There is a phrase so common in Christian circles that it has almost lost the capacity to surprise: “a personal relationship with God”. You hear it in sermons, read it in devotionals, and encounter it in the conversion stories of Christians across centuries. And yet, if you stop to think about what it actually claims, it is one of the most audacious things a human being can say. A relationship, personal and ongoing, with the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, the one before whom the seraphim cover their faces. The claim is not modest.
Most Christians affirm it without much trouble. Fewer would say with confidence that they experience it. There is often a gap between the language of intimacy and the actual texture of their spiritual life: the prayers that feel as though they travel no further than the ceiling, the Scripture reading that has become a dutiful routine rather than a living encounter, the sense of God as a theological fact rather than a living presence. The question is not whether the relationship is real but how to inhabit it more fully.
This article is an attempt to take that question seriously. It will not offer a five-step programme, because this is not that kind of subject. What it will do is examine what Scripture actually says about what it means to know God, and specifically to address the things that the standard treatment of this topic tends to miss: the foundational question of who initiates this relationship and why that matters entirely; the costly and specific friendship Jesus extends in John 15; the honest realities of prayer and Scripture engagement; and what to do in the seasons when God seems unreachably distant. Real relationship involves all of these dimensions.
The Initiative Is His: Why That Changes Everything
Before anything else is said about how you pursue a deeper relationship with God, something prior must be established: you did not choose this relationship first. Jesus makes this plain to his disciples in John 15:16, just before the verse on friendship: “You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit” (NASB). The choosing runs in one direction before it runs in the other.
This matters far more than it might initially seem. The standard approach to spiritual growth tends to treat relationship with God as something we pursue, develop, and maintain through discipline and sincerity. That framing is not entirely wrong, but when it becomes the primary framing it subtly shifts the centre of gravity. You become the agent and God becomes, in effect, the object of your spiritual efforts. The result is a kind of anxious striving: am I praying enough, reading enough, doing enough to sustain this connection?
Scripture’s framing is different. God is the one who initiates, and our seeking is itself a response to his prior movement toward us. The extraordinary promise God gives to the exiles in Babylon through Jeremiah is addressed to people who have comprehensively failed, who are in captivity precisely because of their unfaithfulness, and yet the word that comes to them is this:
“You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.”
(Jeremiah 29:13, NASB)
The context is important. God has told these exiles to settle in Babylon, plant gardens, build houses, and pray for the welfare of the city where they have been sent. He is not offering them a quick return or an easy resolution to their suffering. He is offering something more foundational: the promise that when they turn toward him, he will be found. The finding is guaranteed not because they are worthy but because he is faithful.
The same dynamic is visible in 1 John: “We love, because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19, NASB). Every step we take toward God is a response to a step he has already taken toward us. This does not make our seeking passive or half-hearted; Jeremiah says “with all your heart”, which leaves nothing in reserve. But it means we seek from a position of being already sought, not from an anxious position of trying to attract the attention of a God who might or might not be interested.
The practical difference is significant. When you approach prayer, Scripture, or any other spiritual discipline from the position of the already-sought, the question shifts from “am I doing enough to maintain this relationship?” to “what is God already doing that I am learning to perceive?” That is a different posture entirely, and it produces a different kind of person over time.
Called Friends: What Jesus Actually Offers in John 15
Of all the ways the New Testament describes the relationship between God and human beings, few are more striking than the one Jesus introduces on the night before his crucifixion. He has already spoken of himself as the vine and his disciples as the branches, a metaphor of intimate, vital connection. Then he raises the register still further:
“No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.”
(John 15:15, NASB)
The Greek word translated “friends” here is philous, from the same root as phileo, to love with warmth and affection. But Jesus is not merely describing a feeling; he is redrawing the terms of the relationship. The contrast he draws is precise: a slave does not know what his master is doing. The slave obeys without comprehension, fulfils commands without being taken into confidence, is useful but not known. Jesus says his disciples are no longer in that category. He has made known to them everything he has heard from the Father.
This is extraordinary. The creator of the universe is not keeping his plans and purposes behind a curtain of divine inscrutability, dispensing instructions and waiting for compliance. He is disclosing himself, his character, his purposes, his love, and the full account of what he has done and is doing in the world. Friendship with God, in this sense, is relationship with a God who speaks, who opens himself to be known.
