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How Important is a Relationship with Jesus?
By Kurt Simons | December 26, 2007
The Swedenborg Project is based on the idea that developing a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is and always has been the most fundamentally important component of Christian religious life. Jesus drives home that relationship’s significance in several ways:
1. He does not just tell us about that relationship’s importance as a teaching. He gives it to us as one of the Commandments (Deuteronomy 6:5).
2. Within the Commandments, He gives this one top billing, as the very first Commandment (Deuteronomy 6:5).
3. He tells us explicitly that this is the greatest Commandment (Matthew 28: 38), that, to be truly and fully happy, you need to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).
4. He echoes this Commandment 13 more times in the Old and New Testaments:
Deuteronomy 11:1, 13, 22; 19: 9; 30: 16, 20
Joshua 22: 5, 23: 11
Psalm 31: 23; 116:1
Matt 22:37
Mark 12:30
Luke 10:27
5. He provides further extensive information on this subject in the teachings of the Second Coming. A smallcanonsearch.com search under “love to the Lord,” “love the Lord,” “loving the Lord,” “love God,” and “approach God” provides a total of 675 passages. For instance,
“…T]rue loveconsists in a person’s loving the Lord above all things, and their neighbor as theirself. (Arcana Coelestia 33).
“[T]he Word teaches nothing else than that everyone should live in charity with his neighbor, and love the Lord above all things. (Arcana Coelestia 1408).
“[T]he church is with those who love the Lord, and who love the neighbor as themselves.” Arcana Coelestia 1844).
6. There is a passage in the Second Coming teachings on this subject, Apocalypse Revealed 961, that apparently was of sufficient importance that it was copied verbatim in True Christian Religion 25 & 26. What might be regarded as the punchline of these passages’ teaching is that
“if anyone does not approach the God of heaven and earth Himself, he cannot enter heaven, because it is that one God who makes heaven to be heaven, and that same God is Jesus Christ, who is Jehovah the Lord, the Creator from eternity, the Redeemer in time, and the Regenerator for eternity to come.”(Apocalypse Revealed 961, True Christian Religion 26, italics emphasis Swedenborg’s, boldface emphasis mine).
For Further Reading
December 30th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Awesome post! I have just found a renewed spiritual strength from studying the Writings and getting closer to the Lord. I look forward to more Good News from all you folks at the Swedenborg Project!! Keep up the good work.
February 16th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Good post! But does God really want a relationship with everyone? Calvinists would say no, but what would you say?
April 27th, 2008 at 6:49 am
I have a problem with Swedenborg’s denial of sudden (and deathbed) salvations. Surely, Jesus’ own promise to the theif dying on the cross next to him (that they will be together in Paradise that very day) is proof that salvation can be sudden. The thief was converted during his execution! Also Paul’s reply to the jailer who asked how he could be saved (”believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved”) imlies sudden conversion. Paul did not say “believe and live a good life and you might be saved” but “believe .. and you WILL be saved”. None of us can be good enough to be saved on our own merit, but with the right relationship with Jesus (accepting his Lordship) we are counted right with God and we begin to change by inward union with Jesus. This process itself is NOT sudden, but the beginning of the process is. It will not be complete until Heaven. It is a measure of God’s mercy that a criminal who repents and accepts Jesus at death is still counted worthy of Heaven. To deny this is to retain God’s justice but deny his mercy. That mercy and justice are balanced in the nature of God and in his dealings with us is what the atoning death of Jesus is all about.
April 27th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Hi Lane,
To quote Swedenborg’s True Christian Religion “God is love itself and wisdom itself, and these two constitute His Essence” (n 37) and “It is the essence of love to love others outside of oneself, to desire to be one with them, and to render them blessed from oneself” (n. 43-45). My understanding, then, would be that God literally can’t help Himself (not that He wants to!) - He by definition of Who He is loves everyone. So He not only loves everyone here now, but all the people that will ever exist.
April 27th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Hi Sandi,
I think you have answered your own question: “This process itself is NOT sudden, but the beginning of the process is.†God is, as you note, mercy itself, and doesn’t yank our chain, but lets us develop spiritually at our own speed. As far as the thief on the cross, my assumption is that he had laid all the groundwork, in effect done all the conversion, before he came to the cross and his experience there was like the Gestalt “aha,†when everything all of a sudden falls into place and you see what you had not before. But, again, this isn’t as sudden as it may appear, but just the final step of a long-in-preparation process. I think there is a big difference between that and someone who was never interested in salvation until suddenly being confronted with death. However, I also think that since we can’t really see the inner workings of another person, we have no legitimate basis for judging their spiritual state (and are told in the teachings of the Second Coming not to try). Which has always made sense to me when I think about how hard it often is to know and judge our own motives!