Video: Jesus People

This is a pretty good parody of too many of us in the church

Sweeter as the Days Go By

A guy is born. He gets his first tooth, walks, goes to kindergarten, loses his first tooth, first girlfriend, first heartbreak, sports, prom, homecoming, graduation, car, college, marriage, children, career, house. The list goes on. We have many firsts in our lives. It's all part of growth.

For the first thirty years of life we're anticipating the next step. After forty people tend to look back. It seems like most of our life is spent in the future or the past. For some reason we neglect now.

In the Baptist churches I grew up attending we often had a testimony time. I don't know where the tradition started, but wherever the church, it was usually the same formula. We start with a hymn or two -- always singing the first, second and last verse -- then two or three people would stand up to say how good God had been to them; it sounded something like this:

"Jesus saved me when I was (fill in the age). I asked Him into my heart. When I lost my (fill in the blank) I leaned on Him. Through all of my pain He's been there. God is so good!"

It was followed by a few hearty Amens and a similar testimony.

In all of those testimony meetings, rarely do I remember hearing someone talking about God -- or Jesus, or the Spirit, for that matter -- like they would a close friend they had just run into that afternoon. Really, we tell people they can have "a personal relationship with Jesus" then freeze up when put on the spot to talk about our own "personal relationship" with him.

Throughout Scripture the relationship between the Lord and us is as a groom and his bride. Now, I know some couples who aren't close to each other as they ought to be, but really healthy couples have intimate moments over the years and special moments amost every day. They are, well, intimate. Too many of us -- myself included -- don't have an intimate relationship with the Lord.

For most Christians, we got hitched to the Lord some time in the past and go to church and do stuff here and there because we're Christians. It's not really much of a personal relationship when I think about it. If I spent my Christian life working around God and for God but never really with Him would that be a "personal relationship?"

I hear people talk about their Christian walk getting sweeter as the days go by. As I think about some sour-looking and mean-sounding people who call themselves Christians I wonder whether they have that daily walk with the Lord. I wonder what it would say to people on the outside looking in if people who call themselves Christians really had a "personal relationship" with the Lord that was growing sweeter each day.

A Personal Faith

Think a minute about how you describe your relationship with God. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Did you use words like friend, lover, or father? Was your description more about Him or you? Did you go back to a script you memorized about something that happened to you five, 10, or 15 years ago?

I learned growing up that we are here to tell others about Jesus and convince them that they had to "put their faith in him" or they would spend eternity in hell. In fact, I learned two questions I could ask someone that would open the door to me sharing the gospel. I memorized a five-step model with a tract that was a convincing argument and even the right words someone could pray (as I led them) to reserve their place in heaven.

Every Sunday, and weekdays on Christian TV and radio I hear people repeating similar arguments and prayers, convincing hundreds - even thousands - of people to "give their hearts to Jesus".

It reminds me of the story of Cyrano de Bergerac, who was not attractive, but articulate, who helped his more attractive (but less eloquent) friend win the heart of Roxanne (the title of the movie starring Steve Martin of the same story). This begs the questions: is God a naive woman who needs us to feed our friends lines to convince Him to accept them? or, are our friends really ready to start a real relationship with the Almighty if they need us to tell them what to say to him?

Don Miller develops this idea in his book Searching for God Knows What. For too long, I've tried to rationalize whether someone who prays the right thing when he's twelve can still be saved at 23, when he's turned from all that he believed then. Is he still a believer? Does he have a relationship with the Lord? Is Jesus Lord of his life?

It's a lot less complicated to consider the relational parallels Jesus himself used to describe his followers. He considered us "sheep who need a shepherd", "the sick who need a physician", his "bride", his "friends", and "sons of God". Relationships aren't fabricated; they grow naturally. They come from a heart that gets to know someone else and falls in love with and learns to trust another as that relationship develops.

Instead of persuading others to say a prayer, making a bargain with God I hope to live a life that convinces them He is the lover, shepherd, father, friend, they've been looking for -- that they will be able to express on their own the desire of their heart to turn to him, however that comes out.