This week we had the topic of Relationships and our speaker was Jesse Mesa, the Captain of the Mercy Ship Ministry within YWAM. Jesse, whom is originally from the Philippines and comes from a background that wouldn’t be wished upon the greatest of enemies. Jesse was a person who has made a huge turn around in his life from the ways he used to live and now is living a life that is making a difference around the world.
Our verse for the week was Ephesians 4, which talks about how God has called us not to be His slaves but to relate to Him and bring unity to the body of Christ. When we break down the word “relationships” we find that relation means to carry back or have a reference point as ship is to carry something or to embark on. When we take the word as a whole we find the definition is the reference point to embark from. When we take this with Ephesians 4 we can understand that God want us to relate, as that is what He has created us for. If some of you are doubting this go back to when God created man, it is the only time in the Bible when God created something and didn’t say it was good. So then God created woman to be a help meet to man as an equal partner. In our relationships our reference point is God and if we carry everything back to Him then we will be successful in the adventures we embark upon.
So how has God created us to relate to others and how do we go about doing so? Matthew 22: 37-40 tells us to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind and then to love our neighbor as ourselves. God didn’t just give us these commands and expect us to know how we are to love, so He gave us the 10 commandments. The first four commandments tell us how to relate to God, the fifth tells us how to relate to authority, and then the final five tell us how we are to relate to others. Through understanding these commandments we can do our job to expanding the kingdom of God. In expanding the kingdom we have to know that first someone Belongs to the kingdom, as we are called to love our neighbor. Then by loving our neighbor they will become Believers in God. By believing in God they then become aware of how they are to Behave as a follower of Christ. This is something that many of us struggle with as Christians as we fail to make people feel accepted before they actually believe as they act in ways that we see unfit.
Loving our neighbor is something that can become very difficult at times as we see people as unfit to enter the kingdom or they might happen to be our enemies and how can we love them? This is the question that many of us tend to ask and if we are in a true loving relationship with God then we know we can trust Him. In trusting God we no longer let circumstances rule over Him and make us a Victim, we now let God rule over circumstances and become the Victor. Our way to have a successful relationship is by strengthening our relationship with God and our knowledge of Him. By doing this we can let God guide us as He is our true north. Unsuccessful relationships are usually caused by pride and as Christians we are called to live in humility. Through living in humility we can be united as the body of Christ and as Psalm 133 states, “in unity I command a blessing.”
Of course with relationships we also talked about male and female relationships and how we seem to think that feeling of romance can be a sin. Well, they can be however we have the ability to control them by not entertaining them and continuing to have the right motives toward the opposite sex rather than making them an object. Love also is a choice that we have and we can choose to fall in love and out of love. By doing this we allow our mind to be entertained by sexual immorality and then by letting our mind entertain them more often it makes our conscience week and we choose to fall in and out of love for the wrong reasons and fall into the categories of lust, rather than love. So in dating we need to get the right motives, we need to be honest and real about whom we are, we need to give our rights in dating to marriage, we need to develop non-romantic relationships, and then we need to get ourselves free from sin. By doing these five principles we can be successful and have these amazing relationships among opposite sexes. God’s goal is for us to have attractions and romance among the two sexes as He created both in the beginning and gives us the formula on how to do that within His will.
Relationships are great and there are times when we find it hard to love God with everything we have and to love our neighbor as ourselves, yet usually that is because we are carrying some type of pride in boosting or bitterness. However, when we do His will we will receive heaps of blessings. I have seen these blessing personally as I was a person who tended to judge people and rule them out of the kingdom before I even knew what they were going through because I saw them unfit compared to me. In this respect I was very arrogant thought I was better because I was further along in my journey than they were and I pushed them down rather than building them up as God calls us to do. Over the past year I have found myself now building others up within schools I have volunteered at and have seen many blessing in the relationships with other.
My relationship with my girlfriend Rachel is one of the greatest ways that I have seen God bless me and through that today I am still living in that blessing. So last year I was at a point where I was in idle with my relationship with God and I was treading water just staying in one place. God then called me do missions work and I put it off and then out of nowhere God brings this amazing friend into my life to help me get over the fear of man. Rachel had just come back from a DTS and had all these amazing testimonies about what happened while on DTS and then you could just see her fire for God as it was blazing. It was her blazing fire that ignited mine and got me over the fear of man to actually commit to doing a DTS and growing in my relationship with Christ. As I continued to make these commitments to God and letting Him guide me I started to grow closer to Rachel in our friendship.
We continued to progress in our relationship as we realized it was something more than just friendship, we then had to discuss boundaries in our relationship. Boundaries are the foundation for our motives and help hold us accountable in not giving into sin. As we set these boundaries we had to open up to each other and be real about what things will make us stumble so each of us could hold the other accountable. In our progression of friendship to dating we failed to hold each other accountable to the boundaries of friendship over dating and with that we had to be checked by others. By others realigning us we were able to live in humility and be convicted and correct our motives. Today I am in love with this blessing, Rachel, and thank God for guiding me, as only true successful relationships can come through Him. This week I began to totally see how putting God at the center of this relationship is the only way it has and will continue to succeed because He is our true north. If we can’t understand His love then how can we begin to understand how to love another? Every day I thank God for His love and grace because it is only by Him I have been blessed with such a wonderful relationship.
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