We believe that intimacy is the core and the place where our relationship with Christ is rooted and it’s from intimacy that everything flows. So when we teach on intimacy, we desire that it would remind you of God’s passionate pursuit of you, of his constant invitation to your heart to be safe, set free and satisfied in Christ. We want the power of his love and desire to compel you deeper into his presence to pursue him that nothing else would satisfy you, once you’ve had revelation of the length that he has gone in his love to be with you.
Our heart is that Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. That your roots will grow deep down into God’s love and keep you strong. That intimacy is the root system of your life to weather the storms.
What Intimacy with God Looks Like
One of the things that we have to understand is that knowledge is not the same thing as intimacy.
What we’re going for when we talk about intimacy is oneness or unity. It’s interconnectedness with God, meaning that our lives become inseparable from him. This about connection.
As I was looking over these notes and talking this out with my wife, Suzanne, we were talking about this point of oneness. In unity with Christ and oneness with him, there might be this sense, depending on what kind of religious background you have grown up in that, you lose yourself in relationship with Jesus; you lose the uniqueness of who you are, as you morph into the image of Christ, but that’s not actually Biblically, what this means.
We don’t become unrecognizable in our personality. In fact, when we are united with Christ, the things that are preventing our true heart personality and our makeup from actually being expressed are what Christ strips off of us. The junk that that pollute and distort the image of God in us.
See when Christ made all of you. He made you on purpose for a purpose and the unique way that he made you reflects him in a unique way. The sin and the entanglements and the brokenness in our lives; those things obscure that image. So unity with him doesn’t mean we lose ourselves, it means we actually find truly who we are.
We can look at Ephesians 5, where Paul talks about this idea of marriage, which we know in scripture marriage when a man and a wife become one flesh, there’s there’s unity there. But if you’ve met any married person, they bring out the uniqueness in each other. And often like too many people can be wildly different, but in health, those things are celebrated and enhanced, not squashed or pushed down or rejected. S
And so I want to set that context because so often I think that maybe some of us have grown up in religious environments where the goal was to look like everyone else and to conform to that mold of what Christianity might look like. And I’m just gonna tell you God is so much more beautiful than that and his manifold grace that he pours out on us.
Manifold means multicolored and varied. There is beauty and the diversity of how he created us. And when we’re in unity with him, that diversity, like a prism, shows different aspects of his personality and his nature uniquely through us.