Scripture References:
“Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts you double minded.” James 4:8
The Lord has appeared of old to me, saying, Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore with loving kindness I have drawn you.” Jeremiah 31:3
“But it is good for me to draw near to God; I have put my trust in the Lord God, That I may declare your works.” Psalm 73:28
Intimacy with God is available to you. This is most assuredly what I share with inmates when explaining the true nature of salvation. The intimacy I’m speaking of cannot be separated from love.
Sharing the good news of the gospel is letting someone know that God is the very definition of love; a love so deep that He called His only Son to endure one of the most horrible deaths imaginable, all for the purpose of atoning for our sin. I never get tired of telling someone that we can love God, because He first loved us.
Prison ministry has many unique facets to it. Many prisoners have no concept of what genuine love is. Many come from homes where there was no dad, and whatever closeness or loyalty they developed came from people outside of their home. These are often gang members or people who use their friendship for their own purpose.
When I encounter someone who has trust issues, and who has never experienced genuine love, I point them toward our heavenly father who can demonstrate His unconditional love, - a true father who will never leave them or forsake them.
In Psalm 27, David spoke of God’s comfort and promises to those who needed someone to trust in. For that person who found himself alone and living in fear and insecurity, He gave a solemn promise in verse 10, saying, “When my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.” Unlike man, God always keeps his promises. Remember what Moses declared in Numbers 23?
God is not a man, so he does not lie. He is not human, so he does not change his mind. Has he ever spoken and failed to act?
Has he ever promised and not carried it through?
It’s a fact that if you put your trust or confidence in man, at some point you will surely be let down. Someone in your life may make a promise to you, but when it’s convenient they will let you down in a moment. When we come to faith in Christ we learn that Jehovah God is a promise keeping God and we can count on Him to keep every promise.
The Lord’s promises are accessible to every child of God. And God’s invitation to you is to enjoy intimate fellowship with him and that means putting your faith to the test more than anything else (James 1:2–4).
The Heart of Intimacy
Intimacy is what we call the experience of really knowing and being known by another person. We frequently use spatial language when describing this experience. An intimate friend is someone we feel very close to; they know us at a deep level. If something happens that damages the intimacy with our friend, they feel distant from us. Or a person who doesn’t know us intimately knows us at a superficial level.
But of course intimacy is not spatial but relational. We all know what it’s like to be sitting right next to a person with whom we feel distant and we can feel close to a person who is four thousand miles away.
“Biblical knowledge is far better than gold when it fuels our trust in God. Otherwise, it only fuels our pride.”
What makes us feel intimate with another person? While there are many ingredients to intimacy and each intimate relationship we have has a different recipe, common to all of them is trust. We cannot be intimate with a person we don’t trust.
Trust is at the heart of intimacy. The more we trust someone, the closer we let them get to us. The degree to which trust is compromised in a relationship is the degree to which intimacy evaporates.
The Heart of Intimacy with God
This is as true in our relationship with God as it is in our relationships with other human beings. Our experience of God’s nearness or distance is not a description of his actual proximity to us, but of our experience of intimacy with him. Scripture shows us that God is intimate with those who trust him. The more we trust God, the more intimately we come to know him. A felt distance from God is often due to a disruption in trust, such as a sin or disappointment.
This reality is vitally important to understand. As Christians, we want to experience intimacy with God. With the psalmist we say, “for me it is good to be near God” (Psalm 73:28). And we want to heed James’s exhortation and realize its promise: “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you” (James 4:8). But we can seek that nearness in ways that don’t produce it.
Intimacy Is More Than Knowledge
One common mistake is thinking that nearness to God can be achieved through knowledge accumulation. Now, of course, to intimately know God, we must know crucial things about God. Jesus said, “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32) and he pointed out that many worship what they do not know (John 4:22).
But never in the history of the Christian church has so much theological knowledge been available to so many people as it is today. The American church enjoys perhaps the greatest amount of this abundance. We are awash in Bible translations, good books, insightful articles, recorded sermons, interviews, movies, documentaries, music, and more. And much of it very good. It is right for us to be very thankful.
But America is not abounding in Enochs (or finding them frequently disappearing), saints who walk with God in a profoundly intimate way (Genesis 5:24; Hebrews 11:5). Why? Because knowledge is not synonymous with trust. That’s why Jesus said to the religious leaders of his day, some who possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of Scripture,
“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” (John 5:39–40)
Biblical knowledge is far better than gold when it fuels our trust in God, because it fuels our intimacy with God (Psalm 19:10). But when biblical knowledge replaces our trust in God, it only fuels our pride (1 Corinthians 8:1).
