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The Three Relationships

If the Christian life is Jesus living His life through me, we need to understand that Jesus’s life on earth revolved around three primary relationships. If you arrange each story of the Gospels by category, you’ll discover that every one of them represents one of the primary relationships in Jesus’s life. The first one is His relationship with His Father. 

Everything Jesus accomplished flowed from His intimate fellowship with the Father. When the people of Jesus’s day saw Him perform some great miracle, that was because the Father was working in and through Him. When they heard Jesus speak, that was the Father speaking through His Son. Jesus made that clear: “Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works. Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me” (John 14:10–11).

The second relational priority to Jesus was with His disciples and followers. He started by calling them away from their old lives so they could join in His kingdom activity: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me” (Matthew 16:24). Jesus prayed with His disciples. He taught them, cared for them, challenged them, and walked with each of them through the ups and downs of life.

Jesus and His relationship with the world—meaning, with those who didn’t know God and weren’t part of His kingdom—is the third primary relationship in His life. When you journey through the Gospels, story after story shows Jesus seeking out people who were in desperate need of His saving grace.

In Matthew, we see the religious leaders accusing Him of being a friend of sinners because He joined the hated tax collectors for a meal (9:9–13). In John, Jesus is constantly looking to engage with those who are far from God to bring to them the life-changing message of the gospel—whether it’s those lost in the darkness of religion, like Nicodemus, or those trapped in the seduction of sexual sin, like the Samaritan woman. One of the key patterns in Jesus’s life was building intentional, engaging, loving relationships with people who were far from God so they could come to know God through Him.

As we allow Jesus to live His life through us by the power of His Spirit, our lives will reflect the priority of these three relationships.

Prayer: God, begin to live Your life through me as I respond in love to You, my brothers and sisters in Christ, and to the world around me. In Jesus’s name, amen.