Articles
Our Relationship with The Lord
“Who once were not a people but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy” (1Pet. 2:10, NKJV). Without God we are nobody. We have nothing. We are left to wander like sheep gone astray. We have no connection to One who can anchor us steadfast and sure. We have no faith that holds us tightly to One who is infinitely above all others.
Our relationship with the Lord is everything to us. It is the glue that holds families together. Our relationship with Him is what the spirit is to the body. Without the spirit the body is dead. Without our relationship to the Lord, we are spiritually and morally empty. We have nothing and we are not a people. We are nobody.
Our relationship with the Lord makes us one in marriage. It is not simply the vows that bind us together as one. It is our shared relationship with the Lord. Therefore, when one walks away from that relationship with the Lord, the marriage has been stripped of its heart and soul because the shared, fundamental relationship is absent. That is just what Satan wants. He wants to destroy our marriages by pulling one mate away from the other. Separated from the Lord, the relationship flounders and often fails. Why? Because it was meant to be, not only a relationship with two people, but a relationship with God, man and woman both serving Him.
Our relationship with the Lord is what makes us one with our children. When they are young, they go where we say to go and do what we tell them. They learn to obey parents and therefore obey God. Children are free moral agents. Sometimes they choose differently than the parents might wish. Many times, those decisions are benign. However, when those decisions take one away from the Lord, the glue that held parent and child together as one has dried and shriveled up. They are still parent and child, but the part of the relationship that made them close was their common relationship with the Lord. Now it is gone. That closeness is also now missing.
Our relationship with the Lord is what makes us one in local churches. A wife can still be a wife without the common relationship in the Lord. A parent and child can still be parent and child without a common relationship in the Lord. But we cannot be brothers and sisters in Christ without a common relationship in the Lord. It is our relationship in the Lord that brings us together. We lose ourselves in Him. He is the One that is the focus of our lives. We commonly bow before Him. We mutually honor and worship Him.
Our relationship with to the Lord is everything. That is our identity. I have been given a name by my parents, but that is not who I am. I am a child of God. That makes me somebody. Without my relationship with the Lord, I am lost. I am left to wander, hapless and hopeless. I have no identity. I am nobody. Why would I want to go back to be a nobody? I must let Him draw me close.
“But may the God of all grace, who called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you” (1Pet. 5:10, NKJV).
Rickie Jenkins
