Season 1, Episode 2.
In the first episode of the Led Into Love podcast I shared from my own experience about the vital difference between coming to know God as a ‘born-again’ Christian, and entering into a personal love relationship with Him.
I was 28 when God led me out of being His servant and into being His lover. And what a change that was! Over the many years since then, the love between Him and me has been at the very core of my motivation in belonging to Him, living for Him, and sharing my life with Him.
Yet, after all this time, it still amazes me that He loves sharing His life with me. And, believe me, He longs to share His life with you too!
If you are a born-again Christian, you know the reality of having God in your heart and life. There’s also a good chance you know and believe the truths most Christians and churches believe and proclaim, and you most likely meet regularly with other like-minded believers. But do you expect or desire to have an intensely personal love-relationship with God …except maybe when you get to Heaven?
When God made Adam in His own image, He also poured His own life into that perfect human being – created by Him to fulfil His heart’s desire for the most perfect love relationship.
You likely know the account in the Book of Genesis of that terrible day when Adam and Eve sinned against God – devastating His plans for Creation and His purpose for the entire human race.
Yet so great was God’s desire to live in love with us, that He sent Jesus into this world to undo the awful consequences of Adam’s disobedience.
There could be no clearer statement than Jesus’ own words – which Christians know well and quote often:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
If you are a true believer in Jesus, you not only know that – but you have also experienced it in your own life. But what then?
Which brings me to what I really want to focus on here: the very real, very pervasive danger of coming to God, experiencing His forgiveness, being born-again …and then settling down into something called ‘the Christian life’. You live differently. You’ve stopped doing things you once did and instead do things that Christians do. You go to church, you pray, your life has Christian overtones …and you’re sincere about this ‘new life’ you’ve received from God.
But what God really longs for is an intensely personal relationship with you. And I mean intensely personal, in a one-to-one way. He wants to share all of Himself with all of you, so that you can experience all of Him.
God knows you through and through … way more intimately than you know yourself. And He wants to relate to you, not as someone who is standing alongside of Him, but as someone He has poured His life into and drawn into Himself.
This is oneness with God. It is what you were created for. It is what Adam lost but Jesus restored. It is God’s gift to you. And it is what God so passionately wants to have with you, and with every other person who responds to Him.
A genuine relationship with God requires all of you, just as it required all of Him to send Jesus, and all of Jesus to give Himself for you.
Yet Jesus not only died. He also rose from the dead, so that you could receive God’s gift of a new life – leaving behind the spiritual death in which you were trapped before you knew Him and entering into a whole new life with Him! A life of total relationship, a life of love and intimacy – in which He speaks to you personally, guides you lovingly, and is everything you need in every situation.
To know God and to live with Him in that sort of relationship is not just about becoming a Christian – or even about becoming a better Christian! Nor is it attained by increasing your Bible knowledge, listening to more sermons, reading more Christian books …or throwing yourself into ‘Christian work’. Such things are the trappings of Christianity – not the essence of belonging to God.
To belong to God is to know Him, personally and intimately, for who He really is. Which only happens when you move deeper into a personal relationship with Him.
In choosing His disciples, Jesus gathered a bunch of very ordinary people. No theologians, no spiritual leaders, none who were prominent or influential. Yet to them, and to all the others who responded to Him, Jesus promised the gift that only God can give: the gift of eternal life. Not just ‘a ticket to Heaven’ for when you die, but something far beyond that. When you receive eternal life from God, you get what Adam lost – a free and unfettered existence with Him …forever!
Which is why Jesus said: “I have come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” It broke His heart to see many of God’s people scattered “like sheep without a shepherd” and others confined like sheep in prison-like pens by so-called shepherds who, instead of caring for them, used and abused them for their own gratification.
Those religious leaders hated Jesus denouncing their neglect and mistreatment of God’s people – whose shepherds they claimed to be. They knew He was pointing His finger directly at them and their religious system. Such false shepherds love to display their knowledge of scripture and theology, while at the same time misusing their places of leadership and authority to gratify themselves. Far from being true shepherds who lay down their lives for God’s sheep, they cynically use them and burden them with rules and structures designed to perpetuate man-made religious systems.
Humans have a long history of misrepresenting God – of hi-jacking His words and distorting His ways. And, worst of all, they do it in His name!
When Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice,” He was referring to a familiar sight in that setting, where there would be small flocks of sheep, each tended by a shepherd who alone was each sheep’s security. They relied on their shepherd to lead, feed and protect them – and the sound of his voice promised them safety, security and provision.
Jesus declared Himself the True Shepherd who had come to “the lost sheep of the House of Israel”. Historically, the Israelites were God’s chosen people – but instead they had become God’s lost people at the hands of their so-called shepherds.
Just as a sheep is vulnerable in all sorts of ways, so will you be if, after opening your heart to Jesus, you stop short of abandoning your life to Him who is “the Great Shepherd of the sheep”.
If you draw near to God and remain near to Him, He will always speak to you in a voice you can hear, and in a language you can understand. There is no mystery about that, because God loves to speak to His children. He will reveal Himself and His will to you if you look to Him and depend on Him totally.
That’s how you grow from a child of God into a son. “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.” (Romans 8:14)
You most likely know the account in the Bible of the way God sent Moses to Egypt to lead the Israelites out of slavery and into the Promised Land of Canaan. After God did amazing things and Moses led them all out of Egypt and into freedom, those same people constantly swung to and fro between sometimes trusting God and Moses and at other times mistrusting them.
When, at last, they reached the River Jordan, with the Promised Land of Canaan on the other side, God directed them to send out twelve men – one from each tribe – to spy out the land.
On returning from their mission, ten of the spies brought back a negative report – saying that even though the Land was as amazing as God had said, it was impossible for them to conquer. In fact, so formidable were its fortified cities and so terrifying the giants who dwelt there, it was a land that would surely ‘devour’ them! But the remaining two spies, Joshua and Caleb, vehemently disagreed – declaring that, because God said He was giving Canaan to them, they would succeed in conquering it if they depended on Him. In sharp contrast to what the other ten had said about the Land devouring them, Joshua and Caleb declared ‘we will swallow them up!’
Tragically, the majority prevailed, the rest of the people believed the ten and howled down Joshua and Caleb. As a result, God’s chosen people doomed themselves to 40 years of wandering in the desert …instead of living in the land of abundance God had prepared for them!
The stark, simple truth here is that there was only one reason why the Israelites refused to enter the Promised Land. A reason that had nothing to do with fortified cities and giants, and everything to do with their refusal to believe God, who had promised that land to them!
Nothing that I have shared with you here about relationship with God can be a reality in your own life unless you believe Him. The words of Hebrews 11:6 are straightforward and categorical: “…without faith it is impossible to please God”. Not just more difficult. Not just more complex. Not just that it takes a bit longer. But… impossible!
Faith simply says: ‘I believe God’ …and acts on it. But how can you exercise faith unless you know what God is saying to you? And how can you hear what God is saying to you unless you are living close to Him?
I will be sharing more about faith in the next episode because I so much want you to know and experience a relationship with God like the one He has led me into. I relish that relationship more than I can say, yet in no way is it something just for me. It is the life Jesus came to freely give you …if only you will open your heart wide and abandon yourself to Him.