At times, a package may arrive at your doorstop. On it are words written in bold: Fragile. Handle With Care! This also applies to relationships. The husband-wife relationship or the parent-child relationship can easily shatter. How do you put it back together again?
In the hustle-bustle of every day life, our unquenchable thirst for money, prestige, and status often comes at the expense of nurturing long-term relationships. It’s not something you can buy with money and gifts – try as you may. You can’t throw a few dollars at it and expect love and respect in return. It doesn’t work that way.
Too often we think in terms of houses, not homes; jobs, not vocations; the screen, not the table. Building relationships takes time, commitment, and energy. Relationships are a gift from God to cultivate, cherish, and hold on to into the next generations.
But there’s a problem. We are broken people, broken by sin. We are born that way and this is why relationships so easily break. Sin and selfishness get in the way. And throwing money at it doesn’t make the greed and selfishness go away. Manipulating or using relationships to serve our own personal ends is egregious. It’s not love no matter how much we try to make it look loving! It alienates because our sin alienates us from others.
Our alienation in relationships stems from a deeper problem: our alienation from God. He made us to live in relationship with Him. We broke our relationship with God by disobeying Him and therefore the broken relationships in marriage and in the family.
But there is hope: reconciliation. God came to reconcile broken, sinful people to a right relationship with Him through Jesus Christ. And He didn’t buy that with money but with His own life. That To all who trust in Christ, the Bible says, “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.”
It's when we are reconciled with God through Christ, then we are at home with God. Then we can also build homes, not manipulating relationships but truly cultivating and building relationships, not serving our own ends but serving God. That, money can’t buy!