Intimacy
with God
I pray that out
of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in
your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I
pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together
with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love
of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be
filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Eph. 3:16-19
A
soft kiss. An all-consuming embrace. An intimate moment that touches the very
core of our being. Being moved by overwhelming human passion grants us the
opportunity to catch a glimpse into the vast richness of what a deeper,
spiritual interlude with our Maker would be like.
Intimacy
with God is above all internal, far within, deep-seated. The above Scripture
speaks about allowing the Spirit to strengthen us in our inner man so that
Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith. So what is our inner man and what
does it have to do with intimacy with God? It is because inner man literally means the inside point reached or entered as
well as the countenance or the expression of who we are. This inside, most
basic region of our soul is the only place where spiritual intimacy truly can
take root and begin to grow.
The world also
recognizes this dimensional aspect of our humanity. Proxemics, the study of
informal space, calls the zero to eighteen inches around us the “intimate
zone.” This is the place that, as humans, we do not like to have violated by
those we do not trust. It is a place we feel we own and have learned to
protect. Well below this intimate zone, lies the inner man. This is where we
hide the possessive seeds of our past, the place where our fears accumulate,
the place where we tuck away our private sins. It is the place where we curl
around ourselves and the place where the world and those around us cannot see
the extent of our own kingship in our lives. But God sees. That’s why the
inner, the inmost places of man must be released and cleaned out so that Christ
may dwell deep within us. But it is contrary to everything we know as humans.
The idea of allowing anyone into our inner man is foreign and frightful for us.
It is the place of the last stand.
Intimacy with God begins well beneath
the zero to eighteen-inch barrier, deep within us. No wonder we are
uncomfortable with this and are resistant to it. Our natural tendency is to
keep everything on the surface because it is more comfortable that way,
reducing everything to an outward experience instead of an inward encounter. We
often even view our salvation as an experience, something that happens to us, not in us.
Imagine living your
natural life simply on the surface, running from the depth of meaningful
relationships. Life without passion becomes a vague half-life of unfulfilled
desires. But be wise in your passions. Choose to be filled with a holy longing and seek wisdom of what it means to give yourself wholly to a loving, gracious God. Draw close to the One who desires to sweep you off your feet—the One who calls you by name, the One who desires to hold you eternally in an all-consuming embrace.
