How God Asks You To Love Others: A Field Manual

By Mark Lambert

This book is all about you learning to distinguish your voice from God's, so that you can respond immediately when he taps you on the shoulder to do whatever he wants you to do in any of the relationships in your life. It will also help you to recognize that those people are not in your life accidentally, but have been designed as potential divine encounters before you were ever born, according to Ephesians 2:10. We were made to be relational, and he has called us to be "God with skin on" to impact the world around us. Are we looking for those opportunities, or just making it through our day without giving or getting the blessings he has planned for us and those in our lives? It's part of who you are, and what he created you to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646707324

Book preview

Relationships: God’s Operating Method

God is all about relationships. Everything he has done, is doing, and will ever do revolves around them. And he made the first move.

Someone has said, Life is all in how you spend the dash—the dash on your headstone between your birth date and your death date. What have you done so far, and what will you do from here to impact the content contained in the dash?

Think about this a minute. The God of the entire universe—who knows everything, is all-powerful, and is everywhere at once in time and space—wants nothing but a relationship with you. And he knows your dash. He wants nothing more than a deep-soul-knit-loving relationship with you. It is us, as humans, who have complicated it. But it really is simple.

As with salvation, it’s not complicated. It’s really hard to believe, but it’s not complicated. It’s elegant, simple, straightforward. Isn’t that how God operates?

So let’s start at the beginning. God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit—the Trinity—existed before there was time. Before the rotational sun-earth-moon dance clicked off that first second of time, they had a perfect relationship with each other, and they had a plan for us. Their relationship is the finest example of what a relationship looks like. It’s seamless, integrated, intimate, and very genuine. They have always had that kind of relationship.

It’s hard to wrap your brain around that because we are used to things with beginnings. As with the Trinity, they have always existed. And so has their relationship. At some point, they said, Let’s make man in our image. In other words, let’s have a relationship with a creation that can enjoy a relationship as we do now. They are for us and with us. And our responding to them brings them joy.

But to be genuine, it has to be something that really wants to have a relationship. Something that can choose to have a relationship or not, rather than a robot that must love us.

And that’s not just what they wanted in the beginning, they want it still.

Think about this a minute. The God of the entire universe—who knows everything, is all-powerful, and is everywhere at once in time and space—wants nothing but a relationship with you.

As you may know, we were presented with this ideal situation, and we didn’t do too well when faced with a perceived chance to be equal with God. Our hubris took over, and we messed up that part of the whole plan and, in the process, broke the fellowship they worked so hard to create. Instead of believing God, we believed the first one who thought he could be equal with God: Satan. He is still trying to drag us down with him to this day.

If it had been me, that would have been the end of the story. Well, we tried, guys, and it didn’t work out. Not a bad concept, just poor execution on the human’s part. But as you know, that was not the end of the story. Because they still wanted a relationship with us, they created the sacrificial priestly system to allow us on an indirect basis to enjoy the power of God to forgive our sins and continue enjoying the relationship.

Acquiescing to sin definitely wasn’t God’s preferred choice for us, but once we messed it up, he had a way to make it possible to still connect with him but on a different level, through the Old Testament sacrificial system. Not one-to-one, directly walking and talking together, but a way was made to continue the relationship. And over time, he made it increasingly more personal.

They created a more direct way to have that relationship again, through Jesus Christ’s atonement for that breach in our connectedness, if we accept that gift. And then they sent the Holy Spirit to connect us directly to the Trinity. It was or is God himself dwelling inside us, interceding for us and binding us and the Trinity together, at least in the spiritual realm. So it went from perfect, to distantly separated, to systematized regulatory law relationships. Then to God with us, and now to God living in us.

Why did they do all that? One reason: they still wanted an intimate relationship with us. It takes place in the context of a broken world, with imperfections in our spirits and bodies, as a result of the fall, but it’s about as close to the garden as they could make it. The opportunity is there for it to be as soul-knit, intimately close as it can be this side of heaven.

And the impact of the relationship doesn’t stop there. Even today, God chooses to use relationships between people to get his work done in concert with the Holy Spirit. He could do it himself, but for his own reasons, he desires to work with us in the context of relationships to do his work. Relationships in the workplace, the neighborhood, the church, and the home to accomplish what he wants to do in people we come in contact with. I’m certain the angels were saying, "You are going to use them to change the world? Man, you are God!"

Define Relationship

So what is a relationship? You know that feeling of wanting to have someone special with you to see things on vacation or to see a movie with? A person who shares the fun and the laughter with you but is also there to absorb the pain when your parents die. Someone to share your life with. To know the deep longings of your heart. To look past all the personality quirks and failures. That’s a relationship.

I want to spend time with you. I love being around you and having you around me. And that’s what God wants with you. He wants you to share your life with him. And he wants to build things into your life so you will become more like him. So you look more like him every day.

But there are different levels of relationship. The examples I gave are about a special relationship. A close friend or a spouse. There are other kinds of relationships that start at a more surface level but can, over time, develop into either a special relationship or into a closer friendship.

Regardless of what Facebook might try to tell you, have you ever thought about the combination of people who only you know and come in contact with? No one else in all of time has the combination of contacts that you do. You were made for some specific duties. Christians are all priests, and therefore, we carry a special responsibility to make our interactions—our relationships—count. At least that’s what I read in 1 Peter 2:9: But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

A favorite scene from the movie You’ve Got Mail is the scene where Tom Hanks is trying to repair the relationship with Meg Ryan’s character that has been marred by his gargantuan book company putting her small, quaint, family-owned bookstore out of business.

When Hanks says, It was just business, it wasn’t personal, you may remember her response: What’s that supposed to mean? I’m so sick of that. All that means is it wasn’t personal to you. But it was personal to me. And what’s so wrong with being personal anyway? Because whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.

Meg has a point. Did you ever think of scripture as being personal to you? Consider Psalm 139:13–16: For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. That sounds pretty personal to