Relationships: A Mess Worth Making

In God's plan, our quest for personal identity is meant to drive us back to him as Creator so that we find our meaning and purpose in him. When we live out a sense of who we are IN CHRIST we live our lives based on all we have been given by Christ. This keeps us from seeking to get those things from the people and situations around us. Much of the disappointments and heartache we experience is the result of our attempts to get something from relationships that we already have in Christ.

Your relationships will take you beyond the boundaries of your normal strength. Encouragement gives struggling people eyes to see the unseen Christ.

Every good relationship we have is a gift of God's grace. Left to ourselves, nothing good would happen. Our problem has everything to do with sin and our potential has everything to do with Christ. Sin always draws towards self-interest. It is possible that even in our most altruistic moments are driven by what we get out of them

If you look for God in your relationships, you will always find things to be thankful for. When God reigns in our hearts, peace reigns in our relationships. This work will only be complete in heaven but there is much we can enjoy now.

The shattered relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at the cross provides the basis for our reconciliation. No other relationship ever suffered more than what Father, Son, and Holy Spirit endured when Jesus hung on the cross and cried, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Jesus was willing to be the rejected Son so that our families would know reconciliation. Jesus was willing to become the forsaken friend so that we could have loving friendships. Jesus was willing to be the rejected Lord so that we could live in loving submission to one another. Jesus was willing to be the forsaken brother so that we could have godly relationships. Jesus was willing to be the crucified King so that our communities would experience peace.

No human being was ever meant to be the source of personal joy and contentment for someone else. And surely, no sinner is ever going to be able to pull that off day after day in the all-encompassing relationship of marriage! Your spouse, your friends, and your children cannot be the sources of your identity. When you seek to define who you are through those relationships, you are actually asking another sinner to be your personal messiah, to give you the inward rest of soul that only God can give. Only when I have sought my identity in the proper place (in my relationship with God) am I able to put you in the proper place as well. When I relate to you knowing that I am God’s child and the recipient of his grace, I am able to serve and love you. I have the hope and courage to get my hands dirty with the hard work involved when two sinners live together. And you are able to do the same with me! However, if I am seeking to get identity from you, I will watch you too closely, listen to you too intently, and need you too fundamentally. I will ride the roller coaster of your best and worst moments and everything in between. And because I am watching you too closely, I will become acutely aware of your weaknesses and failures. I will become overly critical, frustrated, disappointed, hopeless, and angry. I will be angry not because you are a sinner, but because you have failed to deliver the one thing I seek from you: identity. But none of us will ever get the well-being that comes from knowing who we are from our relationships. Instead, we will be left with damaged relationships filled with hurt, frustration, and anger. Matt

None of us ever gets to be in relationship with a finished person. God’s redemptive work of change is ongoing in all our lives.

The theology you live out is much more important to your daily life than the theology you claim to believe.

He uses the difficult seasons in our relationships to allow us to see what we typically live for besides him.

reconciling grace, saving grace of Jesus "[In regards to struggles and potential in relationship],..we are sinner with capacity to to do great damage to ourselves and our relationships. We need God's grace to save us from ourselves. But we are also God's children, which means that we have great hope and potential-- not hope that rests on our gifts, experience, or track record, but hope that rests in Christ. Because he is in us and we are in him, it is right to say that our potential IS Christ. We are well aware that we are smack-dab in the middle of God's process of sanctification. And because this is true, we will struggle again. Selfishness, pride, an unforgiving spirit, irritation, and impatience will certainly return. But we are neither afraid nor hopeless. We have experienced what God can do in the middle of the mess. This side of heaven, relationships and ministry are always shaped in the forge of struggle. None of us get to relate to perfect people or avoid the effects of the fall on the work we attempt to do. Yet amid the mess, we find the highest joys of relationship and ministry.

Relationships will push you beyond the limits of your ability to love, serve, and forgive. They will push you beyond you. At times they will beat at the borders of your faith. At times they will exhaust you. In certain situations, your relationships will leave you disappointed and discouraged. They will require what you do not seem to have, but that is exactly as God intended it. That is precisely why he placed these demanding relationships in the middle of the process of sanctification, where God progressively molds us into the likeness of Jesus.

Good relationships are built on a solid foundation. Without this foundation, no amount of hard work will make your relationships what God intended them to be.

And each of us has tried to be the Holy Spirit in another person’s life, trying to work spiritual changes that only God can accomplish.

If our heart’s foundation is solid, based on God’s truth, design, and purpose for us, we will be able to build healthy, God-honoring relationships even though we are flawed people living in a broken world. By contrast, broken community is always the result of broken foundations.

God will take us where we have not planned to go in order to produce in us what we could not achieve on our own.

Romans 7:21—25: So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

It is always harder to live in the middle of something than it is to live at the beginning or the end. When you are at the beginning of something, you are filled with a sense of hope and potential. You are engaged by a vision of all that can be. People at the start of something tend to be dreamers; they want to get started fulfilling the dream. People at the end tend to be filled with relief, gratitude, and a sense of accomplishment. The hardships along the way don’t seem so hard anymore. The sacrifices all seem worth it, and they are glad the work is over.

Words separate you from the rest of creation, making you more like God than like animals.

Human relationships are most satisfying when we enter them not just to please ourselves or even the other person, but to please God.

Weak and needy people finding their hope in Christ’s grace are what mark a mature relationship. The most dangerous aspect of your relationships is not your weakness, but your delusions of strength. Self-reliance is almost always a component of a bad relationship. While

No matter how you spin it, forgiveness is costly. Regardless of how big or small the offense, canceling a debt and absorbing the cost is going to hurt. But the parable shows us that not forgiving also has a price, and it is higher than the price forgiveness demands.

It is easy to forget the impact our words have on every relationship. There has never been a good relationship without good communication. And there has never been a bad relationship that didn’t get that way in part because of something that was said.

Our relationships are often harmed when we try to atone for our own sins while condemning the other person for his.

What is a relationship? The intersection of the stories of two people. The problem is that an awful lot of carnage takes place at this intersection.

When you seek to define who you are through those relationships, you are actually asking another sinner to be your personal messiah, to give you the inward rest of soul that only God can give. Only when I have sought my identity in the proper place (in my relationship with God) am I able to put you in the proper place as well. When I relate to you knowing that I am God’s child and the recipient of his grace, I am able to serve and love you.

Repentance and faith must be your daily lifestyle. Why? Because it lays you low and lifts you up at the same time.

Remember, your relationships have not been designed by God as vehicles for human happiness, but as instruments of redemption.

It’s inevitable. If you live with other sinners, you will have conflict. The closer you are to someone, the more potential there is for conflict. Relationships are costly, but so is avoiding them.

Conflict with others is one of God’s mysterious, counterintuitive ways of rescuing us from ourselves. God uses it to get us where he wants to take us before we die. Because we don’t usually think that trials can be used in such a positive way, this truth catches us by surprise. But it shouldn’t.