Intimacy

Everything I’m reading in my current studies relates to and resonates within me and shakes something up inside of me. In another book that I just finished, the author asks God to unsettle her. That's what I feel is happening to me, I'm being unsettled. I feel like God has just pulled the covers off me and proclaimed, 'Come on, get up. Get out of your sleepy [Christian] bed and follow me, stop laying there saying you're a Christian with your eyes closed and your body at rest.'

Some days it seems that in becoming a Christian, all I did was climb into bed with Jesus and find comfort there - but now there's work to be done and He's [more than gently] nudging me. And those aren't slippers next to the bed for me to slip on; they're leather sandals waiting for me to break them in...

Before I can do anything with God or allow Him to do something through me, it’s essential that I have ‘climbed into bed with Him…’ He requires an intimate relationship with His people. Before we can serve Him, we need to know Him. A few years ago I read a great definition for the word intimacy. I may have already mentioned it at some point – because I really love it: Intimacy = in-to-me-see. When I share intimately with someone, I’m allowing them to see into me. A truly intimate relationship requires them to allow me to see into them as well. That’s what God wants with us! He wants to share His heart and mind and purposes with us, intimately. Since He sees into us with or without our permission – vulnerability is completely void in this relationship. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

I love how the psalmist declares God’s knowledge of him in Psalm 139:1-18 (NIV):

1 You have searched me, LORD,

and you know me.

2 You know when I sit and when I rise;

you perceive my thoughts from afar.

3 You discern my going out and my lying down;

you are familiar with all my ways.

4 Before a word is on my tongue

you, LORD, know it completely.

5 You hem me in behind and before,

and you lay your hand upon me.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,

too lofty for me to attain.

7 Where can I go from your Spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;

if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,

if I settle on the far side of the sea,

10 even there your hand will guide me,

your right hand will hold me fast.

11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me

and the light become night around me,”

12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;

the night will shine like the day,

for darkness is as light to you.

13 For you created my inmost being;

you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

your works are wonderful,

I know that full well.

15 My frame was not hidden from you

when I was made in the secret place,

when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.

16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;

all the days ordained for me were written in your book

before one of them came to be.

17 How precious to me are your thoughts,[a] God!

How vast is the sum of them!

18 Were I to count them,

they would outnumber the grains of sand—

when I awake, I am still with you.

How can we not join the psalmist in crying out?.....

As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God? -Psalm 42:1-2 (NIV)