Is your life built on what you believe, or on whom you believe? Do you know where you actually stand? A certain well-known dancer came to the United States, and one of the specifications she put into her contract was that wherever she went the temperature of the room was to be exactly 72 degrees. One hotel took care of the matter very nicely. The maintenance man took the mercury out of the tube and painted the thermometer red up to 72 degrees. The dancer marveled at the ability of that hotel to keep her room at such a constant temperature. She did wonder, once in a while, why 72 degrees in that hotel seemed to be a bit warmer or colder than the same temperature in other places, but she was content, because the thermometer did not vary. I wonder sometimes if in our Christian lives we haven't painted a certain figure on our thermometers, and never check on the heat we are supposed to be generating.
A basic reason for believing that true religion is a personal relationship is that righteousness and sin cannot exist apart from persons. A star can do no wrong; neither can a frog, or a stone, or a day, or a night. None of these can do either right or wrong—it must be a person who does right or does wrong. There is no way in the laboratory of the universe by which we can distill the pure essence of sin or the pure essence of righteousness and have it outside and apart from personality. I know we do talk in abstractions many times. For example, we speak of the law's being righteous. What we actually mean, of course, is that the law, being a transcript of the character of its Maker, reflects His righteousness. It is because the law is God's character "verbalized" that the law is righteous. It is of the nature of God.
In terms of what has been said, sin is the breaking of a personal relationship rather than the breaking of a law or the corrupting of a doctrine. That is, the essential evil of sin lies in the fact that it brings in a separation between my loving Maker and myself—between my loving Saviour and myself. Not only is sin the violation of the law, but because such violation indicates a course of conduct contrary to that which is to be expected from one claiming to be a son of God, it is essentially sin. When I sin I hurt both God and myself, and bring about a separation.
The evil in sin is that our sin separates us from God. The great sin in the Garden is probably revealed more by the fact that Adam hid behind a tree than it is by the fact that he ate some of the fruit. Immediately separation came in, caused by distrust and suspicion and fear. Here the "mark" was badly missed. Here lay the greatest agony for God. Does God feel the pain of sin because someone has broken a law? Or does the pain come from the separation? Actually, isn't that what happens in a marriage that is broken? It isn't that the partners have broken the marriage contract per se. Rather, two people who had promised to be with each other all through their lives have now broken that intimate companionship, and now cease to be to each other all that was implied in the marriage vows. In short, I should describe the evil of sin as being the betrayal of, and separation from, One who loves us deeply and who has a right to expect far better treatment.
Salvation Requires Personal Relationship
This leads to the conclusion that salvation depends on a personal relationship and on nothing else. We believe in Jesus when we are saved. We sup with Him in our religious experience. We love Him, not an "it." We are drawn to Him, not to an "it." In other words, every phase of the Christian's life—justification, sanctification, regeneration—is a relationship to a Person. It is knowing God well and enough to fall in love with Him and to have that intimacy deepen as the years move on. For me this is the finest description of sanctification. Because we love Him so much, we want to be like Him, and because we want to be like Him, we become like Him.
In this sense, love is the motive power of the whole universe, and salvation then draws its energy and its meaning from falling in love with God—with the Person, Jesus Christ—and accepting Him as our Saviour. Life is not in a system of doctrine or in a code of conduct, but in an intimate relationship with a Person. Meditate someday on how much real warmth you can develop for the doctrine of the tithe or for the doctrine of the state of the dead. The warmth and the thrill come not from the doctrine but from your relation to the Saviour, and these doctrines get their fire and meaning from that relationship. A man can read for years about marriage. He can study all the books on the subject that he pleases. What warmth does he get from these? But when he betroths himself to the girl he has chosen to live with all the rest of his life, then the doctrine of marriage takes on deep meaning for him.
Actually the law of God is lovable, because the Person whom it represents is lovable. Doctrine has something worth believing in and worth dying for because it is the "verbalization" of the thinking of the Person we love and respect and care about. We are immature if we fall in love with things, however good they may be. As one man has put it, the immature man is the man who loves things and uses people, while the mature man loves people and uses things. This is as true in religion as it is in life's other experiences.
