The Christian faith and way of life are personal matters if they are real. They cannot be depersonalized, for they have to do with a personal God and our personal response to him. We believe many people lose the blessings that should be theirs because they fail to realize and to practice this personal aspect of their faith.
The tendency to look at men in the mass, at society as a corporate group, and at the Church as nothing more than a corporate entity has increased the danger of depersonalizing man’s Christian experience so that God is left out in the limbo of unreality, far removed from our day-to-day experiences and needs.
A number of things are necessary for making Christ, and all that is implied in his Person and Work, real to us at the personal level. With many of these we have subconsciously complied, but we should be acutely aware of all of them so that through them Christ may become real and our faith personal.
For a genuine Christian experience there must be a sense of need. The depth of that sense of need will grow with the years, but it must be there at all times. Why turn to a Saviour if we do not need saving? Why seek healing if there is no sickness? Why look for help if we are able to solve our problems? Why ask for forgiveness if there is no offense? Why seek sight if we are not blind?
With the realization of personal need there must be confession of personal sin, not for one day but for an entire lifetime. Sanctification is the work of God’s Spirit in our hearts whereby we grow in our knowledge of and love for the Saviour and in personal righteousness; yet the fact remains that this side of eternity none of us can be perfect. We need daily washing of the Spirit, the application of the divine detergent—the blood of Calvary. Unconfessed sin erects barriers between God and us.
Faith is the hinge that holds the believer to a personal relationship with God. “Without faith it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb. 11:6, RSV).
While God honors our minute faith, compared by our Lord to a grain of mustard seed, he expects us to grow mature and develop in our understanding of the object of our faith, the Lord Jesus Christ. Maturing faith becomes increasingly personal as we comprehend something of the qualities of the one with whom we have to do. Nothing is more able to drive a man to his knees than meditation on the attributes of God.
The intertwining work of the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is revealed from Genesis to Revelation, so that the Three appear at Creation and at the consummation of the age. The reality of God as the personal God enables us to join with the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews: “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear” (Heb. 11:3). We base our faith, therefore, on the God of eternity who is also the God of creation.
But such a God might seem impersonal and far off. And so his Son, the Christ of the Scriptures, intensely human and personal even while being God, has revealed the Father to us in terms we can understand by faith.
We all need to grow in our realization of the holiness of the object of our faith, for nothing is more able to bring us to confession of sin than a sense of the holiness of God. His character, expressed in human terms, is all that perfect purity, goodness, and righteousness might suggest to the mind—and infinitely more. Despite this fact, through faith in and the acceptance of Christ’s imputed righteousness, there can exist between us and God a personal relationship comparable to that of a child with a loving father.
Inseparably a part of such a relationship with God is an overwhelming sense of his love, a love that was seen at Calvary and that may be experienced in our day-to-day experiences. Tempted? He too was tempted and offers the way of escape. Troubled? He knows and understands and comforts. Perplexed? He offers wisdom and guidance. Overwhelmed by the limitations of the flesh? He knows all about it and offers strength and victory where they really count.
The nearness of God, described so beautifully by David in Psalm 139, verses 7–12, must become a reality for us. In no way is he more personal than in his searching and continuing presence with those who put their trust in him. He seeks us personally, longs for our loving response to him as persons to a Person. There is no place in which we may hide from his presence, no time of our earthly existence when he is not at our right hand to respond to us as individuals.
There have been those who in stressing the place of faith in personal salvation have overlooked the place of obedience. Faith is validated by obedience. Through obedience our personal relationship to God becomes a reality. There must be a personal response to a Person. And this response can never be casual. It is unconditional surrender to the Lord of life, this life and the next; and it means seeking and doing God’s will.
At no place is the personal aspect of the Christian faith more real than in the matter of our two-way communication with God. We talk to him in formal prayer and even more in that attitude of mind and heart that always keeps him at the very center of life. And God speaks through the Holy Spirit to our hearts. He speaks directly through his Word. He speaks through other people and circumstances. When we are willing to listen, he speaks to us at the personal level.
Just as we act and react to any number of stimuli, intellectual and material, so the Christian should act and react to the personal claims of the living Christ. A Christianity that is impersonal toward God is impersonal toward man. Reaction against evil and action for good are the results of a relationship with Christ that gives us his mind, his perspective, and his will—all in the light of this life and in the context of eternity.
When our Christian faith becomes a personal matter, our outlook on this world changes completely. Life becomes a matter of God-to-man and man-to-man relationships in which we are the participants but not the activators, the channel but not the contents of the channel, the instrument but not the end.
Many of us have stood merely on the fringes of a life surrendered to Christ. We have held back where we should have trusted. We have regarded him and our relationship to him in a completely impersonal manner. We have been Christians in name but not in reality. We have had a form of godliness but denied the power thereof—the Person and Work of the Son of God as they relate to us as individuals.
Unless he becomes personal Saviour of our souls and Lord of our lives, we are of all men most miserable.
