A lot of life is about relationships.  But sometimes, when people are difficult and we’re busy – we can get to thinking – “Is this whole relationships thing really worth it?”

It’s great to with you for a fresh new week on this program, ‘A Different Perspective’. Over the last three weeks we’ve been sharing some time together to talk about dealing with difficult people, we all have them it’s a fact of life, people are difficult sometimes. They wear different faces and we end up having a siege mentality so learning how to deal with all of that makes a huge difference to our lives.

This week I’d like to look at the other side of that coin, in a series of five programs I’ve called building lasting relationships, let’s face it when it comes right down to it, its our relationships that really add meaning to life. The eternal relationship with God, our husbands and wives and families and friends and colleagues, those relationship with those people, well, that’s what really matters right? So how do we build lasting relationships?

Have a think about your relationships, between husband and wife, with friends, colleagues at work, what are they like? Are they rich and rewarding a source of incredible joy to you, or do have this nagging sense that they should be better? I haven’t got time, I’m too busy I’m too tired, I’m, too something. On a scale from 1 to 10 if you looked at the relationships that you have, the ones that are important to you what’s the richness and satisfaction of your relationships?

The reality in today’s world is that mostly people are very busy, it seems to be an extreme, we’re either really, really busy or life’s really quiet and lonely, there doesn’t seem to be much balance for people in between those two extremes. I heard a story about email on radio the other day that one working day in every ten in offices now involves answering emails. The people are answering their emails at night and on weekends and they’re just so connected they can’t get away.

I read another article in the newspaper, it was about the etiquette of cancelling social engagements because we were too busy or tired or whatever. It’s pretty sad isn’t it? We get conned by the advertising that its all about me and I’m important I’ve got to be busy and I’ve got this to do and that to do and it becomes a cocktail of work and business and selfishness. And relationships, well, they can come down at the bottom can’t they?

Come on, sometimes the relationships that are really important – because relationships take time; they take effort they take energy, we’re so busy doing other things, come on, that relationships end up at the bottom of our list. Let me ask you, compared to when you were younger, how much time do you really spend with people that matter in your life today? I mean just husbands and wives, Jacqui my wife lights up my day but I can get so busy on stuff I end up trading the diamonds for stones.

Let me ask you another question, how rich do you want your relationships to be? Paul the Apostle a couple of thousand years ago has a beautiful about God’s family, one that we can apply right through life. It’s about the church being the body of Christ, hang with me, let me just share some of it with you. He said:

You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body, your body has many parts, limbs and organs and cells but no matter how many parts you can name you’re still one body. (1 Corinthians 12:12)

It’s exactly the same with Christ, by means of His one Spirit we all say goodbye to our partial and piecemeal lives. Which each used to live independently calling our own shots but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which He has the final say in everything. I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant and not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge, it’s all the different but similar parts arranged and functioning together.

If foot says look I’m not as elegant as hand embellished with all those rings I guess I don’t belong to the body, would that make it so? Or if ear said I’m not beautiful like the eye, limpid and expressive, I don’t deserve a place on the head, would you want to remove that from your body? If the body was all eye how could it hear? If it was all ear how could it smell? As it is we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.

But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blow up into self importance, because no matter how significant you are it’s only because of the fact that you’re part of the body. An enormous eye or a gigantic hand wouldn’t be significant it would be a monster, what we have is one body with many parts, each with its proper size and its proper place, no part’s important on its own. Can you imagine the eye telling the hand “get lost, I don’t need you,” or the head telling the foot, “You’re fired, your job’s been fazed out?”

As a matter of fact in practice it works the other way, the lower part the more basic are the more necessary. You can live without an eye but not without a stomach, when it’s a part of your own body you’re concerned with it makes no difference whether the part is visible or closed, higher or lower, you give dignity to it and honour to it just as it is without making comparisons. That’s the way God designed our bodies and it’s a model for understanding our lives together.

Good stuff isn’t it? Beautiful picture, you and I aren’t significant because we’re just good at stuff, we’re significant because we’re part of a group of people, we’re in relationship with other people. Just imagine you can be the best concert violinist, a veritable virtuoso but without an audience, so what? You can be the best hairdresser or butcher or plumber, with no clients so what? And where would the virtuoso violinist be without a hairdresser or a butcher or a plumber?

