It's More Than Relationship

[HKHaugan]

We have elaborated on the ‘world’ and its principles. Now we want to look at Christian principles, those that succeed not from religion but from a personal relationship with Jesus. Immediately one thinks of the Sermon on the Mount as the place to start but I think we have to move more basically from where we are as persons. The danger of jumping into any Bible passages per se is that we tend to segregate them into ideals and make and elaborate a belief system from which we can, from time to time, pull out something to fall back on as opposed to letting them pull us forward into an active lifestyle. One example is the Lord’s Prayer which has become a liturgical ‘rabbit’s foot’ to recite instead of letting Jesus’ personal presence penetrate every moment. That prayer is really a set of teaching nuggets to be mined daily to enable His presence to move through us to others.

So what we really need to do is to start by asking “What is a relationship?” It seems like such an obviously understood concept but really, what is it? The dictionary simply says in so many words that it is the state of being connected or associated with others by some common bond. Actually its origin is rather recent. It comes from 15th Century Latin ‘relatus’, to carry over. ‘Relationship’ is not how Paul sees His experience of Jesus. It is much deeper. He sees Himself as a slave, a bondservant of Jesus (Romans 1:1). It is not a matter of equals relating but one of being submissive to a master, a superior, whose whole being stands above the servant. It is this servant attitude that shapes Paul.

So just what are we ‘carrying over?’ It’s the bond, which is a far more biblically sound word, the basis we agree upon to come together. ‘A blast from the past’ so to speak. He explodes on the scene of history in every generation. We are carrying over and passing on the bond that Jesus established in His life, death and Resurrection. The bond is the living Lord Jesus Himself and the personal qualities He exudes. He is the basis, the substance and the reality bonding us first with Him and then all those that believe in Him. What I am saying is this: It’s the bond, the person of Jesus that determines how we think, decide and act in one another’s presence in any given moment. He is the bond that shapes our modern term ‘relationship’ to make it more meaningful. It’s not just a heart thing. The bond He brings to each of us touches every part of our mind, heart, spirit and body.

When you survey Scripture the words relationship, relate and relations, they appear infrequently and only in modern translations, not in the original documents. What we find in the early Scriptural documents are the personal qualities of the bond upon which our interchange as servants is based. Those are the pure spiritual qualities from the perfect person of Jesus, His love, His grace, His gifts, His insights, His perception, His faith and His attitude.

Once we grasp this fact, the fact of the Person as the bond from whom the qualities come then and only then are we acting out of a living bond that cancels religion, philosophy and all the other human derived systems that keep us separated from being in the heart of God. No longer are we kept in the chains of a man-controlled program. The curtain of mans’ sin, control and the devil’s work have been torn from top to bottom by the Lord Himself. The Cross has lifted us vertically into the presence of God and we are intellectually, emotionally and spiritually at one with our Creator.

But, hold on now, something else has happened. We are horizontally freed from the legalism, institutionalism and slavery to worldly secular principles. We are freed from being alone, from being trapped by fear and this means we can freely and honestly bring those vertical living personal qualities to bear on every next moment as we act horizontally with others.

Next we will look at those qualities which are the principles personified.