Relationships: A Mess Worth Making

by Timothy S. Lane

God has put people in your life and placed you in theirs. When you look back, you can see their imprint on your character.

Some of our deepest joys and most painful hurts have been in relationships.

What is certain is that we all have been shaped significantly by relationships that are full of both sorrow and joy.

You have not become who you are all by yourself, which is why relationships are so important.

We are far too easily pleased.

God wants to bring us to the end of ourselves so that we would see our need for a relationship with him as well as with others. Every painful thing we experience in relationships is meant to remind us of our need for him. And every good thing we experience is meant to be a metaphor of what we can only find in him.

When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.

God created us to be relational beings because he is a social God.

Just as human beings were created with a vertical need for God’s companionship, they are also created for the horizontal companionship of other people.

Genesis 2 points to the fact that relationships are a core component of who God has designed you to be.

No wonder our relationships are so messy! Our struggle with sin is constantly revealed in them.

This vertical communion with God would provide the foundation for the horizontal community they were to have with each other.

The very things God created to reveal his glory become instead the glory we desire.

We settle for the satisfaction of human relationships when they were meant to point us to the perfect relational satisfaction found only with God. The irony is that when we reverse the order and elevate creation above Creator, we destroy the relationships God intended—and would have enabled—us to enjoy.

The health and maturity of a relationship are not measured by an absence of problems, but by the way the inevitable problems are handled.

A good relationship involves honestly identifying the sin patterns that tend to trouble it. It also involves being humble and willing to guard yourself and the other person from these sin patterns.

This sixth fact reminds us that the very thing we would naturally seek to avoid is what God has chosen to use to make us more like him!

a difficult relationship is a mark of his love and care. We would prefer that God would just change the relationship, but he won’t be content until the relationship changes us too.

What happens in the messiness of relationships is that our hearts are revealed, our weaknesses are exposed, and we start coming to the end of ourselves. Only when this happens do we reach out for the help God alone can provide. Weak and needy people finding their hope in Christ’s grace are what mark a mature relationship.

The most dangerous aspect of your relationships is not your weakness, but you...

If you look for God in your relationships, you will always find things to be thankful for.

Jesus was willing to be the rejected Lord so that we could live in loving submission to one another. Jesus was willing to be the forsaken brother so that we could have godly relationships. Jesus was willing to be the crucified King so that our communities would experience peace.

Jesus reconciled us to God, which then becomes the foundation for the way he reconciles us to one another.

They have all faced the difficulty of having relationships with flawed people in a broken world, and they have opted to check out.

Yet something keeps dragging us back to other people. We know we are less than human when we are all alone.

We live with this tension between self-protective isolation and the dream for meaningful relationships.

But if it is true that people are made in the image of God, the first thing we need to do when we talk about relationships is to ask vertical questions.

You will gain a greater understanding of the purpose of relationships not by examining humans, but by looking to God.

Because we were made in God’s likeness, we cannot talk about the nature of human relationships without first thinking about the nature of God.

If God is making us into his likeness, we can be encouraged that he will give us the grace to live like this in community with one another.

Community with one another is not just a duty; it is an aspect of our humanity.

The ultimate flaw in the three kinds of relationships described earlier is that each is driven by personal desire rather than God’s purposes.

Our relationships must be shaped not by what we want, but by what God intends.

We can’t move toward community with one another until we have been drawn into community with God.

The perfect, eternal love relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit was ripped apart to allow us to be restored to God and reconciled to one another.

Our fondest memories and deepest hurts involve relationships.

Every time you affirm the humanity of another, you honor the Creator who made you both.

“For errors can never be uprooted from human hearts until a true knowledge of God is planted therein.

If there are problems in your relationships, the solution starts with God.

Human relationships are most satisfying when we enter them not just to please ourselves or even the other person, but to please God.

We have made ourselves ultimate and God secondary.

Self-Centeredness

When you reject God, you create a void that cannot remain empty. Sin will lead you instinctively to fill it with yourself.

Self-Rule

When God’s wise and loving rule over you is replaced with self-rule, other people become your subjects.

But because relationships are supposed to be conducted between two people who are equally submitted to God, the quest for self-rule will always wreak havoc.

Self-Sufficiency

When you reject God, you believe the intoxicating but poisonous delusion that you are not dependent.

Self-Righteousness

When the holiness of God is not your personal standard of what is good, true, and right, you will always set yourself up as that standard.