I want to preface this post by pointing out that I am not a professional counselor. The following advice is from my own experience, and it is on my heart to share. I’ve been married for ten years and have three children (8, 5, 4) with my beautiful wife. We’ve had our ups and downs and finally seem to have landed pretty solidly on the up side. While the details are private, I believe I’ve learned a few things from the experience. So here it goes…

Relationships are not easy. But they are so important to our lives as people and as Christians. I believe we are made for relationship. We are made in the image of God, Who is a three-in-one (triune) being. God’s very existence is in community. We are made in His likeness.

Point: God wants to be expressed in and to the world. When we live in relationship with others, we are an expression of God. We are an image of Him. So relationships matter.

Alas, God has an Enemy, who stands to oppose any expression of Him. Therefore, this Enemy stands against relationships that bear the image of the divine. I believe that the two highest images of God in the world today are: 1) the ekklesia, the body of Christ living in community, and 2) marriage, a man and a woman living out a covenant bond to each other.

In the Triune Community of God, He expresses Himself as selfless love. I don’t know quite how all that works, but if you read the New Testament, you see Jesus caring for the Father’s purposes, and the Father caring for His Son’s desires. It is a mutually selfless love. We express Him when we live out this kind of relationship.

I didn’t understand this until I was married. For a while. Years, in fact. Fortunately, God and my wife are both full of grace and forgiveness. Looking back, I see some major areas where I went wrong. I’m going to share a big one today. Maybe I’ll share others later.

Contract Relationships Versus Covenant Relationships

In America, we live in a contractual society. Everything is done by contract. Your lawn service, car repairs, mortgage, rental agreement, phone service, and so on are all governed by little contracts. Sign here and we’ll do xyz and you’ll pay 123. If either side doesn’t hold up the contractual agreement, the other side can rightfully do whatever it takes to force them to satisfy their end of the deal. Contract relationships are all about our own expectations. “Are you meeting my needs?” is the main concern. Sadly, some marriages today are even entered into with actual contracts.

The advantage of business contracts is that *usually* the conditions are known to both parties. (Of course, you always have to read the fine print before you sign.) However, one of the pitfalls that I have experienced in approaching marriage this way is that neither side really knows the others’ conditions. This turns into a destructive guessing game as each side swings and misses. Frustration sets in as real needs are not met. Tempers flair and accusations fly. Communication breaks down. People are hurt. Marriages become broken.

Perhaps some of this can be repaired and restored, or even prevented by expressing these things to each other with love. I believe this would help many marriages and marriages-to-be. But I don’t think it is the ultimate answer, because the focus is still on personal expectations and requirements that one feels the other person should satisfy.

In contrast to America’s contract laden society, biblical Israel operated by covenant. God made covenants with His people, and His people covenanted with Him. Marriages were made by a covenant between the couple to each other and to God. And of course, Jesus Christ came to establish with us a new covenant by which we are forgiven and receive the Holy Spirit to indwell us with Christ’s divine life. Covenants in the bible are a big deal!

Israel’s notion of covenant was much deeper than our modern concept of keeping contracts. Contracts are written with clauses that give directions in the event that one side breaks the conditions. But a covenant made by God is permanent and unchangeable, because He is unchangeable. He cannot lie or back out because He is perfect and must abide by His own promise. God’s promises are never “made to be broken”. This theme is seen throughout the Old Testament as Israel wanders from God, but God never forsakes His promises to them. The books of Hosea and Malachi strongly portray this aspect of God’s love, both foreshadowing God’s ultimate fulfilling of His promise in Christ.

The Jewish covenant was not about meeting one’s own needs. It was about meeting someone else’s needs. First Samuel 18:3 says, “Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul.” Jonathan loved David just as he loved himself. This was his motivation: selfless love. If you look further into the Jewish covenant, you will find that it is based on deep devotion to the subject of the covenant. In fact the devotion is absolute. The intention was that where a covenant was formed, the two sides became as though they were one. They were no longer seen as two separate entities, but instead were seen as one new person.

Living in a Covenant

Perhaps at this point, if you made it this far, you’re wondering what the practical application of all this is.  I can’t say that I have all the answers here, but I have personally seen a world of difference in letting go of all my expectations of what I should be getting out of my marriage, and out of relationships with others as well.  It is no easy task to let go of such things.  But Christ is both our example and our strength in this area.  As He said, “we must lose our life to gain it”, and “the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve.”  Living by Christ’s life will lead you straight to the death of your need for self-preservation.  He will lead you into selfless, demandless, expectationless love for others.  When I walked through this door (I’m not perfect at it by any means), I realized that I could never go back.  Nor would I want to.  Seeing my wife’s attitude towards me change as I give up competing for my own desires has completely changed my outlook on this.  Of course, she is more willing now to accommodate things that I desire or prefer, but that’s not the point.  It is truly freeing to let go of the expectations and love others with no demands in return.  It changes how you see others, and how they see you.  I am confident that you will truly see the heart of God.

