Real-ationships
“Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (1 John 4:11)
Love is an action; it was never designed to be contained, but to be freely given. God desires that you receive the fullness of all that He is and the key is growing in authentic RELATIONSHIP. Unconditional “agape” love requires a relationship to be fully expressed to another. When this unconditional love is experienced and received, it opens the heart to desire a greater depth of relationship called intimacy.
The highest form of relationship is expressed through intimacy. In its purest form, it releases the greatest joy, security, honor, and identity to one’s life. Intimacy requires transparency and vulnerability. This is the choice to risk the most sensitive areas of your heart to another in order to discover unconditional acceptance. Such acceptance establishes security and trust and creates the opportunity to fully express oneself without fear of judgment or criticism. Security and trust are the glue for all healthy relationships. Without the ability to trust, you will not be able to receive fully from another. To live at this level of intimacy, the starting point has to be founded on agape love.
God has created us in His image and likeness (Gen 1:26). If He is love, then we have been created to love and be loved. We were designed for intimacy. The picture of man and woman in the Garden of Eden was the ultimate expression of God’s design for relationships. The fullness of God flowed into the man in a masculine way and in turn, the woman expressed the glory she received from God in a feminine way. Together as ONE, their hearts were fully open to God and to each other, and there flowed a beautiful outpouring of the fullness of God’s glory back and forth and expressed between them and toward God.
It’s through this beautiful synergy of relational love that God intended to create health in the individual and then in the family. If the family unit is healthy in love, then it will influence its surrounding community and society with God’s goodness. In turn, this will create an atmosphere and culture that releases God’s glory in order to transform the world. Simply put, relationship is absolutely vital to bring Heaven to Earth.
That is why at the fall the serpent concentrated upon dividing our union with God through sin and upon isolating and dividing the relationship between man and woman. Sin is the action that separated humanity from God. However, the consequence was shame which destroys man’s ability for intimacy. Shame caused Adam and Eve to hide and self-protect and in doing so, vulnerability, transparency, security, and trust were broken. The ingredients for intimacy were destroyed, and the health of identity, family, and society deteriorated.
Yet there is hope in the wonder of the Cross. Jesus gave His life as a sacrificial love offering for us, dying to restore our relationship with God the Father so that His fullness (His glory) could once again dwell within us. The Cross isn’t just about avoiding hell and going to heaven - that’s a bonus! The power of the Cross is in restoring us to intimacy with God and with each other, allowing us to discover and encounter the height, depth, length, and width of God’s unconditional love for us. And the power of this love is made transformational by the vehicle of intimacy. As much as we receive, we can freely give to the broken relationships and society around us. To experience the grace of God’s love creates in us an appetite and hunger to grow in that love and to have our hearts transformed so that we, in turn, can transform the world with LOVE.
