What Is The One Relationship That Rewires Your Mind Like No Other?

Have you ever experienced this?  You’re driving along, and you accidently cut into someone’s lane.  Or maybe you’re simply too slow for someone’s liking.  Whatever the case.  You upset someone on the road.  And boy, do they let you know it!   They make a gesture not suitable for worship.  They yell at you, give you a loud blast of the horn.  And the whole encounter, it upsets you.  It rattles you.   And it takes you a while to get over it.  

But how can one person, a complete stranger, affect you so powerfully, so quickly?  It’s because relationships have power.   Their energy, either positive or negative, impacts you.  Why?   Because that relational energy that a person puts out there doesn’t stay out there, it goes in here.  It goes into you.   You internalize it.   That’s how a random stranger’s anger on the road can affect you like that.   And if a random encounter can do that, think about the deeper relationships that are part of your everyday life.

According to the neurobiologist Daniel Siegel, your relationships, either positive or negative, actually change your physical brain.  Your relationships literally have the power to rewire your neurons.   Isn’t that why we honor the people that we do today; our mothers? 

Yes your mother gave birth to you, but she did far more than that.  She shaped who you are.  The messages she gave you, hopefully good ones, have shaped who you are.   Even if your mother has passed away, she remains with you.  Why?  How she shaped you, remains.   The preacher Frederick Beuchner put it this way.  “You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.”..a world that those relationships created in you. 

But as crucial as your mother’s relationship is, it pales in comparison to the relationship we talk about today.    No relationship will rewire your mind like this on.   No relationship will transform your life like it.   What is this relationship?   How can you have it?  In these words, God shows you the way.   Let’s listen and hear what God has to say. 

I John 1:1-4

Here, God points you to the one relationship compared to which, all other relationships pale.  And since you are sitting in a gathering focused on God, you’ve likely guessed what that relationship is.  But what makes a relationship with God so transforming?   Here God tells you.  That relationship changes who you are.  And as it changes who you are, it expands what you see.  It enables you to even hear the thoughts of God.             

In the last two times I’ve been with you, I have focused on these same four sentences at the beginning of this letter.  And today, we get at the one word to which this whole paragraph points.

John tells how he and his fellow apostles actually saw Jesus how they heard him, how they touched him.    John makes this point because lots of folks in his day had lost touch with the simple reality that God had actually entered into human existence in Jesus.    But why did God do this?   Was God simply bored, wanted a little earthly diversion?

No, John tells you that God did this because God wanted a relationship.  God wanted a relationship with you.     And there you got it.   You’ve got the whole purpose of Christianity in a nutshell.   God wants an intimate, an incredibly intimate relationship with you.  And God went to death and beyond to make that relationship possible.  

So if you don’t have that relationship with God, you’ve missed the whole point.  Every Christian belief, every Christian practice has one sole purpose, to bring you intimately in relationship with God.  And if you don’t have that, then you don’t have Christianity period.

It’s not about simply believing in Jesus, knowing the stories, memorizing the scriptures.  Sure, that’s all good stuff to do.  But if you believe in Jesus, but don’t know Jesus, intimately, well then, you’re not much better off than a demon.   I mean.  A demon believes in Jesus.   But a demon sure doesn’t have any intimacy with him. 

Now this might seem obvious, but to many folks who attend church their whole lives, it isn’t.  

For years, I’ve been asking a set of four questions developed by the Quakers to get to know people.   The questions go like this.

What kind of heat did you have in your house growing up?

What was the warmest place in your house, physically or emotionally?

Who was the warmest person in your life growing up?

And finally, when did Jesus become warm to you.

This week, I was talking to a guy, who grew up in a fundamentalist independent Baptist church in the Midwest.    His family showed up at church every time the door opened, and he went to the church’s school all the way through high school.    Later, after he left that church, he started going to a Presbyterian church.  He sang in the choir there.  He worked in Vacation Bible Schools.    And then he even served a year as a Presbyterian mission worker in Chicago.  There someone suggested that he should really think about seminary.   So sure enough, he enrolled, and that’s when it happened.  That’s finally where Jesus became warm to him. 

Get this. This guy went to a conservative Christian school from Kindergarten through high school.  He became an active leader in not only that Baptist church but a Presbyterian one too.  He even served a year as a missionary.    But he was in love with religion.  He was even in love with church.   But not until seminary, until seminary mind you, did he fall in love with Jesus.   And his story, it’s more typical than you think.

Because, when John talks about the relationship God wants, John makes it clear.  What God wants is something incredibly intense.   You can tell how intense by the word John uses, a word that the writers of the New Testament use a lot.  John uses the Greek word, Koinonia.   It usually gets translated as fellowship, but that term hardly does it justice. 