As a second reason, I should like to point out that this personal element in religion is best illustrated by human relationships. Here God has a difficult task: He has to tell us in human terms what it means for Him to love us and what it means for us to love Him, and He has to use the relationship that we know. Yet He has to deal with us in terms of these relationships that have been badly hurt by thousands of years of sin, with their consequent warping and perversion. He has to tell you, for example, that He loves you like a father, recognizing, however, that a considerable number of you do not have the best of fathers. He says to me, "I love you as a husband loves his wife," recognizing again that I may know many men who do not love their wives as they might. In a sense, God asks me to look through a glass darkly. He hopes that we shall be able to imagine the ideal even if we have never seen it.
Consider some of the human ties He uses as types of our relation to Him. He uses the father-and-son relationship: "Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself" (Eph. 1:5), He "sent forth . . . his Son . . . that we might receive the adoption of sons" (Gal. 4:4, 5). "Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God" (1 John 3:1). "When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt" (Hosea 11:1). Here we find the inner meaning of religion. I love Him because He is my Father; I obey Him and admire Him as my Father. I can serve Him with pleasure because of the intimate bond between us. Why is He my Father? Because He loves me enough to call me His son. He is my Parent by His own choice. He orders me in love, and I obey in love—this relationship is my religious life. There is a commitment on both sides here. He calls Himself, without qualification, Father, and I call myself, with certainty, son.
Another relationship that God uses to illustrate true religion is the husband-andwife relationship. You find it in such statements as these: "I will betroth thee unto me forever" (Hosea 2:19). "I am married unto you" (Jer. 3:14). "Thy Maker is thine husband" (Isa. 54:5). "I have espoused you to one husband" (2 Cor. 11:2). In the Song of Solomon (ch. 5:10) we find Jesus referred to as "the chiefest among ten thousand," with whom we should sit down in companionship. The bride says of Jesus, in the same book, "My beloved is mine, and I am his" (ch. 2:16). And He says to her, "Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee" (ch. 4:7). Here Jesus is speaking of the church. As a Western people, we perhaps have never fully seen in the Song of Solomon the beauty of meaning that it contains. The Oriental can see much more than we, because of our prudishness and our inability to comprehend what is meant when people speak with frankness, purity, delicacy, and deep insight, of the kind of love possible between man and woman. The Lord, however, saw fit to put into His Scriptures a beautiful description of how much He loves us, how much we may love Him, and what this can mean to Him and to us.
This great truth was also expressed negatively. One example is in two very frank chapters in Ezekiel, the sixteenth and the twenty-third, where to Western ears the language again is startling and somewhat disturbing. Here God describes in vivid imagery the conduct of two women who at that time should have been giving Him their whole affection and loyalty. Instead of faithfulness and devotion, there was desertion and betrayal. He refers to this tragedy with painful frankness in Revelation. God regards as a harlot a church that is unfaithful. He employs this plain-speaking metaphor because to Him the true church is a pure and loving bride. Idolatry is often referred to as spiritual adultery. When we realize that most of the idolatry of the Hebrews was deeply polluted by the impure rites of the fertility cults, we have ample grounds for understanding why God abhorred this spiritual adultery.
We find the husband-and-wife relationship in negative and in positive form in the book of Hosea. The prophet loves a woman who, for a time, appears to be a good wife. In the course of time she breaks her marriage vows. She finally comes back in response to the insistent wooing of her husband. The history of Gomer is a fine illustration of God's treatment of the church as an erring wife.
These types of God's relationship to us draw their power and meaning from the fact that they are personal. Many times, however, because of our legitimate interest in doctrine we have taken away from the whole experience of salvation the personalness of the relationship that the saved man shares with his Saviour, that a son of God has with his Father, and that the church, as bride, enjoys with her Husband. People prefer to die for personal loyalties, and to live for personal loyalties. I do not mind living for marriage when I can see it expressed in my relation to my wife, but spending the rest of my life living for marriage in an abstract and academic sense would have very little meaning to me. Living my relationship with my children is far more satisfying than an attempt to find pleasure in some ivory tower, discussing the concept of fatherhood, and spending year after year enlarging on the beauty and significance of this relationship. Yet many of our people seem to be at that point. The church has apparently come to mean to them a system of correct doctrine, "the truth." The church for them is a fellowship of individuals who abstain from harmful things, such as liquor and tobacco. These standards are all good, but it is fatal to mistake externals for inner life. Until we love the doctrine and abstain from unwholesome things because we love the Lord, we are more likely to be miserable than happy.
