize as being friends with God would include: Abra­ham, Joseph, Moses, David, Eli­jah, Ruth, Peter (after Jesus’ res­ur­rec­tion), Barn­abas, and Priscilla.

In the next post, we will begin to explore what it looks like to be “just a believer” in God.