uplifting friends: centered on God

Hey friends! I hope you are all having a lovely day today. Today I want to talk with you all about something that has really been on my heart lately. Something that took a long time and a lot of mistakes for me to learn the truth about.

"Don't team up with those who are unbelievers. How can righteousness be a partner with wickedness? How can light live with darkness?"

2 Corinthians 6:14

I used to read this verse and think to myself that it was only talking about boys. Yep, just boys, I would think to myself. I already knew and understood how important it was for me to give my heart in the future to a man who passionately loved the Lord, so I figured that I had received every tid bit of wisdom that I could from this scripture in 2 Corinthians. Turns out I was wrong, and this verse is actually referring to every relationship in our life.  This verse is referring to our friends, our co-workers or business partners, our colleagues, basically everyone who we are involved with some type of relationship in our lives. And I had to learn this truth in the verse the hard way. 

I convinced myself to believe that it didn't really matter that some of my closest friends didn't love the Lord and weren't leading me closer to Christ. And no, I'm not saying that you should hide in a cave and run away from every non-Christian friend that walks into your life. I have non-Christian friends, but do I consider these friends my close friends? No. Ones that I spend frequent amounts of time with outside of school or work? No. They are my friends, but they are not the kind of friends that I would seek advice from or anything like that. I'm not calling them stupid or saying that I am better than them, I'm simply living a life based on how scripture calls us to live. God doesn't tell us to live like this to make us miserable, He tells us to live like this and have relationships centered around Him to MAKE US HAPPY. If we are surrounding ourselves mostly with people who are leading us away from the light, then our own individual light will diminish, and eventually our light will be gone.  

"But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light."

1 Peter 2:9

I certainly hope that your not upset with me at this point of reading this post, because I know that I became REALLY upset when God confronted me with this issue in my own life. I made up every excuse I could on how I believed that I was right and He was wrong. "But God, my non-Christain friends can simply let me know if they think if that guy was nice or not, whats the harm in that?! and there is nothing wrong with me sharing some of my heart with them!"

The thing is, when I did share my heart with non-beliving friends in the past, I didn't feel good afterwards. The conversation between us didn't leave me feeling encouraged as I hoped it would. They didn't really have much to say at all about the problems in my life, and God seemed non-existant to them. I didn't like that at all. And also, talking about guys with my non-Christian friends was a whole different story. They just didn't understand that there was so much more to a new guy pursuing me than that he was "really cute and nice!" They just didn't get or understand how important a man of faith was to me, and they never encouraged me to pursue a man of faith at all. When I realized these two things, this is about when I started to reel in the anchor on the non-Christian relationships in my life. No I did not let them completely go, I just made them much much MUCH more surface based, simply because that was about as far as I could go with these type of friendships in my life without allowing my heart to go in the wrong direction.

So my friends, in conclusion, yes God does call us as Christians to love everyone, but he also calls us to guard our own hearts by surrounding ourselves continually with people who are leading us closer to Him. I wish I didn't make the many mistakes in my past of surrounding myself with people who didn't loved the Lord, and because of those mistakes I made I was hurt. I learned that I had to be intentional in making friends who loved the Lord, and also that I had to let go of some of the relationships in my life that were leading me in the wrong direction. It wasn't easy, but it certainly was worth it, and now I am in a much happier place in my life. If any of you are in a place in your life where you are unhappy with your relationships, know that if I was able to turn around my own relationships with the help of Jesus, then so can YOU!

I love you guys!

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Love always, Jess