Help to Build Up a Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ

Are you satisfied with your personal relationship with Jesus Christ? I know that I’m not.

But I’m a learner seeking to cultivate, along with fellow believers,  a more affectionate, personal relationship with the Lord Jesus. Along with the lover in the Song of Songs, my prayer to the Lord is “Draw me; we will run after you…”  

So I hope you’ll join me in this pursuit.

That’s how I consider “Holding to Truth in Love”—a community of Christ’s loving seekers “running after” the Lord Jesus together.

May the cry of the lover in Song of Songs become our daily prayer to the Lord,

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine. Draw me; we will run after you.” S. S. 1:2, 4a 

Only His attracting love can bring us into such an affectionate, personal relationship with Jesus.

Help I’ve received to build up a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus

“I love my Lord, but with no love of mine” 

We need to come to the Lord Jesus daily to be “emptied, lost, and swallowed up” in Him. We need to ask Him to infuse us with His loving Self again and again. That’s because It is His attracting power that becomes our pursuing power.

Our love for our Lord is inadequate at best. Madame Guyon, expressed this sentiment very well in the first stanza of her hymn, “I love my Lord, but with no love of mine”: 

I love my Lord, but with no love of mine,
For I have none to give;
I love Thee, Lord, but all the love is Thine,
For by Thy love I live.
I am as nothing, and rejoice to be
Emptied, and lost, and swallowed up in Thee.

[Hymn 546 in Hymns published by Living Stream Ministry]

The need for an affectionate, personal relationship with Jesus

Left to ourselves, we can’t avoid the plight of growing cold toward the Lord. Although we can’t make ourselves love the Lord Jesus, we can cultivate a personal and affectionate relationship with Him.

The following footnote from the Holy Bible Recovery Version expresses this crucial need:

“According to [Song of Songs 1:] 2-3, the lover of Christ has obtained a part of Christ’s love, but now she yearns for something more intimate. This indicates that the very Christ in whom we believe is personal and affectionate toward us, and that every believer’s relationship with Christ must be personal and affectionate (Mark 16:7 and note; John 13:23; 20:1-17; Gal. 2:20b). After believing in Christ to receive Him as the divine life (John 1:4, 12), we need to love Christ in a personal and affectionate way that we may pursue Him and enjoy Him as our satisfaction (1 Cor. 2:9 and note 3; 1 Tim. 1:14 and note 2).” [S.S. 1:2, note 1, par. 2]

Watchman Nee in his classic exposition of Song of Songs also addresses our need for a personal, affectionate relationship with the Lord:

“If the Holy Spirit has not put a real dissatisfaction with a general relationship and a pursuit for personal affection within a believer, he can never expect to have an intimate experience of the Lord. This pursuit is the basis for all future experience. If we do not have such a hunger and thirst, we will only have a poetic song, and it will not be the Song of Songs.” (The Song of Songs, Chapter 1, Section 1 )

May we respond to this word by asking the Lord to grant us His mercy to be dissatisfied with a general relationship.  May we also beseech the Lord to put within us a hunger and thirst for personal affection so that we might pursue, as the lover in Song of Songs, such an intimate relationship with Him.

Based on his own testimony, Witness Lee gives us some practical help to apply the burden conveyed in Watchman Nee’s quote above. In his Crystallization-Study of Song of Songs, Lee says,

“We all need this kind of personal, affectionate, intimate contact with the Lord every day. This has become my habit. Every morning after rising up I go to my desk and the first thing I say is, “Lord Jesus, I love You.”…We all need to take heed to what the seeker says: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” …This is a personal, intimate prayer. “Draw me; we will run after you.” This is personal and affectionate. We need this kind of personal and affectionate seeking after Him, and we need to build up such a relationship with Him that is so personal and affectionate.” (Crystallization-Study of Song of Songs, Chapter 1, Section 4).

May we not allow our precious days to slip away, being  satisfied with a general relationship with the Lord. Instead, we should cultivate a personal and affectionate relationship with Him every day. In such a way Christ will grow in us and make us His loving counterpart for our eternal marriage to Him (Rev. 19:7).

May we make the words of the fourth stanza of Howard Higashi’s song “The Divine Romance” our personal prayer:

Lord, in this close sweet fellowship,
Lord, be with me so intimate,
So personal and affectionate;
A sweet relationship.

Lord, daily change my inward being
Lord, all my heart possessing
In all my being—transforming
To be Your bride and queen.

In Your love I’m drawn,
To You I belong;
I am not my own, Lord,
I’m Yours alone.

By Your love I’m drawn,
In Your name I’m charmed,
And Your Person captured me,
For I’ve been kissed by Thee.

The experience of building up a personal affectionate relationship with the Lord Jesus is vast and will continue for our entire Christian life.  As such, this article can only hope to cultivate the desire for such a relationship with Jesus. Have you received help from this post to cultivate such a affectionate, personal relationship with Jesus? If so, please share it in a brief comment.