But the verse before it (John 15:14, NASB) deserves equal attention: “You are My friends if you do what I command you.” The friendship is not unconditional in the sense of being costless. It is genuine friendship, which means it has a shape, a direction, and a call. In the ancient world, friendship between unequals carried obligations: the lesser party owed loyalty and service; the greater party owed protection and advocacy. Jesus redefines both, collapsing the distance not by ignoring the difference in status but by choosing to cross it. He calls his disciples friends not because they have earned it but because he has decided it, and demonstrated it by laying down his life.
What this means practically is that deepening a relationship with God is not a programme of self-cultivation aimed at reaching an aloof deity. It is the learning to receive and live within a friendship that has already been established and secured at enormous cost. The warmth, the disclosure, the knowing and being known, are already offered. The deepening happens as we learn to receive what has already been given.
Prayer: Honest Speech in an Honest Relationship
Prayer is the most direct form of relationship with God that Scripture describes, and also the one most Christians find most difficult to sustain. There is a gap between the experience of prayer as it appears in devotional literature, luminous and rich with divine presence, and the reality of many Christian prayer lives, which involve considerable effort and considerable silence. The gap is real, and it deserves an honest response rather than encouragement to simply try harder.
The most honest place to begin is with Paul’s remarkable statement in Romans 8:26-27:
“In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”
(Romans 8:26-27, NASB)
This is not a passage about exceptional spiritual difficulty or crisis prayer; it is simply the normal condition. We do not know how to pray as we should. This is not a failure or a sign of underdevelopment; it is the honest condition of creatures trying to communicate with the infinite. Paul’s response is not to prescribe a technique to overcome this weakness but to describe the provision: the Spirit himself intercedes with groanings too deep for words. Prayer is, at its deepest level, something that happens within us by the Spirit rather than something we manufacture and offer upward.
The instruction to “pray without ceasing” in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians appears as part of a rapid-fire set of three commands:
“Rejoice always; pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”
(1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, NASB)
The phrase “pray without ceasing” uses the Greek adialeiptos, which carries the sense of something that is uninterrupted, like a persistent cough or a recurring practice. Paul is not commanding an impossibility of constant verbal prayer; he is describing a posture of ongoing orientation toward God, a life lived in continuous reference to the one who is near. The rejoicing and the thanksgiving are not separate activities from the prayer; together they describe a way of being in the world in which all of life is offered upward in conscious awareness of God.
The most useful thing to understand about prayer in its ordinary, daily form is that it is not primarily performance. It is speech. The Psalms model the full range of speech that belongs in conversation with God: praise and complaint, gratitude and confusion, petition and argument. The prayers of Scripture are not uniformly reverent and composed. They are sometimes raw, sometimes desperate, sometimes angry. What they share is the willingness to address God directly with what is actually happening, rather than with what seems most religiously appropriate.
One of the most honest things a Christian can do to deepen their prayer life is to begin praying what is actually true rather than what sounds like what prayer is supposed to sound like. If you are anxious, say so. If you are grateful, say so. If you are confused by God’s silence, say so. The God who intercedes for us through his Spirit in groanings too deep for words can handle our honest speech. What he is less interested in is the well-formed religious utterance that leaves the actual person untouched.
Scripture: The Living Voice of God
The original article described Bible study as “an act of immersing oneself in God’s Word”, which is not wrong. But it is worth pressing on what exactly makes Scripture different from other books, because the answer to that question determines how you approach it.
Paul’s description in his second letter to Timothy is foundational:
“All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.”
(2 Timothy 3:16-17, NASB)
The word translated “inspired by God” is the Greek theopneustos: literally, God-breathed. It is a compound of theos (God) and pneo (to breathe or blow). The image is striking: Scripture is described not merely as a record of human thoughts about God, nor even as a document God supervised or approved, but as the very breath of God. In the Genesis creation account, God breathes into Adam and he becomes a living being; in Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, the breath of God enters the dead and they live. There is life in the breath. Paul is claiming that what Scripture carries into the world is living and active in a way that other texts are not.
