Relationships That Give Life

Vulnerability

Relationships are eternal because they existed between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit within the Godhead before anything was created so when God created us in His image He made us in the image of a relational being. To find out how God intended relationships to work we need to go back to our beginning and see how our creator related to our original parents in the Garden of Eden.

To make people in the image of a God who is absolutely sovereign they had to be given a place where they could exercise a sovereignty without interference. God chose the earth as that place. Gen 1:27 & 28So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.”. The picture painted for us in Genesis chapters 1 and 2 is of an absolute sovereign God creating a man and a woman in His own image then giving them sovereignty over the earth. On this earth He planted a garden in which He placed two trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He gave them a simple command not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and told them of the consequences of disobeying Him. By doing this the absolute sovereign God entered into a relationship of trust with the man and woman He had made. As hard as it is to believe, God by His own sovereign choice, made Himself dependent on the obedience of Adam and Eve to His command to keep the relationship intact which would also keep sin out of His creation. This dependency on both parties keeping the command is clearly seen when Adam and Eve were tempted to eat the forbidden fruit. God didn’t use His absolute sovereignty to step in and stop them and force them to obey His word. He didn’t come down and stand between the serpent and the man and women and say ‘don’t you dare touch that fruit’. Neither did he command the serpent to leave them alone. He had given the rule of the affairs of earth to man and He would not act against it. Trust between God and Adam, and Adam and Eve that each would stay within the bounds that had been set while at the same time each being free to cross those boundaries was at the centre of their relationship. This is how God intended relationships to work. One of the most satisfying experiences of life is knowing that the person you relate to is faithful to you out of the integrity of their own heart while being completely free of any control from you to force them to be faithful to you. In our marriage of 40+ years we have had our fair share of ups and downs. What has kept us together through those experiences was the complete trustworthiness we have shown towards each other. Everything we have is joint owned without any fear of misuse or loss. We are at each other’s mercy in the sense that we have no safeguards in place to protect ourselves from each other, no squirrel funds secretly stashed away against a possible break up and the result is a wonderful freedom and peace as we live our lives together. This freedom we have given to each other is the real power behind our determined efforts to stick to each other in difficult times.

The basic attitude of the Christian heart in all our relationships is that through the indwelling Christ I maintain a right attitude towards others independent of their attitude and behavior towards me. Even though He had been cruelly betrayed by the actions of Adam and Eve those actions did not change God’s attitude towards them. In other words how you treat me does not control or change how I treat you. It is called covenant and from God’s perspective all relationships are covenant. He doesn’t have any other kind.

Vulnerability

It is obvious from what we have said so far that from the moment God created man in His own image for a relationship with Himself and each other He created an unavoidable risk. We can’t have relationships with people without becoming vulnerable to them. The closer the relationship the greater becomes our vulnerability. It is no wonder that in the opening words of the marriage service it says that we should not enter into it lightly. Tragically many do then wonder why after a few years they come to grief. This vulnerability comes because all relationships place us in a position where we have to exercise a measure of trust towards people who have free will concerning their own behavior which we cannot control. We try to offset our risks and protect ourselves from the possible misuse of their freedom. We have contracts of agreement, liability laws, health and safety, duty of care legislation etc. etc., along with our own personal methods we have developed to keep our exposure to loss, abuse and hurt to a minimum. Any sort of unfaithfulness is a breach of our trust which produces a feeling of being betrayed and the resulting hurt can be devastating. It can lead us to develop bitterness, resentment, even revenge or withdrawing from people by erecting barriers around ourselves in an effort to protect our hearts from further emotional trauma. The problem is that these methods of protection actually hinder our ability to trust because they cause us to become involved in manipulative behavior patterns as we try to protect ourselves. We are all familiar, to some degree with the negative experiences of our vulnerability to others brings us and the subsequent destructive behavior we can become involved in when they go wrong. So how do we live with this vulnerability, enabling us to feel the hurt of being let down without succumbing to the destructive effects it can produce allowing us to continue to live in a positive way towards those who have betrayed our trust. Jesus did not avoid the pain of being let down and betrayed by others, even some of His closest friends because He knew how to keep such behavior from controlling the way He responded.

Overcoming Vulnerability

To be able to live with the vulnerability our relationships bring without succumbing to the emotional trauma it brings when things go wrong we need to look at how God dealt with His vulnerability in the Garden of Eden. We are Christians and we have the life of God in us so we can respond the way He responds. There are two attributes of God’s character that we have been given through the indwelling Holy Spirit that we can manifest so we may feel the pain without a destructive response.