Come on, God is saying that His church, His family is the body of Christ brought together by His Holy Spirit. But it’s like that in just about every social structure too, we’re meant to be a part of a body; the body of Christ is special because the Holy Spirit’s involved. But look at the family, we’re part of a family we have different roles but we’re together. In work we have different roles but we compliment one another; in sporting teams they have different roles but you need all of the roles.

We’re all different, sometimes very, very different, but unless we are a body, a whole, the thing doesn’t work. We’re not a bunch of solo prima-donna opera singers, we’re a choir, we’re a team and significance is about us taking just the special thing that we are. God made you so specially, significance is taking that and being all that we’re meant to be in the context of a relationships.

Tomorrow we’re going to look a bit more at the fact that we’re all different and that can be tough and it can be annoying sometimes too. But let me tell you it’s an awesome thing that you are different from me, that you can do things that I can’t and I can do things that you can’t. And when we say, look relationships are important to me that’s a starting point, to me it’s so important to understand that I’m different and I’m special and who I am and what I can do is unique and beautiful.

And you’re different and you’re special and who and what you are is unique and different and you know, what you are or what I am doesn’t matter unless we have each other, unless we have other people. And that’s how God planned it, that’s why He has a church, that’s why He has a family, that’s why He adopts us into His home, because He wants us to be in relationship with other people. Rich relationships, significant relationships, become richer and more significant when we value who we are and value who other people are. It’s God’s plan.

When you look around at other people, one of the first things you notice is that they’re all different.  And sometimes, just sometimes mind you, those differences can really get to you.

Deep down, one of the things we all hunger for is to have rich and satisfying relationships. I see so many people looking for that something and trying to find it in things or career or, when all along what they’re really looking for is meaning in life, meaning, real meaning comes through relationships. Now I happen to be one of those people that believes that there’s one particular relationship, a relationship with Jesus that’s the most important of all when we’re looking for real meaning, and we’ll talk about that one later this week.

But God made us to be community creatures not hermits and so building lasting relationship is so important in our lives, but so many of us were never taught exactly how to do that. Riding your bike is easy peasy once someone shows us how and we’re fallen off a few times right? It’s the same thing with relationships and one of the things that can really stop us from building those lasting relationships is the fact that we’re all different, and those differences can grate on us to the point where we just give up.

I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember jigsaw puzzles, they don’t seem to use them much any more these days; they’re a much humbler form of entertainment than I guess computer games are. But you get the puzzle and it was 1000 pieces and you’d tip them out of the box and think, “Oh man how am I going to get these together?” They’re all part of the one picture, all different shapes and sizes, they look the same but they’re different and they all have to go in exactly the right place to make up the picture.

Now you either love the challenge or find it absolutely frustrating, bit like that with people. You think of the people in your life at the moment, the ones that are similar to you, some are fast some are slow, some are good communicators others aren’t, some are generous, some are thrifty, some are morning people, some are night people, some are detailed people, some are big picture people. There are so many different dimensions of the differences between people and those differences rub us the wrong way sometimes.

It’s a bit like that jigsaw puzzle we think, “Well I’d like to have all these relationships in place, I’d like to have the picture together but you know something, it’s just such a hard work I couldn’t be bothered.” Relationships can be frustrating but we can’t live without them. Just look at those dimensions of difference again, fast and slow, some people and I’m one of them, we like to get things done quickly we’re outcome focussed we’re always planning and trying to achieve outcomes. Other people, well they’re much more leisurely and their slower and those people and the relationship people, they create relationships much better than fast people like me.

Some people are good communicators, but others aren’t, it’s just as well we’re not all preachers. Some people are generous, boy we need those, and other people they’re thrifty and you know we need those too. Some people do really well at the detail; other people understand the big picture really well.

Actually when you look at those differences, we need them all for things to work well and that’s what the Apostle Paul wrote all those years ago, he said:

I want you to think about how all this make you more significant not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge, it’s all the different but similar parts arranged and functioning together. If the foot said, “I’m not elegant like the hand, embellished with all those rings, I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would it make it so? If the ear said “I’m not beautiful like the eye, limpid and expressive, I don’t deserve to have a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from your head? If the body was all eye how could it hear? If it was all ear how could it smell? As it is we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where He wants it. (1 Corinthians 12:14-18)

I love how Paul starts that off you know this sense that being a part of the body different but similar meant to compliment one another makes us more significant rather than less significant. You know when all the instruments of the orchestra play the one piece together that’s when life really sings. We need each other, now sure differences come with pluses and minuses, the pluses though are that we benefit from each other.

