Covenant Relationship with God
“The most powerful expression of God’s love is His offer to be in covenant relationship with us…
God wants to be in a deep, binding relationship with us.
He ‘cuts through every sin, every storm, every story, every sea… the whole way through for us, to be with us.”
Studying family relations has taught me that human development, from child to teenager and young adult to parent, is the product of family relationships.
Family relationships that are strong and loving, tend to become a more strong and loving.
Family relationships that are willing to have hard conversations with love, and be understanding of one another, tend to develop individuals who are more emotionally resilient, make better choices, and experience more balance in life.
Family relationships that allow worldly distractions to dictate their lives with so much busy-ness, tend to not have time for each other.
Family relationships that are hard and full of struggle and heartache, tend to follow the path of more struggle and heartache.
However…
Our covenant relationship with our Heavenly Father allows us to experience a safe “relationship through which our souls can grow, experience Him, and become beings who can see and know and love as He does.”
What a gift!
Since none of our families are perfect, and we are all navigating the turbulent waves of family relationships…
It is a relief, a moment of calm in the storm, to know that one relationship can be steady and true, if we seek for it – our covenant relationship with Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ!
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The Relationship Cycle
We are going to take a little detour here and talk about what the relationship model looks like, so the rest of our covenant relationship conversation will make more sense.
This is the relationship cycle, using a cyclical model to show us how this works…
There are two halves to a relationship…
One half is YOUR responsibility, and the other half is THEIR responsibility.
On your half, you are responsible for your own thoughts, feelings, and actions — no matter what others have done or said – this gives you an outcome (a result).
Whatever that is, becomes their circumstance and moves to THEIR half, where they get to decide how THEY want to think, feel, and act because of what you did or said. That will give them an outcome also.
Those outcomes, what they did or said, often become the “circumstance” in your model…
And the cycle goes round and round.
We somehow believe that if we say or do the right things, our relationships will be great.
This may be true, and if they are… how wonderful for you!
But sometimes it is not, and we become hurt.
The outcome we expected didn’t happen, so we are disappointed, sad, mad, and/or even resentful.
Sometimes we mistakenly believe that we can control the outcome of THEIR side of the relationship, so we say and do things in sneaky ways or try to maneuver around it – trying to avoid being hurt.
But the reality is, you cannot control THEIR side, you can only CHOOSE how you will respond.
This concept is freeing, but may causes a little heartache as you work through it.
I’ll explain by sharing some examples from my own life in the following posts…
–if you are unfamiliar with the tool I used to explain this, message me. I can link you to a video that will help you understand it better.
