- But I Thought God Wanted Me to…
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Have a Personal Relationship with Him
Last week we started looking at what it meant to have a personal
relationship with God and those that feel that if they have God that
is all that they need. There were a few that ask what’s the problem
with thinking that God is sufficient? In Matthew 19:26, Jesus said,
“with God all things are possible”, and so it isn’t a question of what
God is capable of doing. It isn’t a question of what God can do, but
a question of how He designed things to be done.
The first problem with the “if I have God, I do not need people
approach” is that it refuses to acknowledge the fact that God has
always used people to accomplish His will. Just a quick glance at the
Bible will convince you God uses people. God creates Adam and Eve to
be fruitful and multiply to fill the earth. God was capable of
putting everyone here, but He chose to use people. When He wanted a
people of his own, He chooses Abraham and Sarah to start the nation
that would bring the Messiah into the world. When Abraham’s
descendents went astray, He could have written something in the sky,
but he choose to use prophets and when the people still didn’t listen
he choose to use Assyria and Babylonia to take the people captive and
show them that they needed to repent. We can go on, but you get the
point.
God is still in the practice of using people to accomplish his
will! In Ephesians 4:11-16 we read, “It was he who gave some to be
apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be
pastors and teachers, to prepare God's people for works of service, so
that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in
the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature,
attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we
will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and
blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and
craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the
truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head,
that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by
every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each
part does its work.” In other words God has given people gifts so
that they can work together in order to accomplish certain things and
those that God placed in leadership are to help people find what God
wants them to do. Then the Apostle starts listing some of the
advantages of everyone doing their part, like a stability of your
faith, growing up into the Head, that is Jesus, which is another way
of saying that you will be Christ like, and then love between the
different members of the body. All this is dependant upon each member
doing what God designed.
Could God accomplish his work without people? Sure, He could
have, but He designed the church in such a way that people were used
instead. As we look at our relationship with God, we need to see that
this isn’t an either or, it’s a both. We need a relationship with God
and a relationship with each other because that is the way that God
designed it.
Let me finish with a homework assignment, get a concordance and
look up all the one another verses. It is going to take you a
notebook to write them all down, but it will convince you that
Christianity is a relationship with God and one another.
Love,
Mike
