CRAVE AND SEEK OUT INTIMACY WITH CHRIST

As a Christian writer, it’s important to me to reach my audience with wisdom, knowledge, understanding, patience, passion, but most integral of all—heart. If I don’t reach the heart of my readers, then this is all in vain. 

I’m very passionate about writing, and I enjoy it very deeply. This is my 117th article, and I feel the Holy Spirit drilling away inside of me. The reason I say this is because, if I’m too intellectual in my writing, then what I’m sharing and teaching you as my readers is that it’s more important to understand and reason out faith in Jesus than it is to crave and seek it with every ounce and fiber of our being. And the ministry of this blog would be fruitless if that’s all that resulted from my writing. 

TOO BIG TO FIT ON A CHECKLIST

It’s not enough just to understand the process. Yes—read your Bible. Yes—PRAY. Do these things. Do them daily and do them often. But do not treat them ritualistically. Do them intentionally, placing conscientious effort towards pursuing GOD’S heart, and not treating the pursuit like marking a checkbox off a to-do list. God doesn’t fit on a to-do list, and if He fits on yours, then you’ve made the Lord far too small in your life.

HEART POSTURE OF EMBRACING GOD’S TRUTH

God is worth more than being minimalized, and that’s the idea behind not intellectualizing Christianity to death: we don’t want to rely on deep concepts and complex statements to bring us closer to God because the more critical component of the faith is intimacy with God. We don’t just desire cognitive stimulation that culminates in psychological ecstasy, we want spiritual closeness that only develops by a heart posture of embracing the truth that nothing the world offers will ever carry more significance or value that the love of God in our lives. 

TAKING DOWN THE SPIRITUAL WALLS

Words can’t always encompass an experience. It doesn’t matter how vividly a writer tries to describe a spiritual connection, nothing encapsulates the relationship between God and humans the way being humbled into faith in Christ does. I could write a book on intimacy with God, but until we take down every last one of the spiritual walls we’re holding up against God’s ability to get closer to our heart, words won’t bring us to what we seek. Sometimes we misunderstand that what we really seek will show itself by the fruit it produces in our lives, revealing whatever destination our heart is really traveling to may not be what we tell ourselves it is. 

SEEKING THE WORLD AS A DESTINATION

Intimacy with God bears the fruit of not needing the world. Oppositely, seeking the world as a destination—or anything in it—bears the fruit of becoming more worldly. It’s not complicated. But it’s very important that we take notice of what fruit is spilling into our lives (or out from our behavior and lifestyle); whether it’s the fruit of the Spirit, or fruits of the deceptions of this world intoxicating our beliefs and the ways we live.

SOMETHING WE WANT MORE THAN CHRIST

The walls we hold up are usually a “fruit” that indicates a sense of shame we’re holding onto, or it’s a sign that there’s something in this world we don’t want to let go of more than we want Christ.

Remember, wise words can enhance the spiritual vision of a teachable person, like putting on new prescription glasses. But words cannot tear down the walls, themselves. Seeing our walls and tearing them down are totally separate and distinct. We can live in denial our whole lives without changing a thing about our character or heart posture.

TRUE CHANGE REQUIRES A HEART TRANSPLANT 

Words won’t be able to bring down our walls, but more importantly, they won’t always bring us to the foot of the cross. Having our heart reframed, our thoughts reconditioned, or our desires replaced—all require a humble heart. Our words and desires come from the heart (Matthew 15:11), and that’s where our fruit derives from; even the fruit of the journey towards which destination our heart has chosen to pursue.

PERSONAL INTIMACY WITH GOD

What we do with our beliefs and our trust in God inside our heart, we have to do intimately, without always needing someone else’s hand to hold, or someone else’s mouths breathing our prayers for us. Eventually we need to let the Holy Spirit in and have Him help us learn how to pray. In a spiritually intimate relationship with God, we wouldn’t be relying on Christ-followers to have our own intimacy with God, but we would depend solely on God Himself, through Christ.

This isn’t to say we don’t need the support, fellowship, and wisdom of Christ-following men and women surrounding our spiritual journey, but that we must not use these people as the primary way we seek intimacy with God. 

COMMITTED RELATIONSHIP WITH THE DIVINE UNSEEN

Christians and atheists get into arguments about the intricacies and nuances of how faith and reality clash. We get into back-and-forths over a certain idea or topic that places one worldview in front of the other with the goal of clarifying how one makes more sense. It’s all about “sense.” But faith doesn’t make sense! True faith is all about trusting in something we can’t see while committing our lives to that very relationship. The only reason it’s not crazy or naive is because the relationship is planted by the work of the Holy Spirit, and the fruit is that a person of faith will operate more satisfactorily by the inner-working of the Holy Spirit than solely depending on logic.

In fact, operating out of faith places hope on top of our ratiocination, because by using logic but relying on faith, we live abundantly and not just mechanically.

It’s not a light matter (faith), and yet placing trust in something we can’t see with the naked eye, but which we can learn to see with the spiritual eye—is the beginning of a relationship with God. 

CAN’T TEACH SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T WANT TO LEARN

Most people don’t get even get through the basics of faith because they just want evidence. Evidence… like the type you put in your hand, but… somehow, not the Bible. For them, the Bible doesn’t count. Needless to say, the point is that most people don’t get passed their stubborn hearts. They don’t reach a contrite heart that wants to know who God really is (and not the type of God which arrogant and egotistical people who claim to know God seem to allude to). They just don’t believe. They don’t want to, and that’s it. There’s nothing to teach them until they actually change and want to learn.