So, lean into Christ, and let go…

Some helpful resources:

Covenant Marriage by Gary Chapman

The Community Life of God by Milt Rodriguez
      Author’s Page
      Kindle

Community 101 by Gilbert Bilezikian

Blog: Rediscovering the Triune Nature of God by Frank Viola

The structure of the pomegranate is rich in its similarity to Christ and the saints. The outer shell is its “flesh”, and inside, the seeds make up the actual structure of the fruit.  The point is called a “crown”.  The seeds represent our portion of Christ that was brought out of His side when His flesh was pierced on the cross.

The pomegranate is FULL of life. An apple, for example, is full of flesh. Almost the whole apple is flesh. But the pomegranate is full of life giving seeds! As Paul said in 1 Corinthians, the first Adam became a living soul, but the last Adam (Christ) became a life-giving Spirit (seed)!

Let’s look closer at the seed now. When you look at the seed, you see the juice; that’s what gives it the red color. You see the juice because the seed is transparent. If you could drain the juice out of the seed, the seed would resemble a pearl, or a precious stone.

The seeds are the saints, the bride of Christ! Living, precious stones filled with the blood of Christ, arranged and built together perfectly inside the Person of Jesus Christ (represented by the flesh and the crown)!

This is what the Father sees when He looks at Jesus; the saints assembled together as one body within Christ. And He sees each of us as a precious stone, so pure that He can see the blood of the Lamb – the life of Christ – inside of us! The Father, standing outside of time, sees the Son and His bride in their finished, perfect form!

Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. …Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.” (John 6:53, 56)

When we partake of the blood, the life of Christ, we become like the pomegranate seed. The blood of Christ, the only blood that death could not overcome, makes us pure in spirit, gives us a new heart, and builds us together into one body!

The title question comes from an old hymn we sing in our church. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how well I know Christ, as a Person, and how it is that I might know Him more.

I’m part of an “organic” church that meets in a home. For most of my life, I’ve been part of traditional churches where a pastor preaches on Sunday, the congregation listens, and kids go to Sunday School. If someone would have asked me if I knew Jesus, I would have probably said, “Sure, I know Him. I’m saved. I said the sinner’s prayer and was baptized. I read my Bible. So, yeah, I know Him.”

I’ve realized in the past few years that that answer seems to fall flat. The truth is that Christ has often been only a segment of my life, and I really didn’t know Him very intimately.  I don’t want to just know facts about Christ, nor do I want the extent of my knowing of Christ to be based on the event of saying a prayer and getting baptized. Although those are important events, isn’t there more to having a relationship with Christ than that?

As a husband, I don’t presume to know all about my wife just because we said marriage vows at a wedding ceremony. Knowing my wife is much deeper than that. It takes work, sacrificial love, conversation, quality time together. And after over 12 years of knowing my wife, I am still far from truly knowing her (which is an exciting thought because there is so much more to be explored and known).

In our organic church, our desire, goal, and hope is to learn who Jesus the Christ is. Not the facts and statistics, but the Person. Who is this Jesus? What makes Him tick? What is He all about? What is He up to? What does He want from me?

How do we do that? Well, that’s a long story, but it started with someone describing Him to us. Someone who has gone down this path of knowing Him deeply before us. Someone who could remove the veil of this world and reveal the true nature and person of Christ. Someone who could cut through our pasts of religion, legalism, intellectualism, and self-centeredness. And by this expanded view into who Christ is, we began to be able to see Him ourselves. We began to share Him amongst ourselves, beholding His endless riches!

Now, imagine you asked me to describe the moon to you. I’ve seen the moon plenty of times. I’ve even seen it through a telescope, so I could give you some general features of the moon. It’s usually a sort of white color, it is round, and it has craters all over it. Now, imagine asking an astronaut who has walked on the moon what it is like. Of course, they can give you the facts and figures, but they can also give you the first hand experience of actually walking and living in the moon’s environment. That is what this person (actually it was a few people) did for us. They shared with us the land of Christ through which they had actually walked.

This sighting of Christ did not occur overnight, and as with my wife, there is still much more to explore and see of Jesus. As a church, we pursue Him together in many different ways, most of which look nothing like what most people would consider “church”. We pursue Him together as we live in community with each other. We are learning to live together by His indwelling life, and what it means to be an expression of Him in this world.

So back to the original question. Have you heard Him, seen Him, known Him? I thought I had. But thankfully, I listened to the still, small whisper inside that said, “Maybe there’s more.”