There are some things more certain than death and taxes. If you are alive (and you are if you’re reading this), then you are related three ways: to God, to other people, and to the world.
Whether you ever thought of it or not, you do have some relation to God. But how near is that relation? Is God only a powerful Supreme Being, or has He come near to you and brought you near to Him? Has He only started the worlds spinning and drawn the curtain, or has He shown Himself to you and made you a part of His plans? Does the thought of God and His terrible judgments strike terror to your heart, or have you found Him to be your Father? Or, do you just prefer to forget God and say, “God’s in His heaven, and all’s well with the world”?
Now God is not only in His heaven, but He came down into our world—His world. The coming of Jesus Christ as perfect God and perfect Man to draw God and man together again is an established fact and experience. I say that Jesus Christ draws God and man together again because the “togetherness” in which man and God first delighted was broken by man’s sinful disobedience. The deepest springs of human nature were so incurably poisoned that cleansing and purifying could only be accomplished by the outside help of God. You, likewise, must look to power outside yourself for betterment. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”
When rebellious man comes to God for this renewal, this cleansing, this restoration, the process is so drastic and so painful to sinful nature that God likens it to a birth, a new beginning, a new creation. “Ye must be born again” is God’s express requirement. To change the rebellious mind of man into a loving, dependent submission to God requires the power of God Himself. But God will not usurp man’s power of choice. Man’s decision and surrender are his part. The transformation of man’s life can be imitated but not successfully duplicated. “It is the gift of God.“
The sure fact stands: all mankind is guilty before God and remains so until pardoned by Him. Is that your relation to God—guilty? Have you seen God’s way to forgiveness and pardon through Jesus Christ? Have you learned of His sacrifice and His blood which cleanses from all sin? Have you come to abandon your own opinions regarding your condition, agreeing with God to your guilt and shame? Will you prefer God’s Word to your own? Have you abandoned sin completely as God lays it bare before you and convicts you? Have you believed in the work of pardon accomplished by Jesus Christ in His death and resurrection? If you have so abandoned yourself to Jesus Christ for pardon, for cleansing, and for obedience, then your relation to God is right, straight, and plumb; your vertical relationship is then true and upright.
Some feel sure about this vertical relationship but not so sure about the horizontal relationship: with other people. How are you related to others? By love or by strife? Have you enemies you will not forgive? If so, God cannot forgive you. Can you say in truth of heart that you have no resentments or ill will? Can you further say that you have not only absence of ill will but the actual presence of love? Is your love for others a self-denying, sacrificial love or a kind of looking-down-on-others sort of love that wears a superior feeling while it sympathizes? Can you enjoy the prosperity of your rivals? Do you cater to the admiration of others, their praise of your person, your appearance, your talents, your possessions?
The carpenter’s square is true vertically only if the horizontal is level. So likewise is your relation to God truly upright only if your relations to men measure true. How, then, is your relation to other people? On the square?
Just as real as God and other people is the world about us. This “world” is the whole system of customs, ways, and standards by which men without God live. What is your relation to this social order? Are you living by these customs, ways, and standards? Are you devoting your time and affection and interest to the “arts,” the “sciences,” or to “wine, women, and song”? Are you a slave to the values of your social order or political order? The apostle had to count them all as worthless in relation to Christ. Likewise, the religion which is acceptable to the social orders of the world is not the religion of the meek and lowly Jesus. The most sophisticated of world cultures is, after all, pagan.
Let the question be put in the words of the Scriptures: Do you love the world? the things that are in the world? its entertainments, its pleasures, its goals which are designed to appeal to human honors and accomplishments, to satisfaction of the flesh and the carnal mind? Its religions are designed to appeal to the carnal mind too. What is your relation to this world? “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Could any pronouncement be clearer than this?
Lest you feel happy about your relation to God and to your fellowmen, consider carefully your relation to the world. This may well be the proof of your first two relationships.
God has an open book, the Bible, revealing His will in these three relationships: man to God, man to man, man to the world. No other authority exists for safe steering from here to eternity.
I urge you, while opportunity is at hand (for it may be cut off at any moment), to take serious, sober thought of your inescapable relation to God, for someday you will give account of yourself to Him and will answer as to what you did with this opportunity. As God clears your vertical relationship with Him, He will enable you to clear your relations with other people. He will likewise give you power to live above the sub-Christian standards of the world.
“If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
-by Harold Brenneman