Hope, Healing & Freedom Podcast: Episode 113
TRANSCRIPT
Are you experiencing intimacy with God? Or do you have a theological understanding of your relationship with God, but it is not intimate? In this podcast we are going to show you that intimacy with God is yours right now.
I’m Lee Whitman with Restoring the Foundations and I welcome you to this Hope Healing and Freedom Podcast. I let my friend Mark read this to get his feedback. He is a pastor friend of mine and a serious student of the Bible, and I wanted his opinion on what I had been writing. So over breakfast at one of Americas great culinary establishments, Waffle House, I asked him what he thought. He looked at me with a very serious look on his face and said, “I’m really enjoying reading this, but I’ve got to ask you something. When you talk about having intimacy with Jesus, I don’t understand what you are talking about. I’ve been a Christian for 20 years and a pastor for 6 but having “intimacy” with Jesus is a new paradigm for me. This is something no one has ever taught me before, but if it is really available to me, I want it! How can I develop this kind of intimacy with Christ?”
Let’s begin with the question of what is intimacy? I like the definition that intimacy is “to know and to be known.” It is probably the deepest longing of the human heart. Every human being starts out in life desperately desiring to know those around them and to be known by those closest to them. The first place we naturally look for intimacy is with our parents and family. We then hope for intimacy with our peers. Then we look for a deeper intimacy with a person of the opposite sex.
The essence of intimacy is to know someone else for who they are and to be known by them simply for who we are, without any pretense or façade. We typically describe the sexual relationship as “being intimate” with someone. This fits the definition of being known in a physical sense and being known physically. It is also a good analogy for relational intimacy. For physical intimacy to take place, the two people must be naked. When naked, they can’t hide anything from each other. Emotional intimacy requires this kind of emotional nakedness as well, of not hiding anything from the other. To know each other sexually requires vulnerability. To have true intimacy in your relationships requires emotional vulnerability.
This longing to be loved and accepted just as we are, is so deep and so primal that when it is not met in our early years by those we look to for intimacy, people like parents and family, we experience a deep sense of wounding. Out of that wounding, we build walls around our heart to protect us from getting hurt again. Though these walls are designed to protect the wounded heart, they keep us from receiving the intimacy we desperately desire.
This need to know and be known was designed into mankind by God Himself. It is not something created by the pop-psychology culture to make man feel better about himself. God created this need for intimacy in man so that man would have a longing to know and be known by God which would totally satisfy his longing for love and acceptance. It was also given so that man could know and be known by his fellow man on the relational level.
Is the concept of intimacy with Jesus even biblical? To find that answer let’s start by looking at Matthew 7:21-23 from the New Living Translation. “Not all people who sound religious are really godly. They may refer to me as ‘Lord’, but they still won’t enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The decisive issue is whether they obey my Father in Heaven. On judgment day many will tell me, ‘Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name.’ But I will reply, ‘I never knew you. Go away; the things you did were unauthorized.’”
When Jesus said, “I never knew you”, He used the Greek word ginosko which means: to know, come to know, to become known. Ginosko is also the word most commonly used in the Jewish culture for sexual intercourse between a man and a woman. It means to know something or someone intimately and experientially. Jesus is saying that some of the people claiming to have done wonderful things in His name will be sent away on judgment day because He did not know them intimately and experientially. They were active in doing things for Him, maybe even good religious things, but because He did not know them intimately, they will not be allowed into Heaven.
So, the answer is Yes, intimacy with God is biblical. In fact, intimacy with God was at the heart of why God sent His Son Jesus to die on the cross. In the Old Testament days, God was on the outside of man. With a few exceptions, the people in the Old Testament couldn’t really know God on an intimate level. Their form of worship was dictated by the Levitical laws. Their relationship with God was limited to performing certain acts according to what the law required. And their worship was to a God they knew about intellectually, but really could not know intimately. Unfortunately, that sounds similar to what many people experience in their churches today. They go to church and perform religious rituals to a God they are unable to know personally and intimately.
Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection, and ascension into heaven ushered in a whole new way to know God. Jesus said in John 16:7, “It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper shall not come to you, but if I go, I will send Him to you.” After Jesus’ resurrection, the Holy Spirit was sent to live inside all who believe. Believer’s now have the Spirit of God living on the inside of them so they can know God, and so that God can know them. That is intimacy.
Intimacy is a gift from God. God sent Jesus to die on the cross in order that those who receive Him (John 1:12 “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name”) will become someone they were not before. The term “In Christ” means that believers have been transferred out of one Kingdom with the identity that comes with that kingdom, and they are transferred into a totally new Kingdom with a completely new identity. Colossians 1:13 says “For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son”. In that new Kingdom we already have intimacy with God because we are in Christ.