RISK OF SPIRITUAL VULNERABILITY

We can’t teach someone how to walk if they’re unconscious. In the same way, we can’t teach someone faith if they can’t or won’t learn to see beyond reason. Faith doesn’t require reason; it requires an open, softened heart. The type where we become vulnerable enough for God to speak, and where we can hear and listen without making excuses or having denial over such an experience being real or possible.

If it weren’t possible, there’d be nothing to be worried about getting vulnerable over. Nothing would happen. But because it is possible, there’s a reason to sense a risk about being spiritually vulnerable and open to an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God: He will meet us in that space and bring Himself inside of us through the Holy Spirit. This is where relationship begins to take over the void we’ve been living alone inside of this whole time. 

GOD IS LOOKING FOR THE HEART, NOT OUR LOGIC

This can’t be taught with words. Only you can open your heart and choose to let God in by seeking Jesus. Only you can make the choice to look over the shoulder of reason and logic to see that on the other side, those tools won’t save your soul. Logic and reasoning aren’t necessary for intimacy with God. Just the heart is. Remember, we cannot come into the Kingdom of God unless we become docile like children (Matthew 18:3). God doesn’t need anything but the heart to be able to show us exactly who He is. 

When we read the Bible, it’s the same criteria. Leave logic and reasoning at the door. We can use those later on if we have the curiosity to look into the historicity of the stories. But when it comes to God talking to us through the words of Scripture, we just need our heart and spirit, not our brain. We don’t need to think, we need to learn to tune into God’s Spirit—the Holy Spirit—to sense Him moving, speaking, and convicting.

DONT’ WAIT TO SEEK INTIMACY WITH GOD

Intimacy with God is about allowing Him inside our most personal space to show us who He says He is. And He will if we love Him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength (Matthew 22:37); He will answer our knock at His door (Matthew 7:7); He will respond to our call for His help. He will enter the space we invite Him into when we’re ready for Him. But be mindful—we can tell ourselves, “we’ll be ready a little later” until ‘a little later’ become decades down the road. Don’t wait. Be ready today by taking the time to slow down and understand what wall is between you and intimacy with God in Christ, and find out what you need to get that wall taken down. 

MOST IMPORTANT PLACE TO BE IS IN GOD’S LOVE

I can tell you that being close to God is the most important place to be in this life. I can barely describe what His voice “sounds” like to me, but I can tell you it’s more important to seek intimacy with Him in order to learn to detect His voice than it is to pursue anything else with the limited time we have on this earth.

It’s more important to pursue God’s heart and receive the love He has for us. We need to spend more time becoming a witness to His love redeeming us from the choices we make in blindness, and learn through Holy Spirit-led discernment which desires actually derive from the demonic realm, convincing us that God is “only love,” and that He isn’t equally holy and righteous.

INTOLERANCE FOR THE WAYS OF THE WORLD

His love is so powerful that once we receive it, we no longer have tolerance for the ways of the world. We find ourselves agreeing with His righteous disgust towards the ways that the world defines love, and we sense resistance to the way the world would have us pursue being loved by flawed humans, more than focusing on receiving it from God without ever having to earn it.

Nothing we ever do could earn us God’s love. He loves us because that’s who He is. He judges us by our sins because that’s who He is, too. If we reject Him, we sin. When we sin against a holy God, the wages are death (Romans 6:23). But Jesus came and paid the price, so now we have no excuse to reject God, but to repent of our sins, and live a different way: God’s way. 

WE DON’T NEED TO BE SMART TO KNOW GOD

If we over-intellectualize everything about Christianity, we won’t fully understand the heart of faith has nothing to do with our use of logic. God is superior to our most optimal use of reason and logic. He’s not looking at our intelligence, after all—His foolishness is more wise then the wisest man (1 Corinthians 1:25)! He’s looking for how genuine and contrite we are. He doesn’t care how many great arguments we can lay out in a debate or how many people we can defeat theologically. God only wants us to know Him, to feel known by Him, and to live in intimacy with Him, starting right now. We don’t need to be smart for that.

We just need to be humble and willing to see that we’re sinners in need of God’s grace and mercy, and we need to know He extends them both through Jesus, freely. Meaning, His grace and mercy aren’t deserved or earned by our actions, words, or thoughts, but by God’s choice (Ephesians 2:9)! We need Jesus, and we need Him as Lord, not as a human rabbi; not as a prophet who stayed dead, but the One who resurrected and defeated death, permanently. 

OUR NEED FOR GOD

The reason I’m writing this is for everyone reading to realize that we can’t outsmart faith. We need to not overthink Christianity, because it’s about the heart, not the brain. It’s not about being sophisticated or a quick thinker. It’s about confessing our need for God and recognizing our need for Him needs to outweigh our self-reliance. We can’t contain who we are on our own. Our need for God is so great we can’t even fathom it. It’s beyond logic. It’s practically transcendent (though not literally), being as it was placed in us by God Himself—which could be a way of looking at it as God’s signature pointing us out of overusing logic and back to relying on Him. 

DRIVEN BY PURSUING INTIMACY WITH THE LORD

Let’s put an end to trying to be the smartest Christians in the world and begin working harder towards being the most humble, obedient, “intimacy with God”-driven Christ-followers in the world. It’s not a race, it’s not a show, it’s not a competition. There’s no reward or trophy but your own intimacy with God. There’s no one at the finish line but the angels of Heaven (including late loved ones of faith), and Jesus Christ with the words, “Well done, My good and faithful servant.”

If that’s not more than enough, you’re thinking about it way too hard. 

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