The trouble with human relationships is that man without God does not realize that all men are sinful, and so he hangs too much on his personal relationships, and they crush and break.
No love affair between a man and a woman has ever been great enough to hang everything on. It will crumble away under your feet. And as the edges begin to break away the relationship is destroyed.
But when I am a creature in the presence of God, and I see that the last relationship is with an infinite God, and these human relationships are among equals, I can take from a human relationship what God meant it to provide, without putting the whole structure under an intolerable burden.
More than this, when I acknowledge that none of us are perfect in this life, I can enjoy that which is beautiful in a relationship, without expecting it to be perfect.
But most of all, I must recognize that no human relation-ships are going to be finally sufficient. The finally sufficient relationship must be with God himself.
As Christians we have this relationship, and so our human relationships can be valid without being the finally sufficient thing. As sinners, acknowledging that we are not perfect in this life, we do not need to cast away every human relationship, including the relationship of marriage, or the relationships of Christians inside the Church, just because they prove not to be perfect.
On the basis of the finished work of Christ it is possible, once I have seen this, to begin to understand that my relationships can be substantially healed in the present life. When two Christians find that their relationship has hit a wall, they can come hand-in-hand and bring their failures under the blood of Christ, and get up again and go on.
Think what this means practically in the areas of human relationships, in marriage, in the Church, the parent-child relationships, the employer-employee relationship.
Or we can put it in yet another way.
The Christian is to be a demonstration of the existence of God. But if we as individual Christians, and as the Church, act on less than a personal relationship to other men, where is the demonstration that God the Creator is personal?
If there is no demonstration in our attitude toward other men that we really take seriously the person-to- person relationship, we might as well keep quiet.
There must be a demonstration; that is our calling: to show that there is a reality in personal relationship, and not just words about it. If the individual Christian, and if the Church of Christ, is not allowing the Lord Jesus Christ to bring forth his fruit into the world, as a demonstration in the area of personal relationships, we cannot expect the world to believe.
Lovelessness is a sea which knows no shore, for it is what God is not. And eventually not only will the other man drown, but I will drown, and worst of all, the demonstration of God drowns as well when there is nothing to be seen but a sea of lovelessness and impersonality.
As Christians, we are not to be in fellowship with false doctrine. But in the very midst of the battle against false teaching, we must not forget the proper personal relationships.
Each time I see something wrong in others, it is dangerous, for it can exalt self, and when this happens, my open fellowship with God falls to the ground.
So when I am right, I can be wrong. In the midst of being right, if self is exalted, my fellowship with God can be destroyed. It is not wrong to be right, but it is wrong to have the wrong attitude in being right, and to forget that my relationship with my fellowmen must always be personal.
If I really love a man as I love myself, I will long to see him be what he could be on the basis of Christ's work, for that is what I want or what I should want for myself on the basis of Christ's work.
And if it is otherwise, not only is my communication with the man broken, but my communication with God as well.
For this is sin, breaking the second commandment to love my neighbor as myself.
Francis Schaeffer "True Spirituality"
tj
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