Though people may sometimes point to certain ones and/or gender as being more relationship-oriented, we all realize how untrained we are about “relationship” when it applies to encountering our awesome Creator. Our most intimate and revealing relationships reflect this. How we live one is how we live the other. There is an awkwardness and ignorance in all of us in relationship especially as it comes to being fully revealed and known. How do we live a relationship? If we are given an experience we want to repeat, and we as humans will naturally turn that thing into categories, principles, habits, techniques, methods, steps, patterns…EVERYTHING but actually encountering the Living Person and living before this Person. This Person is the Risen Jesus.

Francis Schaeffer asked, “How do we then live?” A heartfelt question! Is there the in-between when we aren’t in a Christian discipline of worship, prayer, reading? What do we do then? “God, who has called into fellowship with His Son Jesus Christ our Lord…” (1 Cor 1:9) We are called into that! How do we do it? How do we DO fellowship with the Son? How do we walk a full day before Him and into the next?

For those of us who know we are prone to veer off from close proximity and anything that starts to feel intimate with the unknown, Henry Blackaby in EXPERIENCING GOD continually reminds us that various communications from God don’t lead us to encountering Him, they ARE encountering Him!

A major Christian historic verse: “The just shall live by faith” (Gal 3:11). It’s a different way of living. Duties and appointments are strung together within the enveloping Relationship. They are mere notes on the page, but the melody is already there. It has been provided. Upon the hollows of His being, our notes are being written as we live them.

Boredom, dullness, stagnation are excluded when we are walking on top of the boundless depths of Relationship. “God Who has called you into fellowship…is FAITHFUL” (1 Cor 1:9). In His faithfulness, we WILL enter in! —————————

Close-est

“that the world may know that You…have loved them AS You have loved Me” (Jn 17:23)

“I will BE to Him a Father, and He will BE to Me a Son” (Heb 1:5)

“As I was with Moses, so will I be with you” (Joshua 1:5)

How close is close? It seems we can think of God as a distant relative who can be easily fooled by our nail filing, check balancing, newspaper reading as they share with us over the phone. Just give them a few word responses here and there, and behold, we have the depth of relationship we desire! The problem is we are hurting ourselves by actually believing this is “close.” We are merely religious.

Throughout the Scriptures, God notices. “…their hearts are far from Me” He has said. He notices because His way is to give His fullest heart and attentiveness. His way is hidden inside these words: “He had by Himself purged our sins…” (Heb 1:3). If He did it Himself, there was no distance or insincerity, no halfheartedness. It was close. It is close…close enough to TOUCH us.

What is true religion as we feel our needs and those around us? I find it expressed in the following words of A.W. Tozer: “But the man who has been taught even slightly by the Spirit of Truth…cannot love a God who is no more than a deduction from a text…’We must see with our eyes, and hear with our ears, and our hands must handle the word of life.’ Nothing can take the place of the TOUCH of God…”?

Might we get spoiled by such a God as this! It would then be unthinkable to go one step into a day without the assurance that daily He seeks to touch us, that He will be to us a Father, and we will be to Him a son.———–

“Remember the height to which you have fallen, and repent…” 

Remembering the top height of an experience might bring to mind a mountain peak, a walk to the top of steps, or a view from a plane. Either way, we’d try to remember the vista from that experience of height.

Can this relate to closeness with Jesus? Is there a height to that experience? Can we recall “first love” (Rev 2:4) with Jesus? Can we remember a time when courtship of one another had the freshness of young love? 

One of the commands to this end-time church is clear—”remember” (Rev 2:5). Stop, consider and remember. What surrounded the days of the height? What deeds accompanied those days of awakening: poems, long walks, love notes, sacrifice? 

Another word is “repent.” Consider the height so the descent can be measured. Such a measurement can lead us to temporary shame, but we can press on if we face it. Jesus wants us to. 

If we do, won’t He help us face our fall, and rekindle “the things we did at first” (Rev 2:5)? For obeying the command of the written Word promises that He, the same Word made flesh, will accomplish that very thing. He is the one of jealous love who most keenly feels being forsaken from first love (2:4). And perhaps, too, He knows that only by looking back can we truly go forward and stand in a future that climbs the heights.