Your relationship with God (part four)

Love the Lord your God with all your heart (Deuteronomy 6:5).

How does Jesus want you to feel about Him?  What does He expect from your relationship with Him?  The answer can be summed up in four words: love, trust, gratitude, and obedience.

More than anything else, Jesus wants you to love Him.  He has loved you with an everlasting love, a love so committed to your welfare that He gave His life to make you His forever.  He looks for your love in return, a love that sees Him as the most important person in your life.  He wants your relationship with Him to trump all other priorities.

The Son of God also wants you to trust Him.  He has proven His commitment to you on the cross where He suffered so you could be spared.  He has proven His wisdom by the teachings of His ministry.  He has proven His power to make good on every promise; nothing is impossible for the Savior who broke free of death to take care of His followers.  He has proven His dependability beyond all doubt; He wants you to have complete and unswerving faith in Him.

Christ deserves your thanks and praise.  He gave you life; He has filled that life with blessings great and small, chief among them love and value and purpose.  You are not an accident.  You are not a mistake.  You are a child of God, a sinner redeemed by Christ and adopted into His family by grace.  He has rescued you from a life controlled by sin and wasted on frivolous things.  To say 'thank you' is appropriate; to tell others how great He is should be a priority.

And Jesus wants your obedient service. We are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works (Ephesians 2:10).  Instead of wasting time, Jesus wants us to share His love by helping those in need.  Instead of wasting money, Christ wants us to invest it growing the kingdom of God.  Instead of focusing on our own needs and problems, the Savior wants us to look at each other with the same concern He has for each of us and get moving. 

So how would you describe your relationship with Jesus?  My hope is that you would say it is characterized by trust, gratitude, obedience, and most importantly by love.