To love God, you must first love another…
Step 11: We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
Last week we talked about the fact that there are multiple possible pathways available to us to get closer to God (i.e., improve conscious contact). The one I didn’t spend much time on, because I knew I’d come back to it this week, is the fact that we can improve conscious contact with God through our relationships with other humans. Now, this is not necessarily part of step 11. I’m just using step 11 as a jumping off point to talk about something I personally care about. And that’s okay, right? There’s no rules here.
So let me just make a fairly tangential point: We can come to understand God through human relationships. The passage below indicates the vast importance of human relationships and how being out of sorts in these relationships has drastic spiritual implications…such that we would need to abandon worship in order to make things right.
Therefore, if you bring your gift to the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, 24 leave your gift at the altar and go. First make things right with your brother or sister and then come back and offer your gift.
Matthew 5:23-24, CEB
Now- I always thought of worship as a holy and sacred act. And I’m not saying that’s wrong. In fact, it’s crucial that we think of worship as holy and sacred. Or to think of God as holy and sacred and therefore worthy of worship. In thinking of God, and the worship of God, as holy and sacred, I also assumed that nothing should ever interfere with it…or else. “Or else what?” I’m not sure…but it just feels like it would be bad to interrupt worship to go do literally anything else.
Except for the fact that we have Matthew 5:23-24. In this passage we find out that there are things more important than worship, including making sure that we’re handling issues of forgiveness, conflict, and/or resentment in our relationships. Being at odds with other people compromises our ability to worship and resolving those conflicts takes priority over completing worship.
This is just how important human-to-human relationships are. If they’re disrupted, our relationship with God is disrupted (not permanently, not irreparably, but temporarily).
I’ve listened to so many talks about the importance of personal, individual spirituality. Talks where spirituality is solely about having your own private practices that you do to engage God. And these practices are good enough.
Except that they aren’t. Your private spiritual practices are less important than prioritizing your human relationships (this doesn’t mean they are not important, it’s just that the status of our relationships is that important). Because if your human relationships are out of sorts, your private worship practices aren’t going to compensate for that. In fact, we’re taught to interrupt them in order to go make things right with others.
Of course- this is being a bit black and white. Practically speaking we can’t leave every Sunday morning when we remember some “wrong” we need to make “right.” It’s obviously not that easy to just “right” our “wrongs.” And we can’t always get others to engage in our acts of reconciliation. I get all of this and it’s important that you get it too. My point with all this is not to make you ashamed of your relationships where things aren’t 100% positive. No relationship meets that standard. My relationships are certainly not all 100% positive. And I’m not interrupting my own sermons to go talk to every single person that I have some issue with or vice versa.
My point is simply this: Human relationships are so important they’re worth interrupting worship to attend to. Problems in our human relationships can create problems in our relationship to/with God. And surely the opposite is likely true: relationships that mirror the love of God likely strengthen or deepen our spirituality as a whole.
So, don’t let yourself off the hook. Don’t downplay the importance of modeling the love of God in your human relationships. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that private acts of worship will cover your struggles to mirror the love of God to people. In fact, if you’re looking to deepen your relationship with God, I’d start by finding a way to love another.