1 Sovereignty

God took the risk of creating man in the way He did because He knew that if it failed He had the absolute sovereign power to redeem it. It was a sovereignty that could not be interfered with by man or devil. God was not dependent on the behavior of Adam and Eve to maintain a right attitude towards them. Gen 3:15And I will cause hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” tells us He used His sovereignty to sow salvation into the disaster instead of condemnation and judgement. The decision to provide salvation for mankind was a decision taken by the love of God for the people He had made with no influence from the way He had been treated. He acted without reference as to whether they either wanted or deserved to be saved. When He spoke the words of salvation in the garden He was speaking to the serpent not to Adam and Eve. He was telling him that he might have won this battle but he was not going to win the war and he would eventually lose the power he had gained over them.

Already Prepared

This precious promise was a declaration of something that had already been accomplished as far as God was concerned. 1 Pet 1:19-21It was the precious blood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. God chose him as your ransom long before the world began, but now in these last days he has been revealed for your sake. Through Christ you have come to trust in God. And you have placed your faith and hope in God because he raised Christ from the dead and gave him great glory.. God went into the creation of man having already prepared Himself as to how He would act before He needed to act. He, not them and their behavior was in control. This is the essential attitude we need to manifest in our lives if we are not going to let the betrayal we may experience dictate how we act. Just as God sovereignly decided beforehand to sow salvation into the broken relationship so we can do the same because He lives in us. We have the sovereign power to decide whether we will allow the behavior of the people we relate to control us and how we react/ We often use the expression ‘look what you made me do’ or ‘you make me so mad when you do that’ but no one can make us do anything if we have decided not to do it. No one can make you lose your temper if you have decided not to lose it. When we allow another person’s behavior to control how we respond then we have become a slave to that person no matter how much we try to justify our response. Rom 6:16Don’t you realize that you become the slave of whatever you choose to obey? You can be a slave to sin, which leads to death, or you can choose to obey God, which leads to righteous living.. The devil wants to enslave us but God gives us freedom of choice. God has provided salvation in a way that included everybody but did not take away our original sovereignty. Man was left in a position to either receive it or reject it and if it was rejected God would still go on using His sovereignty to maintain a right attitude towards us even though we would experience the consequences of our rejection. The world will always be held together with the Word of His power, Heb ch 1, and the seasons will never cease no matter how we behave.

Freedom of Choice

We need to understand what it means to be free because in the West we have the idea that it means to be able to do whatever we like, whenever we like, however we like without any interference from others to our choices. This type of freedom is a lie. It is true that we may be free to do what we like but we are not free to choose the consequences of our choices. Nathaniel Bacon, an English politician (1593-1660) said man knows the beginning of sin but who bounds the issues thereof. Once we start something it can easily get out of our control and bring us hurtful consequences we never expected. True freedom is to have the ability to choose to do wrong but to always use that ability to choose to do right. That is the freedom that Christ brings to us when He says in John 8:36 if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed. For example, because I don’t smoke I am free to decide whether I will or not but the moment I choose to take up smoking I lose my freedom because I become a slave to nicotine. I am only free around smoking as long as I use my freedom to choose not to smoke. Freedom in Christ means we have the sovereign ability to always do the right thing no matter what the provocation to do otherwise. When Jesus went through His passion from the garden of Gethsemane to the resurrection He appeared to be completely at the mercy of those around Him but it was not the case. While appearing to have no control over events He was in complete control. In John 18:4-7Jesus fully realized all that was going to happen to him, so he stepped forward to meet them. “Who are you looking for?” he asked. “Jesus the Nazarene,” they replied. “I am he,” Jesus said. (Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them.) As Jesus said “I am he,” they all drew back and fell to the ground! Once more he asked them, “Who are you looking for?” And again they replied, “Jesus the Nazarene.” we find that when He spoke to those who were coming to arrest Him they all fell over backwards. In John 19:10-11“Why don’t you talk to me?” Pilate demanded. “Don’t you realize that I have the power to release you or crucify you?” Then Jesus said, “You would have no power over me at all unless it were given to you from above. So the one who handed me over to you has the greater sin.” He told the all powerful Pilate that he had no power over Him at all and on the cross John 19:30Add a Tooltip Text He gave up His life, nobody took it from Him. Nobody could kill Jesus. He died being in full control of the moment of His death. During the time of the worst mistreatment anyone has ever suffered He did not use His sovereign power to control events around Him to deliver Himself. He used it to live the way His Father wanted Him to live in the midst of everything that happened to Him. That is the way to handle all our relationships. Jesus behaved the way God wanted Him to behave and He overcame sin and death to bring us life, Adam and Ever went their own way and brought us sin and death.

Before we run away with the idea that it doesn’t matter how people treat us and there is nothing we can do about it we need to see that action should be taken against people’s abusive behavior for our protection and the protection of others. The point I am making is that whatever action we do take must be taken with the right attitude. Sowing salvation into our broken relationships does not mean that every breakdown will be mended but it does mean that we will not be the one to close the door to reconciliation. Our heavenly Father knows intimately our heart and the hearts of those we relate to whether it is a friend, work colleague, or marital partner. He knows what will work and what will not work to make our relationships become what He intended them to be so ask Him to reveal His heart to you so you can live in the fullness of what He died to purchase for you. Sowing salvation into broken relationships also gives us the ability to protect our hearts and not allow the trauma of the experience to destroy us. The hurt we experience is bad enough to overcome without us going on a pathway of self-destruction. We have a ‘duty of care’ to ourselves. The best form of revenge is to show a person that we are not going to allow their mistreatment of us ruin our lives. This is the way to deal with being bullied. Why believe the lies of other people who say you are a useless waste of space when God believes you are so precious to Him that He gave His only Son to save you. This is our freedom in Christ and we have the Holy Spirit in us to enable us to achieve it.

