To help us gain the relational and emotional skills we need for engaging in a closer relationship with him, God offers a school of love through experiences with our human friendships. Not only are human friendships a joy in and of themselves, they are also an essential means to deepen the most important relationship we can ever have, our friendship with God. Our intimate relationships with others, brothers and sisters, spouses, friends, are actually more essential to Christian living than we may have previously thought.
Yet contemporary examples of deeply intimate friendships are rare. Many of us are novices at intimacy, for relationships are not highly valued in society today. A frightful consequence of the dramatic technological changes in the last few decades is how rapidly and thoroughly the relational life has come unglued. Nearly all indices of the scripturally prescribed relational life have suffered major setbacks over the last three decades. Marriage- worse; parenting- worse; the extended family- worse; the sense of community- worse.
Furthermore, although buzzwords like community and love abound in the church, deep relationships fair no better here. Believers tend to gravitate toward ways of seeking God that are predominantly individualistic; personal bible study, private prayer and times of solitude. Although helpful, these spiritual disciplines do not enrich the relational competencies we need to deepen our relationship with a God who experiences a deep fellowship within the Trinity.
We must develop closer friendships with other believers in order to make room in our lives for God. Greater intimacy experienced with others increases our capacity to become more intimate with God.
Close friendship love is voluntary and mutual. Family love is covenantal and reciprocal. At our deepest level of being, we yearn for a mutual and intimate kind of companionship that deep friendships can offer. Deep friendships help us grow in our own maturity, for such become another self to reflect back to us the depths of our own journey in character formation. The moral life is the seeking of and growing in the good in the company of friends who also want to be good.
Our relationship with God can never be right when our relationship with other people is wrong. If our friendships with God can only rise to the level of the most intimate relationship we have on this earth, then we must intensify our friendships. Believers need to develop closer friendships with many and deep or spiritual friendships with a few. Such deep friendships of the few provide a rich context for maturing trust and intimacy.
If there is a close connection between our need for richer human relationships and our need for intimacy with God. Each dimension (our relationship with people and with God) reinforces the other. If we find it hard to form lasting relationships with those we see around us, then we will find it very hard to relate in any depth to the God we cannot see. By improving and deepening our human relationships, we make more room for friendship with God.
A Christian community needs long-term, genuine love, a love that matures through intentionality and shared experiences over time. Community is an emergent interdependency of people in Christ who are in the process of loving each other genuinely, a process of becoming one. Relationships must be cultivated.
Wasting time with God - Klaus Issler
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it; 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments." -Matt 22:37-40
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