How To Have A Personal Relationship With Jesus May 6, 2007
Starting the Relationship
Bill Leslie Story as intro to the series
Pastor of La Salle St. Church in Chicago
- Evangelical, inner-city pastor, Church sponsored by Moody Church
- burnt out, goes to Catholic nun for counseling, says he feels like he is a pump, and everyone who comes by takes a turn at the handle, and the well has gone dry, its all been pumped away.
She tells him he is pumping of the surface: he has to dig the well deeper,
"Do you Know what you need? You need a personal relationship with Jesus Christ."
I had a conversation with one of our newer people this week, and she was explaining that what excited her about Runnymede was the possibility of actually having a personal relationship with God! Sounds like a good sermon series to me!
Begin with Reconciliation
In order to have a relationship with God, we need to actually start the relationship! We can assume that we already have one.
Starting a relationship with God is different than beginning a relationship with another human, it is even different than starting a relationship with a famous or powerful person.
You might think that you’d like to be friends with Sydney Crosby – he seems like a nice enough guy, and all you would have to do is show up at a dinner party where Sydney was going to be, strike up a conversation and see where it goes from there. You could do this since you have no history with Sydney – you only have to get to know each other and see if you make for good friends.
The difficulty with starting a relationship with God is that we have history.
It is more like trying to start a relationship with a parent that we ran away from when we were 16. It’s not impossible, but it is not as simple as starting up the conversation.
God created us to live in relationship with him. He made us to be his friend, his child, his companion. But In many different ways each of us has rejected that relationship.
Either consciously or unconsciously, with full knowledge, or unknowingly we said no-thanks to the relationship with God deciding that there were other things more important that the relationship we were created for.
You know in human relationships that there are things that you can do that will break the relationship – a friend tells you something in confidence and you blab it all over the city, you promise yourself to the one you love and then go sharing your love (or your lust) with someone else…
This is how Paul describes humanity’s rejection of our relationship with God: “People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn’t treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives. They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand.
So God said, in effect, "If that’s what you want, that’s what you get." It wasn’t long before they were living in a pigpen, smeared with filth, filthy inside and out. And all this because they traded the true God for a fake god, and worshiped the god they made instead of the God who made them—the God we bless, the God who blesses us.” Romans 1:21-25
When you read this passage with an understanding of the relationship that God made us for, and relate it to human relationships, you see that what we have done is not unlike sleeping around on our marriage partner. We were made to worship the God who made us, by worshiping things other than God, we have broken the relationship. By going to created things, or even things that we have created for the things that only our creator should give us, by giving created things, or even things that we have created things that we should only give our creator, we have been unfaithful and broken the relationship.
Paul says here that it is our unfaithfulness to God that leads us to do the wrong things that we do in our lives. The sin in our lives is a symptom of our unfaithfulness to God.
You might hear that and say “Oh yeah, that’s me.” Or you might be thinking, “What on earth is he saying, I never did such a thing!” The reality is whether we consciously broke relationship with God or not, that is our heritage and it is the stuff that we have to deal with in order to start the relationship with God.
If you and I were from Rwanda and I was a Hutu, and you were a Tutsi, even if we had never met before, even if neither of us had participated in the atrocities between our two tribes, we would have some things to work out before we could be friends.
None of us are innocent members of a screwed up humanity. We have all, in our own way, turned violently from relationship with God. In the Western world we have become much more “sophisticated” in our worship of other gods – most of us do not bow down to idols, but we do worship things – money, human beauty, sexuality, fame, … We try to find our sense of being, our purpose, our security, our primary relationship in things or people that are not God
So it is not that we just need to begin our relationship with God, we need to reconcile our relationship with God.
The amazing thing is that even though it was us who walked, or ran, away from God, God is the one who begins the reconciliation process. Most of us, when a friend or a loved one has broken relationship with us, are quite happy to wait around until that person realizes what they have done wrong and comes and makes amends. God, unlike us, comes down to earth himself in the form of Jesus Christ
1 Timothy 2:4-7
He wants not only us but everyone saved, you know, everyone to get to know the truth we’ve learned: that there’s one God and only one, and one Priest-Mediator between God and us—Jesus, who offered himself in exchange for everyone held captive by sin, to set them all free. Eventually the news is going to get out. This and this only has been my appointed work: getting this news to those who have never heard of God, and explaining how it works by simple faith and plain truth.
Ernest Hemingway has a short story about a father and his teenage son who had a relationship that had become strained to the point of breaking. Finally the son ran away from home. His father, however, began a journey in search of his rebellious son. Finally, in Madrid, in a last desperate effort to find him, the father put an ad in the newspaper. The ad read: “Dear Paco, meet me in front of the newspaper office at noon. All is forgiven. I love you, your father.”
The next day at noon, in front of the newspaper office, 800 “Pacos” showed up
When Jesus died on the cross, it was God’s great newspaper ad saying Dear _________ Meet me in front of the cross today. All is forgiven. I love you, your Father.
Will you be a “Paco” today? Will you come to the cross, ask for forgiveness and be reconciled to God? This is how we begin our relationship.
Jesus tells a similar story to Hemingways – a son runs from home with the family inheritance and spends it on wild living in a far off country. The money runs out and he is starving to death in the midst of a famine. He decides to go back home, ask forgiveness and beg to be taken back as a hired hand. The father sees the son coming over the crest of the hill, and runs to meet him, embracing him. The son tries to get the words of contrition out, but his father has already forgiven him, gets him clothes, shoes and a ring and throws a big party to celebrate the return of his son.
When we come to the cross and ask forgiveness for all that we have done wrong, we find that we don’t have to beg – God, like the father in the story runs to meet us and his forgiveness is already given. Jesus says that there is a great celebration in heaven every time one of God’s lost sons or daughters returns home to reconcile the relationship.
Fast forward a few months and imagine the prodigal son settling into life on the farm again. He is well dressed, well fed and given good work to do. But he starts to wonder, did dad really forgive me? Or is he holding my wrongs against me, quietly seething? Will he always treat me as a son, or will my sins come back to haunt me. He looks down on his hand and there sits the ring his father gave him on that first day back. It is not just any old ring – it is a signet ring. The kind of ring that you would use to on sealing wax to mark it as belonging to the family. Slaves don’t get rings, hired hands don’t get rings, only sons get rings. Just as you might look at your wedding band and be reminded that your spouse has vowed to love you and be faithful to you for life, the son looks down at the ring, gives his head a shake and remembers that he is back, he is a forgiven, reconciled son.
When we come to the cross and are reconciled with our heavenly Father, he gives us something greater than a signet ring. He gives us the Holy Spirit.
Peter reminds us that God gives us his Holy Spirit when we are reconciled to him in Acts 2:38 when he says to the people of Jerusalem “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
2 Corinthians 1:21-22 says this: “Now it is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ. He anointed us, set his seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.”
Romans 8:14-16 “For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.”
So you can see how the whole Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit come together to bring us back into relationship with God.
The Spirit is the sign and seal on our hearts to remind us that we have been reconciled and we are God’s Children, and he is the one that we hear as we listen to God in this relationship. We will spend more time in this series talking about how we hear from God, how we speak to him and how to live in personal relationship with him.
But now, we need to start the relationship
Invite people to come to Jesus for forgiveness
Invite people to come and be filled with the Holy Spirit.