Ok, if that is true, then are you saying that there is nothing I can do to experience deeper intimacy in my relationship with Father God? Let me try to explain by using an example from marriage. My wife Cindi and I have been married 45 years. Over the last 15 years we have been together almost 24/7 365 days a year because we work together out of our home. Other than running errands or when she recommends (ok, demands) that I go for a ride on my motorcycle, we are together. Yet with all of that togetherness, we have to work at keeping our intimacy alive. It would be easy to only talk about work, or talk about the kids and grandkids, or talk about finances and not share our hearts with each other. I heard a joke about the old farmer who had been married many years when asked if he tells his wife that he loves her, respond by saying “I told her I loved her when we got married and I will let her know when that changes.” Intimacy is to know and to be known. In order for that to happen you must share life with the other person, getting to know them and letting them know you. There is nothing I have to do in order to be Cindi’s husband. That happened on our wedding day 45 years ago. But there are things I want to do to experience more intimacy with her which makes our marriage better. The same is true in your relationship with God. You have been given the gift of intimacy when you accepted Christ, but there are things you can do to develop that intimacy.
How do you develop intimacy with God? Let’s take this out of the arena of developing intimacy with God and ask an easier question. What does it take to develop intimacy with another human being? For example, how did you develop intimacy with someone like your spouse or even a close friend? Those relationships didn’t just magically develop over night, they were formed by spending time together. So, the first ingredient necessary for developing intimacy with another person is time. You have to spend time with that person to get to know them in order to develop an intimate relationship with them.
Those relationships also didn’t happen by chance. It took some intentionality on your part to make them happen. You had to make the effort to spend time with that person so that the relationship could develop. If you would have left getting together up to pure chance, there is a good “chance” that the relationship would never have developed. You purposefully made an effort to spend time together in order to get to know them. And the combination of taking the time necessary coupled with being intentional about getting together allowed intimacy to develop. The same is true in developing intimacy with God as well. It will take a willingness on your part to spend the time necessary, coupled with being intentional about making it happen. The difference between developing intimacy with another person and developing intimacy with God is that God lives in you by the Holy Spirit. You are already intimate with God. There are things you can do, however, that will help you experience that intimacy.
One of those things that will help you experience intimacy with God is prayer. Oh! here we go with the legalism, you might be saying. No. We don’t spend time praying to earn or get something from God. Legalism would say that if you pray more than God will be more pleased with you, or He will grant you more blessings. That is not the reason we pray. We pray because we are already intimate with Father God. We talk with our intimate friends to express our intimacy and to cause the intimacy to grow. By spending time in prayer, we come to know God’s voice on a more intimate level. John 15:15 says “No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, because all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you”.
Another way to experience intimacy with God is through worship. We don’t worship in order to get intimacy with God, but we worship because we already have intimacy with God. Worship in song is one of the times in life when we can express our love and affection for God. I know for me there are many times when I will weep during worship. It is not a sorrowful type of weeping, it is a joyful weeping. God has gifted song writers in the body of Christ the ability to express incredible intimacy to our Father God that I can’t put into my own words. Worship is more than just singing songs. Worship becomes a lifestyle. We can worship God through our service, through our jobs, through how we raise our children, through many other non-musical forms. And all of these forms of worship are because we are already intimate with God.
Spending time reading God’s word is another way to experience intimacy with God. The Bible is a love letter from our Father God to us. Psalms 119:105 says “Your word is a lamp to my feet And a light to my path.” It is a letter from a very good Father to guide us along life’s path. It is not a list of rules and regulations, but rather a guide. It is written from the intimate heart of our Father to help us know Him better. By spending time in His word, we can experience even more intimacy.
Do we have to do these things to develop intimacy with God? Do I have to spend time talking and being with my wife? Not out of a legalistic motivation. We do them because we want to experience the intimacy we already have with our Heavenly Father.
PRAYER
Father God I am so thankful that you wanted relationship with us so badly that you sent your only Son Jesus to die for us on the cross. Because we are now In Christ, we already have intimacy with you. I ask that you help each one of us experience more of that intimacy on a personal level. It is not enough to know it intellectually. We want to experience it personally.
Amen
Some of you might recognize that you have blocks to knowing God on an intimate level like my friend Mark. Please don’t settle for less than what Jesus came to give you. Go to our website restoringthefoundations.org and click on the Get Ministry tab at the top and find a highly trained RTF ministry team in your area who can help you break those blocks so you can experience what is already yours, intimacy with God.
