The Weapon Of Intimacy With God
Your intimacy with God will be your greatest weapon in Spiritual Warfare. How many of you know that when you are in the arms of the biggest daddy in town, you win? Isn't that right? There isn't anybody bigger! "Don't mess with me, or I'll call my daddy!" When you are in your daddy's arms, no one will want to mess with you. That's the key to war, the key to fighting and winning: pursuing intimacy with our Lord. God wants to be intimate with you--to be close to you, and He wants you to be intimate with Him--to be close to Him.
I know this is hard to believe sometimes. It's easy to think, "Why would God want to be close to me? If God really knew all about me, He wouldn't want to be close to me." However, God does know all about you, and He still wants to be intimate with you!
In the New Testament, the most common word for worship is the Greek word 'proskuneo' (Strong's #4352). It means, "to kiss toward"--a term of intimacy. Kissing happens to be an activity of endearment. You don't go down the street just kissing anybody, do you? (Well, you shouldn't!) You kiss your spouse, you kiss your children, and in certain cultures, you use it to greet your brother. It is an act of endearment. It is also something you do in close proximity. In other words, you have to be close to kiss. You know those little X's and O's just don't cut it. They're just not like the real thing! Also, blowing a kiss is not like the real kiss. Intimacy is a term that the Bible uses to describe our worship of the Lord Jesus. Intimacy means, "to kiss towards". God really wants us to be close and intimate with Him.
Having this intimacy means I can come before God, and I can come without shame, without embarrassment, without condemnation, without judgments. I can come right into His presence, because He is my Daddy. He loves me, and I'm covered by the blood in the full work of Christ. I can come right into His presence, enjoy Him and get really close to Him. This is what God wants for me.
The pursuit of intimacy is not a very easy thing. It has not been a very easy thing for me, personally. In the last two weeks, God has really been dealing with me in this area. The Lord started to "mess" with me by playing the hymn, "In the Garden," over and over in my mind. The words to that hymn go: "I come to the garden alone . . . and He walks with me and He talks with me . . . " I have to tell you, most of the time that I sing this song is at funerals. So I listened to this and I thought, "Okay, Lord, what is it You are trying to tell me here? Are You trying to break something to me here -- like it's my time to die and You're just easing it in?" I could not get this song out of my head. It was not as though I had just sung it. I was just going over it in my head, until finally I figured it out. God was trying to teach me and speak to me.
Whenever God asks you a question, He is not looking for information; He already knows everything. When God asks you a question it is because He wants to reveal something about you. So, as this song was playing repeatedly in my head, the question came to me, "Rodney, do you have the same closeness with Me that is in this hymn?" I thought about it. "And He walks with me and He talks with me and He tells me I am His own . . .. " What was it saying? Was it possible to just walk along and have God say, "Hi! I love you; you're Mine?"
As I said earlier, God was trying to reveal something to me about my walk and my intimacy with Him. Had I been asked that question three weeks before, I would have quickly answered it, "You bet!" But when God kept asking me that question, I began to think that perhaps I had not given Him the right answer the first time; that maybe He would continue to ask this question until I answered it correctly. "Rodney, do you have the relationship with Me that we see in that hymn?" I finally concluded that I did not. I realized that I don't I have that relationship, that intimacy that is in the hymn -- that I can walk with God and talk with Him, holding hands like we're buddies or friends. I began to question myself, "Have I ever done that; have I ever had that intimacy?"
Pursuit Of Intimacy
I began to look back at my life and reflect on my life, checking to see if I had ever had that kind of relationship with God. There was a time when I did pursue loving the Lord. I did not begin that way, but I remember back in the mid-70s when I was a youth pastor and an associate pastor, my senior pastor asked me this question. He said, "Do you love the Lord or do you love the things He gives?" Of course, I thought I knew the answer: I loved the Lord! Then God began to get hold of my heart and ask me that question over and over again until finally I said, "All right, I love the things You give, but I want to love You too." Then I began to pursue loving the Lord. It was a desire of mine; it was a passion of mine, and I intentionally pursued loving the Lord. I went after Him! I read all the scriptures on loving the Lord, but I was a little confused and I asked, "How do you love God?"
