Intimacy with God

I’m sure we’re all familiar with what Jesus called the “first commandment”, found in Matthew 22:37-38:

“Jesus said to him, " 'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the first and great commandment.”
(Matthew 22:37-38 NKJV)

These 27 words of Jesus are perhaps the most weighty and most demanding yet the most inviting and invigorating words ever spoken. In them He gives us the only plausible outlook and only foreseeable future if we desire to live in the highest expression He has for our lives. He calls us to give Him everything.

I believe the greatest point of contention that men will wrestle with at the end of the age is the identity of Jesus. Is he just a good man that lived a few thousand years ago or is He fully God?

I’ve been studying Christology lately, and even just yesterday my roommate Tim spoke to some Jehovah’s Witnesses at our door. As we were talking last night, we both quickly made the point that the root of the problem in their faith is their misunderstanding of the person of Jesus. They believe He was just a mediator for a super-spiritual class of believers throughout history, the 144,000 “spiritual Jews”. They don’t believe He is God, and they believe He is still dead and was never resurrected, contrary to the belief of all of the New Testament writers.

In part 1 of this series, I wrote briefly about the subject of intimacy with God – what it is, what it isn’t, and how we grab a hold of the means to growing in it. We all want to grow in intimacy with God, but in order to grow in something, we must have clarity on exactly what it is and how we grow in it because we can never expect to lay hold of something unless we know exactly what we’re looking for. Scripture tells us that we grow in intimacy with God by beholding Jesus Christ, the highest revelation of God’s nature, character, and name.

But what does that practically look like? In part 1, I made the case that intimacy can be defined as relational knowledge, and that the way to the knowledge of God is by revelation. If the pinnacle of the revelation of God is in a human being named Jesus Christ, then intimacy is simply the prayerful, adoring study of the person and work of Christ in the context of a life of obedience.