The Essence of Our Relationship With God

It’s good to be with you again at the beginning of a new week, sharing out of truths that life has taught me. Truths that can make the difference between success and failure in your life, as they have done in mine.

Today, and for the rest of this week, I’ll be sharing with you on one of life’s most important issues: how to build successful relationships. Our world today is full of people who have developed skills in handling things, all sorts of things: cars, radios, engines, computers, printing presses, scientific instruments, and of course, money. An endless list. But they do not know how to handle people. Their lives are a train of broken relationships.

Nevertheless, in the last resort, if you succeed in handling every thing you touch, but you cannot handle people, your life will be more of a failure than a success. And yet the key to successful relationships is not far from you. It is to be found, like the answer to so many other problems of life, in that unique and inexhaustible book, the Bible.

The first thing I want to communicate to you today is that Christianity is primarily a religion of right relationships, rather than right doctrines. For many Christians, the primary test of whether a man is right or wrong is whether he holds the right doctrines. Now, I do not want to underestimate the importance of doctrine, but doctrine is not terminal. It is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end. In Romans chapter six, Paul calls doctrine a form or a mold.

A mold is something that we pour something hot into to bring it out in a certain specific shape. The test of the mold is the product it produces. And so it is with doctrine. It’s to be tested by its product. And the product is relationships. Doctrines are means, relationships are ends. It’s a sad fact, but many people who pride themselves on their right doctrines are wrong in almost all their relationships: at home, with other people, in business, with the members of their own church. And yet, they base all their claims to success on the rightness of their doctrines.

The great symbol of the Christian faith has always been the cross. And this is very appropriate because a cross has two beams, without which it is incomplete. The one is vertical, the other is horizontal. These two beams symbolize two relationships. The vertical beam symbolizes our relationship toward God, but the horizontal beam symbolizes our relationship toward our fellow human beings.

Now, it’s a fact of nature, a fact of physics, that if one beam is out of line in a cross, the other must be. If the horizontal beam is crooked, we do not need to look to see if the vertical beam is crooked, it must be. And that’s true in our relationships. If our relationships with our fellow human beings are wrong, our relationship with God cannot possibly be right. This is a painful fact for some, because, especially in certain sections of the church, those which we might call evangelical or fundamentalist, the whole emphasis has been on doctrine and on relationship with God. All that is very good, but it’s not sufficient. We have to get both beams in place.

Now, let me speak to you for a moment about the essence of relationship with God. I’d like to turn to a very familiar verse, Psalm 23, verse one, where David says,

“The Lord ‘is’ my shepherd; I shall not want.”

Notice there that he’s not talking about a doctrine. He’s talking about a relationship, a personal relationship between himself and the Lord. And he declares that out of that relationship, he has total security.

“I shall not want.”

Everything I will ever need for time and for eternity is included in that one relationship with God.

Notice two things about that relationship. First of all, it’s present, it’s not future. Religious people sometimes tend to believe that everything good is going to happen in the future. Meanwhile, everything’s going wrong and the world is falling to pieces, but somewhere in the future things are going to be all right. David speaks about a present relationship, one that he has now. Then it’s a personal relationship. He says,

“The Lord ‘is’ my shepherd.”

There’s something direct and personal between the Lord and me, and that is the basis for my security. My security is not in a doctrine, it’s in a relationship, a relationship with God Himself, a relationship that guarantees the supply of every need in my life.