How’s your relationship with God?
It’s a question many Christians and religious people ask of each other. When I answer this question over the years, I typically work my way through the same cluster of questions—am I praying and spending private time with God, am I avoiding certain sins, am I maturing in my likeness to Jesus?
However, there is something crucial I often miss in my reflection—the unavoidably social, communal dimension of fellowship with God.
“So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” Mt 5:23
There is a natural tendency to understand the Two Great Commandments in terms of priority. “You shall love the Lord your God” is greatest and first. Love your neighbor follows as the necessary outworking of the first. But if this line of thinking were true, Jesus’s teaching on the Sermon on the Mount would go like this: “If you are offering your gift to God, but your brother has something against you, render first things first. Give your gift to God and then deal necessarily with the matter of your brother.” To the contrary, Jesus emphasizes that the two commandments are not sequential; they are inseparable.
Our Relationship with God is Rooted in Both Faith and Love
A similar divide tends to be drawn regarding faith and love. In our minds, faith is most commonly associated with that which is rendered to God; Love, by contrast, is that which we render both to God and other people. We do not typically understand faith and love as belonging together. But Scripture pairs them together as an irreducible coupling.
“For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.” Gal 5:6
In the language of Scripture, faith and love are mutually interpretive. The thing Paul is most thankful for among the churches is reports of their “faith and love” (Eph 1:15; Col 1:4; 1 Th 1:3, 3:6). We are to put on “the breastplate of faith and love” in our life as God’s people (1 Th 5:8). Perhaps most poignantly, “I may have all the faith so as to remove mountains, but if I have not love, I am nothing” (1 Cor 13:2).
The inseparability of faith and love, at a minimum, means that we cannot make one set of actions directed as unto God and a separate set of actions that are directed to fellow humans. More to the point, we cannot attempt a “relationship with God,” in the absence of community with his people.
Our Relationship With God is Not Just Any Other Relationship
Furthermore, to speak of a “personal relationship with Jesus” if not handled carefully, leads to some poorly defined ideas of what kind of relationship we are called to have with God. Talk of a relationship with Jesus is to invite analogies to friendship, which while true (John 15:13-15), is misleading if given more emphasis than is biblically warranted. Indeed, as is true of friendship, we can grow in a relationship with God as we spend time in personal devotion, in private prayer, in “quiet time,” in seasons of trust and the like. But Scripture uses specialized language to draw attention to the kind of relationship we have with God. It is the language of covenant (2 Cor 3:6–17), the language of marriage (1 Cor 6:16–17), the language of fatherhood (Rom 8:15), the language of sacred communion and participation (1 Cor 10:16). Our relationship with God is not merely a hazy, free-flowing friendship that strengthens and weakens with time and effort. It is an ordered bond, grounded in promise, formalized with a covenant people, and practiced in a worshipping family. It is carefully structured around mutual vow and commitment. It is unavoidably social.
So, How Is Your Relationship With God?
If one is tempted to say the relationship with God is “on the rocks,” the way forward may not simply be more prayer, more quiet time, or being a better person (important as these are). Scripture, rather, points us to the reality that relating with God has everything to do with social unity and reconciliation with the people that God has providentially put in our church community and those who God wants us to bring into that community. The social aspects of unity and reconciliation are not secondary aspects related to one’s relationship to God. They are the necessary features of the thing itself. Loving God means loving one another.
If you’re like me, this is indeed an inconvenient truth. Jesus we like, but his Christians? (Still can’t verify if Gandhi really said this?) People are difficult. Many of them are tacky, they are judgmental, they are dangerous, they don’t appreciate others like they should, they aren’t interested in getting to know you better. Wouldn’t it be easier if I just give my personal devotion to God himself and then simply be courteous to others and be done with it?
God doesn’t give us this option it seems. Church is the pre-eminent place where our relationship with God is built. Our personal time with the Lord is indispensible, yes, but never reducible to our fellowship with God. The hard part still is that we are called to love those God has placed in our lives—and not just our friends. The examples from Scripture point the way to loving others much different from us. The Bible puts it in terms of Jew and Gentile, Slave and Free. We might use other binaries today: rich and poor, right and left. Those seeking a deeper relationship with God are called to be reconciled with their brother and sister.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. 1 Cor 13:13
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