God Meets Us Where We Are
Your relationship with God matters.
That’s a cliche, so let me explain what I mean.
God values your relationship with Him.
No matter how close you’ve grown to Him, or how long you’ve been in relationship with Him, God thinks you are worth pursuing.
Think about that for a minute.
Consider the implications.
It works both ways: if you are a new follower of Jesus, you are not so new in the faith that God delegates His relationship with you. You are at the front of His mind. You are the apple of His eye. He is focused on you and developing His relationship with you. He is telling you to come closer and closer. He is celebrating the fact that you have come to know Him in relationship and that you have chosen to accept His gift of the forgiveness of your sins through Jesus.
If you are a mature believer, God has not discarded you. The life of a believer in Jesus is one of knowing and being known by God. It is not a life of being used up by God or of being discarded by Him in favor of a newer recruit. God is about relationship and about calling His children (you) into His family. God relishes with the mature believer the relational knowledge and the shared experiences that they have together. Time, trials, and trust with God strengthen our relationship with God. As we walk with God, we come to know Him. We begin the first steps of the intimate knowledge of the One Who has existed from before the beginning of all things.
For those in the middle, God celebrates the journey with us. He celebrates that we have overcome the evil one and turned from our sins to follow Jesus. We have put aside ourselves, the world, or whatever else we would have allowed to lead our lives, and we have said yes to Jesus and His gift of salvation. This is the first overcoming of the evil one in our lives. God celebrates that with us! As we mature as followers of Jesus, we continue to put sin to death in our lives, continuing to choose to follow the leadership of the Holy Spirit instead of the leadership of satan–and every time we make this choice, God celebrates with us. As we live in this world of struggle, whether that is struggle with temptation, suffering, or anything else, God teaches us to grow strong by relying on His strength. This strengthening is part of the maturing process, and God delights when He sees it happening in us. All of this is facilitated by our intentional strengthening of our relationship with God–by spending time with Him in prayer and meditation, by reading His Word, and by learning to obey Him. When we do these things, we allow His Word to live in us, and we become more like Him.
Whatever stage of our relationship with God we find ourselves in, God does not shame us. He celebrates the growth that is there.
One of the things that should happen in the community of believers in Jesus is that the more mature believers should provide an example for the maturing believers. A new believer should be able to look at the strength and faith of a maturing believer and the deep relationship with God of a more mature believer and say to themselves, “I want to get to that place; that is where I am trying to go with the Holy Spirit’s help.”
While the Holy Spirit does celebrate our relationship with Him wherever we find ourselves, it is not His goal that we stay in one place. It is not His goal that we should remain new believers forever. It is not His goal that we should remain immature in our relationship with Him forever. As the writer of Hebrews exhorts, “let us go on to maturity.” (Hebrews 6:1)
In 1 John 2, John writes a poem about why he is writing to different groups of believers in the church.
He does this for a few reasons. One of those reasons seems to be to remind each of these groups that his exhortations (which we’ve already discussed) are not just for new believers and not just for mature believers. He’s writing to the whole church.
Another reason for the poem seems to be that He wants to celebrate each stage of a believer’s Christian life; John wants the believers to know that no part of their walk with God is wasted. That is an amazing thought. It is easy to think when we are at certain stages of things that we are wasting our time. Some of us find the beginnings of things difficult, and this applies to our Christian life. We think: if I could just get to the end, then I could really do something for God. Some of us loathe the endings of things, and we apply this to our relationship with God. We may think: when I was at another stage of life I had more energy or more time or more this or that and I could have accomplished more for Him.
The enemy will tell us it is the wrong time and that God doesn’t have anything valuable for us. We’re too young or too old. We’re too inexperienced or too weary. We’re too weak or too busy. God says I have brought you to this season and this moment for a purpose. God says I love you. God says you matter. God says you yourself are a part of my family, and I have instruction for you, I have a role for you, and I have a place close to my heart for you.
John will go on in his letter to give some important instructions to believers, some of it even more strongly worded than what he has said so far in his letter. But first he wants all the believers to know that they are safe and secure in their relationship with God and that they matter to God their Father.