I was asked by someone recently what it meant to have a personal relationship with God. If you have spent any time in church, you have surely heard the phrase, “Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship” or something of that sort. It’s one of those things that you hear often, that it begins to lose its meaning, but if a phrase is used so often that it becomes a kind of platitude, does its truth diminish? What does it mean to have a personal relationship with God? Is it even possible?

Often for me, God lives intellectually in my head as an ideology, as opposed to a personal reality in which I partake and commune with. I often treat him as a God who lives as a concept that helps build moral structure to my life. Moral structure is good, but apart from a communal relationship with the God of the universe, it’s dead.

I want to live a life of enchantment, where every ounce of my soul lives in unity with Christ. I want to live a life where there is no separation from the sacred to the secular.

Brother Lawrence talked about this in his book “Practicing the Presence of God”. Brother Lawrence worked in a French monastery in the 17th century. He worked mostly in the kitchen but learned to commune with God even during the most menial tasks. He lived in simplicity and lived a life devoted to God. The monastery had designated hours dedicated to prayer, he would use them, but insisted it wasn’t necessary because all his hours were spent communing with God. How would this mindset change our lives? How would it change our careers, families, and the hectic schedules of modern life?

I think it starts simply with gratitude. Giving God praise during the perceived good and bad throughout our daily lives. It starts with focusing our minds on the divine. Constantly asking God to realign our thought patterns with his. It’s asking the Lord to fill our consciousness with a realization of his presence. God is not separated by wood and stone but lives actively in us and all around us.

Instead of asking God to realign our lives with his, we often sacrifice the greater for the lesser. God is the ultimate fulfiller of purpose, peace, and aspirations. Everything that the world offers is but a shadow of the real thing. Everything good in the created world is meant to point to the giver of those gifts, but we have sacrificed the Creator for his creation.

I have spent a lot of my life searching for fulfillment in everything but the one who fulfills. I’ve believed that once I found the right career, saved enough money, lost enough weight, or read enough books, I would find meaning and purpose. But nothing other than a communal relationship with Christ will give that.

But we cannot search for happiness and find God. We must seek God for God himself. God is not a means of to an end, he is the end. CS Lewis wrote, “If we search for happiness, we will find neither God nor happiness, but if we search for God, we will find both.”

A personal relationship with God requires the Cross, and the cross brings death. But it’s a death that brings you back to life. The self, and all its desire and deception is the ultimate killer of the soul. When you place your desires above the God of the universe and your fellow man, it destroys you.

The self needs to be crucified with Christ. Everything in you will want to resist, but you must surrender. Remember, it is God who works in you, both to will and to do for his Good pleasure – Philippians 2:13. His yoke is easy and his burden is light – Mathew 11:28. Come to him and he will give rest to your soul. Do not substitute the greater for the lesser. Do you not believe, that God, who created every atom in the universe, does not know what you need to truly be alive? It is he himself, who is life and the giver of life.

Once you realize that every desire is fulfilled in Christ, and every sinful act fogs that fulfillment, your paradigm begins to shift. Instead of viewing God as an overbearing parent, you start to realize that the sinful acts that the natural self desires can never fulfill what your soul actually needs.

Man was created to have a perfect union with God, Adam broke that union through sin. Christ overcame that broken union on the cross and reunified our souls with God.

God is the living water, anything short of that living water will find you void and wanting. Surrender your heart. Surrender your will. Surrender your goals, aspirations, limitations, weakness’s and ego and see where God takes you.

²⁸ “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. ²⁹ Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. ³⁰ For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. – Mathew 11:28-30