My wife, Jacqui who works in the ministry she is a detailed person, if you ring up the ministry or you write to us chances are she’ll be involved in responding to that; and she cares for people who ring and she’s always wanting to fix this up and make sure that CD goes out, you know she loves the detail. I tell you without someone like that in our ministry it just wouldn’t work, I’m a big picture person I like the story, I’m a story teller and Gary our Assistant Director, Gary’s a really relational sort of a guy, he binds things together really, really well.

We’re all different but we benefit from one another’s differences even though the differences sometimes rub us up the wrong way. Why did God put those differences there? I think to teach us humility, to teach us not to be the top dog, to help us to learn that real significance happens when we lay down our pride and our rights and our haughtiness and live in relationships and community. In society for instance we lay down our right we’re subject to the law it’s the price of being in community, now that’s the macro scale.

And the micro scale it’s the same thing, if I want to live in community with you I have to lay down some of my rights, I have to let you be different to me. To have my way all the time to make everyone look like me to have everyone nod when I speak, my way or the high way that’s not community, that’s not relationship its not reality. In real life people are different and they have different perspectives and by and large that creates a rich tapestry.

People who are closed off to that are stunted, people who are open to that are some of the smartest people I know, as long as they do that in a discerning way. I’ve learned so much by accepting other people for who they are, for their differences and learning from them. Does that mean that I’ve become just like them? Of course not, but I can take on the good things from them to make me richer.

A man called Graeme, who mentored me taught me how to listen and how to reflect and how to think about things. Another man called Hake one of the smartest people I know taught me never to have pride in my own ideas, you know he was so smart and he’d hear something better from someone else, he’d lay down his own idea and pick that idea up. A young man that I know, Nick how to burrow into detail and be systematic, the list goes on. I look nothing like them but I’m so much the richer for having been blessed by these different people.

Now to be sure one another’s differences can drive us nuts, but here it is, God made us all different, very different and this diversity is His idea, it’s His choice and when we get with that plan what a rich life. Accepting other people just as they are, right here, right now is the starting point of rich relationships. The point isn’t to change them but as they discover who we are and we discover who they are what are the good bits from each other that we can share that can contribute to one another’s lives.

And when that happens relationships become richer, they become deeper because that’s the fabric, that’s the rich tapestry that God always planned. We can try and fight the differences, we can try and make other people like us, let’s get a revelation – doesn’t work – because they’re just different. When we get with God’s plan, when we enjoy those differences, when we benefit from those differences, when we accept other people just the way they are, now that’s relationship!

Sometimes when you take a good, hard look at your various relationships with different people, you sense that not all of them are what they should be – so how do you breathe new life into them?

Relationships are a funny thing we can be close to someone at one level but when it comes to really connecting with them at a meaningful level we can be a million miles apart. We’ve all seen it socially; this couple looks like they have it all together, but a home they hardly talk. So often relationships are just relationships of convenience, there’s nothing deep or rich or meaningful to them. And so life starts feeling well pretty hollow right? I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a cocktail party but people stand around talking about superficial things then when they run out of stuff to say they make an excuse like “I just need to duck of to the bathroom,” or “I’m just going to get another drink.”

We can’t live our lives at that cocktail party level, well I guess we can, but what an empty hollow life it is, and that’s the sort of life that we’re encouraged to live these days in all sorts of ways. So if we have a string of relationships like that, superficial and hollow, what can you and I do to start turning those relationships around into lasting relationships, not next week, not next month, today?

Let’s just take a moment to survey the landscape of relationships in our lives, just think through the deep rich ones, the superficial ones, the people you love but seem to be a long way off, the people you butt up against who drive you bonkers at work. There’s quite a variety isn’t there? Now out of all of those I just ask you, choose one or maybe two that matter to you the most, just think of the people and the relationships and where they are, the one or two that you’d really like to lift up to a new level, richer, closer, deeper. A month, six months, looking back that you’d like to say, “You know I started something back then, I’m so glad that I did it.”

