Relationship

sheep & Shepherd

We are made to be relational beings and we all have relationships.  Hopefully they are good, sometimes they are not.  When I think about a person that I have a close and important relationship with, it feels comfortable.  I don’t wonder whether this person really likes me or worry about what they might be thinking.  I don’t censor myself, but speak and act with freedom.  It feels natural that I am understood and accepted. And there is room for working out disagreements and misunderstandings that inevitably occur.

Father & son

Is this in any way similar to our relationship with God, or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit?  Christians talk a lot about our faith being a relationship with God or with Jesus Christ, but is that what we experience?

or daughter

 If God wants to have a relationship with us the way he did before sin entered the world, then something has to happen to clear the way.  That, of course, is why Jesus came.  He came to take sin out of the way – the guilt and shame we feel, and the need to keep on sinning as part of life.  With that done, the way is open to closeness and intimacy and security and rest with God.

It can be a challenge to receive cleansing if you feel guilty and can’t accept that the blood of Jesus has truly washed you white as snow.  Some of us really hang onto our guilt and condemnation, but faith knows that God’s word is true.  He wants to be near me, so he made the way.  He did it for me.  Believing that, agreeing with that, can be a process, but God says that the work He began in me, He will complete (Philippians 1:6; 2:13) to his satisfaction.

His satisfaction doesn’t mean that I will be good enough to satisfy Him.  It means that I will finally understand that I am good enough to satisfy him.  When I receive the knowledge that His righteous wrath against my sin was satisfied by the death of Jesus and personally accept the sacrifice of Jesus on my behalf, I have done what it takes to please God. 

ultimately His bride

What is it that so pleases and satisfies God about me already?  Faith in His Son!  It is faith in His Son that brings me to the narrow gate and faith that qualifies me to be adopted by the Father, and faith that transforms me more and more into the image of His Son.  I don’t have to look like Jesus to be saved and I don’t have to look like Him to satisfy God in our relationship. From this position, I can have faith to yield to the process of ‘becoming’ by grace.  No fear or anxiety, just His love transforming me -- victory to victory.  Stumbles are acceptable.  It really is so much more simple than we try to make it.

Hallelujah!  What freedom, what joy!  What a great relationship!  What we often turn into 'religion' is the relationship which is meant to be secure and delightful and comforting and fun and strengthening and complete.  Many people feel that kind of joy and peace when they are first adopted, but lose it as they begin to feel responsible for growing up to meet a standard.  People may ask you to live up to a standard, but God does not.  He doesn’t expect us to achieve anything because we can’t.  Trusting His unconditional love unconditionally is all there is to do.

Really?  What about all the verses that tell me to do things? 

God forms Christ in us

Those commands are part of becoming more like Jesus.  But who can live like Jesus, except Jesus in us?  It is still grace by faith that enables me to become a person through whom Jesus is free to live out his love.  Don’t the commands come back to love?  The whole point is about being so loved by God that I can be a vessel of His love for others.

And by making this process of growing as a Christian about Jesus instead of about me, He is honored and glorified.  He is the Name above all names.  He gets the glory and He is exalted.  I like that, don’t you?!