Wired for Love

I listened to this great message series recently called “Wired for Love.” It’s almost completely explained by the title: it’s about the fact that God has designed, “wired,” us for relationships with others: first with Him, but also one other person in marriage and with other people in our lives such as friends, family and coworkers.

The pastor creatively uses science to explain how God has wired us to form all of these various connections. But he starts with having a relationship with God, from which all other right human relationships flow. He also looks at behaviors – viewing pornography, promiscuity, cheating, manipulating, sexual victimization – that the enemy uses to keep us from experiencing God’s best in all relationships and instead cloud us with guilt, shame, anger, bitterness and fear. He ends with a picture of a romantic relationship that honors God. And during each message he provides solid, biblical relationship advice presented in a very dynamic way! It is very much worth the listen (and so are his other messages)!

As I listened to the series, I could not help but be reminded of a truth about God that blows my mind: the fact that He, the Creator of the big, vast Universe – wants to have a real, personal relationship with me. David sums up how this wonderful knowledge makes me feel in Psalm 8: 3-4:

3 When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
4 what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
5 You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.

The more I grow in my relationship with God, the more that I come to understand how awesome it is that He, the Creator of the Universe, loved us so much that He pursued us all the way to the Cross so that we had a way to reach Him, relate to Him personally, despite our sin. The Bible says in John 1 that he came became flesh and dwelled among us. When Jesus was on earth, He had relationships with ordinary people – especially His disciples, who were mostly uneducated and probably even teenagers. And after resurrecting, He left His promised Spirit, through which those simple disciples received power and did extraordinary things for God. Their accounts in the New Testament are not just stories for old times, but living, powerful words that remind us that He continues to use us through our relationships with Him today.

Yet we often take the out stretched, life-giving arms of the God of the Universe for granted, choosing not to relate to Him on His terms, but instead our own. We think we do Him a favor when we go to church, serve on a ministry team or read our Bible every now and then. We get mad at Him for not doing what we want Him to do. But the truth is, He doesn’t even have to deal with us. He’s God – the one who created mountains, plants, animals, light, night, angels, people – everything! He could always be too busy for us. Yet he never is. And He loves us so much and wants to make our lives full because of our relationships with Him.

There are many verses in the Bible that capture God’s story of relating to us since the beginning, but there is one that I rank at or near the very top, from the mouth of Jesus:

10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. (NIV)
10 The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. (NKJV)

Satan, the thief, tries to thwart God’s perfect plans for our relationships by distorting what right relationships look like. And we buy into his lies far too often – just a couple of the ways in how we approach physicality in dating relationships and in how we choose people to date. Yet Jesus always offers us abundant life that wasn’t meant to stop with just life after death, but, more immediately, to give us a marvelous life at present that includes thriving relationships here on earth with Him and others.

Let’s trade Satan’s cheap, junky substitutes for relationships and grow in our relationships with God daily and, in turn, flourish in our relationships with others.

Please check out “Wired for Love!” It’s available on iTunes: Podcasts> Miles McPherson The Rock Church – Weekend Messages. Note it is video only on iTunes. Or, you can get access to mp3 and video versions of the series, and the full message archives here (2011, September 18-October 23. If you click on individual messages you will be directed to a page where you can also get copies of the sermons notes, which he refers to as lesson plans in each of his messages).

Happy listening!