We often speak about God as our Father and our Savior, our helper and our Lord, our King, and our Redeemer.

But what does it look like to have God as our friend?

Can we truly see the ruler of the universe as our personal confidant and companion?

In my interview today, I talked with Mike McKinley about

what it means for us as Christians to be friends of God. We discuss the friendship that Jesus

had on earth and explore what it looks like for us to lean into our friendship with God in our

own lives. Mike McKinley is the senior pastor of Sterling Park Baptist Church in Sterling, Virginia,

and the author of Friendship with God, a Path to Deeper Fellowship with a Father,

Son, and Spirit from Crossway. Let's get started. Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining

me today on the Crossway podcast. Thanks for having me.

So today we're going to talk about friendship with God, how we as Christians can view God as a friend.

But if I'm honest, there's one thing that comes to my mind when I think about this topic, the

idea of being friends with God.

And that's that old T-shirt that was so popular in the early to mid-90s that said,

Jesus is my homeboy on it. Do you remember that shirt? I think I saw that shirt. Did you,

did you own that shirt? I will not admit on a podcast to ever owning that shirt.

So I think this shirt kind of illustrates maybe some of the suspicion that sometimes

some of us can have when we think about the idea of being friends with God.

And it's that it can kind of carry with it connotations of over familiarity, of kind of a lack

of reverence towards God. What do you think of that? Do you

resonate with that kind of default concern? Yeah, I really do. I was converted as a young person in a

fairly large non-denominational megachurch that was, I think, really helpful in proclaiming the gospel.

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