June 7, 2026
You all have friends, don’t you! It’s great to have friends, isn’t it! You can play with your friends and have fun. You can go places with them. Maybe you can have a friend come over and spend the night.
Have you ever done something mean to a friend? Maybe you got mad one day and said you didn’t like them. Maybe you even said you didn’t want to be their friend anymore. That surely hurt their feelings. Since we’re sinful, we sometimes do that—even though we know we should always be nice to our friends and not say or do things that hurt them.
God is our best friend. More than just fun, He loves us, gives us every good thing, and is even going to take us to heaven someday. But every day we do things that hurt God—like any time we hurt another one of His children, like when we’re mean to our friends. But God still wants to have us as His friends. That’s why He sent Jesus to die on the cross for us. Jesus’ death on the cross took away all our sins, the mean things we’ve done to our friends, the ways we’ve hurt God Himself. They’re forgiven.
If we’ve been mean to a friend, we might think he or she will only be our friend again if we do something really extra good for them—like give them a present or something. But it shouldn’t be that way, and it’s certainly not that way with God. Because of Jesus dying for us, God is already our best friend again. God says we don’t have to do anything to make Him like us again.
But here’s what God does want us to do: He wants us to be nice to others when they’ve been unkind to us. Maybe you’ve had a friend who was mean to you. God wants us to forgive that friend. He wants us to be kind and friendly to him or her again. He doesn’t want us to say, “Since you were mean to me, I’ll never like you again.” In other words, God wants us to do for others what He has done so kindly for us. He still loved us when we hurt Him, and we can do that for our friends too.
Dear God, I am sorry when I do bad things to You and to one another. Please forgive me and help me to be kind to others and forgive them as You have forgiven me. Amen.