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We are sinners with the capacity to do great damage to ourselves and our relationships. We need God’s grace to save us from ourselves.
This side of heaven, relationships and ministry are always shaped in the forge of struggle.
You have not become who you are all by yourself, which is why relationships are so important. They are inescapable and powerfully influential. The difficulty is that sin and grace coexist in all of them.
Sin gets in the way of what grace can do, while grace covers what sin causes.
The fatal flaw of human wisdom is that it promises that you can change your relationships without needing to change yourself.
Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. 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.
When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.
In Genesis 2:18, God says that it is not good for man to be “alone.” This statement has more to do with God’s design for humanity than Adam’s neediness.
Each of us is tempted to make relationships the end rather than the means
But in our sin we tend to treat people and creation as more important. 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.
Skills and techniques appeal to us because they promise that relational problems can be fixed by tweaking our behavior without altering the bent of our hearts. But the Bible says something very different. It says that Christ is the only real hope for relationships because only he can dig deep enough to address the core motivations and desires of our hearts.
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.
the very thing we would naturally seek to avoid is what God has chosen to use to make us more like him!
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 your delusions of strength.
The shattered relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at the cross provides the basis for our reconciliation.
As C. S. Lewis said, Christ restores first things so that second things are not suppressed but increased!
When God reigns in our hearts, peace reigns in our relationships.
relationships are not inherently dangerous, the expectations we bring to them can be.
You will gain a greater understanding of the purpose of relationships not by examining humans, but by looking to God.
We see theology as a systematic study of religious thought that has little to do with everyday life. But, rightly understood, theology is the real life story of God’s relationship to us and our relationship to one another lived out in a broken world.
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.
My problem was that I didn’t love God as I should.
As Jesus prays to the Father for the creation of a new human community, he is anticipating what will happen to his own relationship with his Father as he dies to bear the sins of his people.
You deny your humanity every time you avoid someone, when you get angry with your children, when you opt for isolation over facing your hurt, when you exploit another human being, or when you give way to bigotry.
If there are problems in your relationships, the solution starts with God. Typically, we start with what we want. But starting with yourself and your own perceived wants and needs will bring you into collision with another person doing the same thing. It will doom the relationship. Only when we start with God—someone bigger than ourselves—can we escape the destructive results of our own selfishness.
What we want, for ourselves and from others, becomes more important to us than God himself. We have made ourselves ultimate and God secondary.
Until you are finally delivered from the power and presence of sin, you will never escape your own sin in relationships.
Sin affects us in six basic ways.
Since relationships are about being other-centered, the self-centeredness of sin will inevitably subvert God’s design.
If you don’t see that you are dependent upon God, it is unlikely that you will be humbly dependent on others.
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.
Godly relationships flourish best between two humble people who acknowledge their weaknesses and sins and their need for grace.
Sinful self-interest turns the two great commands upside down: rather than loving God and using his gifts to serve others, we love the gifts and use people to get them.
This is what sin does. It blinds us to our dependence upon God, turns us inward, and causes us to either fear or exploit others.
all relationships are shaped by an allegiance to God, and they thrive and grow. Sin, however, places human community within the context of an allegiance to other gods (comfort, control, material things, power, success, approval). This radically alters the agenda we have for other people. In this context, my affection for other people is never an end in itself, but a means to an end: getting what I want
So true. Relationships function under the rule of the relational Triune God.
Here on earth, we will always be sinners relating to other sinners.
When it comes to the sins others commit against us, we tend to communicate about them in destructive ways.
the more satisfying the relationship, the less conscious you will be of self-interest. The most destructive diseases are the ones that don’t show themselves in obvious ways. This is true of spiritual maladies as well.
Whether we are conscious of it or not, we all have dreams for our relationships, and we are always working to realize those dreams. How close is your dream to God’s purpose?
In other words, you can’t take the gospel seriously and not take your relationships seriously.
Have you ever noticed how distasteful, unsatisfying, and uninteresting relationships suddenly become when they require work? How many marriages have suffered because neither husband nor wife had a biblical work ethic for their relationship? Paul says that we find excitement and satisfaction within the context of hard work. But most of us give up when we decide that the dividend yield is not worth the investment. Sadly, we frequently do the accounting with our personal interests at the center instead of God’s call.
these are character qualities before they are actions toward others.
God uses our diversity to accomplish his purpose—our growth in grace. Diversity is not an obstacle, but a very significant means to this end.
God chooses to surround us with people who are different from us because he knows it will promote his purpose.
When we are frustrated and ready to give up, God is at work, revealing the places where we have given in to a selfish agenda (the diagnosis). He then uses that new awareness to help us grow precisely where we have struggled (the cure). That is what the rest of this book is about.
