Personal

It seems like we have a problem. Because if formulas and three-step processes don't lead to God, then that means that what we need is a relationship, something personal.

Forming really personal relationships seems to be really hard for a lot of people to do. First of all its hard to find the right people, I know that has been a hard thing for me ever since the "Resolutions" series. But, secondly actually opening up to someone and forming that trust bond with one another is hard to do.

I know a girl who told me the other day, "I only let people know me a little bit. Everyone knows some parts of me, but no one knows everything." It's like she's scared. Because she's doing this she feels safe, because no one knows her completely. It seems like she's hiding, but in a sense we all are. Whenever I went into driver's ed for the first time there was a line of chairs that everyone sat in to wait to go into the classroom. I walked up to the chairs to sit and I noticed that everyone was sitting in every other seat so as not to be sitting next to someone they don't know. We all have ways of hiding in public social situations. We just latch our iPod to our ears and we're officially cut-off from any awkward social situation that would force us to let someone into our personal life, to let someone get to know more about us.

The idea that God wants to get to know us personally is a scary thought. There's this psalm that makes me see God's longing to know us as something much more as a love story. It reminds me of when Donald Miller says that "The God of the Bible seemed to be brokenhearted over the separation in our relationship and downright obsessed with mending the tear." The psalm I mentioned is Psalm 139, it speaks of God as though He is always thinking about us, like a girl with a crush who's obsessed with getting to know everything about that guy. The psalm says:

"How precious your thoughts about me, O God!
They are innumerable!
I can't even count them;
they outnumber the grains of sand!
And when I wake up in the morning,
you are still with me!"

God is in love with us and He spends so much time thinking about us and wanting to know us. It's not like He doesn't know us, because just before saying that in the psalm it says:

"You saw me before I was born.
Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed."

Clearly God knows us. He can just take out His book and look up what has happened and even what's about to happen in our lives. But God wants us to be personally involved with Him. Here's what Donald Miller has to say:

"I realized that. Jesus was always, and I mean always, talking about love, about people, about relationship, and He never once broke anything into steps or formulas. What if, because we were constantly trying to dissect His message we were missing a blatant invitation? I began to wonder if becoming a Christian did not work more like falling in love than agreeing with a list of true principles ... It seems like something else has to take place in the heart for somebody to to become a believer, for somebody to understand the gospel of Jesus. It began to seem like more than just a cerebral exercise. What if the gospel of Jesus was an invitation to know God?

Now I have to tell you, all of this frightened me a bit because I had always assumed a kind of anonymity with God. When I saw myself in heaven, I didn't imagine sitting at the right hand of God, as the Scripture says, but I pictured myself off behind some mountain range doing some fishing and writing a good detective novel. But if the gospel of Jesus is relational; that is, if our brokenness will be fixed, not by our understanding of theology, but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind of intimacy of which only heaven knows. Imagine, a Being with a mind as great as God's with feet like trees and a voice like a rushing wind, telling you that you are His cherished creation. It's exciting if you think about it. Earthly love, I mean the stuff I was trying to get by sounding smart, is temporal and slight so that it has to be given again and again in order for us to feel any sense of security; but God's love, God's voice and presence, would instill our souls with such affirmation we would need nothing more and would cause us to love other people so much we would be willing to die for them."

It says in Romans that "each of us will have to give a personal account to God." That someday each of us will personally have to open up to God and explain what was going on in our lives, even though He already knows. Someday we will have to open up to God. Why not today? Why not stop being scared and hiding behind the headphones of your iPod and start opening up and become personal.

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Quotations taken from: Psalm 139:17-18,16, "Searching For God Knows What" by Donald Miller pgs 44, 46-47, and Romans 14:12

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