Personal Relationships

Whelp, its been awhile, but Finals is officially kicking my butt... I really am spending my time preparing all my paperwork and odds and ends for this summer, as well as trying to finish all of my papers and get myself in some sort of state of mind to take the final exams at school.

Luckily the subject matter holds my attention!

Recently its been interesting to see how even with all my study, if I lose the personal relationship with God, it turns into an empty relationship and can lose a lot of its meaning in my life. In the same way, As I try and maintain friendships and study, I realize that our relationships with each other can easily suffer in the same way.

God created us to have relationships that mirror what our relationship is supposed to be with Him. If we are pursuing righteousness in the one area of our life, it then necessitates that we pursue the same in the other. Not only that, but as Lt Col Hal Moore says in We Were Soldiers "Id hope that being good at the one, makes me better at the other."

One of the foundational theologians in my life, Francis Schaeffer, wrote on this in a way clearer than I ever could... His words I think we can all strive for. (You might note a similar writing voice to my own as well!).

"I have said that the last screen in our thinking and in our life must be nothing other than God himself. The last screen, the last point of our thinking, must not be just things about God, it must be a relationship with God himself. The same must be true in our thinking of men. The last screen cannot be anything less than the individual and personal relationship, in love and communication. The command is to love him, not just think about him, or do things for him. We are not to stop with a proper legal relationship- for example, to think of a man as legally lost, which he is, in the sight of a holy God-without thinking of him as a person. Saying this, we can suddenly see that much evangelism is not only sub-Christian, but subhuman- legalistic and impersonal."

This is the crux of the whole issue... God did not give us salvation and justification through some abstract idea, rather He became a man, came to earth and lived among us. Our God is a personal God and has created us the same. We are made for real and personal interaction, fulfilling relationships... We should not only preach the Gospel to each other every day, and every hour as I have already written about before; we must also preach to each other with the love and patience of Christ, our God who loved us so much as to become personal Himself.

Praise God!