What is your
relationship to God?
What is my
relationship to God? Prayer is my relationship to God. Jesus is my relationship
to God. Love is my relationship to God. Grace is my relationship to God.
Humility is my relationship to God.
Which is more
difficult to describe: God, or my relationship with God? Does my relationship
to God have more to do with who I am or with what I do? First and foremost, I
suppose, my relationship to God has to do with God’s “character” and action.
I believe that,
insofar as I exist, I am related to God. God created all things, including me,
and God loves us all. God’s creative act and love keeps me in relation to Him,
whether or not I want to be related to Him.
Beyond that, God
invites me to intensify and make whole my relationship with Him. How so? Let’s
pick three ways; God’s invitation is at least three-fold. God invites us into
acceptance, awareness, and action.
God invites me to
relate to Her by fully accepting Her love. This involves accepting myself,
confessing all my sin, guilt, and shame, and accepting God’s forgiving love and
grace. God wants me to be His son. We are all already God’s creation, beloved
and cared for. God wants me to fully open my mind and heart to this. Accept
God’s acceptance of me.
Once I’ve accepted
God’s love, then I can begin to grow more and more aware of that love. Every
moment, every situation, every conversation, every human interaction is an
opportunity to become more aware of God’s love for me. I have no idea how this
works; in fact it seems crazy at times, because not all of my experiences are
good. Many are down right bad. And surely God doesn’t want terrible things to
happen to me. But somehow, even in the darkest times, God wants to show me Her
love. In every circumstance God invites me to grow in my awareness of His
presence and love.
There are many
ways I intentionally grow in awareness: prayer, worship, service, silence,
fellowship, conversation, listening, observation of nature, study, Scripture;
the list goes on. Is there anything that doesn’t open up as an opportunity to
learn about God? To become more aware of God and Her love?
As I accept and
become more aware of God’s love, I feel the call to participate in this love –
to act out this love. That famous command from Micah – “…love mercy, do
justice, and walk humbly with your God” is a great way to describe the action
that flows from and contributes to awareness. Many of the activities I
mentioned under awareness are as much in response to awareness as they are in
anticipation of awareness.
Acceptance,
awareness, and action – at the end of the day they are all one; they are all
summed up in the love of God as taught and demonstrated by Jesus Christ. Jesus
is not only the incarnation of God, he embodies my (and our) relationship with
God. Jesus embodies God’s love for us and our acceptance, awareness, and action
in response to God.
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