Relationship Guidance
Friendship with God: A Path to Deeper Fellowship with the Father, Son, and Spirit, Mike McKinley. Wheaton: Crossway, 2023. Hardcover, 168 pages.
This is one of those books you wish you could have read 25 years ago. It’s about our relationship with the Triune God and how we grow in that relationship. That’s a topic many Reformed writers shy away from or treat in a superficial way. While it’s easy reading, Friendship with God is far from shallow and it tracks Reformed straight down the middle.
In 1657, the Puritan John Owen published a landmark devotional volume, Communion with God. This book, based on a series of sermons, has long been hailed as one of Owen’s best. There’s just one problem with Owen: on the spectrum of Puritan writers, he’s way over on the difficult-to-read side. For example, he never used an English phrase where a Latin or Greek one would suffice. I exaggerate, but only a little.
Enter Mike McKinley, a Baptist pastor serving in Virginia. While a simplified and modernized version of Owen’s book was published by Crossway in 2007, McKinley has gone a step further, providing us with essentially a rewritten Communion with God. He writes, “My goal in this little book is to mine some of the most precious diamonds of Owen’s spiritual insights and make them available and applicable to you as you grow in your enjoyment of the friendship of the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (p.4).
What Owen called “communion,” McKinley calls “friendship.” It is “our daily awareness, experience, and enjoyment” of the gracious status we have in Christ. Our union with Christ and the status we have before God as a result comes to us as a gift of grace. Our communion with God is a living two-way relationship flowing from our union with Christ. While Friendship with God certainly encourages us with the gospel realities of what God does on his side of this communion, the focus is on how we can best live it out on our side. As such, this is an extremely practical book, filled with spiritual application.
McKinley follows Owen’s structure in explaining how friendship with God works. There are three main parts corresponding to each person of the Trinity. With each person of the Trinity, Owen explained that there is a particular medium or means of communion. McKinley follows suit. For example, with the Father the medium of our friendship is the Father’s free, undeserved, and eternal love. On our side we’re to conscientiously receive that love, revel in it, rest in it, and respond appropriately to it. McKinley explains what that looks like with concrete detail.
I did put a question mark on page 148 in McKinley’s discussion of Ephesians 4:30. McKinley (and Owen) insist that it is technically impossible to grieve the Holy Spirit. Writes McKinley, “Because he is divine and lacking in nothing, he cannot be robbed of his happiness and joy. He is in no way influenced or disappointed by our actions, for that would imply weakness and changeability on his part.” I’m not convinced, since the same could be said in relation to God’s wrath. Do we rob God of his happiness and joy when we provoke his wrath (e.g. Deut. 9:7)? If God can be wrathful as an expression of his justice, why can’t the Holy Spirit grieve as an expression of his love? That does not necessarily imply a change in the divine being or the addition of new characteristics to it. Owen was a giant of Reformed theology, but I wonder whether his understanding of divine impassibility was correct.
At times I can’t help but wonder whether we Reformed folk have an allergy to the idea of a relationship with God. We seem to more comfortable with God as a concept. Perhaps this is a reaction to the excesses of evangelicalism and its saccharine sentimentalism. But if we go back to Owen, we find a Reformed author unfolding a healthy and biblical way of understanding and living a relationship with the Triune God. As McKinley writes in his conclusion, John Owen’s “Communion with God seems to be an antidote perfectly designed for what plagues us” (p.159). And McKinley’s Friendship with God delivers Owen in a palatable and lucid format. Get this book and learn to savour your relationship with the Triune God.
Originally published in Clarion 73.15 (November 22, 2024)
