Yes, God Wants to Play an Active Role in Your Life

“Being a Christian is about a relationship, not religion!”

I thoroughly enjoyed being a sassy, self-righteous seventh grader as I talked to my classmates about Jesus. I had been to a number of Christian youth conferences and had heard Steven Curtis Chapman perform live, so it was obviously my job as the new right-hand of God to inform everyone that it didn’t matter how many times you went to Sunday School last year. I pretty much told my friends that religion was a swear word.

Not only could I have been a lot less obnoxious, I could have used a little more knowledge on the importance of obedience and submission to Christ. However, I have to give my obnoxious little seventh-grade self some credit - I was tuning into something that the Holy Spirit has been trying to tell me since I was born:

I am all you’ve ever needed, and a relationship with you is exactly what I want. The blood of Jesus proves it. 

The Psalms have always held a special place in my heart. Not only could I guarantee that if I opened my Bible with my eyes closed I could find the Psalms (again, I was a very obnoxious little Christian), but there is something about the way they are written that captivated me even as a punk kid. I’ve always loved writing, and there was something that resonated with me about David, Moses, and Solomon crying out to the Lord. There are Psalms for rejoicing, gratitude, and worship, and there are also Psalms that blatantly lay out these writers’ grievances with God. They lament openly and ask God hard questions. They doubt God without wondering if they will be punished. They talk to God like someone would talk to an incredibly close friend, spouse, or family member.

They don’t engage God by writing a report card for Him. They don’t even just perform for His amusement, as if we were created to just be God’s personal American BandStand. They come to God as their authentic, unfiltered, emotional, and sin-riddled selves. That is what God wants in a relationship with us. 

A Psalm that I have been meditating on lately is Psalm 51. In this piece, we find an imperfect, beat-up David who had just been confronted about his adultery with Bathsheba engaging God in the covenantal relationship that God has always desired with His children. David knows that he screwed up, big-time. 

The Psalm starts out with David saying,

“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight; so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge.”

We see David doing a couple of things here.

First, he is confessing his sin to God. He isn’t making excuses, and he isn’t pretending that God has a different set of standards for him, no matter how much he was “after God’s own heart”. We see in Scripture that the only thing we have to do to enter into this covenantal relationship with the Living God is to confess our sin and believe that He is Lord. We see David coming to God as a first-time believer would - as a sinner that desperately needs grace that he doesn’t deserve. 

Second, we see David worshipping God in the midst of His confession. He is acknowledging that God is all-powerful (while also remaining merciful) by saying that he understands that what he has done was evil and worthy of death. 

I wish that I more often invited God into the conversation of my prayers in that way. 

I think that sometimes we forget that God wants to play an active role in our lives. He isn’t a professor that is simply grading our papers and keeping tabs on our progress. He is a loving, caring, and all-powerful Father that paid an unthinkable price for us. He did that to grant us full VIP access to Him. We hit the jackpot and won the outrageously expensive Harry Styles backstage passes, except the general consensus is that Jesus is around one bajillion times better than Harry Styles. And the backstage pass lasts forever. 

David goes on to write in Psalm 15:16-17:

“You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”

If you had live video footage of me reading those two verses out loud, you would see a huge blubbering baby that couldn’t contain his tears if his life depended on it. It’s the best news there is.

Our sacrifice has absolutely no line item on the “Who Gets to Be Loved by God” rubric. It will not be on the end-of-course test. It won’t be weighed and averaged into a score. We get to be loved by God because sacrificing our broken, messy, dumpster-fire lives are enough. It’s all He asks for. And He knows we’ll screw it up. He doesn’t even care. 

He will not despise a broken and contrite heart. So if that’s the case, do you think God’s ideal role in our lives is to be the almighty SAT proctor in the sky, just making sure everything goes as planned? Only being there for us to praise and feel judged by? Of course not.

He wants to be right there beside you, keeping His promise to never leave or forsake you. The Holy Spirit is living and active. His word is just as relevant today as it was two thousand years ago. His love is still the most powerful thing in the universe. We get to invite Him into that and live in that. We’ll see it when we read the scriptures, and we’ll see it when we desperately need a Father to come rescue us. God wants to take on the role He has wanted in your life since you were born. Are you ready to have that kind of intimacy with God?