Exchanging Intimacy for Knowledge

So many professing Christians know that real life is found in an intimate relationship with Father God and yet all too often we exchange our loving relationship with Him for rules and memorizing verses or portions of scripture. We exchange our intimacy with God himself for God’s word, which is filled with God’s thoughts rather than God himself. The pharisees of old are a good example of this exchange. For Christians today, we do the same thing by becoming more loyal to a book than to the one who wrote the book. 

How and why this happens is often complicated, but we as human beings are creature of habit, so once a habit has been developed, like reading scripture, we tend to lose the intimacy part for the knowledge part. Secondly, human beings get distracted easily. One minute we are hungering to know God better and the next minute we get captivated by the things around us, like our work or the pursuit of things like cars, TVs and houses.  The same thing can happen in your relationships with your friends and family.  We live in close proximity to loved ones and the next thing you know we don’t feel like we even know the person around us. When we take God for granted and stop truly investing in our interactive relationship with him our closeness and intimacy fades.

I like to look at the early church for examples and principles about staying in love with God.  They had the same problems we face with sliding from our intimacy. Within 20-30 years after the resurrection of Jesus the early church was starting to go off the rails in their application of intimacy with God and the end result was they were getting messed up in their relationship with one another. When Jesus told us the truth will set us free it was dependent on staying close to him as his disciples. Somehow we separated the whole recipe of freedom and therefore we lost the outcome. Not continuing as consistent disciples of Jesus forfeits the freedom we all desire.  Discipleship is not just about learning fact about God.

John 8:31-32        So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” 

The apostle Paul, who wrote 17 books of the New Testament, often wrote about people getting off track in their intimacy with God. Much of the New Testament is really about correcting bad behavior which is due to our lack of intimacy with God. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul marveled at how far the believers had slipped from their pure devotion to God and spoke about the shift from the real gospel to a counterfeit one. This shift didn’t take long but just a few short years.

Galatians 1:6        I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel, 

One of the problems modern believers face is that we so easily accept the modern view of “Grace” as some kind of favor we received at salvation and yet Paul talked about grace from the context of an “Empowerment” that we should long for and embrace. The word grace means so much more than we realize because we tend to turn our personal relationship with God into merely an intellectual knowledge exercise. The western mindset thinks in terms of information more than experience and thus we sacrifice our intimacy with God for knowledge of the bible. Instead of the bible leading us to God, we get stuck in the study, not the application of it.

How does this exchange happen without us realizing it? I think some of the reason is that we are hammered with the idea that the scripture is in fact God himself, when it is not. Now I know some of you reading this are getting mad but hear me out. Scripture are the thoughts of God for sure but to identify God’s word’s as God himself would be like God writing us letters which we fall in love with and yet when he arrives we are more in love with the letters than God himself. We end up ignoring him personally for his letters.

There is often a fine line between loving what God says because it reflects his thoughts and desires and loving a book more than God himself. I used to love cars. I lived for working on them and racing them but those cars could never love me back. They gave me satisfaction but not relational intimacy. As much as the cars were a real joy in my life they could never fill the void in my soul for intimate relationship with a person that I was created for. When I gave my life to Jesus I knew I had to give up the god of cars and motorcycles if I was to keep him as the center of my life.

Reading about Jesus and all he taught and did with his disciples is exciting but those stories and principles were never meant to be and end in themselves but a “Bridge” to a relationship with our Heavenly Father. Jesus came to reveal that intimate relationship he had with the Father so we would know the difference between what the pharisees had with the law of Moses and knowing experientially the God of the bible. Reading the bible is meant to encourage us to pursue a relationship where we end up calling Father God “Abba”, which translates daddy. 

Romans 8:15         For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” 

If you have turned your relationship with God into mostly reading the scripture, ask yourself if this is what you are called for? Does your Heavenly Father just want a correspondence relationship or does he hope for more from you and with you?  I think you know the answer to that question but I ask it so you will evaluate where you are with your Heavenly Father and not just where you were when you first got saved. Remember Jesus lived out what we should aspire to, intimacy with our Heavenly Father. As Jesus was fully man and fully God he had to keep an eye on his relationship with his Heavenly Father. It was not automatic but had to be pursued.

Mark 1:35      Now in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, He went out and departed to a solitary place; and there He prayed. 

Luke 6:12      Now it came to pass in those days that He went out to the mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God. 

Don’t be surprised at the fact that you have to regularly pursue your Heavenly Father if you hope to keep it fresh and alive. Don’t be surprised that you have to sacrifice your time and attention to that pursuit because Jesus had to as a man and so will we. Invest the time with him and that doesn’t mean just reading scripture. 

Have you ever gone to a county fair or some festival where hundreds, if not thousands, of people are? Do you you remember the feeling as a kid of being so excited with all the sights and sounds that you couldn’t wait to launch out on your own and discover things only to realize you were lost and didn’t know where your parent are? You may find yourself in the same feeling of being lost because you can’t sense the presence of the Lord. That distance can be overcome if you acknowledge your longing for the Father and ask him to refresh your soul with his presence. As it is said, confession is good for the soul and Father God loves to be close to us.

Questions:

1) When was the last time you spoke at length with your Heavenly Father? Jesus says if we long for him he will give us rest (Mt 11:28)

2) Have you made your relationship with God purely about loving his Word? Remember the word was meant to led us to the Father, not just give us rules and information.

Pastor Dale