Anxiety

Part 5 - Worry in Relationships, Part Two

Relationships often evoke negative emotions, finger pointing, and accusations. As seen with Mary and Martha, relationships often occasion anxieties that distract us from needed devotion to Christ. We therefore fail to discover God's mercies in and through these relationships. We can skip across this hurdle if we understand the purpose of our relationships. Some purposes are more pragmatic. We need the companionship. We need the employment. The Shorter Catechism gives us a higher purpose. We must glorify God in our relationships. I'm interested in a yet more overarching concept.

To get at it, let's start once again with 1 Corinthians 7:32. Note Paul's bottom line. "I want you to be free from [anxiety] concern." Relationships are not bad. Take marriage. Did God design marriage to cause anxiety and distract us from Christ? No. For one thing, marriage provides essential companionship (Genesis 2:18, Malachi 2:14). However, there is a deeper purpose. God designed the love of a husband and wife in marriage to reflect the love Christ has for His church. "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her" (Ephesians 5:25). Many times my wife and I embrace and I say, "I'm sure glad we have us." She says, "Me too." We have companionship. We have much more. We bask in love. In the midst of our relationship we therefore discover the mercy of God, the love of God, and the strength of God. This is a basic and important witness of God's love to the world. Unfortunately, this is a witness being systematically destroyed by the pervasiveness of divorce and the scandal of homosexuality.

Again, note Paul's bottom line. "This I say for your own benefit; not to put a restraint upon you, but to promote what is appropriate and to secure undistracted devotion to the Lord" (1 Corinthians 7:35). Paul is after freedom from anxiety and undistracted devotion to God. He wants us to experience the love, mercy, and grace of God. In order for this to take place, we need to see and understand the deeper purpose for our relationships. Like marriage, God gives us other relationships to display His many-faceted love to a lost and fallen world. In most instances, at the outset, the only way men and women see God's love is through the interaction, the relationships, of God's people. This is the import of 1 John 4:12. "No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us." Men and woman may indeed see God in and through the love we have for one another. When we enter into relationships knowing this overarching purpose, we may also discover the God's love and mercy in them.

Putting it a little differently, we have the profound opportunity to display God's love in all our relationships. Realizing this changes our outlook and our actions. We discover God's mercy in the midst of the very relationship that could be the source of our greatest anxieties. Surely this was the case at the foot of the cross. "When Jesus then saw His mother, and the disciple whom He loved standing nearby, He said to His mother, 'Woman, behold, your son!' Then He said to the disciple, 'Behold, your mother!' From that hour the disciple took her into his own household" (John 19:26-27). This relationship of mother and Son occasioned deep anxiety. However, it became a vehicle for earnest devotion to God and a discovery of His great mercy and love. May it be so with each of us.