Closeness, intimacy, connecting with someone, is so rewarding isn’t it but so often we don’t know how, we just don’t have a sense of, “Where do I start?” “I’m supposed to be close to my wife or husband but we’re a million miles away, how to I start? My boss at work is such a nice person but you know we just don’t connect, where do I begin?”

When we have drifted apart or perhaps never been as close as we’d like to be to someone or as close as we know we should be, we need to do something about it. Ok have you got those people, one or two relationships in your mind? Let me ask you something are you prepared to do something about them, are you prepared to invest into those relationships? Because if so, I’m going to pray for you right now.

Father, you know each one of us; you know the people that you’ve put next to us; you know the grace and the blessing that you have planned in those relationships, and Father you know how lousy we can be at this sometimes. So Father I ask in the name of Jesus Christ that you would do something in each one of us today, that you would breathe a new spirit, a new life, a new desire into our hearts to have this relationships. And as we just spend a little bit of time together today Father I pray that you will start a new work, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Well, we’re going to look at two things, I like to keep things simple, I don’t know about you but I listen to a program on the radio but I can’t remember five dot points. So two things you and I can do to breathe new life into a relationship. Yesterday on the program we spoke about differences, the fact that I’m different to you, you have different strengths to me I have different weaknesses to you, we both need each other just like the body needs eyes and ears and mouth and nose and hands and feet and kidneys and stomaches.

The body needs all of those things, they’re all part of the one body, but they’re different and sometimes we can sit there comparing and looking at each other and say, “Well you know I’m not as good looking as that one or I’m not as smart as that one,” and “Oh I wish that one was faster like I am.” We compare, what a waste, an ear is an ear, a nose is a nose, an eye is an eye, a mouth is a mouth and that’s just the way it was meant to be, praise God!

So, the first thing that we can do to breathe new life into a relationship is to resign from the renovation committee. Over, no more, I am not going to try to change this person any more, instead I’m going to accept them for who they are, today, tomorrow, the next day and for the rest of our lives together, I am no longer going to try and change them.

When you and I take a decision like that it shows. The other person all of a sudden starts to sense that we’re happy with who they are, we accept them just the way they are. Maybe your teenager, you’d like them to go out and get a real job but they just want to be an artist, and I know it’s not a real job, but if that’s who they are can we accept them for that. Can we validated them? Can we encourage them. Can we say, “You know the world needs artists go on be a great artist.”

Maybe wives, your husband, you’d like him to be more attentive but he seems to need some space right now, will you let him have space without nagging him? Will you say, “Darling I know when you get home you just need a little bit of time to watch the news?” Husbands, maybe your wife, you’d like her to have the house tidier than it is when you get home. Now that sounds old-fashioned but I have to tell you that’s what’s in a lot of men’s hearts.

But she, she doesn’t feel cherished by you, you’re trying to get something out of her. But the one thing that she needs more than anything else is to know that you cherish her and value her just the way she is, whether she cleans the house the way you want it or not. Today you and I can decide to have a relationship not for what we get out of it but instead to give to the other person, to love them, to experience their beauty to just accept them the way they are.

The second thing we can do after we resign from the renovation committee, is say, “How can I serve them, how can I meet their needs, how can I do something practical that’s just what they need, just what they want?” Sit back, have a look, have a listen, what are they saying, what’s in their language? You know we hear each other talk but we never listen. Is this person at work aggressive? Maybe they’re just lonely. Is the neighbour grumpy? Maybe they’re just having a hard time with the kids and need a break. Husbands and wives, what are your real issues, what are you real needs?

So often we look at relationships from the perspective of, “What can I get out of it? What can I squeeze out of this relationship for me?” Can I give you a response to that? No! What can I give? Are we going to be like a farmer that constantly wants to reap but never plants or waters or weeds, come on, this is the crux of relationship we want to get without giving. Actually in relationships all we can control directly is what we give, the getting is the fruit of the giving and it’s largely out of our control.

Jesus figured it out he said, “The greatest among you will be the servant of all for whoever exalts themselves will be humbled and whoever humbles themselves will be exalted.” When we become the servant of the people we want to have relationships with we stand out from the crowd. We become a bridge builder we step down off our little pulpits and get our hands dirty.