2 Divine love

One of the weaknesses of our human relationships is that they are behavior controlled. We tend to only do good to those who do good to us and become friends with those we think deserve our friendship. If, for example, we are looking to support an orphaned child we are biased to giving a better life to the child that we think most deserves it. What about picking the child who least deserves it because he is the naughtiest of the bunch?

God made the sovereign choice to save mankind because He was motivated entirely by His love for the man and woman He had created and not their behavior. His love for us did not depend on the way we behaved so He was able to go beyond the betrayal of their sin and maintain His integrity. We see this manifest in the interchange between God and Adam and Eve in the garden after the event. They hid because they were afraid of what God would say and do; after all, it was God they had sinned against and Heb 10:31It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. says that it is a fearful thing to fall into His hands. However there was nothing to be afraid of because although they had to suffer the consequences of what they had done there was no rejection, no condemnation, no outburst of rage, no tantrum, no harsh words of judgment, no terrible revenge at being so cruelly betrayed. God’s response was an offer that salvation would be provided even though it would cost Him everything. 2 Cor 5:21For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.. God became everything that was abhorrent to Him so that we could become like Him. In the midst of the hurt and pain of betrayal His love for the man and woman he had made was so unselfish that He, the innocent victim, paid the price to open the door to reconciliation. It was the fact that God is love 1 John 4:8But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love. that enabled Him to maintain His integrity within Himself causing Him to act out of His loving heart instead of the circumstances He was in. He honoured His covenant relationship with man instead of reacting to what had happened to Him making His actions independent of the man’s behavior.

Our Protection

Our protection for our vulnerability in our relationships is the same as God’s because through the new birth His divine love is our love. By the new birth we have become Divine love in our spirit. We have been made 1 Cor 13:4-8 in our innermost being. We are fully capable of manifesting this quality of love because our spirits are full of it. This challenge highlights the fact that when we are hurt by a relationship breakdown we focus far too much on God’s love for us as our source of comfort, protection, help and wellbeing. This focus makes us prey to our vulnerability because it focuses our attention on how hurt we are, how much comforting we need, how much injustice we have experienced. This focus is the source of our struggle to overcome our natural responses to the breakdown. This is because when you are focusing on God to meet a need it keeps us focused on the need rather than on the God who meets it. When divine love flows out of our innermost being we are able to act the way God acted in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve sinned. Divine love does not focus on the hurt it receives only on the wellbeing of the person loved. Heb 12:1-3Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith. Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame. Now he is seated in the place of honor beside God’s throne. Think of all the hostility he endured from sinful people; then you won’t become weary and give up.

In the book of Ruth, Ruth discovered the abundant provision of the God she had decided to follow. It was manifest in her life by the very generous provision of Boaz. However, Boaz had not been provided just to support Ruth. He had been provided for the purpose of being her husband so she could inherit everything she needed. Before getting married to Boaz Ruth had needs which were met by the provision of Boaz. After she married Boaz she had the same needs but she had inherited the supply. Through marriage she had become one with her supply so all she had to do was make use of it. Jesus has not just been provided so we can be saved and blessed and get His help in our time of need, He was given to us so we might become one spirit with the Father. Many of our relationships are entered into because we use them to meet our emotional needs. Self esteem, a sense of belonging, a sense of importance, a sense of well being etc. This is why we are so devastated when they fail but if divine love is the reason to have a relationship then we have a much stronger foundation to cope if it fails because the Divine love in us satisfies all our needs. We have to see our relationships as Christians from a supernatural rather than a natural perspective and even when we think of natural romantic love we are supposed to love each other the way we loved before the fall not after it. The problem with our natural love is that it is corrupted with self-centeredness which means that it is tainted with ‘loving to get’ rather than ‘loving to give’. How often do we get offended when what we give to others is not appreciated? That betrays the impurity of our natural love.

As Christians we can take the risk of being vulnerable when we give ourselves to others because we have the freedom of choice to allow the divine love that dwells in us to be the protection of our hearts. This means we can sow all the principles of salvation we have been given into every relationship especially when it goes wrong. That doesn’t mean that breakdowns won’t occur or that every breakdown can be mended because we have our hardness of heart to deal with and the need for the other party to be willing to do their part in being reconciled but it does mean that we can protect our hearts from all the negative traumatic possibilities that breakdowns spawn.