Having A Personal Relationship With God

And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty. 2 Corinthians 6 v 18

God does not enjoy having limited access to you. What God wants is to have communion with Him every time, on a line that is never busy or interrupted. Imagine your relationship with your biological father; you are close to him and he cares for you: to clothe you, to feed you and to get you a good education and enjoy life at the same time. The same is true, or even better, where God is concerned.

Imagine a scenario where you visit the nearest hospital, and there you are charged a $50 bill. If you want that to be paid by someone, you will not go to a stranger in the neighbourhood and ask him to pay for you that hospital bill, no, it is the responsibility of your father. That stranger is never under any obligation whatsoever to pay anything for you. However, if the daughter of that same stranger has a medical bill that needs to be paid, he will fork out the cash or write a check for the daughter. The reason why that man does not pay for you is because you are not his child and he has no relationship with you.

This is how some of us are trying to relate with God. We do not have a relationship with Him but we expect Him to fare for us; it's difficult. There is a point we can get to where we have a strong relationship with God where we are rest assured that we will get whatever we ask of Him because of the relationship we have with Him. He will feel obligated as a father to take care of you and get the best out of your life because that is what every father wants of his child.

I just want to encourage you to know that God wants a relationship with you, not just a one-day-per-week consultation program as if He is a practitioner of some sort. God wants continual fellowship with you. You can dedicate more of your time to Him and seek to build a strong personal relationship with Him through prayer and through getting knowledge of His Word. The more you know the Word the more you know how God operates and the stronger the relationship you can have with Him.

In my past messages on this blog I once wrote about two kinds of relationships that people have with God. There are people who have a service relationship with God whilst others have a personal relationship with God.

Someone who has a service relationship with God is the one who loves God only on Church days. Such people as these come to Church all the time, they serve in departments in Church, they know all the Church principles, leaders, Pastors and generally all things in the Church. Such people never miss a Church event, at all the gatherings and outings they will be present and hyper-active. If you see such a person in Church you will conclude that this person is a model of what a true Christin really is. However, inasmuch as they may have all these attributes, these people are Sunday Christians. Come Monday, where there is no Church, you will not recognise them, especially where no fellow Church member is. They will be totally changed; they don't even read their Bibles, they rarely pray and never do anything for spiritual growth. In their cellphones and media players are all kinds of music with any type of lyrics, from Gospel through secular to hard core inexplicable music with all kinds of lyrics. Their list of favourite tv programmes consist of anything from gospel through secular to hard core evil viewing, gratuitous violence and explicit material. Not all people who have a service relationship with God are extremists in the things I have mentioned above but they are simply unstable, anything for them is consumable and they don't have set standards for themselves. Some of these people also do not want to talk about God or to discuss the Bible. You hear them advocating for what they call “social lives” yet their own spiritual lives are empty. They have nothing to do with God apart from Church.

Then comes they that have personal relationships with God. These are always serious in their faith. They do not allow anything near or around them that compromises their relationship with God. Their music is of clean lyrics, they study their Bibles, they discuss with other believers about God and they organise meetings for prayer and spiritual growth. They are usually hated by others at Church and they are esteemed proud and therefore usually called “holier than thou.” some of them are too extreme they don't have any music other than Gospel music, they are very selective as to what they watch or listen to and also as to whom they talk to. It seems as if all they live to do is worship God. They are also very stable in their faith and firm in what they believe.

Many of us have service relationships with God but we don't know God on a personal basis. I have friends who love soccer. Whenever I see them talking even to each other, they will be talking about soccer. They have details about teams, coaches and players' private and public lives. They are always on the internet to get the latest news about their teams and players. They always have updates on which player is injured and for how long, they

know all the locker room fights and feuds, they know which team will play another even in five weeks time. I know that these fanatics barely know about each other, when they meet they never ask each other how everything is at home, the first thing they talk about is the way one team won and how another lost during the weekend. It seems as if they came on earth to discuss soccer. My point here is, these people are so much soaked and absorbed into soccer that they don't even put any importance on anything else in life.

This is how Christians ought to be about God, knowing about verses and all the Bible stories, researching on the internet about Bible commentaries and how to strengthen their relationship with God. If that is possible with soccer, it is obviously possible also with Christianity, the problem is that we have never tried giving it a go.

When you have a personal relationship with God, He can open doors and give you access that a father can give only to his son and not a stranger. Refuse to be a stranger in the throne room of God, let His courts be your dwelling place. Love Him, worship Him more, seek Him more and I know that with a personal relationship with God, the devil will not be able to sift you. Till next time,

Jesus is Lord TLG