Why do most of the churches I visit these days seem to inexorably incorporate the praise song "I am a friend of God" into their Sunday worship as if it were the core of their beliefs? For me, and my house, this song embodies everything that is wrong with the way most Christians approach their faith in Christ.
The song, while catchy and often uplifting to many, has a text which can be interpreted to be fundamentally counter to the spirit of scripture. While it is based on a few key verses in scripture, the spirit of what the repetitive chorus “I am a friend of God” seems to denote a certain arrogance and implied equality with God that makes me shudder each time I hear it.
Friend
This word has many meanings and contexts. In our culture today, when someone is your friend, that person is someone you consider yourself to be equal to. Someone you can confide in, and who confides in you. They are someone whom you lend your tools to or borrow money from. They are someone with whom you see eye to eye. I can’t say that God sees me this way because it would in my mind be heresy.
Other meanings of the word friend include someone who is not my enemy, someone who is friendly to me, and someone who is my ally. These latter meanings are ones that I could get behind in terms of calling God my friend. But I am not an equal to Him by any means. I am indebted to Him for my life. I am forever His humble servant. I am His adopted child.
Me-worship
Repeating the mantra over and over again feels to me like we are trying to force this concept into our consciousness and make ourselves feel better for it. It’s something I like to call me-worship. While it can mimic the deep down warm and fuzzy feeling of true worship, the self-centered nature of it detracts our authentic worship from the one who deserves it. This is not the only song that does this. Any song that has one to many ‘me’s’ ‘I’s’ or ‘my’s’ that you can think of would fall under the category of me-worship.
Authentic worship
I wrote a paper on this once. I subscribe to the ideas put forth by one Harold Best in his book Unceasing Worship. Authentic Worship is unceasing. We worship 24-7-365. But it is what we focus our worship on that makes our worship true or not. Our worship can be focused on God, His son Jesus the Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Or our worship could be focused on the Bears game, the cute girl in the second pew, or our self. It is what we focus our lives on that makes worship true.
The reason this song bothers me is because our culture has begun to look at God as the “great sugar-daddy in the sky.” He is someone to whom we can make requests to but not much else. We do not serve Him like we ought; instead we serve our own selfish desires, all the while whining when we don’t get our way. How dare we?
DH out
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