Befriending God: The 7 Essential Truths for Divine Intimacy

By Patrick Grattan

Are you experiencing God at the level you should be?

For many Christians, the daily grind of life dulls the passion for Christ we once had when we were new believers. Without passion, our spiritual journeys tend to stall out and we don't experience the deeper, more meaningful connection and presence of God in our lives.

In Befriending God: The 7 Essential Truths for Divine Intimacy, author Patrick Grattan breaks down the Christian experience of sanctification into seven truths essential for developing a deep and meaningful relationship with God. Each stage is described from being created in God's image, to a child of God, a servant of God, and ultimately, friend of God. No matter where you are with your faith today, you can discover how to experience God at a deeper level.

In this book, you will discover:
-What it means to be "set apart" in love and purpose
-The assurance that comes with being "set apart" in love and purpose
-The blessings we experience when we "belong" to God through obedience
-The joy of reflecting His holy light
-The peace that comes with walking with God in trust
-The key to a fulfilling life of meaning

Great as a stand-alone guide for your personal spiritual journey or study together with a small group, the discussion questions at the end of each chapter are sure to challenge and promote greater levels of faith through understanding.

God is our source of strength, wisdom, security, and happiness, but only after we have moved beyond a lukewarm faith. Let's pursue Him together!

James 4:8 "Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick Grattan
• Release date: Feb 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224410217

Patrick Grattan

In 2008, Patrick Grattan was an individual investor who subscribed to the buy-and-hold mentality. When the markets crashed that year, he felt a wake-up call, recognizing that investors are merely passengers at the mercy of shadowy market forces. Immediately, Mr. Grattan realized that there was no guarantee that markets should always recover or that buy-and-hold will always be advantageous in the long run. With such future uncertainty, he discovered that the only way to mitigate such risks was by actively managing his investments. Mr. Grattan's principal goal was to design a strategy that would earn consistent profits without the roller-coaster returns of buy-and-hold. The result of his labor was a profitable trading strategy that minimized risk while using the leveraging power of compounding to provide fantastic returns despite market conditions. In 2010, Revere Trading was born, a premier market-timing subscription service that allows others to profit from Mr. Grattan's unique and invaluable strategies. Due to an overwhelming interest by people wishing to design their own personalized strategy like the Revere Trading system, Mr. Grattan authored the book "Developing Profitable Trading Strategies: A Beginner's Guide to Backtesting using Microsoft Excel" in 2013. It serves as a resource that shows others the lessons and pitfalls he encountered while developing and proving his personally-designed technical trading strategies.

Book preview

Befriending God

The 7 Essential Truths for Divine Intimacy

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A Study Guide by Patrick Grattan

All Rights Reserved © 2015 Patrick Grattan

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – The Spirit’s Amazing Journey

Chapter 2 – The Promise of God

Chapter 3 – God’s Wonderful Gift

Chapter 4 – The Greatest Command

Chapter 5 – A Crown of Righteousness

Chapter 6 – A New Song

Chapter 7 – The Secret of Peace

Chapter 8 – CONNECTION!

Chapter 9 – Experiencing God

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hapter 1

The Spirit’s Amazing Journey

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How are you experiencing God in your life?

This is a critical question that requires some reflection. After all, we know from the book of Genesis that the whole point of creation was for humans to be in communion with God. Unfortunately, many people, including believers, don’t experience God at that level. Many fail to find the purpose they were created for and lack the fulfillment that leads to a satisfying life.

This is not only unfortunate but a real problem! God sent His son Jesus Christ to reveal God to us so that we might know Him. Jesus made clear many of God’s promises for establishing and growing a real and personal relationship with Him. Yet many of us are not looking for those promises to be fulfilled, and as a result, we fail to experience that deeper connection.

For many Christians, this is because we tend to see the pinnacle of our faith as the first moment we decided to believe in God as our Creator and Jesus Christ our Savior. Indeed, this is a major milestone in our lives that we will likely remember for eternity. However, if this is seen as the end goal rather than the milestone that it is, our spiritual journey will be stuck in neutral.

A variety of other circumstances can also lead to a stagnant faith. For instance, faith can stop growing when we don’t realize that God has a purpose for our lives. Faith can fall to the wayside when the daily grind of everyday life becomes a distraction. Wealth and a privileged life-style can dull our desire for God, while hardships constantly challenge the little faith that we have. Whatever the reason, the result is the same for so many of us: we become lukewarm.

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Revelation 3:16

New Living Translation (NLT)

¹⁶ But since you are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth!

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Living a lukewarm Christian life is the result of a stagnant faith. When we are not looking for God to fulfill His promises, we will ultimately fail to experience God at the deeper, more intimate level that we were designed for. If that happens, we will miss out on the one thing that can lead us to a purposeful and fulfilling life.

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God’s Vision of Friendship

In the book of Genesis 1-3, we see that God created the world for mankind so that we could be in communion with Him. We also see the vision that God has for the relationship that He wants with us. Like Adam, we are made in His likeness so that we can have the capacity to know our Creator (Genesis 1:27). It is said that we are to be His servant (Genesis 1:28), to be blessed (Genesis 1:29), to be righteous in His sight, and to have no shame (Genesis 2:25). We are to walk with Him (Genesis 3:8) and talk face to face with Him as one who speaks to a friend (Genesis 3:9).

Of course, Adam and Eve faltered and sin entered the garden bringing about a distancing of humankind from God. But the relationship and experiences Adam and Eve had with God in the Garden of Eden is the life He wants for us today. The story of creation lays out God’s vision for the deep and intimate relationship He desires for us. This is the ultimate goal we must strive for in this life. The story of Abraham depicts how it can be achieved despite a fallen world.

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James 2:23

New Living Translation (NLT)

²³ And so it happened just as the Scriptures say: Abraham believed God, and God counted him as righteous because of his faith. He was even called the friend of God.

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Wow! Friend of God, what a wonderful description of the remarkable relationship Abraham shared with God. To be truly counted as one of God’s friends is an unimaginable honor. And there were others in the Bible who walked and talked with God in friendship too, such as Noah (Genesis 6:9), Moses (Exodus 33:11), and David (Acts 13:22) among others. The deep friendship these mortal men had with God reveal that such relationships are not exclusively reserved for His Son, Jesus, but that it is a relationship that you and I can also attain. These were the experiences of ordinary people who knew God’s promises, trusted them, and did as God commanded. However, achieving such amazing levels of intimacy with God is not developed overnight nor automatically granted once you become a believer. Like any relationship you would have with another person, a deep relationship with God takes time to develop and all the more so due to humankind’s sinful nature, which distances us from Him. 

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Degrees of Intimacy

In living our lives, we come into contact with many people with whom the depth of our relationship varies. For example, there are many people we are unfamiliar with, otherwise known as strangers. There are other people in our lives we have only slight knowledge of, whom we regard as acquaintances. And others of whom we know well: people we would consider friends. In fact, it is generally accepted that there are five different levels of intimacy that we experience with others, as shown in the diagram below.

As you can see in the diagram, there are many people in our lives with whom we merely share clichés and superficialities. There are fewer people in our lives with whom we will share information or ideas. Fewer still that we are willing to discuss our feelings with. Getting to the point of intimacy with another person only occurs with a select few in our life with whom we have made a concerted and deliberate effort. As you know, relationships at this level cannot develop overnight. A great time investment is involved during which mutual trust is built. But it is these relationships that are the most valuable and worthwhile to have.

Like our relationships with people, there are also different levels of relating to God. By shedding our stagnant faith and actively pursuing our spiritual journey, we can move up this ladder from being a Stranger to God to a Friend of God through a process known as sanctification.