Made for Relationships

January 30, 2022 Preacher: Luis A. Cardenas Series: Relationships

Topic: English

My intention is for us to return to the book of Daniel and finish studying it. It’s an interesting and fascinating portion of Scripture, and it’s also very important for us to understand. But before going back to Daniel, we are going to spend the next few weeks addressing a very important subject for all of us.

Most of you know that besides covering the book of Daniel we have been looking at various topics that are important for us to understand as exiles in this world. To uses the words of the Apostle Peter, we are “aliens and strangers.” This world, as a whole, has accepted things that do not align with the word of God, and they do not live in accordance with it. We are called to be different. We are in the world, but we are not of the world. And one of the most profound ways that this distinction should be made visible is in the way we live with and respond to others. So, the topic I want to address today, and for the next few weeks, is relationships. Relationships.

God really cares about relationships. And His desire is that our relationships would look different than the relationships of rest of the world. Would you agree to that?

God wants you and me to have strong, healthy relationships. And that includes husbands and wives, parents and children, and brothers and sisters. Outside of the immediate family, God wants the local church to have strong, healthy relationships. He even wants us to seek good relationships with neighbors and unbelievers.

Biblically, we see God’s desire for this over and over again in the Scriptures, but sadly, practically and experientially, we see people who claim to be Christians but struggle with personal relationships. So, because of those realities, and because of how rapidly disconnected our culture is becoming, I had a growing desire to study and teach on this topic.

For the next few weeks, we won’t really be having sermons in the formal sense, but it’s going to be more like a seminar. My hope is that God will work in my heart and in your heart, and that He will work to strengthen our marriages and our families. We also hope that God will help us grow in the way we relate to others outside our family and our church.

If you asked my parents and my wife, I think they’d agree that I am a naturally curious guy. I like to learn about things, and I like to understand how things work. For example, when I wondered as a teenager how a car worked, I wasn’t looking for someone to talk to me about the steering wheel, the gas and brake pedals, and the radio. As helpful as that information is, I wanted a more detailed or complete answer. I don’t just want to know how to move a car, I want to know how it operates. What I was looking for in my question was an introductory lesson on the internal combustion engine.

I tell you this because as I think about human relationships, I don’t just want to give you a bunch of tips about how to deal with people or, even worse, how to manipulate them. I want us to start with a deeper understanding of the topic. There needs to be a theological foundation behind what we’re learning.

Like I said earlier, God greatly cares about your relationships. That’s not a side issue or secondary issues. This is a primary issue with God, and today, I want to prove it, or at least remind you about that. To do that, I’m going to give you some important theological principles. They’re not complicated. They’re not difficult. But they are important. So, let’s get ready, not just for today’s message, but for whatever God will teach us in the next few weeks.

To start our study, we have a basic principle related to God. This is principle number 1. God is a relational being. God is a relational being. For a lot of you that should be obvious, but we don’t always have that in the front of our minds.

This is not a principle that everyone agrees with though. Whenever you hear people talk about karma or even Mother Earth, that is in contradiction to the reality that God is a relational being. We do not serve a Star Wars God. We’re not just connected to some inanimate force in the universe. Our God is relational.

In theology, one of the fundamental properties of God is that He is a person. He has what we might call “personality” or “personhood.” God is not a generic or impersonal force; He is a person. He is self-aware. He has a mind. He has emotions. He has desires. And he has a will. Those are components of personhood.

Beyond that, the God of Christianity is a relational God within Himself. We say that because the Bible teaches that there are three Persons within God. There is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We refer to that as the Trinity. “Trinity” come from “tri,” meaning three, and “unity” meaning one. God is, we could say, three-in-one. There is definitely a mysterious element to it, but all three Persons are God, and yet there is only one God.

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are distinct, but they are also united. They each have the qualities of personhood with distinct roles, but they also work together in all that they do. They’re never in contradiction to one another.

This idea of the Trinity is what sets the Christian God apart from other ideas of God because it means that even before the creation of anything else, God was never alone. He existed in all eternity as a relational being.

Turn with me to the opening verses of John’s gospel—John 1:1. Obviously there is some mystery regarding God before creation, but John’s gospel gives us some hints about it.

The second Person of the Trinity is who we now call Jesus. John calls Him the Word. Speaking of Jesus, John 1:1 says: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Jesus was not created. In the very beginning, He already existed, just like the Father. The Son, we say, is uncreated. In the beginning, the Word existed, and He was with God.

Literally, that phrase “with God” could be written “toward God,” and it speaks of an interpersonal relationship. They didn’t just exist at the same, they had a relationship. There was an intimacy between them. Everything that it means to be God, the Son is, but He is distinct from the Father. And even before angels or earth or mankind, even before anything else existed, the Father and the Son enjoyed a relationship. To get a picture of this relationship, then, we go to John 17.