Love is about meeting needs, but how do you meet God's needs? I didn't really know how, so I just did what I knew to do. I just spent time with God and hung out with God. I sought to pursue getting to know Him and to gaze into His presence. And the Lord led me to II Corinthians 3:18 where it says that as we gaze into His glory, we are changed and "transformed . . . from glory to glory." And I hung on to that verse. I disciplined my life. I had my quiet times and I would spend time talking to God, and He would talk to me, and a lot of that came out of discipline. However, the question that the Lord kept bringing up to me was, "Are we intimate friends?" "We talked a lot!" "Well, a lot of your talking was telling Me what you wanted, what you wanted Me to do, and how you wanted Me to bless other people. Did you like just hanging around Me?" Well, I had things to do, places to go, people to see--you know how it goes.
I found out the Lord speaks to me. I heard His voice. I spent time with God, and God gave me words for people. He gave me words of knowledge. He gave me prophetic words. There was a flow of conversation. God was speaking to me; I was hearing the Lord! I would spend my time in discipline and prayer; I got the Bible out and had my quiet times. And I think that's still important in spending time with the Lord; in pursuing intimacy it is necessary to do that.
But the Lord asked me, "Do we have that deeper kind of relationship?" Then I came across Exodus, Chapter 33:11: "The Lord spoke to Moses face to face as a man speaks with his friend." I do not think I had quite that level of relationship with God. I did not know if I really wanted to or not. I thought that if I looked God face to face I would be scared to death, so I didn't know if I wanted to get that close to Him or not.
But when I finally said, "Lord, I don't have that; I'm not like that," I became jealous for it. I said, "I want to be that close to You; I want to be Your friend. I would like one day to be known for being a friend of God." God's friend! That would be my heart's passion--to be close to God and be intimate with Him in that way.
I looked through my quiet-time journals. (That is one of the best ways I can document my walk with God, my relationship with God.) As I went through them, I saw somebody who passionately pursued a relationship with God--spent time with God, getting to know God to a degree or to a measure. It wasn't as if I had not been pursuing intimacy, but the Lord was revealing to me a level of intimacy that He wanted to bring me into that I did not have. I had begun to think that just because God blesses me, anoints me, speaks to me, and works through me that I am intimate with Him. I had just presumed that because we were close in areas of ministry.
Developing Intimacy With God
In our last lesson, we discussed intimacy with God, and how that is one of the greatest weapons we have in Spiritual Warfare. In other words, our ability to exercise God's authority over the enemy arises out of a close and intimate relationship with God, were we can hear His voice clearly and get our directions from Him.
Intimacy And Anointing
I came to realize how much God honors His gifting and His anointing. When God gives a gift to a person, when God gives an anointing and extends a call upon a person's life, He will honor that call, even if the person is not walking in closeness or intimacy with Him. He will honor that. In fact, God doesn't do a whole lot of revoking of His gifts and callings. Yes, God can and God will, but that is not His first desire; it is not the first thing that He does to get your attention. You can still walk in your gifting, walk in your anointing, walk in a powerful ministry, yet not be close to God.
There are times when I am in the pulpit and I have just had a horrible week, and I just don't feel good at all. I want to say, "Okay, let's take the offering and go home." I admit it. But then the Lord says, "I've brought the people here to get a word. I've brought people here to minister to them, to let them celebrate, to teach them and to equip them. So, I'm going to use you because I love My people and I'm going to minister to My people. I'm going to let the power flow regardless of what you feel like, or regardless of what's going on in your life-- regardless of whether you had a good quiet time today or a lousy one; whether things went well for you last week or poorly. I love My people, and I'm going to minister to My people despite who's in the pulpit."
