Christ gives us all we need to draw nearer to him and enjoy him amid difficulties and blessings. We may get tired, but not despondent. We will be sad, but not hopeless. We will endure pain, but we will not give up. We will enjoy blessings, but not grow proud. We see that our lives do not consist only in what we have, how we feel, or what we have accomplished, but in who we are in Christ. This enables us to stand where we would once have fallen down.

Weak and needy people finding their hope in Christ's grace are what mark a mature relationship. The most dangerous aspect of your relationships is not your weakness, but your delusions of strength. Self-reliance is almost always a component of a bad relationship. While

Much of the disappointment and heartache we experience is the result of our attempts to get something from relationships that we already have in Christ.

Because of the coexistence of sin and grace, we all shift between denying and affirming our humanity.

Christ brings the assets. We bring the liabilities. Yet Christ still joins himself to us!

Is there evidence that you are looking to your relationships to give you things you have already been given in Christ?

As we live with each other in the middle of the already and the not yet, we need more than elevated emotion and accurate understanding. We need eyes to see this one amazing reality: we are Christ's and he is ours. We need to see that it is spiritually impossible for us to ever be alone. His amazing resources of grace are constantly at our disposal.

Often in our blindness, we take on our problems as identities. While divorce, depression, and single parenthood are significant human experiences, they are not identities. Our work is not our identity, though it is an important part of how God intends us to live. For too many of us, our sense of identity is more rooted in our performance than it is in God's grace.

This chapter invites you to consider the life-changing help you can find in the person and promises of the Lord Jesus Christ for your struggle with words.

When we live out of a sense of who we are in Christ, we live our lives based on all we have been given by Christ. This keeps us from seeking to get those things from the people and situations around us.

At some point, every relationship brings you to the end of yourself, and with God there is no healthier place to be. When I am willing to confess how weak I am, I am most ready to reach out for the grace that can only be found in Christ. He was willing to follow his Father's plan and become weak so that, in our moments of weakness, we could receive his strength.

but God wants to bring us to the end of ourselves so that we would see our need for a relationship with him as well as with others.