John 17 is the record of Jesus’ prayer in the Upper Room with His disciples on the night He was going to be arrested. This was the night before He was crucified. Look with me near the beginning of the prayer in John 17:5. Jesus prays: And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.

Now skip down to the final verses, and notice what Jesus says in verse 24. Here Jesus is praying for His disciples and for all who will come to faith in Him. Verse 24—Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

Jesus describes His eternal relationship with the Father as one of glory and of love. But verse 24 adds one more dimension to that. It says that God’s desire is to bring people into that relationship.

And this leads us to our second principle. The first principle was about God. God is a relational being. Principle number 2 is about man. God created man as a relational being. Or more God created man as a relational being.

You and I, and every other human being on this planet, are created by God as relational beings. God created mankind, you know, in His own image. That means that there is going to be an overlap between the characteristics of God and the characteristics of man. We were placed here to act as God’s representatives, and so, by necessity, we are relational beings. That’s God’s design. Like God, we have personhood. We have a self-awareness, and we interact with others.

Self-awareness means we have the ability to think about ourselves. We’re not animals driven simply by instinct and natural desires. We can, in a sense, evaluate ourselves. We can analyze ourselves. You can say to yourself, “Why am I so nervous? Take a breath. Don’t be scared. Calm down.” Your dog and your cat don’t do that. Your dog never asks himself, “Why am I so hungry right now?” or “Why am I so grumpy?” But you and I can think like that. We have, you could say, a relationship with ourselves.

We also have the capacity to live in relationship with God. Again, this was by design. How could we properly represent and honor God if we couldn’t relate to Him. When Adam and Eve were in the garden, they literally walked with God. He was there with them. And even though those days are gone, the Bible continues that kind of language describing our relationship with God. Enoch, Genesis says, walked with God. And the New Testament uses that same kind of language.

So, you have a relationship with yourself, a relationship with God, but, obviously, you also have a relationship with others. That’s God’s design too. God didn’t just create one man. He made a woman. He said it was not good for the man to be alone. He wanted Adam and Eve to live in relationship to one another, and then in relationship to their children. Mankind was designed for relationships.

Why do people decide to watch and then get connected with movies or TV shows or books? Even if those stories are fiction or fantasy, or even if we’re reading about dead people on the other side of the world, we relate to the story because we are relational beings.

Human relationships are part of God’s design because they are part of how we represent or showcase the fullness of who God is. For example, the relationship between a father and a son, helps us understand and picture the relationship between the eternal Father and the eternal Son. It’s the same in a marriage. A husband and wife, according to 1 Corinthians 11, picture the relationship between God the Father. According to Ephesians 5, it also pictures the relationship between Christ and the church. Human relationships help us understand and showcase the eternal relational qualities of God Himself.

Have you ever thought about that? The way you treat your wife, the way you talk to your kids, the way you respond to your boss or your coworkers or your neighbors—all of that is an opportunity and an obligation to put God the Father or Jesus Christ on display.

Ephesians 5:1 commands us, for example, as God’s beloved children, to be imitators of God. We are called to imitate our heavenly Father in holiness and in our relationships with other.

Now remember, Jesus described His eternal relationship with the Father as one of love. And that’s exactly the word He uses to describe our relationship with God and with one another. They asked Jesus, “What’s the greatest commandment? And He said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” And the second greatest commandment is “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

In thinking about our relationships with God and with others and with ourselves, author Ken Sande says, “God’s teaching on relationships is consistently three dimensional. In passage after passage, he tells us how to be faithful to him..., how to discipline ourselves..., and how to serve our neighbors.”

Sande calls our ability and skill to do this, relational wisdom, and he says we can categorize biblical instruction along these lines.

Just as an example, take Romans 12. It starts by telling us to present ourselves as living sacrifices to God. That’s our relationship with God. Then it says we shouldn’t think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think; that’s our relationship with ourselves. Then is talks about using our gifts to serve the church and about not responding to evil with evil; that’s our relationship with others.

Ken Sande’s website is rw360.org, the “RW” stands for Relational Wisdom. There’s a lot of good stuff there, and I encourage you to look at it. In his material, Sande takes each of those three categories—God, others, and yourself—and he splits them into two components; one is awareness, and the other is engagement.

So, that produces six categories: God-awareness, God-engagement, self-awareness, self-engagement, other-awareness, and other-engagement. Then, using those six categories as a grid, you can start to categorize biblical instruction.

In terms of our God awareness, Sande says, you can remember, or you can forget. In terms of God-engaging, you can be faithful, or you can be fickle. For self-awareness you can be humble or proud. For self-engagement, you can be disciplined or indulgent. For others-awareness, you can be compassionate, or you can be insensitive. And in engaging with others, you can serve, or you can manipulate.