“God is impressed with our faith, not our feats.”
Think of it like this: A candlelit dinner with romantic music may encourage a sweet moment of relational intimacy between a husband and wife, but only to the degree that the environment encourages and deepens their mutual trust and love. If there’s relational distance between them due to a lack of trust, the aesthetics themselves have no power to bridge the distance. Only restoring the trust will do that.
How We Draw Near to God
The secret to drawing near to God and having him draw near to us is revealed clearly in the Bible: we draw near to God through faith in Christ who alone gives us access to him (Hebrews 4:14–16; 7:25; Philippians 3:9), and we put our trust in all of “his precious and very great promises” which find their Yes to us in Christ (2 Peter 1:4; 2 Corinthians 1:20).
God is impressed with our faith, not our feats. Where faith is lacking, he is not pleased with the quantity of our knowledge or the quality of our aesthetic events.
And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. (Hebrews 11:6)
When God sees someone whose heart fully trusts his promises and lives by them, God comes to strongly support that saint (2 Chronicles 16:9) and manifests himself to him:
“Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” (John 14:21)
God’s Invitation to Intimacy
“What you must trust God most for right now is where he means for you to draw closer to him.”
God wants intimacy with you. Christ has done all the hard work in the cross to make it possible. All he requires is that you believe in him (John 14:1). He wants you to trust him with all your heart (Proverbs 3:5).
Which means his invitation to you to enjoy intimacy with him is the providences in your life that are testing your faith more than anything else. What you must trust God most for right now is where he means for you to draw closer to him.
It is likely an invitation that your flesh wants to decline. But as you read your Bible, do not the great cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1) all agree with James and Peter that the greatest testing of faith is the path to the greatest joy (James 1:2–4; 1 Peter 1:8–9)? And do they not agree with Paul that it is not worth comparing to the joy of knowing Christ and the coming glory (Philippians 3:8; Romans 8:18)?
Intimacy with God often occurs in the places where we must trust him most. Heaven on earth is the inexpressible joy and the peace that surpasses understanding that comes from trusting God wholly (Philippians 4:6–7). For, as the old hymn writer said, “they who trust him wholly find him wholly true.”
Conclusion:
How can I personally experience true intimacy with God?
ANSWER
True intimacy with God is something that has been sought by Christians since Christ walked the earth. It is natural for Christians to long to experience the closeness of an intimate relationship with God. But true intimacy with God is not simply a feeling on a par with a romantic relationship. It goes much deeper than emotion, down to our very souls and reflected by our actions.
“For the LORD detests the perverse but takes the upright into his confidence” (Proverbs 3:32). God cannot have an intimacy with evil or with disobedient Christians. True intimacy with God begins with drawing near to Him.
God will never draw near to those who do not draw near to Him, and the way we “draw near” is through righteousness. “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded” (James 4:8).
Certainly, God will never draw near in intimacy with the unrighteous, but those who have been cleansed by the blood of Christ and have received His righteousness at the cross (2 Corinthians 5:21) have the hope of intimacy with God.
In fact, it is only those who have been saved by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8–9) who have that hope, because Christ is the hope through which we draw near to God (Hebrews 7:19).
Jesus is, in fact, the model of intimacy with God because He and the Father are one (John 10:30), and no relationship can be closer than that oneness with the Father that Jesus experienced. His relationship with the Father was characterized by love and obedience. In love, Jesus came to earth to do His Father’s will. He did nothing on His own, but in all things did the will of His Father (John 5:30).
This was most evident in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before His crucifixion. Suffering the agony of anticipating what was to come, Jesus asked that the fate He was about to suffer might be removed from Him, but He ended the plea by saying, “Yet not My will, but Yours be done” (Luke 22:42). Here we see a perfect example of true intimacy reflected in obedience as Jesus yielded His will to that of His Father.
If we hope to attain true intimacy with God, Jesus must be our model. We love God because He first loved us (1 John 4:10), and we prove our love for Him by obeying Him. Jesus told His followers, “If you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). When we obey Him and keep what He has commanded, He promised that we will remain in His love, just as He remains in the love of the Father by doing the Father’s will (John 15:10).
There can only be intimacy with God when we are in good fellowship with Him through obedience. Then we can know the joy and peace that comes from trusting Him and yielding to His will, just as Jesus did.
Thank you, O Lord for the intimacy we have found in You. Thank you for loving us with an everlasting love. Thank you for being our Rock and Refuge during times when our strength fails us, where we find ourselves hanging on by a thread. Strengthen our resolve O Father God to seek you daily, and to love you as you have first loved us.
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