Just two things, accept people for who they are and serve them without expecting anything in return. Practical, real, decent, honest and watch that relationship blossom it’ll be like light and food and water. Greatness isn’t being famous, greatness is the honour and respect that we build in people’s hearts when we take them just as they are and we serve them.

Much of who we are, develops from the relationships we’re in.  Whether we like it or not – we model things that we see in other people, in our own lives.  So we need to choose wisely.

A few days ago on the program we chatted about the fact that relationships are a bit like a large jigsaw puzzle. We’re all kind of the same but we come in different shapes and sizes, and not every piece goes with every other piece, you have to put matching pieces together to get the whole picture, and that can take some time and effort. We’re not all the same, we seem to click with some people and not with others and sometimes we think, “Wow that’s a neat person I’d like them for a friend or I’d love to go and work with that person.” But then a bit of water goes under the bridge and we discover their true colours.

This week we’re looking at building lasting relationships because relationships matter, they’re what add depth and satisfaction to our lives. And tomorrow on the program we’ll talk about the most important relationship of all, but today, today I’d like to unpack this jigsaw puzzle a bit. Truth is if we’re going to build lasting relationships we need to choose wisely – what does that mean?

A few years ago man by the name of Chuck Swindoll who’s a great preacher and teacher out of the US, did a series called Christ at the Crossroads, and it was at a time when I desperately needed to hear that message. He said the only thing worse than not being married is being married to the wrong person, and that stuck with me through a time where I desperately, desperately wanted to be married. And I have no doubt that simple little message that God took and put in my heart stopped me from making a disastrous choice at the time.

Marriage is very special, it’s a life long relationship and it’s a huge investment, what if we choose the wrong one? The principle holds true for other relationships too, think about it, building a relationship is a process, we meet someone socially or at work or something like that and the relationship is quite distant and transactional.

All of a sudden a group of us go out or we get to know the person a little bit, it’s still superficial but at that point we have a decision to make, do we keep going do we invest time and effort and energy into a relationship with this person? If we say yes, well, we build a stronger relationship whether it’s a boy girl thing or whether it’s just friends or whether it’s a business relationship whatever it is. And then time goes on and the relationship grows and we get to know the person better, and the level of commitment to one another grows, and as time goes on people start to show their true colours.

The problem happens when we commit to deeper relationships before we really know the people, then we’re committed. Say in a business relationship, then we discover that the person is disloyal or dishonest or untrustworthy or lazy or so insecure that they’re useless at work or supercritical or…. You know we find stuff, we think we can never work with this person; it doesn’t become evident until down the track yet we’ve already committed into a relationship.

The problem happens when we kind of wander aimlessly through the landscape of relationships down this path without ever stopping to think, without ever evaluating. As a person’s character unfolds I mean it’s really easy when you don’t know me very well for me to keep pretty well self-contained and to look good, you know it’s just not a difficult thing to do. But as you get to know me more, as you spend more time with me, my character unfolds, I can’t help it and if it’s a good character, a good character will unfold, and if it’s a bad character, if its got some serious flaws a bad character will unfold.

So we’re wandering down this path, down this relationship path and we begin to see some signs, we begin to see some things that are a little bit disturbing, you know what most of us do? Most of us ignore them, most of us are so busy and we’re doing so much stuff we just ignore them. We want this relationship so badly we just completely ignore the warning signs as they start to appear as a persons character unfolds. We cannot even be looking, we can fail to see the bridge out sign in the fog and the further I go the harder it is to end the relationship.

You see that’s what this whole sex before marriage discussion is about, its not some prudish Christian thing it’s really practical. An intimate physical relationship binds two people together, if we get into that sort of a relationship before we really know the person, before there’s real commitment by way of marriage, it’s a dangerous and hurtful thing.

Now you might say to me, “But Berni on this whole relationship front aren’t Christians supposed to be lovey dovey, aren’t we suppose to kind of accept everyone and you know? Have a listen to this, this is the Apostle Paul; by the time he wrote this to his young protégé Timothy, Paul was a seasoned old campaigner. This is what he says:

Don’t be naive Timothy there are some difficult times ahead, and as the end approaches people are going to be self-absorbed and money hungry and self-promoting and stuck up and profane. And contemptuous of their parents and crude and course and dog eat dog and unbending and slanderers and impulsively wild. And savage and cynical and treacherous and ruthless and bloated wind bags, addicted to lust and allergic to God.

