Bearing God’s Image: Relationship Status

If you’ve seen the movie “The Social Network” you know that Facebook turned a major corner in its success by adding relationship status to profiles. At our core as humans, we long for relationships of various types. Those include family, friends, and “significant others.” We need these relationships to fulfill a basic purpose of our existence. To relate.

God created us to relate in 3 ways. You’ll find a common theme again here in loving God, loving people, and doing stuff. First, He created us to relate to Him – “love God”. As we discussed last week, we were created in His image. And now we add in the fact that all our relationships should reflect our relationship with God. If we honor Him in all we do, it makes our relationships with each other much simpler.

The second relationship is to one another “love People”. These range from our closest relationships such as spouses and children out to our acquaintances in work and communities. If we put the other person in these relationships ahead of ourselves, we are reflecting the image that God has shown us with His own sacrifice of His Son on the Cross.

Finally, we are created to related to the world around us. This is the “do stuff” challenge. These are incidental connections where we can make a difference in someone’s life. It’s as simple as handing someone the $20 bill they accidentally dropped or passing out water bottles at a local event like Sanger Sellabration this past Saturday. On the other end of the spectrum, it’s packing yourself up and going to the ends of the earth to share Christ and serve others.

If we take the challenge into our family directly – we must daily challenge ourselves to relate to the people who live in our homes.  If our relationship with our spouse is not modeled with respect and honor, then we have little hope of achieving that with our kids.  Equally important, if our only relationship with our teens is one of discipline, then we are missing out on getting to know the people who are quickly developing and growing into the adults they will be.  I’m certainly not saying you should be best friends, but relationship requires conversation and quality time together.  Make certain to work that into your busy schedules.

Regardless of where you started reading this post, I hope you’ve found a reason to grow closer to God, put the significant people in your life above your own objectives, and finally to find a way to serve others in you community or around the world.