This is why engagement with Scripture is not simply intellectual acquisition. It is encounter. The writer of Hebrews extends Paul’s claim: “For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12, NASB). The Word does not merely inform; it discloses. It operates on the reader in ways the reader cannot anticipate or control.
This has practical implications for how you read. If Scripture is the living voice of God rather than a record of past divine activity, then reading it is a form of listening, an attentiveness to a voice that is speaking now to your actual situation rather than generally to anyone who happens to open the page. This does not mean forcing every passage into relevance to your immediate circumstances; it means approaching the text with the expectation of being met.
The disciplines that support this kind of reading are slower and more attentive than much devotional Bible engagement: reading whole books rather than isolated verses, sitting with a passage long enough to ask what it actually says before asking what it means for you today, returning to the same text across different seasons of life and finding it differently illuminating. The goal is not coverage but depth, not the completion of a reading plan but the gradual formation of a person whose mind and imagination are increasingly shaped by the world Scripture describes.
Fellowship: Why You Cannot Grow Alone
The letter to the Hebrews places its instruction about the gathered community immediately after one of the most significant theological statements in the whole New Testament. The writer has established that through Jesus we now have full and confident access into the very presence of God: “Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He inaugurated for us through the veil, that is, His flesh… let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith” (Hebrews 10:19-22, NASB). And then, on the basis of this access:
“…and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near.”
(Hebrews 10:24-25, NASB)
The connection between the access into God’s presence (verses 19-22) and the call to gather together (verses 24-25) is not accidental. Hebrews is arguing that the new covenant community, the church, is itself the sphere in which the full benefits of Christ’s priesthood are experienced. You cannot have the access and then refuse the community; they belong together.
The word translated “stimulate” in verse 24 is the Greek paroxumos, from which we get the English word “paroxysm”. It means to provoke, to irritate in a useful sense, to stir up. The community is not simply a support group where people affirm each other; it is a community that provokes one another to love and good deeds. This is not always comfortable. Real fellowship involves challenge as well as comfort, accountability as well as encouragement.
There are things that cannot happen to you alone. Certain capacities of character, patience under difficulty, generosity, the ability to forgive in practice rather than in principle, can only be formed in relationship with other people who are themselves broken and sometimes difficult. The solitary spiritual life, however earnest, tends to become a spiritual life shaped entirely around its own temperament, encountering only the God it has already imagined. Community disrupts that, and in disrupting it, enlarges it.
The instruction not to forsake assembling together is often read as a practical command about church attendance. It is that, but it is more: it is a statement about the nature of Christian formation. We are not formed in isolation. We are formed in community, and the community itself, gathered in the name of Jesus, is one of the primary means by which the relationship with God deepens.
Service: Love That Has Moved from Belief to Action
The passage in Ephesians 2 that is commonly cited in discussions of Christian service is more theologically dense than it is usually given credit for. The verse about service follows immediately from Paul’s most concentrated statement about grace:
“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”
(Ephesians 2:8-10, NASB)
The word translated “workmanship” is the Greek poiema, from which we get the English word “poem”. A poem is not a random arrangement of words; it is an intentional creation shaped by its author with purpose and beauty. Paul is saying that you are God’s crafted work, and that the good works you are called to walk in are not something you invented or discovered through moral effort but something God prepared beforehand. There is a plan, and you are in it.
This changes the frame for service entirely. Service is not the means by which you earn or demonstrate your standing with God; you already have standing through the grace described in verses 8-9. Service is the outflow of having received that grace, the natural expression of a person who has been genuinely encountered by the love of God and finds that they can no longer be content with that love staying still inside them.
Jesus himself describes this logic when he says in Matthew 25 that care for the hungry, the stranger, the sick, and the imprisoned is care offered to him. The service is not merely humanitarian; it is an encounter with Christ in the person of the neighbour. This gives service its theological depth: it is not just doing good in the world; it is participating in the ongoing ministry of Christ through his body in the world.
The relationship between service and the deepening of your relationship with God is genuine but easy to misstate. Service does not earn deeper intimacy; intimacy overflows into service. When it flows naturally in that direction, service keeps you tethered to the concrete realities of other people’s lives and thereby prevents the spiritual life from becoming a private, self-referential project. You cannot love a God you cannot see and despise the people you can (1 John 4:20, NASB). Service is what love looks like when it takes a form the world can touch.
