{"id":2264,"date":"2025-03-09T00:40:56","date_gmt":"2025-03-08T15:40:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/203.170.86.202\/wildeden.com.au\/news\/?p=2264"},"modified":"2025-05-30T01:08:01","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T16:08:01","slug":"i-am-a-friend-of-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wildeden.com.au\/news\/soul-food\/for-thought\/2025\/i-am-a-friend-of-god\/","title":{"rendered":"I am a friend of God!\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The holy, perfect, just, powerful, all knowing Creator and judge,\u00a0<em>should<\/em> hate me\u2026<\/p>\n<p>He should <i>want<\/i>\u00a0to judge &amp; punish me. He would be totally justified in condemning me &amp; sending me to hell.\u00a0<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>But He doesn\u2019t. He loves. He forgives. He even loves to forgive!\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>This God who I used to love to hate, who I thought was horrible, vindictive, abusive &#8211; He is actually the embodiment of love: True love, not the Hollywood erotic, selfish love, but the pure, selfless and transformative love.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>He saw how much I would hate Him, how much I would go against Him and hurt the people He loved. But instead of removing me from the opportunity of life or earmarking me for judgment, He sent His Son to die in my place!\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Wow. Now *that* is love!\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I AM A FRIEND OF GOD!\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>What a mind blowing reality!<\/p>\n<p>#thankYouJesus!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The holy, perfect, just, powerful, all knowing Creator and judge,\u00a0should hate me\u2026 He should want\u00a0to judge &amp; punish me. He would be totally justified in condemning me &amp; sending me to hell.\u00a0 But He doesn\u2019t. He loves. He forgives. He even loves to forgive!\u00a0 This God who I used to love to hate, who I thought was horrible, vindictive, abusive &#8211; He is actually the embodiment of love: True love, not the Hollywood erotic, selfish love, but the pure, selfless and transformative love.\u00a0 He saw how much I would hate Him, how much I would go against Him and hurt &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2296,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-for-thought"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.wildeden.com.au\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Friend-of-Jesus.jpg?fit=1576%2C1570&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pasDCW-Aw","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wildeden.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wildeden.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wildeden.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildeden.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildeden.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2264"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildeden.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2265,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildeden.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264\/revisions\/2265"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildeden.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wildeden.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildeden.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildeden.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}