Failure in human relationships is very similar to failure in religion. If a boy obeys his father only because he is afraid of him, and carries that meaning over into religion, then he has an unhealthy religion. If he tries to trick his father, to get everything out of him that he can, then he deals with the Lord as a sort of glorified Santa Claus Or as an indulgent grandfather. That is not healthy religion. If a husband goes into marriage without assessing his true feelings, he is not happy. If we accept this message without assessing our true feelings, we are not happy. If a man does not know why he entered marriage, he is not too happy. If we do not know why we call ourselves Christians, we cannot be happy. To be married with no knowledge of the responsibilities entailed in this relationship, is quite likely to lead to unhappiness. The same is true in religion. Commitment to a person carries tremendous responsibilities, and we cannot escape them. Unless we love that person, those obligations become unbearably burdensome. Any couple who have come to the point of talking about divorce know what a burden the finances of a home can be. They knew it before, but now they are painfully aware of the fact. How shall the ex-husband support both his family and himself with the added expense of separate living quarters? What shall be done about visiting the children? How often should he come to see them? And when he marries again, what will they do? In such circumstances fatherhood becomes partially a burden. In like manner, when religion ceases to be a love relationship with a Person, the skeleton begins to show through the flesh, and what was formerly attractive to the eye is now depressing and often repulsive.
Spiritual Advantages of the Personal Relationship
A third point to be brought out is that a personal relationship vitalizes religion. Falling in love with Jesus Christ as a personal Saviour helps me to live a truly religious life. One advantage is that I lose all sight of the law as an end in itself. No happily married wife has hanging over the kitchen sink a list of all the things she ought to do to be a good wife. No happily married man needs a similar list. They make a general promise in front of a group of people and then live in such a way as to carry out that promise. I have not seen any wedding service yet in which the parties have to sign a list of fifty or a hundred do's and don'ts before they marry.
A second benefit growing out of this personal relationship is that it helps us to live up to our highest potentialities. When we fall in love with God and know how much He cares about us, we want to be the best kind of men and women that we can for His sake. Jesus, looking at the woman taken in adultery, saw her as an affectionate, loving, and kind woman—potentially a good wife and mother. He saw that in her. She started a life leading in that direction.When He looked at a coward like Peter, He saw him as a brave man ready to die for Him. Peter became that kind of man. When He looked at Zacchaeus, the hardened outcast of Jericho, He saw him as a generous member of the church. Zacchaeus became that kind of man. Although James and John lost their temper frequently, He saw them as patient men able to guide people into mature Christian love. They became that kind of men. We grow when somebody cares about us and inspires us to be what we can become.
A third advantage in the personal relationship in religion lies in being kept from legalism and Pharisaism and pseudo orthodoxy. Those for whom religion is grounded in love do not succumb to hardness of the spiritual arteries. Only when love fades, do rules begin to pile up. When you love someone you do not have to serve him by rules. In following the Lord the same thing is true. Of course, we need rules or laws to give detailed expression to principles, but love working through a clear conscience and a balanced mind leads us to do intuitively what is right. The man who loves does not observe rules because they are obligatory in a legal sense. His keeping of law is a natural consequence of his deep and ardent commitment to the Saviour as a Person.
Finally, in a religion of personal relationship we see the real meaning of great doctrines. The Sabbath now becomes a more intimate communion at the end of the week with the Saviour whom we love and serve every day of the week. This special time with Him sheds a radiance over all the days. We see tithe paying as a privilege of sharing with Someone we love in a common activity. Presenting tithe and offerings to the Lord becomes a "family" affair, not the dutiful response to a command. We enjoy the opportunity to participate.
The Spirit of prophecy becomes an expression of the love and wisdom by which God guides us and helps us. The standards of Christian living are seen as ways of attaining full and happy maturity in Christian living. The second coming becomes a time when we shall see the Saviour in person, ecstatic in the knowledge that there will never be a parting from Him throughout eternity.
Religion, then, is a personal relationship whose best symbols, even in a sinful world, are those of father-and-son, and husbandand-wife. In this setting concepts such as justification, sanctification, repentance, conversion, forgiveness, sin, and many others reveal their true meaning. It is for the Person, our Saviour, that we are living and that we are willing to die. The law is His law. The truth is His truth. The doctrine is His doctrine. In Him lies the reason for our being, the hope of our immortality. In this relationship we become all that we may be. The perfect Father ultimately has perfect sons; the perfect Husband ultimately has a perfect wife.
