Relationships—Learning to cultivate relationships will be the most important skill on earth because they are the source of our greatest blessings and curses. Since most of human problems are relational in nature. That is also the reason why many people nowadays prefer to stay private/isolated than risk the rejection and turmoil found in relationships. For some, it just takes too much work. It is a skill worth developing.

Relationships are so fragile. People carry all kinds of emotional, cultural, spiritual and psychological baggage that we don’t know about. Sometimes, you say something innocent and the other person get upset. People are fragile that is why relationships are fragile. That is why some people would rather remain private, quiet and unknown:

An elderly woman walked into the local country church. The friendly usher greeted her at the door and helped her up the flight of steps. "Where would you like to sit?" he asked politely.
"The front row please." she answered.
"You really don't want to do that", the usher said.
"The pastor is really boring."
"Do you happen to know who I am?" the woman inquired.
"No." he said.
"I'm the pastor's mother," she replied indignantly.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked.
"No." she said.
"Good", he answered

Some of us like to remain private, quiet and unknown. Deep down, we all want quality relationships:

There are natural relationships that we require for support, guidance, love, emotional and spiritual growth. In fact, the two greatest commandments in the Bible are to do with relationships—relationship with God and relationship with others. Lets take a closer look at them.

Matthew 22:36-40 (NLT)
"Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?"
[37] Jesus replied, " 'You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.' [38] This is the first and greatest commandment. [39] A second is equally important: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' [40] All the other commandments and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments."

We develop healthy personalities by developing relationships with:
1. God—We learn to believe and trust in God, but this is a relationship where we depend mostly on God. We develop this relationship by faith, which is not dependent on how good we are. As this relationship grows, we begin to change and this affects every other relationship.
2. Family and friends—we get our day to day intimacy needs through them. In fact, we get a better sense of ourselves through feedback from them. Some run away from conflicts but it is conflicts that are the greatest teachers that tell us who we are—if we avoid them, we end up avoiding ourselves. Conflicts are the greatest character builders. It is through relationships with friends and family that we develop a sense of being needed as we need others. We learn reciprocity—helping others and letting others help us. We learn responsibility knowing that how we act affects others and how others affect us. It is here that we learn healthy interdependence.
3. Self—“Through a caring relationship with ourselves we learn self-nurturing—the ability to love ourselves and see ourselves as one resource we can turn to during times of difficulty. It is through a relationship with ourselves that we learn to be caring and patient with others. The relationship we have with ourselves is carried in some form to all our other relationships.”
4. Community—Through our relationship with the different communities (work, recovery, church, Care Groups, ICF, ethnic community), we learn about responsibility towards ourselves and others. We learn to view relationships within a larger framework—we learn to contribute; we learn to take; we learn to give and receive care from those we have never met; and we learn to be interdependent.

We see Jesus living these different kinds of relationships…
These 4 types of relationships tell us something about how God created us: we must reach within ourselves and we must reach out to be complete persons. In these natural relationships, there is connection with others that includes giving and receiving. We need these relationships to develop healthy character qualities. Without outside relationships, there is only taking. People who are constantly taking and not giving have not had such healthy relationships to develop the character of giving to others. And if a person is constantly taking—people will take notice say—enough is enough—I am not a blank check book.

Let me now focus on some Biblical principles about relationships before we learn some practical applications:
You will notice that as Christians, God sets a higher standard for us than for non-believers. But God does this for a reason—because the only way people will be attracted to Him is for you to be attractively different.

Luke 6:27-38 (NLT)

"But if you are willing to listen, I say, love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. [28] Pray for the happiness of those who curse you. Pray for those who hurt you. [29] If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn the other cheek. If someone demands your coat, offer your shirt also. [30] Give what you have to anyone who asks you for it; and when things are taken away from you, don't try to get them back. [31] Do for others as you would like them to do for you.

Underline the verbs, the action words. God is not interested in good intentions but good actions. But some of you might say—I love the people in church!! Is that sufficient in the Kingdom of God?

[32] "Do you think you deserve credit merely for loving those who love you? Even the sinners do that! [33] And if you do good only to those who do good to you, is that so wonderful? Even sinners do that much! [34] And if you lend money only to those who can repay you, what good is that? Even sinners will lend to their own kind for a full return.

Christ has not called you to be ordinary—but extraordinary!!

[35] "Love your enemies! Do good to them! Lend to them! And don't be concerned that they might not repay. Then your reward from heaven will be very great, and you will truly be acting as children of the Most High, for he is kind to the unthankful and to those who are wicked. [36] You must be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate. [37] "Stop judging others, and you will not be judged. Stop criticizing others, or it will all come back on you. If you forgive others, you will be forgiven.

Some of you are thinking—wait a second! I don’t want to be hurt by others again, I don’t want to be a door mat for others to step on.

Please pay attention here: the Christian life is a process, a journey—if you need recovery, get recovery; if you need healing your past, deal with it by getting help—but if you are always at the beginning of the journey and cannot get past your past experiences—you are not growing at all. At some point—God is saying—you need to mature because I need you to be different from others so that I can use you to reach those who do not understand my love.
I want you to look at something very interesting now. God does not use human standards to bless us. I want you to understand a secret here—you need to learn to use God’s standard to measure your relationship with others:

[38] If you give, you will receive. Your gift will return to you in full measure, pressed down, shaken together to make room for more, and running over. Whatever measure you use in giving—large or small—it will be used to measure what is given back to you."