That is one thing I like about God: there are times when I am feeling really spiritually lousy, and all of a sudden the Lord gives one of the best words of knowledge or flow of power that I have ever seen, and I am amazed at what God did when He ministered through me. Of course, I wonder what it would have been like if I had been in spiritual shape. Would I have gotten anything then? Was I at a better place to get something because I was at a place of weakness? I don't know. I do go through these ebbs and flows in my pursuit of God. There are times when I am just as dry as I can be, but God continues to come through and honor the gifting and the anointing that He has given, because He is God.
God's Friend
It all came to a head one week. I went to a conference. The speaker, who travels around the world and pastors in Missouri, confessed his dryness and I related to him. I thought to myself, "Brother, preach on. Tell me how dry you really are! Tell me what you've been going through here. Tell me what's been happening with you." As he was talking, he said a prophetic word had come to him sometime before that he had ignored. The prophetic word was, "God says to you that He misses you," and he said, "I ignored it." He said some of the same things I shared earlier. He said, "You know, I elevated the gifting and I elevated the works and the flow of power, and I presumed that just because God was there, and the power showed up, and the power flowed, that God and I were intimate."
That struck a chord in my spirit; it resonated. Yes, I know how that feels. Then all of a sudden it hit me: he had gotten the word that God said to him, "I've missed you," and I began to wonder if God missed me too. I mean, at least that infers that he had a relationship. At least, that infers that he and God had been walking hand in hand. They were buddies, were close. But he wasn't walking like he should, and God said, "I miss that." I wanted to cry out, "You never said You missed me. Didn't we have this closeness?" I was really starting to feel depressed, wondering why I came to the meeting. I had come to the conference to be built up, and instead walked away feeling bad and a little depressed, because I was wondering why God never told me that He missed me. I thought, "Maybe I've never been a friend to Jesus. Maybe I've never been that close. Maybe I've never had that kind of intimacy with the Lord. Maybe I'm a lot more shallow than I think I am."
Those were very hard words for me to swallow. When I looked at that hymn, I saw a level of intimacy that I see with Moses, a level of intimacy that is foreign to me. I did not really realize that it was missing until then, and then I found the hunger in my heart. "God, I want to walk with You like that, I want to know You like that. God, I want to be Your friend. I want to be able to walk to the garden without having to ask You for something or trying to get something from You; out of the clear blue just hear Your voice say to me, 'I like you Rodney, you're my friend.'" I wanted what the hymn described: " . . . And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own . . . the voice I hear ringing in my ear . . ." I just wanted to hear His voice and to be that close to Him.
I have to be honest with you, a lot of my relationship with God is because I am getting something from Him -- getting a sermon, getting a Bible study, getting a word for myself, or getting a word for somebody else. I am usually asking God to do something or to intervene. I will get into His presence and praise Him and thank Him, then think, "Okay, now that we're done with that let's get down to the real stuff." Little did I know that that beginning part is the real stuff. God did all that He did so that I could have that deep, "Moses-kind" of relationship and intimacy with Him.
I know it's difficult. At least when you are talking to a person, you have a warm body there that you're talking to and engaging. With God, well, I really need to visualize Him. I need to see Him to be able to get this close to Him.
That is what I want, and I pray that you do, too. I pray that this is your greatest passion. It will be your greatest protection, too. If for no other reason, do it for selfish reasons. God will protect you. He will cover you. When you're in the arms of the Big Daddy, you are covered! Even so, God wants to move you beyond the selfish reasons, simply so you can enjoy Him and enjoy His presence. Do you enjoy the Lord? Do you really enjoy the Lord? I have to admit to you that sometimes it is more work than enjoyment. That is the nature of spiritual warfare. It is not always pleasant to allow the Lord to show us our areas of shortcomings and strongholds that keep us from truly knowing Him. However, that is what I'm pursuing: intimacy and passion with my Lord.
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