Relationships: Do we even know what they are?

Relationships. I have had many deep heart-to-heart conversations with people older than me. All of them, life is all about relationships. Afterwards, they all say that relationships are about communication. But what if there is more to relationships than communication? We all know that relationships are an unfathomably important part of our life here on this earth, but what if we are doing relationships wrong?

That’s a scary thought to me. God has been speaking to me a lot lately through a leadership training I have been doing with my youth pastor, Eddie Williams. One of the things we have been talking about in this training, and in most of his sermons, is the vertical relationship with Jesus comes first, and then the horizontal ones will fall into place. That got me wondering: if my relationship with Jesus isn’t what it is suppose to be, am I having a true relationship with anyone else, and more fundamentally, am I even able to have a real relationship with somebody else? And also, what is an example of a true, healthy relationship in this day and age when the word “relationship” has been weighted down with so many preconceived ideas and expectations about it?

The starting place when it comes to our relationship with Jesus is how we even managed to start having a relationship with Him. The Bible says, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8. The only reason we are able to love Him is because Jesus first loved us. That’s crazy to me. I’m sure that anyone who is a parent will understand this better than I can, but it is just so strange that I can be loved by God even before I knew Him. Even though I am still a sinner, that God not only loves me now that I am trying to follow Him in all His ways, but also before when I openly and wilfully defied Him. That is truly mind-boggling to me, and it makes me so grateful to my God.

Something that was pointed out to me when I first started this leadership training with Eddie is that I lack affection for Jesus. I definitely did not understand this when he first said this. Eddie then explained that the affection is something that comes not only when you know, but when you feelJesus’ perfect unfailing love for you. For me. This is something that I have always struggled with. Growing up attending Christian school, I was taught to know that Jesus loves me. However, I had and have never truly felt the overwhelming love that Jesus has for me. And if I can’t know with my heart that Jesus loves me, even if my head knows, how can I truly know if I love Him back, and am therefore able to have true love for others?

In order to know if I love Jesus, I look at the example that from John 21:15-19 where Jesus questions Peter three times if Peter loved Him. When Peter responded that he did love Him, Jesus responded to take care of His people, and for Peter to follow Him. When it comes to loving people and taking care of others, that includes not only the physical needs, but also the emotional and the spiritual needs. It is easy to help, be there, and pray for people who are nice to me. However, I thing of Matthew 5:44 where Jesus says to love my enemies, and pray for those who persecute me. Now that one is difficult. Everyone always says it is difficult, but you don’t truly realize how difficult it is to do until you try to actually do it. When someone says something just to cut me down, or worse, tries to tell me how wrong and sinful I am when I (at least feel) like I did nothing wrong and was just trying to help, now that is difficult. Now that makes that person feel like my enemy, and I do not want to pray for them in that moment. However, Jesus commands me to. Because I love Jesus, I do what he commands me to do, which includes loving, helping, and praying for others even when I don’t feel like they need or deserve it.

Jesus is Lord. We can argue it, deny it, fight it, but it is true. Jesus is Lord. In Romans 8:15-17 it says that we are children of God’s. Now that is something that is amazing. Me, someone who in the scheme of the universe is an insignificant nothing, is a child of God. And something even MORE amazing is that if I was the only one who Jesus would have bought by dying on the cross, He still would have died this horrible agonizing death. Now, for anyone like me who at least at times has self-esteem issues, issues of not feeling good enough, smart enough, talented enough, am special enough to be bought with the price of the Lord of the universe dying on the cross.

Really quickly, I want to touch on our horizontal relationships, specifically relationships with others. I could go through and talk about all different types of relationships, but I am just going to focus on three types: guys and guys, girls and girls, and guys and girls.

Guys and Guys: The Bible says that iron sharpens iron Proverbs 27:17. It is important for guys to not only be Godly examples to other guys, but also to be Godly council and to be encouraging other men to pursue Godly things. Men already have enough trouble with lust, we do not need to be bringing each other down deeper into that rabbit hole. We instead need to be encouraging and helping one another to pursue Godly and righteous things and ideals. That is something I have been blessed with thanks to the many Godly men in my life.

Girls and Girls: I do not claim to be an expert in this. Tonight in youth group, we went over Proverbs 31:10-31, which gives a list of Godly ideals for women to aspire to. The two things I can add is to, just like for the men, to be Godly council to other women. The other thing is to not gossip about each other. It is no doubt that men do this to, just it always seems to be something that everyone brings up when talking about being a Godly woman, so I feel it is important to mention it.

Guys and Girls: The Bible says we are brothers and sisters in Christ, so that is how we need to treat the opposite sex who are of comparable age. That is something that is not taught in our culture what so ever, but something that is ever important. When you do date someone, it is important to not only respect the other person, but to also respect yourself and most importantly to respect God with how you date someone. Lastly, it is important to treat others like mothers or fathers, respecting elders, and to also not look down on people because of their youth.

So, as a wrap up, it seems that the most important relationship is the vertical one, the one with Jesus. Once this relationship is right, it becomes possible to have Godly relationships with other people.