The Perfect Relationship

Leticia Adams

I found a magical lamp when I was a little girl. I’m not sure exactly how old I was, but my guess is about 8 or 9 if not younger. It was on Sunday when the Pastor at the First Baptist Church gave the altar call. I remember looking at everyone going up there and hearing Pastor say “Do you want to give your life to Jesus? Do you want Him to bless you?” and thinking “YES!”. I thought that giving my life to Jesus would mean that my life would start looking like the lives of those people that I saw every Sunday at Sunday School. I would get a dad, my mom would be nice to me, the kids at school would like me and I would magically become “normal”. I didn’t want a Savior, I wanted a Genie.

I walked up the isle and went to that altar (I’m sure it wasn’t called an altar, but I have no clue what it was called) and I said the Sinner’s Prayer, invited Jesus into my heart and asked Him to be my Lord and Savior. Just like that, I was a Christian. The years that followed were up and down, but I read the Bible, carried one with me everywhere, went to youth conference after youth conference, became an Al Denson fangirl and collected Chick tracts like most kids collect baseball cards. I thought that I knew what being a Christian was all about. I had asked Jesus into my heart and made Him my Lord and Savior. Where I was confused was when it came to having a personal relationship with Him and sin. Both of those things made no sense to me. Why was I still sinning if I was saved and why didn’t I feel like I was in a relationship with Jesus?

I know now that I have never known how to have a relationship with anyone for most of my life. I am 37 years old, have 4 kids and have been married twice and I am barely now learning what relationships are and what sin is.

I always thought of sin as this list of things that you could not do or God would send you to hell. Heaven was a reward for not doing those things. I could never really get anyone to give me a list of these things that didn’t include things that I saw people doing all the time. At some point (when I discovered boys and sex) I decided that what I was hearing preached was not what I was seeing lived. Not by anyone. So I did what every Protestant does, I left the church that I disagreed with. I made the church of me. I made the rules, I decided Who God was, I decided what the “rules” were, I decided what would or wouldn’t be on the list of sins. Spoiler alert: there was nothing on that list except Thou Shalt not Kill, and even then, that can be bent. No matter what I did, I was sure that God would let me into Heaven because He loves me and is Good.

It wasn’t until recently that I realized that God does love me and He is good, but that has nothing to do with me going to Heaven or hell. Heaven is not a reward and Hell a punishment. Both of them are results of my response to the knowledge that God loves me. It isn’t about rules or lists of things that you can or can’t do, it is about a relationship. A healthy one. When you have never seen or had a healthy relationship, not even with yourself or anyone else, then guess what? You aren’t really going to grasp how to have one with God.

God is love and God is also the perfect relationship. So perfect, that He is three Divine Persons yet one God. We are created in the Image and Likeness of that Love and perfect Relationship. Each one of us is a living breathing thought of God Himself who is made in His image of Love and Relationship. When we sin, we are choosing to cover up that Image with things that we think are better than God Himself and we lose our true selves. We become slaves to those idols, those things that come between us and God. Those sins cause wounds and those wounds cause us to sin again. It’s a vicious cycle that only God can break. And the only way that He can break it is by us saying “yes” to Him and allowing Him to break it and heal us. He will not impose His will on us, so we have to say “yes”. We also will have to do so every single day until the moment that we stand before Him for judgment. That “yes” heals our wounds, it purifies us and it is a “yes” to Heaven which is being in perfect relationship with God, the Image that we are made of, in the first place. Sin is anything that hinders that relationship and damages us because it separates us from God, Who is Love, Goodness, and Truth.

Saying “yes” to God means that we are in relationship with Him, when that is perfected, then that is Heaven. When we don’t, then we are separated from Him and that is hell. Simple. I don’t know why I never saw that before. It is not about being like the person next to you, or even a list, even though God the Father and Jesus gave us a few pretty good lists on how to say “yes” to God. It is about being yourself. The more that we detach from those sins, the more ourselves we become. That is freedom.

As long as we who are followers of Christ continue to try and look at a list of sins and check off all the ones that others are committing, we will never be examples of people in relationship with Love Himself and that will never attract anyone to Him. The greatest challenge to me is to learn how to be in relationship with God, my husband, my kids, others and myself so that when people look at me and wonder what exactly it is that I have they can see that it is a relationship with Love, not a list of rules that I follow.

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4 thoughts on “The Perfect Relationship”

  1. Pingback: 7 Ways to Grow in Holiness Before Noon - BigPulpit.com

  2. Thank you. And you have nailed it re: yes. And God will say Yes right back at you: “2 Cor.: For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by us—by me and Silas and Timothy—was not “Yes” and “No,” but in him it has always been “Yes.” For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God. Now it is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ. He anointed us, set his seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.” Guy McClung, San
    Antonio

  3. Very succinct.
    In the following quote I was wondering if you meant this while we are still alive ?
    ‘when we don’t say ‘yes’ – ” then we are separated from Him and that is hell. Simple.”

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