Literally, koinonia, means communion. It means that you share in something or someone.  For example at this table, we share in this bread and this cup, and in doing so, we share in the very presence of God.   We are communing with God, and thus we call this communion.

But what does it mean to commune with God, like John talks about?    What does it mean to share in the communion with the Father and his son, Jesus Christ?  

It means first that God isn’t just out there anymore.  God is in here.    As 2 Peter puts it, you become a partaker of the Divine nature.    Or as Paul puts it.  I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me.   Do you get this?   To become a Christian means you start sharing in the very life, in the very nature of God.

Now, don’t get any big ideas.   Sharing in the very life of God, doesn’t make you God.  But it does make you kin.   You literally become a relation of God.   In fact, that’s a helpful way to think of it.

In some ways, I look like my mom.   I have for example her nose, what she calls the Westbrook nose.   In other ways, I look like my dad.     But still we are different people.    But we are different people who share many characteristics in common.  Why?  We are related.

What does it mean then to be related to God?   It means you have become far more than you could even have imagined.    And maybe the writer, C.S. Lewis, came closest to describing that more.  He wrote.

The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. God is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were ‘gods’ and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him—for we can prevent Him, if we choose—He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. God meant what He said.

Now Christians are not there yet, but even now, the effect of the transformation begins to take place.    And it begins with how you see.    When I was growing up, I loved this song by the Christian singer, Amy Grant.    And even though, the writer, Gary Chapman, obviously wrote it for her, it still gets me to this day. 

The song goes something like this: 

I may not be every mom's dream for her little girl, 
And my face may not grace the mind of everyone in the world.
But that's all right, as long as I can have one wish I pray:
When people look inside my life, I want to hear them say, 

She's got her father's eyes, Her father's eyes; 
Eyes that find the good in things, When good is not around; 
Eyes that find the source of help, When help just can't be found; 
Eyes full of compassion, Seeing every pain; 
Knowing what you're going through and feeling it the same.
Just like my father's eyes, My father's eyes, My father's eyes, 
Just like my father's eyes.

That song still gets me.  Why?  It gives us a vision of what can happen when God’s presence starts living in you.  It changes the way you see.   You start to see as Amy Grant put it through your father’s eyes.  Your heart begins to get broken by the things that break the heart of God.

Now, your sight isn’t perfect, because you’re not perfect.   But still something happens. 

Growing up, my mom nurtured in me certain ways of seeing the world.  For example, in our household, it was always Kraft Mayonnaise, there could be no other.   And to this day, that’s where my eyes go when it comes to Mayonnaise.  Now have I strayed from the path, and used Hellman’s or even Duke’s at times, sure.  But still, my eyes always go back to Kraft.   Why?  What was once outside, my mother’s thoughts on mayonnaise have now come to live in me. 

And in the same way, you begin to see the world as Jesus sees it.   The same things bother you that bother Jesus.   The same things move you that would move Jesus.   Why?   Because Jesus is no longer out there.  He is in here.   He has come to live in you. 

And for the same reason, you start recognizing his voice.  Now our phones make it easy.  When someone calls you, the phone usually tells you who it is.  But if it didn’t, most of the time, you’d still know, wouldn’t you?   You’d recognize the voice. 

And when you start sharing in Jesus’ life, the same thing happens.  It doesn’t mean you hear some audible voice, but still when certain thoughts come into your mind, you recognize the voice.  You know, that’s Jesus.  

Now a lot of times that voice gives me insight about something I share here.   Other times, it points out a failing in my life, one I’d rather overlook.  But I know the voice.   And frankly, I’m usually carrying on a conversation with that voice throughout the day.   And for those sharing in Jesus’ life, that becomes pretty typical.  You may have set times when you talk to Jesus, when you make time to hear back, but prayer never stops there.  It grows and grows until that voice becomes just a beautiful, integral part of your life, a conversation that never ends. 

That’s why God came in Jesus to give you that, to give you the divine nature; to give you eyes to see as God sees; ears to hear God’s very thoughts.   So how do you get this?   Is there an esoteric practice that gets you there?    No.   It’s as simple as opening a door.  God doesn’t hide from you.  God pursues you.  But like any relationship, you have to be willing to open the door.    

If you go to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, you’ll see this famed painting, by the English artist, William Holman Hunt, hanging in the chapel there.   Hunt based the picture on a verse in Revelation that we’ll say together in just a few moments.   

You may not be able to see it here, but the door on which Jesus knocks is all grown over with vines.   Yet, that isn’t the most interesting detail.   If you look on the door, you won’t find a handle.   Hunt painted it that way, to make clear the tragedy of what he called “the obstinately shut mind.”   You see.  Jesus is knocking, always knocking.  That’s not the question.  The question is.  Have you opened the door?   Will you open the door?  

If you have, you already know how it has changed your life.   If you haven’t, why don’t you make this the day you do.