“Dear friends, build each other up in your most holy faith” (Jude 20)
Dear Jesus, it’s dangerously easy to presume on our most vital friendships—investing less, and drawing on old memories and previous emotional connection. But even our favorite, most comfortable pair of jeans need attention, care, and mending.
The older we get, the more we need our friendships to be saturated with and shaped by the Gospel—”building each other up in the faith.” I wish our hearts naturally drifted towards the Spirit’s fruit, the joy of repentance, and loving you above everything. But it just doesn’t work that way. The devil has lost us for eternity, so he is constantly attempting to divert, diminish, and destroy our love for you (2 Cor. 11:1-3).
Invariably, each of us will go through seasons of numbing prosperity, suffering and heart-exhausting challenges, and hard-to-resist temptations. Unless we resist it, we will succumb to a life of busyness counterfeiting as success, hearing and heeding our fears more so than the voice of your Spirit, and (drat it) a perpetual habit of forgetting the Gospel. We do need each other.
Jesus, this is our peace, freedom, and joy. You are our righteousness, holiness, and redemption. You are keeping us for yourself, and you get us Home safely on the day of your choosing. But until that day, keep underscoring how important it is for us to build each other up in faith, hope, and love. Aloneness is an option, but a destructive one. So Very Amen.