Intimacy with God

Allow me to ask a bold question. Are we more in love with the idea of Jesus, the power of Jesus, or the doctrines of Jesus than we are in love with Jesus Himself?

I’ve written on this topic in these past articles here and here but I’ve been been personally convicted again lately by the way I would answer this question, because I have had a wrong understanding about what a “relationship with Jesus” is for so long.

Unfortunately we’ve made a relationship with Jesus to be something completely different than what it should be. Men are sincere but misdirected in their pursuit of intimacy and relationship with God. Intimacy with Jesus has been characterized by a nebulous, intangible warm fuzzy feeling on our hearts during a prayer meeting or worship gathering. If someone has memorized the Bible and can speak eloquently, or they have lots of “intimacy language” we often say that they “know Jesus”. With this false idea of intimacy, Jesus is not a real human to us in the same way that the people close to us like our family, friends, and coworkers are. As this wrong mindset progresses in a downward spiral, the incarnation becomes only a doctrine that we adhere to, and Jesus becomes nothing more than a fairytale-like figure that sits on a cloud in the heights of the heavens.

There’s been so many testimonies of people receiving emotional or physical healing from the Lord as a result of the extended meetings at IHOP’s FSM building that we are now calling the “International House of Prayer University Student Awakening” (see my previous post). If you haven’t been tuning in, you can watch some of them directly on IHOP’s website at http://www.ihop.org/watch through the player by clicking on “testimonies”. Live broadcasts will continue to be through this Saturday from 6p-midnight Central time.

As I said in my last post on this topic, the Holy Spirit has three general purposes when He releases His heightened activity – power for salvation and healing, wisdom, and humility. The main one I’m absolutely sure He is establishing in every single one of us, even external participants and observers to the meetings, is humility.

Here’s an illustration I am sure you can relate to. You know the story – there’s that guy – the one weeping uncontrollably across the aisle, and then that girl, the one jumping and filled with the joy of the Lord in row three. And there’s you, sitting there at the meeting or even in front of your computer screen watching the webcast, not feeling a thing. Everything within you says “why God?” And you believe a lie in that instant – “I must not be receiving from God. He must not want to touch me. What’s wrong with me?”

The picture of someone living a holy life has been skewed and distorted by the devil so much that even those in the church today look at a holy lifestyle as one of boredom, drudgery, and continual frustration in the denial of our flesh. Some “holiness preachers” in their zeal for righteousness have also presented to us an angry God that sits in heaven full of bitterness and wishing that His people could finally “get it right”. Because of this perspective, we believe lies and end up running from God when we encounter our frailty instead of running to Him in the midst of it.

But Jesus calls us to a radically different approach to holiness and shows us a completely different picture of the Father that we must fill our minds and hearts with. Jesus’ own experience on the earth showed us that holiness is not a call to a life of drudgery, boredom, and frustration. He showed us over and over again that His Father is so tender with us in our weakness. He presented holiness as a call to the greatest pleasure that the human heart has ever experienced.

It’s so easy to read the scriptures become overly familiar with them – so much so that we end up floating on the surface of the waters and never plunging into the depths of them. That’s been my recent experience with John 4 when Jesus speaks to the Samaritan woman by Jacob’s well. Jesus asks the woman for a drink from the well, and the woman responds with shock because Jews never have dealings with Samaritans in the way they were interacting at that point. Jesus responds in such a stunning way:

Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” (John 4:10 NKJV)

This entire verse is loaded with bread for the hungry, but I want to highlight the latter part of the verse. Jesus is saying “if you knew what God was really like, and you knew who I was – God in the flesh – you would be filled with absolute confidence and boldness in asking Me to give you a drink.”