Everything in your life rises and falls on your ability to live in healthy relationships. Your spiritual well-being, emotional stability, mental wellness and even physical health will all be impacted by your relationship with:
- God
- Yourself
- Your world around you
All three relationships need to be wrapped in the power of love for you to manifest an abundant life.
But so many think these areas should manifest love easily, with no drama or problems. They get so easily discouraged because they aware of the battle that is waging over their relationships.
We scratch our heads when conversations go sour, motives are questioned, communication is not heard and being offended becomes commonplace. Are we aware of what is going on here?
If you have been ignorant of the battle, now would be a good time to sober up and realize your relationship world is under attack. It is time to stop fighting those around you and gain a spiritual lens for your relationships.
Most people genuinely love each other, but they cannot fully engage connection with others because the war is interfering.We so easily get divided and become at odds in relationships. An invisible war grabs onto our brokenness and hooks into another person’s brokenness to keep us in a spiritual and emotional dodge ball match. All to keep us from living out healthy bonds with each another.
Three Battlegrounds of Relationships
God created and designed us to function in healthy relationships on three levels. The first dimension is our love relationship with God (“You shall love the Lord your God” Mark 12:30).
A love relationship with God begins by learning to receive God’s love. (“We love Him because He first loved us.”) Most honest believers I speak with have a genuine struggle receiving love from God. Receiving love from Him is critical, because it is out of what we receive that we are able to love God back in response.
The second dimension is with yourself. We have not been equipped to walk in this. In fact, I dedicated an entire book to this subject, because masses of people are lost in not loving themselves as God does.
God’s design is for us to love ourselves as His creation. A great way to see that you have received God’s love is you are able to love yourself. (“Love your neighbor as yourself” Mark 12:31) Loving yourself comes into agreement with how God sees you. You are His workmanship and wonderful masterpiece, called to be dwelling places of the Holy Spirit.
Finally, love has its greatest fulfillment when we take the love we have received from God and give it out freely to others (“Love your neighbor” Mark 12:31).
But don’t miss this. All three areas are under attack. In fact, my personal work with thousands of people show they struggle with receiving love from God, loving themselves and being able to love people without interference.
You Were Made for Love
God’s highest priority is love. That’s because He is love. He doesn’t just have love, He is the very essence of it. When you experience love in life, it is for the purpose of leading you to Himself. If you want to see God’s nature manifested on this planet, then we need to learn the power of love that is like nothing else.
Not only has God created us for love, He has given us many tools that are effective in healing the areas of our lives that lack love’s presence. He does not leave us hanging. There are many practical ways we can address our struggle with love, but they are often areas we overlook.
The Spiritual Shift in My Life
Years ago, I began a reformation in my Christian walk. It actually came out of a person breakdown, where the anxiety, depression and deep struggle of my mind were overtaking me. I began to see that the love of God was missing in my daily experience and I was under siege with thoughts that kept me bound.
In a posture of surrender, I began to seek God’s Word at a deeper level in an effort to understand what was at the root of my personal battles. I needed some real answers and was feeling very discontented with the current Christian clichés. I wanted truth, even if it made me uncomfortable. As I read God’s Word, I asked God to show me what I had been missing.
I remember praying out loud to God, “If there is something I am missing in the Bible, please expose it to me. If there is truth that I need to know that I am blind to, I ask that you reveal it to me, even if it makes me uncomfortable.” Little did I know, that would be one of the most effective prayers I have ever prayed. The Scriptures opened up to me like I was reading them for the first time.
The Bible became more than just a nice book with great stories and good-boy rules. I began to see the spiritual dimension that the Scriptures seek for us to understand. It was like I was given a pair of spiritual goggles as I was reading the Word. It wasn’t just stories; I was receiving a lens on how to see!
One thing that became immediately apparent was the war going on all around me; a war I had neglected to keep in mind when addressing limitations and struggles in my life. Very few people seemed to be fighting the battle. Most people were not even acknowledging it and many were living in a world of denial.
I came to realize that these relational breakdowns all around me were not just natural occurrences. They were spiritually orchestrated and carried out with an intelligent strategy. The same problems followed through generations of families and spilled over from individuals into the lives of those they came in contact with.
Once we realize the war that we are engaged in, this is the first step in getting leverage over the relationship drama that we face.