The Upper Register Blog

Two Sundays ago, I taught an adult Sunday School class on Developing a Personal Relationship with Christ, or How to Regain Your First Love (both handout and audio are available for free download from the New Life Burbank website - thanks to Charles Sy for putting it up).

Some Reformed people are allergic to the language of “having a personal relationship with Christ.” I understand why. It carries a lot of baggage from its use and misuse in evangelicalism. Believe me, I know, since I was raised in a cult called “The Assembly” that practiced a higher life spirituality that was quite successful at creating Pharisees (who thought they had achieved a superior spirituality) and burned out Christians (who threw in the towel because they never could).

The temptation for us Reformed people is to over-react and end up with a very cerebral, stoical expression of the Christian life that is loveless, prayerless, and cold. As with practically every issue, and due to the passions of our frail human nature, the pendulum so easily swings in the opposite direction. Having bottomed-out on the narcissism and shallowness of evangelical piety, we reject all the subjective aspects of the Christian life and opt instead for more objective expressions of piety — doctrine, corporate worship, and the sacraments.

Don’t get me wrong. These things are all valid and necessary. The problem is that they cannot serve as a substitute for a personal relationship with Christ. I find corporate worship and the public means of grace most beneficial to my growth in grace when I am maintaining a healthy prayer life throughout the week. If I am distant from the Lord throughout the week, it takes much more effort to enjoy the means of grace in public worship and it becomes much easier to sit through a church service without any spiritual benefit.

In my Sunday School lesson, I said that the key to having a personal relationship with Christ is faith — not just faith in the sense that I know that I believe the gospel. To have a personal relationship with Christ involves what I call repeated “actings of faith,” that is, continually talking to the Father through Christ, or directly to Christ himself. I know, the word “talking” sounds goofy, perhaps too intimate, as if we are bringing the holy and transcendent God down to our level as just another buddy that we can chat with. I don’t mean that. I use the word “talking” because it gets at the idea of having a relationship. We talk to the Father through Christ, or directly to Christ, about anything and everything that is on our minds, anything and everything that is causing us anxiety. We cast our burdens on the Lord. That is what a personal relationship is, right?

Of course, by talking to God, I mean “prayer.” But the problem with “prayer” is that it sounds too formal, as if we have to have a set time, a set pattern, a devotional, or whatever. That is good too, but we also need to have a lively, humble, continual relationship with Christ throughout the day, as we walk through our daily lives. We need to be able to shoot up “arrow prayers” to the Lord as we go along. We need to get used to the idea that the risen Lord Jesus Christ is really alive and really present in our hearts by his Spirit. And so we must relate to, talk to, and rest up him by repeated actings of faith throughout the day and throughout the week.

Anyway, that’s just a brief synopsis. Download the handout and audio to get the whole thing. I plan to expand these thoughts into a six week Sunday School series in the future. I particularly want to show how the private element connects with the corporate, i.e., attending upon the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments. The two must go hand-in-hand.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 10:48 am and is filed under Prayer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.