Your ministry activities are not your relationship with God they are your service to Him. If your walk is constituted primarily through ministry then you are setting yourself up to walk away from God. Why? Because ministries are created and run by men and men will always let you down where God never will. I have seen all the time people leave their church because they were hurt in ministry. I have seen people leave the faith because they were hurt in ministry. That is like breaking up with someone you claim to love because you were reprimanded at work! Your work is different from your walk. If you find yourself today where your relationship with God is all about what you think you do for Him then you need to realize that it should be based upon everything He has done for you!
But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. Romans 5: 8 (NLT)
And that is always the great relationship killer isn't it? Selfishness. But we live in such a me-centric society that inevitably we end up making the relationship about us when it should always be about Him. Selfishness, as with all sin, can be traced back to pride. Realize what this means for us today. There are people who right now who are spending their lives in service to God without bothering to have a relationship with Him! Your salvation is not based upon your works! Here is the warning from Jesus:
"Not
everyone who calls out to me, 'Lord! Lord!' will enter the
Look at the ministry works listed in this warning! These folks cast demons out! They performed miracles! Yet on that last day they will discover that they had a lot of religion but no relationship. And religion will not get you into heaven. You may say to yourself, "Well, I don't break God's law." Not so fast. Remember, the law constituted over 613 different Mosaic laws. No one was able to keep them and if you broke one, you broke them all. That was the entire reason why God sent Jesus to earth to begin with! We cannot say that we have no sin:
If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth. But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness. If we claim we have not sinned, we are calling God a liar and showing that his word has no place in our hearts. 1John 1: 8-10 (NLT)
So how do we repair this? How do we develop the relationship? Let's make it simple today there are three things that are non-negotiable when it comes to successful relationships. First of all, as with anyone you have interest in, you need to get to know them better. You need to figure out their patterns and the way they think. You need to learn what makes them happy, sad, or even angry. You need to understand who they are, especially in relation to you. Have you ever stayed in a relationship where the other person made no effort to get to know you? Why would you? Well, God is not a big secretive God. He has given us a slice of exactly who He is in the Bible.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1: 1 (NIV)
