Relationship? No –Right Standing and Oneness in Christ

To talk about forming a relationship with God is just not adequate. In fact, the whole things becomes a subtle blasphemy when we realize that Jesus Christ is much more than a husband, a friend, or a loved, although He presents Himself as all three.

“Relationship” implies that we bring something, and the other party contributes something. In truth, we are dead in our trespasses. Jesus Christ has brought us back to life.

Reasons for following Christ Jesus are beyond us. Jesus even told His disciples that where He was going, we could not follow. Man cannot save Himself from his own trespasses, he cannot cleanse himself from his own perversions, he could not walk the Way, for He did not know the Truth and he had no Life in him. We have nothing but an infinite sin debt, one that we cannot even claim to begin to pay for.

We did not initiate a relationship. We are called, welcomed into a covenant, one which could not keep ourselves, one which God the Father cut with His own Son, who represents us before the Father. He came to us, while still sinners. He died the death and provides the life which we cannot create for ourselves.

Christ is not a religion, or even a relationship. He is everything for man. The heart and the beat. The Body and the Blood, who meets every need, gives every seed, and blesses with all deliberate seed. We give nothing but our poverty, and He makes us rich. We bring nothing to this "relationship", if we insist on calling it such. "Righteousness and right standing", this is what every believer has in Christ:

"I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me." (John 17: 23)

We are not just in a relationship. We are not just in righteousness and right standing. We are Christ, we are His:

"And ye are Christ's; and Christ is God's." (1 Corinthians 3: 23)

and

"For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." (Colossians 3: 3)

and

"For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3: 26)

and

"Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world." (1 John 4: 17)

A relationship implies separation, division, a lack of oneness. Even a man and a woman are not as one as we are in Christ Jesus!