Jesus came to earth as a man, suffered, died and rose again…one time. There are certainly universal aspects to His saving work. However, each of us is saved individually. We have our own unique relationship and experience with God. Although each of our relationships has the common elements: Jesus, sin, repentance, redemption and sanctification, each of us has our own story. While we have sin in common, our sins are different. While for each of us, Jesus is the answer, we reach Him in different ways. We have different struggles, different challenges and we experience victory through Him in different ways.
This is more than just the differences in our cultures and denominations. God is complex beyond our understandings. We each experience just a sliver of His entirety. This is why it is so important for us to be in intimate fellowship with others who are in fellowship with Him. We learn from our direct experience of Him, but we also learn from the experiences of others. The broader our Christian connections, the greater is our experience of God.
Learning how Jesus has impacted the lives of other Christians, expands our understanding of how much more He can mean to us. We tend to let Him into certain aspects of our lives and believe that He has no interest or power to affect other parts. When we hear how He has touched others in ways we have not yet experienced, we open up to new possibilities in our lives.
When we share what He has meant to us, that experience becomes clearer and more real in the telling. It encourages not only the listener, but ourselves as we recount our history with Him.
No matter how much He has done for us and how much we have changed because of Him, there is always more. On this earth we will never experience all of Jesus, but through relationship with others we can experience so much more than we have through our special personal relationship.
Be blessed in your personal experience with Him and with what He has meant to others.
Nick
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