We can to a great degree decide the extent of God’s blessings upon our lives. We determine the kind of measure that God uses to bless us. It is like a blessing meter that measures our giving on a scale of 1 to 10. If our giving is a 1, God will use that number to bless us with. There is a divine formula that pours out in proportion to our giving or lack of giving. And this is largely determined by us where the measure itself is our giving. If we say—we give this much to others and no more—God will say—I will give this much and no more; its that simple!! In other words—you cannot out-give God. If you develop relationships based on sacrificial giving—God will bless you more than you sacrifice.

Wise people are those look for opportunities to give to God and to others…

Luke 6 is a chapter of how relationships are to work in the Kingdom of God. Jesus in this chapter is showing that this kind of relationship comes from examining oneself, it begins out of a changed heart. In this kingdom, we love enemies and repay evil with good. For if we only do good to those who do good to us, those are the values of the world.

1. Loving others begins with a change of your heart.
Remember that you can pretend to love people but if the heart is not real, it will only be a temporary show. If the heart is not changed, we are only being religious. And a person who loves out of a right heart will never fear rejection! Why, because you are already complete—you don’t love to get something back!
But how do we change our hearts?

i. Trusting in God by Obeying Him by
ii. Building a new foundation on Jesus

Many of us build foundations on the church, on our fellowships, on our Care Groups instead of Christ. When we do that—when they are removed, say for example when we return home to our home countries, we fall away because our foundations were on the wrong place. Don’t get me wrong—church, Care Groups, fellowship is great but your foundation needs to be ultimately on Christ because every other foundation cannot sustain you. In fact, God often removes us from our fellowship, or church just so that we can get to see where our foundation is all along. This is a Life Skill we all need to build—building our lives on the rock of Christ and not of the sand of church, fellowships, or Christian emotional highs. The best way to see where our foundation is is to see how faithful you are when all the other foundations are removes. And God has done that to me a couple of times as a season of reflection to see if Christ is our foundation.

Luke 6:46-49 (NLT)
"So why do you call me 'Lord,' when you won't obey me? [47] I will show you what it's like when someone comes to me, listens to my teaching, and then obeys me. [48] It is like a person who builds a house on a strong foundation laid upon the underlying rock. When the floodwaters rise and break against the house, it stands firm because it is well built. [49] But anyone who listens and doesn't obey is like a person who builds a house without a foundation. When the floods sweep down against that house, it will crumble into a heap of ruins."

Loving others is ultimately an issue of the heart. Often, we try to repair the outside without changing the inside. We can do all the right outside things with a rotten inside. If you change your heart, you are building a new foundation.

So after you begin with the heart, what practical Life Skills can you cultivate to build healthy relationships?

2. Learning forgiveness. In this world, people will hurt you. The greatest lesson of the cross is that no matter how the past has been, today can be a new day all over again. For those who never learn this skill, they are like living lives picking up baggage and burdens along the way until life becomes just too heavy to bear anymore. It is like the story of Pilgrim’s Progress.
Matthew 6:12 (NLT)
…and forgive us our sins, just as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us.

And that is what my brother who is in politics taught me—that the older generation and politicians often have difficulties in this and after a while, you just get stuck in life because there are just too many raw wounds.
And no matter what accident you get into—if you want to get well, you need to take medicine, no matter how bitter it is. Forgiveness is the medicine to be spiritually, emotionally, and emotionally free in this life.

3. Cultivate a genuine interest in other people’s lives.
Do you want to learn people skills? This is it!! Deep down, we want people to care genuinely about what we care about. It requires investment and risk. We are always waiting for people to reach out instead of us reaching out. When I was in Secondary 2, I had a metal work teacher who actually met with me after school to ask about my life and my family! No one in school had cared that much about me before. That began the change in my life. The question is not—do I have many friends—rather, its—how can I be a friend to someone else.

Romans 12:9 (NLT)
Don't just pretend that you love others. Really love them…

1 John 3:18 (NLT)
Dear children, let us stop just saying we love each other; let us really show it by our actions.

When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it

Is it possible that your family members, close friends or people around you seem distant is because you have not taken the effort to build that bridge across to them? Instead of thinking—who is going to meet my needs—tell yourself—I am going to stop being self-absorbed (since it is not working anyway) and take a genuine interest in my parents lives, in my colleague’s life, in my friend’s life—and you will be surprised how quickly connected you become. Like all skills, it requires perseverance, constant exposure until you are used to it and lots of practice until it becomes second nature.

4. Lastly, because you are the church, you are there to demonstrate
genuine love. There was once a woman who was religious and devout and filled with love for God. Each morning she would go to church. And on her way children would call out to her, beggars would accost her, but so immersed was she in her devotions what she did not even see them. Now on day she walked down the street in her customary matter and arrived at the church just in time for service. She pushed the door, but it would not open. She pushed it again harder, and found the door was locked. Distressed at the thought that she would miss service for the first time in years and not knowing what to do, she looked up. And there, right before her face, she found a note pinned to the door. It said, “I’m out there!”

We do not only find God in church but where people are. Mother Theresa used to say about the AIDS victims that she held that she sees the face of Christ in each one of them. We do not only find God at Church but at our work place, our families, among our non-believing friends and relatives.

1 Cor. 8:1 (Living)
… But although being a "know-it-all" makes us feel important, what is really needed to build the church is love.

If someone is in trouble, fallen away from God or is living in a life of sin, what should we do. If I stand there and judge (use Luke 6 as an example), or merely criticize, this is an indication of a self-righteous spirit that still has a long way to go to understand God’s love. The Bible tells me that I am the church—me and not the building. And if I do not help my brother or sister who is in sin or who has fallen, what am I there in the first place? If the church cannot help even those who have fallen within the church, why would anyone even want to come to church the first place? Does this make sense? Again, I am the church, and if I do not help my brother or sister in trouble, why am I there in the first place—the church has ceased to be the church.

André Ong