Rebuilding Our Relationship with God
C.S. Lewis once said that “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” How does our relationship with God grow when we stumble?According to Proverbs 3:5-6 (NKJV), “5. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; 6. In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths.”As this scripture says, we are to trust in the Lord with everything we have, acknowledging who He is and He, in turn, will direct our paths.When we stumble in our relationship with God and acknowledge our transgression against Him, He picks us up again and starts anew, like a child on a bike.As heirs of God through Jesus Christ, we are called to be set apart from the world around us and renew our minds.Our relationship with God stems from our obedience to Him and our desire to bring glory to His Name, but can we do this when we are giving into our earthly desires?Galatians 5:16-17 (NKJV) says, “16. I say then, ‘Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. 17. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish.”
We are called to walk in the Spirit and as such, with the Spirit’s guidance, our relationship with God continues forward.
However, like little children, we sometimes need the Holy Spirit to hold our hand and guide us in the right direction. As Christians, if we want to rebuild our relationship with God, we sometimes have to go back to our child-like mindset of putting our trust into our Heavenly Father.In the Gospels, Jesus talks about little children in regard to faith and humility and in the Gospel of Matthew, we see this is Matthew 18:4.So, how do we as Christians learn to rebuild our relationship with God?
Related Post: Humble Yourself By Submitting to God’s Plan.
Through my own experiences, I’ve come to recognize a couple of lessons about rebuilding my relationship with God.
1). Learning to Humble Myself Before God
James 4:10 (NKJV) says, “10. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.”Learning to humble myself before God is not an easy task because of my own desire to do what I please and I’ve noticed how this affects my understanding of God and my relationship with Him.However, through an understanding of what it means to be humble, I learned to rebuild my relationship with God by trusting Him and humbling myself.
By humbling ourselves before God, we acknowledge that He is the person we should put our focus on.
2). Stopping and Listening for God’s direction
In order for us to rebuild our relationship with God, it requires us to stop and listen for God’s direction.In life, we can become so busy that we neglect to spend time in God’s Word and cultivating that intimacy with Him that we need for spiritual nourishment.Psalms 46:10 (NKJV) says, “10. Be Still and Know I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!”
When we learn to stop and listen to God’s voice, we can understand more about who He is and what He wants from us: to exalt His name among the nations.
3). Cultivating the relationship is Not Easy
As stated before, rebuilding our relationship with God isn’t going to be easy. When we let ourselves become fixated on the desires of the world instead of God, we stumble but we get back up and try again.When we seek to rebuild our relationship with God, we have to first ask ourselves: Are we rebuilding our relationship with God in order to bring Him glory?C.S. Lewis stated, “Man is to be understood only in his relationship with God.”
As Christians, we should learn not just from these lessons but from the ones in our own relationship with God.
The understanding of our relationship with God stems from who we are as Christians, even more as human beings. If we are to rebuild our relationship with God, we might have to begin as little children, trusting our Heavenly Father and the Spirit to guide us in the direction He has called for us.