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According to Ephesians 4, it is that the highest joys of relationship grow in the soil of the deepest struggles. Struggles are not obstacles, but instruments in God’s hands. Every struggle is an opportunity to experience God’s grace yourself and give it to the other person.
broken community is always the result of broken foundations.
we all live theologically; that is, the things we believe about God and ourselves are the foundation for all the decisions we make, all the actions we take, and all the words we speak.
The theology you live out is much more important to your daily life than the theology you claim to believe.
Who you tell yourself you are has a very powerful impact on the way you deal with the big and small issues of daily life.
Much of the disappointment and heartache we experience is the result of our attempts to get something from relationships that we already have in Christ.
Worship is first an identity before it becomes an activity.
Christ says that what controls our hearts controls our behavior (v. 24). If something is valuable to us, we will seek to get it through the situations and relationships of daily life.
Although most of us have affirmed that God is the Creator of all things, it is quite easy to worship him as Creator on Sunday and curse his work during the week. We do this when we are dissatisfied with the way God has made the people we relate to every day. When we fail to worship God as Creator in our relationships, we try to ascend to his throne and do all we can to recreate others in our own image. This always leads to frustration and failure.
What is a relationship? The intersection of the stories of two people.
What sets the course of a person’s life are the ways he responds to the little moments. The character developed in a thousand little moments is what you carry into the big, important moments.
It is easy to forget the impact our words have on every relationship. There has never been a good relationship without good communication. And there has never been a bad relationship that didn’t get that way in part because of something that was said. Our ability to express ourselves verbally is anything but ordinary. It gets right to the heart of who God made us as our Creator, and how he is remaking us as our Savior.
Genesis 1 makes it plain that the first words ever spoken were spoken by God. Language is not a human invention to be used in whatever way serves our interests. If God is the first speaker, then language is his creation. This means that our ability to speak was given to us by the Creator and it exists for his glory. Everything we will ever say belongs to him and should be used for his purposes. Words, in short, have a high and holy calling. Words separate you from the rest of creation, making you more like God than like animals. The gift of words calls us to live and speak in a God-focused
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Your words are always in pursuit of some kind of kingdom. You are either speaking as a mini-king, seeking to establish your will in your relationships and circumstances; or you are speaking as an ambassador, seeking to be part of what the King is doing.
Speaking as an ambassador is not about using biblical words; it’s about speaking with a biblical agenda.
we must never imagine that our own unaided efforts can be relied on to carry us even through the next twenty-four hours as “decent” people.
Conflict with others is one of God’s mysterious, counterintuitive ways of rescuing us from ourselves.
What has become more important to me than my relationship with God?
A better way to translate the word “jealous” is “zealous.” The word “jealousy” has negative connotations, but it can actually be a very positive word. Like the person whose spouse has been unfaithful, God is zealous to do whatever it takes to regain the affection of our hearts. He doesn’t do this because he needs us; he does it because he loves us.
What do you think God typically uses to regain our affection? Ironically, he uses other people!
God uses other people to mysteriously and counterintuitively rescue us from self-glory and self-love. Why does he do that? Because he loves us more than we love ourselves!
As C. S. Lewis says, when you put first things first, second things are increased, not decreased.
Conflict can be good. God himself engages in conflict. In fact, the Bible is a book about God entering into conflict in order to save us. He comes humbly, in the person of Christ, and fights on our behalf against the ravages of sin. He suffers, dies, and is raised as the victor over sin and death. He calls us to imitate him as we engage in conflict with others. Godly conflict is an act of compassion!
Only deal with one problem at a time!
When we reject the opportunity to forgive or ask for forgiveness, the relationship suffers.
When you forgive someone, you also cancel a debt. But, more specifically, you make a conscious choice to absorb the cost yourself. You choose not to make the offender pay for the offense.
forgiving someone is not just a past event. It’s something we must continue to practice, even when we are dealing with an offense we have already forgiven.
The passage in Jeremiah does not say that God has amnesia when he looks at you. Our omniscient God does not forget anything! The word remember is not a “memory” word, but a “promise” word, a covenant word. God is promising that when we confess our sins, “I will not treat you as your sins deserve. Instead, I will forgive you.”
If there truly was a sin committed, it has to be specifically acknowledged by the person who sinned. That person then needs to ask forgiveness for the specific sin. The offended person must then choose to forgive or not.
It is always harder to live in the middle of something than it is to live at the beginning or the end. When you are at the beginning of something, you are filled with a sense of hope and potential. You are engaged by a vision of all that can be. People at the start of something tend to be dreamers; they want to get started fulfilling the dream. People at the end tend to be filled with relief, gratitude, and a sense of accomplishment. The hardships along the way don’t seem so hard anymore. The sacrifices all seem worth it, and they are glad the work is over. People in the middle usually
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The problem with relationships is that they all take place right smack-dab in the middle of something, and that something is the story of redemption, God’s plan to turn everything in our lives into instruments of Christlike change and growth.
Our relationships will never work according to our plan
Our relationships don’t work according to our plan because they are part of his plan.
Our relationships will never live up to our expectations
This side of eternity, none of us get to be with the person of our dreams and none of us are ready to be the person of someone else’s dreams! We are all flawed people living in a fallen world, but with a faithful God.
Our relationships will always grapple with some kind of difficulty
Building relationships is often like threading a needle while driving on a bumpy road!
Our relationships will always need to improve
It takes perseverance to be part of change in a relationship because that change is most often a process and rarely an event.
your relationships will take you beyond the boundaries of your normal strength. They will take you beyond the range of your natural abilities and beyond the borders of your natural and acquired wisdom. Relationships will push you beyond the limits of your ability to love, serve, and forgive. They will push you beyond you. At times they will beat at the borders of your faith. At times they will exhaust you. In certain situations, your relationships will leave you disappointed and discouraged. They will require what you do not seem to have, but that is exactly as God intended it. That is
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At some point, every relationship brings you to the end of yourself, and with God there is no healthier place to be.
What makes right thinking about God powerful is the life that emerges daily from that theology.
Serving others is a simple way of consolidating all the Bible’s “one another” passages under one big idea.
I am married and have four children, and most of the time I am committed to thinking about how they can make my life more fulfilling. I know this is true because of how easily I get irritated when I have to give up personal comfort to serve them.
You have to see how much of a servant you aren’t before you can start to become one.
We are not just promised life after death, but life before death!
It is when we are serving that we are most like the Trinity. Father, Son, and Spirit redeemed a fallen world through service and sacrifice. There is nothing more God-like than serving others.
Jesus has come for sinners to begin a process of total transformation that will end in us exhibiting the very character of Jesus.
the cost of ministry always exceeds your preliminary calculations.
(1) Mercy is the kind, sympathetic, and forgiving treatment of others that works to relieve their distress and cancel their debt. Or (2) mercy is compassion combined with forbearance and action.
