Why we need a personal relationship with God

 Posted at Reformation Scotland:

It is one of the great joys of the Christian church that the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is so easily accessible and readily available to sinners. The salvation He has procured is not hidden somewhere remote, but there for the taking. The question is whether those who need it most will actually take possession of it and make use of it. The Saviour must be embraced, His salvation needs to be grasped hold of. One pastor who felt the urgency of this point was Patrick Gillespie, who wrote a book on the covenant of grace. Patrick Gillespie (1617–1675) was minister in Kirkcaldy and Glasgow before being appointed Principal of Glasgow University. George Gillespie was his older brother. The following updated extract is from the section of his book devoted to explaining how the covenant is personal.

What is personal about it?

No one else can do it for me

This is a work and business which no one can transact for someone else, but each one must personally enter the covenant for himself. I mean, the saving interesting of a soul in Christ is an act which you cannot do by a proxy, nor transmit to your heirs, not even to your children.

It’s about persons, not things

The covenant of grace is not only, or even mainly, a covenant of goods or of things, but of persons. Both parties to the covenant speak the apostle’s words, “I seek not yours, but you” (2 Corinthians 12:14). On God’s side, it consists not so much in God promising life and salvation and all good things to us, as in His promising and bequeathing Himself to us, even Himself personally considered, the Father, Son, and Spirit. On the sinner’s side, it does not consist in our covenanting our service and duty and obedience to God, so much as in our giving ourselves away to him. “Ye shall be my people, and I will be your God” (Ezekiel 36:28). “And I will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty” (2 Corinthians 6:18).

It involves my whole person

It is a covenant with the whole person. It is not a covenant with this or that part of you, but with the whole person, soul and body. “He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:17). “Glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Corinthians 6:20). There is no part in him that is not in covenant with God; yea, the very dust of the saints, their dead bodies are in covenant with God, and by virtue thereof, shall be raised up again at the last day, as Christ proves. (Matthew 22:31, 32).

It requires me to personally do something

This covenant requires and presupposes something to be personally done by us (beside what Christ did for us, and in our name) before we can actually have any benefit by it. “As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me (John 6:57). And “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37).

Continue here.