A "personal relationship with Jesus" may be a poor choice of words

We are often told in evangelical circles we need a “personal relationship with Jesus.”

Unfortunately in our Western culture (and perhaps in others) the words “personal” and “relationship” when combined can carry the wrong idea.

This is reinforced when we pair “personal relationship” with “He loves us,” and then sing songs in church containing words like “secret garden” and “embrace” and “passion” while describing the Bible as God’s “love letter” to us.

(When this is in full swing, it’s no wonder to me that young men don’t find church appealing–I’m personally a little squeamish when asked to sing about embracing Jesus in a secret place. Umm–)

The problem I want to highlight is not so much whether this is comfortable imagery to use, but the disconnect we encounter when things get hard. We build the imagery of human romance around the relationship between me-and-Jesus–and then, when we do not get out of the relationship what we expect, I think we can’t help but look at it through the lenses of poor-boyfriend/girlfriend-performance and potential-breakup-looming.

I’m not sure how women look at this, but I know that when I have a “dry period” spiritually, I am often tempted to think of it as my fault. I’m the guy, and moreover, I’m an introvert-thinker. I’m not much into the touchy-feely stuff. If there’s a relationship breakdown, I’m quick to think it’s probably my fault.

Or, sometimes, I can even be tempted as far as a minor crisis of faith: We expect to hear, personally, from the “lover of our souls” – but if we had a Significant Other who professed through a friend-of-a-friend his love for us, and sent us one massive letter which we could read over and over again, but then we never heard anything further how would we react?

This can be made worse complicated by what I think is a grave theological error: we say, perhaps unthinkingly, that “a personal relationship with Jesus” saves us. But does it?

It’s not the relationship that saves, any more than “praying the prayer.” It’s not what saves us, it’s who. As J. D. Payne has noted, salvation is offered by Jesus to those who repent and believe. It has nothing to do with how well you can sing, dance, give, or pray.

This is perhaps a picky distinction, but isn’t it an important one?

Because, should you enter a “dark night of the soul” (as many have) and not hear from Jesus at all–should you lack what you would define to be a relationship–are you still saved?

One of the reasons that we wonder about our salvation is, I think, because we frame the relationship as a romantic one and then say the relationship saves.

So here you are, practicing the spiritual disciplines, not in habits of sin, and earnestly seeking Christ–yet you aren’t hearing anything in your prayer times. Things are “dry.” What’s the problem? Are you still saved? Are you a bad relationship? Or (for the really heretical) is Jesus a bad boyfriend? Some would perhaps say it’s impossible to be in this situation and not hear the voice of God, but I am assured from my own experience and the experiences of others (including writings of C. S. Lewis and the experience of Mother Theresa, among many others) that it is entirely possible. And then someone looks at you and earnestly asks, “But are you saved? Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus? Do you talk with Him every day?” And you wonder. You feel, as I recently heard, “lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon wheel rut.” Am I going to get dumped? Should I dump him first? Wierd, but these kinds of frames are there, even subconciously.

All of this is important because it impacts not just our own relationship, but also how we present this to others when we are evangelizing and discipling them. If we introduce someone to Jesus, will they find Him to be a good friend? someone who is “closer than a brother?” Will their experience be a good one, or a bad one? When I introduce someone to a potential business contact, there is some part of me that hopes the two of them will value me for the introduction. Do we feel the same way about telling our friends about Jesus?

So let me just state my thinking belief here:

Where salvation is concerned, feelings don’t matter. Where salvation is concerned, whether you hear the voice of God doesn’t matter.

I suggest that a personal relationship with Jesus is: personal – between me as a person and Jesus as a person a relationship – in that there is a relationship of some form between us.

What kind of relationship? There are many relationships in this world: employer/employee, sovereign/subject, husband/wife, parent/child, sibling/sibling, distant relative/distant relative, friend/friend, enemy/enemy… Yet there is only one kind of God/individual relationship. To describe the relationship between God and me in terms analogous to my human/human relationships is fraught with danger. To say I love my wife, and Christ loves me, is to compare a single grain of sand to the seashore.

I think this was a challenge for the early church, too: the hope that something as simple as confessing-and-believing (which caused following-and-obeying) would lead them to Christ and Eternity. That endless sacrifices to gods and good works to men did not save.

The thing that was most liberating to me was something I heard in Asia: in the relationship that comes from God to man, there are two things that must happen: God must speak, and I must listen. I cannot force God to do anything–even by the act of earnestly listening. You can’t say “if you do x, God will do y.” That’s putting God in a box. He is not, in that favorite of sayings, “a tame lion.” All I can do is earnestly and faithfully do what He has commanded me to, and expect that in some way He will provide all that is required – the light for my path, the strength to walk, the resources to cope with any problems that come my way.

Jesus loves me, this I know. But I have to bear in mind that when I say “loves,” my idea of what that means can actually be very limiting. He can act in a friendly fashion some times. He can act in a parental fashion sometimes. He can surround me with love and compassion. He can pursue me like a wild creature tracking my trail. He knows more about me than the NSA. But at the end of the day, I must remember that He is God, no one else is, and any description of the relationship between myself and Him which uses a human relationship as an analogy will always fall light-years short. The best thing that I can do is bow my knee in submission to the one who is bigger than anything I can imagine.