How Difficult Relationships Grow Your Faith
A few months ago I was preaching a message on “Do difficult relationships hinder resilient faith or grow resilient faith?”
*Important Qualifier: There are toxic relationships you shouldn’t be in because they are abusive, manipulative, or so hard-hearted that you can not have relationship with them. God calls us to love unconditionally, not trust unconditionally. God cares about your safety and well being and while He may call you to stay in hard relationships He isn’t telling you to stay in damaging or toxic relationships. Knowing the difference requires wisdom and discernment.
Here are 10 quotes I found helpful when considering how God uses difficulty in relationships to grow our faith:
God’s primary aim for your relationships (and life) is not your happiness but your sanctification. Sanctification is the on-going process of becoming more and more like Jesus Christ. It’s as if we are each a slab of marble and who we could be in the light of Jesus is underneath. Sanctification is the chipping away at the marble. (1st Thessalonians 3:4: For this is the will of God, your sanctification.)
God’s aim in difficult relationships is sanctification: This is a radically different idea than the one our culture will give us about marriage, friendship, or even church. God’s goal, or will, for us in all of these things is not primarily happiness. Now, he isn’t against our joy, he’s just against giving us temporary joy at the cost of our soul and intimacy with Him. God, like a good coach or father, knows that what is best for you is sometimes the difficulty of refining fire. Because on the other side of temporary difficulty is long lasting joy.
This changes how we view relationships. This idea of God’s primary aim in our life and relationships not being our happiness but our sanctification challenges the way we view difficulty in relationships. This is something God has been really working on in me over the last few years. I wrote this in my journal a bit ago:
“If my greatest goal in relationships is to gain ultimate happiness and avoid difficulty, at the root of my heart, all relationships are about me. I am selfish. And when I think this way I will resent when relationships become difficult (because that doesn’t lead to my happiness) or I will make sure all my relationships stay shallow enough to where we never have difficulty.” That was born out of meditation on Ephesians 4:32-5:1.
God has a purpose in the relationship difficulty you face. He is sovereign and he intends to not remove every difficulty you face in this life because He has a long view of your growth and He knows that there are some lessons you cannot learn the easy way, some sins within you that he can never reveal and kill without the presence of relational strife in your life which lead you to grow in selflessness.
God wants to reframe our outlook on relationships and friendships. And this expanding of our framework gives us greater spiritual resiliency in them, because we know the purpose.
It is pricesly when the decision to love and to serve comes with cost that we know love has bumped up against our selfishness. The desire to always put self above the other. Paul constantly points back to Jesus as a model for how we ought to love. “As Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.”
The framework for relationships for the Christian is not primarily “what do I get out of this, how do you make me feel happy and warm and complete?” the framework is “Walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a sacrifice.” Paul is helping us fight against the me-centric idea of relationships so many of us are so used to.
May we not tie our love for people to what they can offer us. Because that's not real love. That's payment. We need relationships that are difficult because they force us to either run or face our selfishness head on. And the only way to begin chipping away at the marble of selfishness is the painful process of loving when you don’t want to. Don’t feel like it. When the emotion is no longer driving you. When the other person is more annoying than anything else.
But the model of Jesus is to find humility and in the difficult relationship ask: “How can I serve, how can I make this persons life better, how can I seek to understand. How can I be kind, tenderhearted, forgiving, as God in Christ is to me?” When it isn’t deserved . It means the way you give love isn’t that you only give it when it is earned.
We must speak against our hearts natural inclination when love is hard. “We must say to ourselves something like this: 'Well, when Jesus looked down from the cross, he didn't think "I am giving myself to you because you are so attractive to me." No, he was in agony, and he looked down at us - denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him - and in the greatest act of love in history, he STAYED. He said, "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they are doing." He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely. That is why I am going to love my spouse/friend.' Speak to your heart like that,” - Timothy keller
The greater we understand the debt of ours that has been canceled by God, the more we will love others because we’ve experienced grace. To the degree we are selfish with our love, we have a low view of the Gospel. To the extent we strive to love much to those hard to love, we have a high view of the Gospel in our lives.
There is something about God’s love for us that stirs up our love for others. It hit me in that shower as the Lord brought this text to my mind. As I struggled to forgive and love I saw with greater clarity how great the cost was for Jesus to love me. As I saw the difficulty in choosing to love someone who had wronged me, frustrated me, not reciprocated love to me, so I saw with greater clarity and capacity how difficult it was for Jesus to love me. And He did.
I am more sinful than I am ever aware of. I have spat in the face of God, I longed for other things before Him, sinned in ways that bring me regret to this day. And Jesus, knowing all of that, died for me? We often assume that is just the way it has to be, that it was easy for Jesus. It wasn’t easy. Love and grace that comes from the choice, not the feeling, forms within us a selfless heart and helps us see with more clarity how much Jesus actually sacrificed for us.
Asking God to help me engage the process of becoming more selfless,
Josh.