It’d be nice if all our relationships were easy and wonderful. But they’re not.  There’s always a cost.  So – how much of a cost should you pay and when should you pay it?

There seems to be a basic law in this universe that nothing worthwhile comes easy. People who want to have a nest egg for retirement have to take some of the income they have now and invest it to get their returns. There’s a sacrifice now to reap rewards later, the same goes with just about everything else, loosing weight, getting fit, learning, studying, they all require sacrifices now so that we can have benefits later. And life seems to be about achieving a sensible balance between those two. Sure we need to live for today but at the same time we need to invest for tomorrow, and that applies equally to relationships.

Over the last few days on the program we’ve been talking about building lasting relationships, because relationships are so important to the richness or otherwise of our lives. But sometimes it can be a tough road, building that relationship is hard, we want things to go more quickly and when it gets hard we want to give up, that’s why today I’d like to spend some time together counting the cost of relationships.

The ultimate relationship model is one of Jesus and what He did for you and me; it’s the one relationship above any other on the planet that serves to illustrate the cost. Let me read this to you:

Jesus arrived right on time for us, He didn’t and doesn’t wait for us to get ready, He presented Himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway, we can understand someone dieing for a person that’s worth dying for and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspiring us to selfless sacrifice. But God, God put His love on the line for us by offering His Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatsoever to Him.

The Apostle Paul wrote that in the book of Romans.

It’s awesome isn’t it? It’s about proactive love, its about Jesus looking at us and saying, “You know something this Berni guy, man he needs my help, this Berni guy has got his life so messed up, I’m going to die on the cross for this Berni guy, I’m going to die on the cross for each person on this planet.” That is awesome, and there’s always a price, there’s always a cost, there’s always a sacrifice to a relationship.

The wonderful thing about God’s model for relationship is that before we’re ready he steps out and makes a sacrifice; just translate that into the relationships that we have; the people who hurt us, the people who are difficult. While they’re hurting us, while they’re being difficult, while they’re being a pain in the neck right when we’d like to saw them in half, we step out and love them and accept them and make sacrifices for them, what a model.

Every relationship is about sacrifice, we cannot have relationships unless we lay some things down. I mean marriage, I used to be able to come and go as I pleased when I was single, today I can’t, today I have to make a sacrifice, now that sacrifice happens to be very worthwhile but any social construct puts limits on us. The law puts limits on us, and the same is true in individual relationships, makes sense doesn’t it? But so often we approach relationships from this self-centred perspective, to say what can I get out of this, me, me, me and me.

But if we want rich and genuine relationships we’ve got to be prepared to pay the price don’t we? Because people are different, we won’t always see eye to eye with them, they won’t always think we are the most delightful, wonderful person that God put on the earth. I know that might surprise us but that what happens. We want genuine, rich relationships but sometimes we aren’t prepared to pay the price.

“Well, well you know I deserve better, but I’m entitled, you know they owe me.” Well maybe they do, people do wrong thing to us sometimes but waiting around hoping that things will get better, that’s not how relationships work, that’s not how the Jesus relationship thing works. Imagine if Jesus sat up there in heaven and said “I’m going to wait for Berni to sort his act out before I come to save him”? I’d be lost, I’d have not future, I’d have no eternal life, I wouldn’t have the joy and the peace and the richness and the power and the grace and the mercy in my life today that I do have.

If Jesus had sat back in His lounge chair and said, “I’ll just watch a little bit more television and wait for Berni to sort his act out?” Can I put it really bluntly? If we want to have relationships we have to get off our backsides and take the initiative, even when the other person doesn’t deserve it, especially when the other person just doesn’t deserve it.

Jesus is the model of a relationship because when we say, “well you know I going to wait until they do something,” He says “No, go now before they’re ready, no, don’t wait until they sort themselves out, help them, love them, encourage them, be Me for them, when? While they’re still your enemies.” That’s when Jesus paid the ultimate price, when we weren’t worth dying for He counted us worthy; His is a model of proactive, awesome relationship, even pre-emptive sacrifice.

So before the other person does anything good we humble ourselves and sacrifice for them. In all my life that’s the most important thing I’ve ever learned about relationships, because if I humble myself and I go and do something for someone that doesn’t deserve it I’ve just built a bridge of relationship, and influence and love into their lives that money cannot buy. It works that’s why God did it, that’s why Jesus is the authentic Saviour, look around look at all the other belief systems and religions, you wont find anything like that, rings true, it’s genuine, it’s real.

That’s why I’ve given my whole life to telling people about Jesus, and here’s the rub, here’s the bottom line for me, John the Apostle wrote this he said, “We know love by this that Jesus laid down His life for us and we therefore ought to lay down our lives for one another.” You can read that in 1 John 3:16. Now we’re basically selfish creatures, for me I couldn’t really get a handle on pre-emptive sacrifice as the basis for relationship until I tasted it for myself, until I experienced God’s pre-emptive sacrifice for me.

You think about it, it’s a pre-emptive strike of love, it’s a pre-emptive strike of grace, the cross, Jesus being crucified on the cross it was so brutal it was so ugly, it was so for you and for me, why? So all our muck could be forgiven, cleaned out, left behind, and we can have a new life, a fresh life, an eternal life, He took the first step.

Can I encourage you to spend your life wrapping your heart around that? I tell you what it did for me, it changed me on the inside, it gave me a sense of dignity, a sense of value, a sense of peace. When we taste that grace, when we reach out to God with our hearts and say, “Lord I accept your free gift of eternal life through Jesus,” we start living that stuff we can’t help it, we change, we’ll never be the same again.

Now I’m a pretty smart guy but I could never have figured that out on my own, this rich eternal relationship with Jesus, where all the goodness in my life comes from, is something that flows out of me now. Not perfectly mind you but there was a cost, Jesus paid the cost and when we look at our relationships with other people will we be prepared to pay the price in advance as a deposit with no guarantee of return? Because that’s the way Jesus did it for us. Come on, how about it, what did you think, is it worth it?