When God Feels Distant: The Seasons No One Warns You About
Most articles on deepening your relationship with God do not include this section. That absence is itself a kind of dishonesty, because the experience of God’s distance or silence is not an exception in the Christian life; it is a recurring reality that virtually every serious believer encounters, and for which very little preparation is offered.
The Psalms are more candid. “How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1, NASB). “I cry out to You and You do not answer me; I stand up, and You turn Your attention against me” (Job 30:20, NASB). The biblical record of people who were deeply known by God is full of seasons of bewildering silence and apparent absence. Abraham waited decades for the promised son. The exiles sat by the rivers of Babylon and could not sing. The disciples spent three days in a silence they did not yet understand.
What Scripture does not say, and what Christian wisdom has generally affirmed, is that the feeling of God’s absence is equivalent to the reality of it. The mystics of the church spoke of the “dark night of the soul”, a season of spiritual aridity in which the consolations of faith dry up and the felt sense of God’s presence disappears, while the faith itself, held more deeply and less pleasurably, continues and even deepens. Many who have come through such seasons have reported that the relationship with God that emerged on the other side was more honest, less dependent on feeling, and more real than what existed before.
What do you do in those seasons? The Psalms suggest several things. First, keep addressing God. The psalms of lament do not stop speaking to God even while they accuse him of absence; the act of continuing to address him is itself a form of faith. Second, remember. The psalmists repeatedly invoke the history of what God has done in the past as evidence of what he can be trusted to do in the present: “In You our fathers trusted; they trusted and You delivered them” (Psalm 22:4, NASB). Third, do not mistake silence for absence. The God who intercedes for you “with groanings too deep for words” is not passive in your silence. Something may be happening that you cannot yet perceive.
There is also a practical wisdom in maintaining the disciplines of prayer and Scripture reading during these seasons even when they yield nothing that feels like encounter. The person who only prays when prayer feels vivid, and only reads Scripture when it yields immediate insight, has a relationship with God that is actually a relationship with their own spiritual states. Fidelity in the dry seasons is not hypocrisy; it is the deepest form of trust, the decision to keep showing up even when the reasons for showing up are not presently visible.
Conclusion: The Relationship That Has Already Been Given
Developing a deeper relationship with God is real work. It requires the consistent practice of prayer, even when prayer is difficult. It requires attentive engagement with Scripture as the living voice of God. It requires the willingness to be formed within community rather than in isolation. It requires service that keeps you tethered to the concrete world God loves. And it requires the courage to keep showing up in the seasons when none of this seems to be working.
But before any of that, there is a gift. Paul prays in Ephesians 3:17-19 that his readers might be “rooted and grounded in love” and come to “know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge” (NASB). The love that surpasses knowledge is already there; the work of growing in relationship is the work of learning to inhabit what already exists, to know increasingly what has already been made known, to receive more fully what has already been given.
Jesus, on the night before he died, did not give his disciples a programme for spiritual development. He said: “Abide in Me, and I in you” (John 15:4, NASB). The abiding is both promise and command. It is already the case that Christ is in his people by his Spirit; the command is to live as though that is true, to remain in the relationship that has been established rather than to wander from it. The deepening is less a matter of climbing upward toward a God who is far away and more a matter of learning to live in a presence that was never absent.
You were sought before you sought. You were loved before you loved. You were chosen before you chose. That is not the end of the story; it is the beginning. Everything else, the prayer and the Scripture and the community and the service and the long faithfulness through silent seasons, is the living of a life inside a love that preceded it and will outlast it.
This article is the second in a natural progression of three. If you are earlier in the journey and looking for practical help building prayer and Scripture into your daily rhythm, “Creating a Daily Devotional Practice” is the place to start: honest, grounded guidance on making a sustainable habit that does not collapse under the weight of ordinary life. And if the relationship described in this article has taken root and you want to go deeper into one specific practice, the upcoming “Hiding God’s Word in Your Heart” takes Scripture memory as its subject: what it does, how to begin, and what it means to carry the words of God with you through every part of your day.
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All Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible (NASB) 1995 edition.