The terms he’s chosen isn’t what matters so much, but the main idea is we are called to honor God as relational beings. We are called to be self-disciplined and humble, faithful toward God, and compassionate toward others. That’s God’s design. Whether you’re an extrovert or an introvert, loud or quiet, English-speaking or Spanish-speaking, an artist or an athlete, you were created by God to live in relationship with Him and with others for His glory.

The Apostle Peter talks about God’s varied grace. And he says we put that on display when we serve and love one another with the gifts and resources God has given us.

So, in theory, it’s a wonderful plan. Humanity is a mosaic or a kaleidoscope of the multi-faceted, and eternal glory and grace of God. But that’s not what happens, right?

This leads us to our third principle for today. First we had a principle about God, then a principle about man. Now, we have the relational principle connected to sin. Principle number 3. Sin has broken our relationships. Sin has broken our relationships.

Go back with me to Genesis chapter 3. Genesis 3—this is the origin of sin in the human race. Satan, the enemy of God, wants to corrupt the glory of God. So, in the form of a serpent, he comes to Adam’s wife. Genesis 3:1—Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”

What is Satan doing here? He’s trying to undermine Adam and Eve’s confidence and trust in God. He’s trying to make then doubt God’s love. Adam, as we find out in verse 6, is right there with Eve. But he says nothing. So, Satan is working to sabotage the relationship between the man and his wife, and between them and God. In verse 5, Satan basically says, “God doesn’t want what’s best for you. God is holding out on you.” Satan wants mankind to doubt God’s goodness and to rebel against Him. He wants to corrupt that relationship.

Well, once Adam and Eve give in to the sin, their relationship with God is broken, and their relationship with one another is broken. Look at verse 7—Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

Shame is an expression of a broken relationship. At the end of chapter 2, the man and the women were naked and unashamed. But now, they have shame. Their self-awareness is broken, their relationship with one another is broken, and their relationship with God is broken.

In verse 8, God comes walking back into the garden, and what do they do? They hide among the trees. Instead of enjoying fellowship with God, they avoid Him. And then, when God asks Adam a direct question about eating the fruit, what does Adam say?

Look at verse 12—The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.”

He doesn’t confess. He doesn’t say, “Forgive me, Lord.” He shifts the blame. It was the woman. She made me do it. And then he adds, by the way, “You’re the one who gave her to me, God. So, in a way, maybe this is your fault God.” That’s a broken relationship if I’ve ever seen one, right?

How many arguments do we get into where it either starts, or eventually evolves into the blame game? “Well, we would never have been late to church if you wouldn’t have taken so long in the shower! Well, I would have showered faster if you hadn’t wasted all the hot water before me. By the way, I told you to get a bigger water heater.” And on and on it goes. That’s human relationships.

Romans 5 tells us that sin came into the world through one man, and then sin spread to all men. Sin has corrupted every part of who we are. It brought physical consequences like sickness and death, but it also brought the spiritual consequences of a sinful nature, or a sinful heart. Biblically, your heart is the invisible part of you. It’s the control center of your life. Our hearts have been hijacked, if you will.

Our desires, our emotions, our plans, our motives—all of that has been corrupted by sin. The prophet Jeremiah said the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick.

It’s so perverted, Jeremiah says, that we can’t fully understand it. On our own, we can’t fully search our own hearts or our own wickedness. We can’t have a proper relationship with ourselves.

King David said that he was conceived in iniquity. He understood that even from his mother’s womb, he was bent away form God’s design. Rather than love God and love others, we are consumed with ourselves. Ephesians 2 says we are dead in trespasses and sins. We are enemies of God. Proverbs says we think we know the right thing to do, but the end of that path is death.

So sin, you need to understand, is not on the outside. Sin is not like some robber who comes into a bank and steals the money. Sin is on the inside. This is all an inside job.

When you get into an argument with your wife or your husband, or with anybody else, the real problem is not external. You’re not fighting, ultimately, because of money or because of the kids, or because of a broken-down car. You are arguing because you two are sinners.

Instead of having two people seeking to honor God, you’ve got two people trying to fulfill their own plans and satisfy their own desires.

This is exactly what James 4 says, and we’ll probably come back to this passage in this series. James asks: What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.

Now, all of these broken relationships are connected to and symptoms of an even greater broken relationship, and that is our relationship with God. When Adam an Even sinned, not only did their lifespan start counting down, God kicked the out of the beautiful garden He had created for them. God and sin can’t go together. God must punish sin. He has to separate Himself from it.

And that’s why, even though the world hates to hear it, and even though it’s unpleasant to talk about many times, God has created hell. Hell, or the abyss, is the eternal punishment for Satan and the rebellious angels. But it’s also for all who continue in rebellion against God and against Jesus Christ. Your sin has broken your relationship with God, and unless something changes, you will be judged eternally.

