God Wants a Personal Relationship With You

Last Monday, February the 20th, I started a Bible reading plan that has me reading the entire Bible in only 35 days… which means in just a few days time, I read from the book of Genesis to the book of Deuteronomy (and yes, there are a lot of genealogies and laws!).

But there was one thing that kept popping back up in my face when I’d read: Moses and God were friends.

Exodus 33:11 says, “Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend.”

This was a time period where very few knew God, so the fact that Moses had any sort of relationship with Him is amazing. But that they spoke like friends? That’s incredible.

At this point in the Bible reading plan, I’m much further along than Deuteronomy– this morning, I read the book of Job. But one theme is consistent in everything I read.

God wants a relationship with His people.

Jeremiah 24:7 says, “I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart.”

This has been God’s desire since the beginning of time.

It started in the Garden of Eden, where God would walk with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening (Genesis 3:8). He wanted to speak to His children, have a relationship with them, and be personal. He loved them.

Then things went bad, and I’m sure you know the story. Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and sin entered the world, dragging death, destruction, and separation from God in its wake.

A book later, the Israelites (God’s chosen people) became enslaved in Egypt. So what did God do? He sent a rescuer by the name of Moses, and He set His people free from the oppression of the Egyptians by bringing them into the desert.

He didn’t abandon them in the wilderness, though. With a cloud by day, and fire by night, He led His people into the bountiful land that He had promised to them.

Despite how faithful God proved to be to His children, however, the Israelites continuously rebelled against Him, and that usually brought calamity and all sorts of troubles (trust me–I know– I read 1 & 2 Kings in two days!).

But God did the same thing every time: He would rescue them when they would repent–turn away from their sin and come back to Him– and would once again have a relationship with His people.

This theme is everywhere in the Bible, and I can’t even share all of the stories here to prove this, since it would take way too long.

The story of Jesus is the most obvious one that drives this point, even though the whole Bible leads up to it with stories of the faithfulness, forgiveness, and compassion of God.

The world was a dark, broken, sinful wreck. The Israelites were under the oppressive rule of the Romans. They had given up on hope; they had given up on God–but He hadn’t given up on them.

“But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)

That verse beautifully sums up everything I’ve been trying to say.

Mankind was in a bad place. We were wandering aimlessly, lost without God, and living a life of sin. We were doing life apart from God, not having the relationship with Him that He had always wanted us to have.

But God didn’t want it to end like that– it wasn’t His best for us!

So He sent Jesus, His one and only Son, to make things right (John 3:16). Jesus lived the life we couldn’t live, died the death we were supposed to die, and came back to life to prove a point to Satan, our enemy: God has the greatest power.

Why did He do it? Why did Jesus sacrifice everything He had in heaven to come to our crummy, undeserving earth?

The answer is quite simple: us.

God gave up everything just to be reconciled to us again.

But it’s not just us as a whole, it’s you as an individual. God wants to be personal to each and every one of us, although we’re all different in one way or another.

That’s part of the beauty of the type of relationship God wants to have with us. He knows exactly what each individual person needs in different phases of their lives.

When I’m going through a trial or life situation, I may need something different from God than you would if you were in my circumstances.

That’s no problem for God! He knows how to be intimate with us specifically, how to work in our situations specifically. I shared a story about how He did that for me in this blog post, How Does God’s Love Affect Our Everyday Lives?

Today, I encourage you to take some time and think about how your relationship with God affects your life on a daily basis.

How He teaches and encourages you may look different than it does with another person, but that doesn’t mean you’re any less special. In fact, it should show you the exact opposite: God gives you exactly what you need when you need it.

Rest in the fact that God is so in love with you, and truly enjoys the time you both spend together. Get quiet with Him, and He’ll do just that– speak to your heart in a way that you will understand and receive; because He wants to have a personal relationship with you!