"A Personal Relationship With Jesus Christ" Part 2

Shortly after posting my objections in the last essay to the phrase "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ," I read that pop star Katy Perry said in Part of Me 3-D, "I have a personal, one-on-one relationship with God, and it's continually evolving."

That comment pretty much sums up why I have lost all patience with evangelicals who talk about a "personal relationship" with God (or Jesus) while ignoring biblical terms like "holiness," "obedience," "submission" and "self-denial." Perry, like countless others, has learned to spout lame Christian jargon rather than Scripture. It would have been interesting if she had restricted herself to the Bible's own words in describing her connection to the Almighty. Then she might have said something like, "I show that I love Jesus by keeping his commandments" (John 14:21), or, "I deny myself and take up my cross daily to follow Jesus" (Luke 9:23), or, "I present myself to God as a living sacrifice" (Romans 12:1). Or maybe instead she would have been moved to confess, "My lifestyle proves that I am an enemy of the cross of Christ" (Phillipians 3:18-19), or, "Because of behavior like mine the wrath of God is coming" (Colossians 3:5).

Perry - as most people know - writes and performs songs that celebrate sexual immorality. The Bible denies that sexually immoral people have a relationship with God. Instead it says that God will judge them (Hebrews 13:4), that he will exclude them from his kingdom (1 Corinthians 6:9-10; Galatians 5:19-21; Ephesians 5:5), and that he will cast them into the fiery lake of burning sulfur (Revelation 21:8). Does that sound like a personal relationship to you? In the Bible it sounds a lot more like adversarial contempt!

But thanks be to God, all is not lost. If Perry - like any other enemy of Christ - repents of her sins and follows Jesus, she will be forgiven and will be received in love and will live forever. Jesus said, "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me, and I give to them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand." (John 10:27). But if Perry persists in unrepentant sin, the Bible warns of a different destiny: "If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God" (Hebrews 10:26-27).

No, I'm not picking on Katy Perry. She's merely one among millions who think that "a relationship with God" is possible without holy living. It isn't. "Without holiness no one will see the Lord." (Hebrews 12:14).

I could tell you lots of stories of people who delude themselves into thinking they have a personal relationship with God when all they really have is his enmity and mortal opposition. An egregious example is my ex brother-in-law. When deserting my sister after telling her that he had had a long-standing affair, he explained, "I have this relationship with God that you just don't understand." It beggars belief - a man defies God's commands, commits monstrous acts of selfishness, dispatches his loving wife with cruel indifference, and still thinks he is on good terms with God! If he had only read what the Bible says, he would see there that God promises to sizzle his flesh in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. On Judgment Day, many who expect to indulge the delights of their "relationship with God" will instead hear him utter the terrible words, "I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness" (Matthew 7:23).

I'm afraid I am all too familiar with one source of the delusion that a relationship with God is possible without submission to his will. It's the bad preaching I hear in our cheap-grace churches and evangelical institutions, and the bad teaching I read in trashy evangelical literature. Some examples:

Alan Chambers of Exodus International, in a June interview for The Atlantic, denied that immoral lifestyles preclude a relationship with God. "Some of us choose very different lives than others," he said. "But whatever we choose, it doesn't remove our relationship with God...My personal belief is...while behavior matters, those things don't interrupt someone's relationship with Christ."

Donald Miller (author of Christian best-sellers Blue Like Jazz and Father Fiction) spoke of visiting a university frat house in order to talk to the students about faith and morality. One young man said to him, "I like sex. Do you think I'm going to hell or something?" (Context indicates that by "sex" he meant fornication, not marital union.) Rather than citing all the texts that affirm that fornicators will not make it into God's kingdom, Miller said, "I don't think having sex is the way you get into hell. Heaven and hell are about who you know, not what you do...Morality is more important and more beneficial than any of us know. But heaven and hell are something different."

The pastor of a church my wife and I used to attend recommended from the pulpit a book by Fil Anderson, Breaking The Rules: Trading Performance for Intimacy with God. This book is an abominable piece of filth straight from the pit of hell. It might more profitably have been titled, Defying The Commandments: Neglecting Goodness In Order To Have A Personal Relationship With God. Anderson seems unable to speak of disciplined submission to the will of God without belittling it with pejorative labels like "performance," "list-heeding," or "rule-keeping religion." He writes, "Consider the colossal burden of concentrating on the ought tos, shoulds, have tos and musts. It's time to leave that life behind...We no longer need to feel the pressure to do certain things in order to be in relationship with God." Really? We don't have to do certain things (like remain faithful to our spouses) in order be in relationship with God? My ex brother-in-law could not have said it better!

I will let these examples suffice. Time would fail me - and the effort depress me - to cite similar examples of cheap-grace rhetoric in the works of evangelical titans Max Lucado, Andy Stanley and Philip Yancey. So I'll leave it with this: the next time you hear an evangelical spout mindlessly unbiblical slogans like "It's not about rules - it's about relationship!" or, "Jesus invites you into a personal relationship with him just as you are," come back with the Bible's own words in 1 John 2:3-5a: We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, "I know him," but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him. If we do not obey God's rules, not only do we not have a personal relationship with him - the Bible insists that we do not even know him!

Know the Lord. That is to say, obey him.