Maintaining A Relationship With God

A Church group called on me out of the blue to help them answer a question. How should one build a healthy Church, and not just “straw”? I said the first ingredient is to magnify the Lord Jesus Christ, or people tend to get fixated with themselves and various other things. I said next to that is Scripture -- to know who God is and how He acts. A young woman said: “But it’s about a personal relationship with God -- and maintaining it!” I sensed some anxiety in the second part of that. I said yes, absolutely, a personal relationship with God is the essence of Christianity -- if you bear in mind that it's not all about what you put in, but also what God does regardless of the (palpable) relationship. OBSERVATION: I see it again and again in counselling: people agonising over the status of their relationship with God, as if the whole universe depended on it and on all that it involves: prayer, humility, obedience, and so on. But God is greater than that. He works beyond that.