Intimacy with God

It is in the quiet of our hearts where we enter into intimacy with God. When there is noise we cannot hear so well.

Our hearts ‘noise’ comes in the form of lies, fears, and judgments.

Lies get in the way of hearing God and of experiencing God because they scream loud. Very loud.

Think about condemning phrases over your life, the self-talk that came from long ago, the beliefs about your worth or the character of God that stand in the way of intimacy.

These things scream pretty loud, don’t they?

This is part of the noise that must be shut down. It may be obvious but worth saying, lies are not true. They are lies.

And lies are grown only by our participation in them. Starve a lie and it dies. Feed a lie, tell it over and over again, and it grows and just might take on ginormous proportions.

It’s up to you.

Fears work the same way. They grow and exagerate themselves the more we either live by them, or work against them. Either way they are getting way too much attention.

I have found that fears must simply be confessed. “God I am afraid”

Brought into the light fears shrivel and lose their strength. Left in the dark, they multiply.

Almost every day, certainly most weeks, I am confessing some fear. Acknowledged they lose their power. We are human, we are frail, and only in this honesty before God do we find strength.

Judgments are the worst of all. They create a noise that confounds our best intentions. The nature of a judgment is that for every ‘snarl’ from our spirit (aren’t all judgments snarls?) we lock our lives into expectations.

An expectation towards something negative and limiting and destruction… well, guess what you will get.

I have been an expert judger my entire life. The last thirteen years has been a systematic and deliberate erradication and confession and releasing of judgments. Thankfully today I am far freer than I have ever been in my life. But even this week I was once more before the Lord bringing my ‘conclusions’ about something or someone to the cross.

God thank-you for the cross and that the cross becomes a sweet, sweet way of life.

For there is no other way to be completely free of our stuff than to have it washed away by the blood of the lamb.

Literally, we are cleansed in the power of the cross and the presence of our Lord.

Which brings us back to intimacy.

The Bible speaks about the judgment throne at the end of time. Now I’ve not studied all the variables of implication regarding this, but what I do know, what I can say is that judgment of God is a sweet thing.

Experiencing the cleansing and healing, the conviction and confession, of our souls before a Holy God is in fact intimacy. It is the place where our hearts receive love and affirmation and deep hope.

The fire of God is the safest place to be. Intimacy is fellowship in this, his fire. My judgments (my conclusions) given over for God’s judgment (his conclusions) is paradise to my soul.

Sweet fellowship and deep intimacy. The best place to be.