That’s a list isn’t it? “They’ll make a show of religion but behind the scenes they’re just animals. Timothy stay clear of those people, have nothing to do with them.

Quite a list isn’t it? Maybe we know a few people like that; maybe some of those adjectives in that list talk about us. Let me ask you, if you look at people with that sort of dog-eat-dog, unbending slanderous, impulsively wild savage thing happening can you really have a lasting relationship with someone like that? Can you have a relationship that’s going to be fruitful and fulfilling and rich and … ? No, of course you can’t. So if we want to have lasting relationships that count we need to choose wisely don’t we?

Can I ask you are you in any destructive relationships right now? Because the people we hang around with shape who we are. At work whether a person’s a colleague or a friend depends on how far we take that relationship, if we stand around the water cooler whinging and complaining and deriding and being self-serving with these people we’re going to hang around them because it’s going to rub off.

Truly I tell you I only am who I am because of some of the wonderful people I’ve been blessed to be close to. Learning from them, modelling my behaviour and my attitudes from them, I cannot imagine who I’d be today if I’d hung around with the wrong crowd. It can be hard when we’ve walked down that path of a relationship and we’ve gotten reasonably close to someone, it can be really hard to acknowledge that we’re in a wrong relationship. Even harder to step out of it because there’s pressure, there’s sneers; there’s rejection you know the stuff.

But can I ask you honestly to look around at some of the relationships that you are in and if you relate to that list that I’ve just read that Paul wrote in his letter to Timothy, its actually from the second letter to Timothy in the New Testament, chapter 3 and verse 5 if you’d like to go and look at it again. If you relate to that list in some of the relationships that you’re having, maybe its time to end some of those relationships, maybe there is a relationship or two in your life that’s dragging you down and ruining your life and as hard as it might be it may be the best investment you ever make.

Now understand I’m not talking about wives leaving husbands, or husbands leaving wives or severing ties with our children, those are life long relationships, we’re meant to work at them, we’re meant to sacrifice, we’re meant to develop character. But all these other people I would really encourage you just to look across the relationships and the friends and the colleagues and the people whom you allow to influence you and say:

“God are there any there that shouldn’t be, are there any there pulling me down, and if they are Father give me the courage and the wisdom to get out. In Jesus’ Name.”

It’d be nice if all our relationships were easy and wonderful. But they’re not.  There’s always a cost.  So – how much of a cost should you pay and when should you pay it?

There seems to be a basic law in this universe that nothing worthwhile comes easy. People who want to have a nest egg for retirement have to take some of the income they have now and invest it to get their returns. There’s a sacrifice now to reap rewards later, the same goes with just about everything else, loosing weight, getting fit, learning, studying, they all require sacrifices now so that we can have benefits later. And life seems to be about achieving a sensible balance between those two. Sure we need to live for today but at the same time we need to invest for tomorrow, and that applies equally to relationships.

Over the last few days on the program we’ve been talking about building lasting relationships, because relationships are so important to the richness or otherwise of our lives. But sometimes it can be a tough road, building that relationship is hard, we want things to go more quickly and when it gets hard we want to give up, that’s why today I’d like to spend some time together counting the cost of relationships.

The ultimate relationship model is one of Jesus and what He did for you and me; it’s the one relationship above any other on the planet that serves to illustrate the cost. Let me read this to you:

Jesus arrived right on time for us, He didn’t and doesn’t wait for us to get ready, He presented Himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway, we can understand someone dieing for a person that’s worth dying for and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspiring us to selfless sacrifice. But God, God put His love on the line for us by offering His Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatsoever to Him.

The Apostle Paul wrote that in the book of Romans.

It’s awesome isn’t it? It’s about proactive love, its about Jesus looking at us and saying, “You know something this Berni guy, man he needs my help, this Berni guy has got his life so messed up, I’m going to die on the cross for this Berni guy, I’m going to die on the cross for each person on this planet.” That is awesome, and there’s always a price, there’s always a cost, there’s always a sacrifice to a relationship.

