Take It Personal Part 7: Intrude

Monica has joined Jermaine Jackson if giving bad advice, please do take it personal.

Sorry for disappearing for a month again, I tend to do that. But, in the meantime, someone did find this blog by googling "I take it personal when people label me", so in my absence of new posts perhaps someone learned a valuable lesson about interpersonal communication, right?  

This is the seventh and final post in a series entitled "Take It Personal". My argument is simple. All people have faith in something, but for faith to be truly effective it must by made personal and more specifically be personally placed in Christ, which will inevitably lead to a transformative relationship with Christ.

The rub is that so many of us are so very prone to place our faith in all kinds of surrogates rather than in Christ and Christ alone. The majority of these posts covered those various surrogates (family, politics, intellect, etc) so I won't rehash them here.

Here I need to address an aside I promised to cover all the way back in the first post, which I believe was published back when Jermaine Jackson was still an active musician. In speaking of the relationship that stems from rightly-placed faith, I wrote:

For any relationship to be real, however, the other person must be able to intrude on your life.  The marriage where the husband runs over his wife in every instance is not a real relationship. That’s not love, it’s a control idol.  The employer who abuses her workers isn’t in relationship with them, she has a power idol.  The wife or the workers will not be in a real relationship until each has the ability to intrude on the other’s life in some way (same for the husband and boss too). 

In the same way, if I have met God personally He must be able to intrude upon my life.  There must be things I want to do but do not do because of that relationship.  There must be things I don't want to do, yet I do them because of that relationship.  
There must be things I’d like to think or believe that I don’t because God says, “Nope.” 

If I’m in a true relationship with Him (and He is God!) He must have the ability to intrude on my life (and if He never intrudes on my life, that suggests I’m merely following a “god” of my own creation, not a true, righteous God, but rather a projection of my own desires).

So, that's nice, but it leads to an obvious question. If I am truly able to have a relationship with God that means I must also be able to intrude upon him as well. So, when did I ever intrude on God? When did he become vulnerable to me? When did he make himself utterly available to me?

There's at least two answers that if dwelled upon will shake the foundation of your whole life.

First, those who are in relationship with the Godhead can intrude upon him as a result of their adoption. God has declared those who trust in him to be not just church members, not just followers, but daughters and sons. He has adopted them and made them his very own children.

1 John 3:1-2 "See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! . . . Beloved, NOW we are children of God."

This truth should strike our entire existence. If we really reckon true as fact, that God has called us "Daughter" and "Son" even the most linear, focused, and rational of us ought to get lost in daydream about it daily.

But, how does this give us the ability to intrude upon God? Tim Keller gives us a useful illustration. He invites us to imagine the President of the United States. He is always the most important person in the room. The fact is no one can intrude upon the President, no one can tell him what to do . . . almost no one.

It would be utterly ridiculous for the Secretary of State or a citizen or probably even the First Lady to awaken him in the night and say, "I'm thirsty. I need a drink of water. Can you help me?" Utterly ridiculous, but . . .

. . . if the President's daughter came with the same request at 3 AM. He would respond. And not just that, but probably respond gladly. The child of the President has a level of access unimaginable to anyone else. She can intrude and not do so with fear, but do so with full assurance of getting an affirmative answer.

Why?

Because of her position as his child. Her standing guarantees her access and the ability to intrude.

Those who are in Christ, adopted as his children, have this same level of access (Heb 4:16). Except to a far higher degree because our God has way more power than Article II of the Constitution allots and our God exists outside of time so he'll never be too busy.

Second and more directly, those who have faith in Christ have been allowed to intrude and even trample upon God by the pathway that let us into his Kingdom: the Cross.

The Christian stands and exists as such only on the basis, that Jesus himself became human, lived a perfect life, and died an unjust death on the cross taking on the weight of sin of a humanity who stood around him mocking him, denying him, and hiding from him. Charles Spurgeon put it, "Jesus Christ was up on the cross, nailed, bleeding, dying, looking down at the people betraying him, and forsaking him, and denying him, and in the greatest act of love in the history of the universe, HE STAYED!"

We have intruded on Christ because it was not Christ's sin that held him there, it was ours. It was our idolatry, our unrighteousness, our self-righteousness, our bad acts, and our good acts for bad reasons that trampled him, crushed him, and utterly decimated Jesus Christ.

He willingly let us intrude upon him so that we could be with him. "For the joy set before him, he endured the cross scorning its shame." (Heb 12:2)

What joy was set before Christ on that cross? It wasn't oneness with the Father . . . he'd already experienced that. It wasn't the perfection of Heaven, that's where he came from.

The joy set before him was you. The only thing Jesus got that he didn't have before on that cross was you.

For the joy set before him, he endured the cross. For the joy set before him, he let us trample him, intrude upon him, and treat him like the least honored of criminals.

This relationship, if true, is in essence personal. It does not get more personal than that.