How can I have a personal relationship with Jesus?

Question 7104

The phrase personal relationship with Jesus is everywhere in evangelical speech and nowhere in the Bible, which is worth noticing before we go any further. That does not make it wrong. The reality it points to is thoroughly biblical. But the wording has caused a fair amount of confusion, and clearing that up first will make the practical answer much more useful.

What people usually mean when they ask about a personal relationship is something like this: how do I move from knowing about Jesus to actually knowing Him? That is a good question, and Scripture answers it directly.

Why the Phrase Needs Care

The danger in the language of a personal relationship is that it can suggest something private, emotional and self-generated, as though the goal were a warm feeling I manufacture by concentration. Whole industries of Christian experience have grown up around producing that feeling, and people who cannot produce it conclude they have no relationship at all.

Scripture prefers other terms. It speaks of knowing God, of being in Christ, of fellowship with the Father and with His Son, of being reconciled, adopted and indwelt. Every one of those is more objective than the language of a personal relationship, and every one of them is more secure, because none depends on how I feel this morning.

How the Relationship Begins

It begins where everything in the Christian life begins, at the cross. A personal relationship with Jesus is not something a person works up to; it is given at the moment of faith. Until sin is dealt with there is no relationship to have, because the barrier is not shyness on either side but guilt. Reconciliation precedes friendship.

So the first step is not a technique but a transaction. Repent and believe. Trust that Jesus died in your place and rose again, and receive Him. John writes that to all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God (John 1:12). At that moment a personal relationship exists, whether it feels like anything or not.

That is worth pressing, because many people are trying to build a relationship with someone they have never actually come to. If you are unsure whether that has happened, the question of what you must do to be saved is the place to start rather than here.

The Spirit Makes It Personal

What makes the relationship genuinely personal rather than notional is the indwelling Spirit. Jesus is not physically present with us; He is at the Father’s right hand. But the Spirit He sent dwells in every believer, and it is by the Spirit that we cry Abba, Father and that the love of God is poured into our hearts.

This is why a personal relationship with Jesus is not a matter of imaginative effort. There is a real Person living in the believer, and He is not a force or an influence. Understanding who the Holy Spirit is transforms how people experience this, because they stop trying to reach across a gap that has already been closed from the other side.

How the Relationship Grows: Scripture

Relationships grow by communication, and God has spoken. If I want to know a person, I listen to them, and God has given us sixty-six books of Himself speaking. There is no substitute for this and no shortcut around it. A believer who does not read will not know God well, whatever their emotional temperature.

I would say two things about how to read. Read regularly rather than heroically; twenty minutes daily beats three hours on a wet Sunday. And read to meet a Person rather than to gather information. The Spirit uses the word to make Jesus real to us, which is why a personal relationship deepens over an open Bible more reliably than anywhere else.

How the Relationship Grows: Prayer

Prayer is the other half of the conversation, and most Christians find it harder than reading. Part of the reason is that we have been given a model of prayer as performance rather than as speech to a Father. Jesus taught us to begin with Our Father, which sets the tone for everything that follows.

Honest prayer does more for a personal relationship than eloquent prayer ever will. Tell Him the truth about your day, your failures, your fears, your gratitude. The Psalms give permission for a far wider emotional range than most prayer meetings allow. And when words fail, Paul says the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26).

The Place of Obedience and Fellowship

Jesus put it starkly: if you love me, you will keep my commandments. Obedience is not the price of intimacy but it is the environment in which intimacy grows. Persistent disobedience does not cancel the relationship, since standing does not fluctuate, but it certainly dulls the enjoyment of it, and confession restores what sin obscured (1 John 1:9).

The other neglected element is other Christians. A personal relationship with Jesus is not a solitary project, whatever the word personal suggests. John links fellowship with God and fellowship with one another in the same breath. Much of what Jesus does in a believer’s life He does through the local church, and people who withdraw from it usually find their sense of God thinning out.

When It Does Not Feel Personal at All

Every believer passes through periods when God seems distant. The causes vary: unconfessed sin, exhaustion, grief, illness, or simply the ordinary rhythm of Christian experience which the older writers understood far better than we do. What matters is not to treat the feeling as the measure of the relationship.

In those seasons I would do the plain things and stop hunting for experiences. Keep reading. Keep praying badly. Keep turning up on Sunday. A personal relationship rests on what Jesus has done and on the Spirit’s presence rather than on my emotional weather, and anyone whose confidence has become tangled up with feelings should read what to do when you do not feel saved.

Signs That a Personal Relationship Is Real

People often want to know how they can tell whether anything is actually there. The evidences are quieter than most expect. An instinct to pray when trouble comes rather than to run. Discomfort about sin that was not there before. A strange affection for other Christians, which John treats as a mark of life. A Bible that has started to speak rather than sitting inert.

Notice that none of these is an emotional peak. A personal relationship shows itself in reflexes rather than in experiences, and reflexes are formed slowly. That is why a believer who feels nothing in particular may nevertheless be considerably further on than one who has frequent spiritual highs and no changed instincts.

What About Feeling Close to God?

I would not want to leave the impression that feelings are irrelevant. Scripture speaks of joy inexpressible, of the love of God poured into our hearts, of peace that guards the mind. God does give His people a felt sense of Himself, sometimes overwhelmingly, and it is a real mercy when He does.

What I resist is making the feeling the measure. The love of God is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5), which locates it in His action rather than my effort. Seek Him and the affections generally follow. Seek the affections directly and you will usually find neither.

Where People Go Wrong With This

Two errors are common. The first is treating the relationship as a technique to be mastered, so that people move from one method to another looking for the arrangement that will finally produce intimacy. Scripture gives means rather than techniques, and the means are unspectacular.

The second is treating the relationship as private in a way that cuts a believer off from the ordinary channels God uses. Preaching, the ordinances, the fellowship of a local church, the counsel of older Christians: these are how God normally deals with His people, and someone who has retreated into a purely interior spirituality has usually cut themselves off from most of what God is doing.

Neither error is wickedness. Both are usually the result of poor teaching, and both are corrected by patient instruction rather than by rebuke.

So, now what?

If you want a personal relationship with Jesus, start where Scripture starts rather than where the language of the phrase suggests. Come to Him for forgiveness, then read a Gospel slowly and talk to Him honestly about what you find there. Do that for a month and see what happens. And if the whole idea has felt like something other people manage and you do not, what would change if you stopped trying to generate a feeling and simply began the conversation?

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” Revelation 3:20