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My Personal Lord and Savior
By John R. Gavazzoni
Whoever coined the phrase, "throwing out the baby with the bathwater," must have been a person of keen observational insight. The saying applies to so many situations....situations that call for the kind of careful examination of content by which that which is of worth is preserved as the unworthy is in the process of being discarded. It is thus so in the experience of that first saving encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ. I, for one, and I think I speak for many who, upon being quickened in spirit by the power of Jesus' resurrection, was awakened to a vital awareness of Jesus becoming to me personally all that He is universally.
That experience fits well into Paul's description of God as the Savior of all men, especially those who believe. While being the Savior of the world, God, in the person of His Son, makes Himself especially known to the elect of that place and time, but to be sure, as G. Campbell Morgan explained, not as God's pets, but as God's pattern. God becomes in a few upfront what the all, the whole, is to Him in His Son. Those enter into "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ." That popular evangelical description has come, for not a few, something more to be denied than affirmed. It seems that, following that primal, pristine experience of having been called into Jesus' presence to "know and believe the love God has for us," our evangelical mentors proceeded to insist that we believe things completely alien to who our Lord is, and who He had become to us experientially.
So, comes the day when God reveals to us that we needed to rid ourselves of all that alien baggage. We were MADE to know that God is, indeed, in truth, the Savior of the world, and to know that it is true AS STATED without the need for the addition of any exclusionary disclaimers. Light began to flood our hearts. We saw that all that eternal torment stuff had come from within the darkest regions of the fallen human psyche....yes, even in our own case. It may have been our mentors that taught such things, but there was something within us, that is in our flesh, that found it believable.
But then, for some, came the time, when they couldn't separate out that real personal experience from the alien stuff that had been laid upon them. It seemed to them that that belonged to their hell-believing days, and it all needed to be discarded. For them, to speak of having come into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ meant denying the universality of His salvation. "How dare I speak of Him as my personal Savior when He is the Savior of all men?" They presumed that to make that confession meant that "personal" implied exclusive, not understanding that when God does, in fact, reveal Himself to some exclusive of others, He does so to show in the few what, from His side, is His relationship to the whole. What God becomes experientially to a few is representative of what He finally will become to the many, for the many have, from the beginning, been included in His Son, in whom, and in whose human experience is the truth of the destiny of every man's humanity.
This manner of confusion has led many to replace "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ," with "the Divine Principle within," and/or, "coming into Christ-consciousness." Starts the slippery slide down the slippery slope at the bottom of which a personal allegiance, a personal loyalty to the Person of Jesus Christ is no longer seen as intrinsic to the experience of saving grace. By definition, as indicated by the Greek for faith, allegiance and loyalty to His Person is included right there at the core. He, Jesus, was sent personally into the world, and personally to each of us, not as a "divine principle," but as God's beloved Son to bring us all into the same personal relationship He has with the Father.
In the New Testament, saving faith is the faith OF Christ, and the faith OF Christ has its origin in the faith OF God. God wholeheartedly believes in His Son with complete allegiance, loyalty, devotion and commitment. Such faith drew and continues to draw forth from the Son the same toward the Father. Talk about a personal relationship, THAT'S IT, and in Christ, we, personally, are made to share in that relationship....that relationship which is at the heart of the communion within, and which is the very life of, Deity Itself. That's ours as the family of God. Be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
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