The wonderful thing about God’s model for relationship is that before we’re ready he steps out and makes a sacrifice; just translate that into the relationships that we have; the people who hurt us, the people who are difficult. While they’re hurting us, while they’re being difficult, while they’re being a pain in the neck right when we’d like to saw them in half, we step out and love them and accept them and make sacrifices for them, what a model.

Every relationship is about sacrifice, we cannot have relationships unless we lay some things down. I mean marriage, I used to be able to come and go as I pleased when I was single, today I can’t, today I have to make a sacrifice, now that sacrifice happens to be very worthwhile but any social construct puts limits on us. The law puts limits on us, and the same is true in individual relationships, makes sense doesn’t it? But so often we approach relationships from this self-centred perspective, to say what can I get out of this, me, me, me and me.

But if we want rich and genuine relationships we’ve got to be prepared to pay the price don’t we? Because people are different, we won’t always see eye to eye with them, they won’t always think we are the most delightful, wonderful person that God put on the earth. I know that might surprise us but that what happens. We want genuine, rich relationships but sometimes we aren’t prepared to pay the price.

“Well, well you know I deserve better, but I’m entitled, you know they owe me.” Well maybe they do, people do wrong thing to us sometimes but waiting around hoping that things will get better, that’s not how relationships work, that’s not how the Jesus relationship thing works. Imagine if Jesus sat up there in heaven and said “I’m going to wait for Berni to sort his act out before I come to save him”? I’d be lost, I’d have not future, I’d have no eternal life, I wouldn’t have the joy and the peace and the richness and the power and the grace and the mercy in my life today that I do have.

If Jesus had sat back in His lounge chair and said, “I’ll just watch a little bit more television and wait for Berni to sort his act out?” Can I put it really bluntly? If we want to have relationships we have to get off our backsides and take the initiative, even when the other person doesn’t deserve it, especially when the other person just doesn’t deserve it.

Jesus is the model of a relationship because when we say, “well you know I going to wait until they do something,” He says “No, go now before they’re ready, no, don’t wait until they sort themselves out, help them, love them, encourage them, be Me for them, when? While they’re still your enemies.” That’s when Jesus paid the ultimate price, when we weren’t worth dying for He counted us worthy; His is a model of proactive, awesome relationship, even pre-emptive sacrifice.

So before the other person does anything good we humble ourselves and sacrifice for them. In all my life that’s the most important thing I’ve ever learned about relationships, because if I humble myself and I go and do something for someone that doesn’t deserve it I’ve just built a bridge of relationship, and influence and love into their lives that money cannot buy. It works that’s why God did it, that’s why Jesus is the authentic Saviour, look around look at all the other belief systems and religions, you wont find anything like that, rings true, it’s genuine, it’s real.

That’s why I’ve given my whole life to telling people about Jesus, and here’s the rub, here’s the bottom line for me, John the Apostle wrote this he said, “We know love by this that Jesus laid down His life for us and we therefore ought to lay down our lives for one another.” You can read that in 1 John 3:16. Now we’re basically selfish creatures, for me I couldn’t really get a handle on pre-emptive sacrifice as the basis for relationship until I tasted it for myself, until I experienced God’s pre-emptive sacrifice for me.

You think about it, it’s a pre-emptive strike of love, it’s a pre-emptive strike of grace, the cross, Jesus being crucified on the cross it was so brutal it was so ugly, it was so for you and for me, why? So all our muck could be forgiven, cleaned out, left behind, and we can have a new life, a fresh life, an eternal life, He took the first step.

Can I encourage you to spend your life wrapping your heart around that? I tell you what it did for me, it changed me on the inside, it gave me a sense of dignity, a sense of value, a sense of peace. When we taste that grace, when we reach out to God with our hearts and say, “Lord I accept your free gift of eternal life through Jesus,” we start living that stuff we can’t help it, we change, we’ll never be the same again.

Now I’m a pretty smart guy but I could never have figured that out on my own, this rich eternal relationship with Jesus, where all the goodness in my life comes from, is something that flows out of me now. Not perfectly mind you but there was a cost, Jesus paid the cost and when we look at our relationships with other people will we be prepared to pay the price in advance as a deposit with no guarantee of return? Because that’s the way Jesus did it for us. Come on, how about it, what did you think, is it worth it?