But that’s not the end of the story, right? Let’s close now with our final principle. We had a principle related to God. He is a relational being. We had a principle for Man. God created us as relational beings. We had a principle for Sin. Sin has broken our relationships. And lastly, we have a principle related to the gospel. The gospel can heal our relationships. The gospel can heal our relationships.

Remember, God is a relational being. So, when Jesus came to die on the cross for sinners, and then be raised from the dead in victory, that wasn’t just about granting some kind of generic forgiveness. The goal was restoration. Cleansing from sin is not the end. It’s a means.

Forgiveness sets us right so that our relationship with God can be restored. That’s the essence of the gospel. John 17:3 tells us that eternal life is to know the only true God, and to know Jesus Christ whom God has sent. Eternal life is about a relationship. Salvation is not just about forgiveness, or about feeling better about yourself. The gospel of Jesus Christ, His sacrifice on the cross was about reconciliation.

We, who once were enemies of God, have been reconciled to God through the death of Jesus. That’s what Romans 5 says. Second Corinthians 5 says the same thing; God reconciled us to Himself through Christ.

More important than any other relationship you have in this world, is your relationship with the eternal God. How is that relationship? Are you confident that when that day comes and you stand before God, He is going to accept you with open arms? Or is He going to cast you away because you have not lived up to His perfect standard? What is God going to do? And are you sure of that?

You can be sure of that today! The message of Christ and the message of our church is: Be reconciled to God! No matter what you’ve done, no matter how far you think you’ve fallen from Him, He will cleanse you, He will forgive You and accept you, if you’re willing to turn from your sin and believe in Lord Jesus Christ. That’s the gospel. That’s the good news of Jesus Christ.

You don’t have to jump through hoops. You don’t have to wait until your life gets back on track because it won’t. There’s no magic words that brings salvation, but a heart that admits its own sin, and cries out for mercy and trusts in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

You can do that right now if you want. You can do that at the end of the sermon when we pray. Or, if you have questions or want to talk about it a little more, go to any member of our church. But don’t waste this opportunity to be made right before the holy God.

For those of you who have already trusted in Jesus Christ, you know that it’s not an easy path. The power of sin is broken, you’re not a slave to it anymore, but you still have to fight, right? It’s a daily battle. And we still have to come to the Father daily in repentance, asking Him to forgive us. But now, it’s not the forgiveness of a holy Judge; it’s the forgiveness of a compassionate Father. He restores us constantly, because of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

And if our relationship with God is right, then we need to be working to make sure our relationships with one another is right too. In the book of Ephesians, Paul spends 3 chapters unpacking the glorious riches of salvation. He reminds us of all that Christ has done for us and given to us. And light of all that, we get the instruction of chapter 4. As a child of the eternal and glorious King, what do we do now? What does this radical new life look like?

He doesn’t say, “Now, go live in the desert,” or “Go be a missionary across the world.” What does he say? He says, “Walk in a manner worthy of your calling, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, with forbearance and love. Live in unity with one another.”

Do you get the idea that God cares about our relationships? I hope so.

I imagine a lot of you are familiar with Proverbs 3:5, Trust in the Lord with all your heart. But less widely known is the verse right before that. Proverbs 3:4. If you abide by the word of God, what happens? Proverbs 3:4 says: So you will find favor and good success in the sight of God and man.

That’s what God wants for us as relational beings—favor with God and favor with man. That’s exactly what Luke 2:52 says characterized Jesus’ maturity. That’s the summary of his childhood: And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.

That’s what we want, isn’t it? And isn’t that what we want our kids to have too? We want them to grow in their relationship with God and in their relationship with others. Daniel’s been a good model of that, too, hasn’t he?

God cares about our relationships. Ephesians 4 says that the Holy Spirit grieves over the way sin damages our relationships. So, do some self-evaluation this morning. Think about your relationship with God and think about your relationship with others. Where is that strained? Where are you feeling differences or disagreements turning into conflict and division? And what can you do about that?

Like I said, we’ll spend the next few weeks talking about relationships, but I hope this morning has been an informative and profitable study on such a valuable component of the Christian life.

As we close, I just want to share one final passage, and this is directly from our Lord. And given the fact that tonight we’ll be partaking of the Lord’s Supper, I think it’s appropriate.

This is from Matthew 5:23, which is part of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus said: So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.

What was Jesus saying? I think I can put it like this: Don’t think that you and God are on the best of terms if you and your brother are not. God cares about our relationships. As a relational being, He created us to live in relationship with Him and with one another. And though the effects of sin have been devastating, by the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ, there can and will be reconciliation. And we’ll talk more about that in the weeks to come.

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