Intimacy with God: Chapter Six

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"If I knew the world would come to an end tomorrow, I'd still plant an apple tree today" -Martin Luther

God is invisible. You can't see, hear, smell, touch or taste God. This frankly makes communication difficult. Intimacy on this earth is hard. Our hope is set on Heaven where our union will be complete. In the meantime, our life with God is at turns immediate and profound, and at turns isolated and painful.
Even in the Garden, before any sin, God looked at Adam and said "It's not good for him to be alone." We may be apt to think (especially after reading a book like this) that it is somehow unspiritual and weak to need other people - that our sufficiency should come completely from God. But what we fail to realize is that one of the major ways God loves us is through other people.
In Hosea God says, "l led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love" but, "They did not realize it was I who healed them." Everything we receive - any love we experience whether from people, songs, books, the Bible, whatever - none of it can reach us unless God breathes life into it. If a Pigmy headhunter somewhere in the depths of Africa talks with a friend and is comforted, that is God loving him through that person. God loves people in this way all the time, all over the world. This is the unselfish love of God. A love that is, for the most part, unacknowledged. All the people over the course of your life who have cared for you were only able to reach you because God was giving you love through them. Without God's touch, without God breathing life into it, it would fall short like a dead arrow never penetrating the heart.
This is how God has woven all our lives together. Loving others is not simply a polite after-thought when speaking of intimacy with God, but an integral part of what it means to love, and be loved by God. When you love me I am receiving God's love, and at the same time you are loving God through me. Jesus said, "As you've done it unto the least of these my brethren, you've done it unto me." Intimacy with God is not an isolated relationship, but one that intertwines all of our lives.

LOVE VS. FEAR

One of the most obvious ways that loving God interrelates with loving others is through sharing Christ's love with those around us. When you're in love, you want to share your happiness, so it comes as no surprise that evangelism should be an outgrowth of intimacy with God. With all the pain around us though, all the lostness in the world, this can get mixed up with pressures to save everyone "before it's too late". We want to shake them, and make them see, but we can't. Love compels through truth not force.
This urgency is motivated primarily by fear not love. "Of course I believe that love leads to God and salvation", says our impatient reasoning, "but there isn't enough time! What if they died tomorrow?" So in our urgency we try to help God out a bit, and speed up the process. But fear is always a bad motivation. Love is patient. Love always hopes, always waits, always trusts, always believes, and though it's hard to take - love hurries for no one. We are not the Holy Spirit. Salvation is God's responsibility, ours is to love.
Everyone finds themselves somewhere along a scale leading to God. We need to therefore love each person with the amount of truth they are able to bear, where they are at. For some towards the end of the scale, this may mean telling them the Gospel, but for others, their need may be another at this point. We must therefore dependently listen, both to them and to God, to know how we can love them the best. And if we are lucky, we'll be able to contribute to them moving a step or two closer. This perspective is important to keep in mind. When we approach life without it, it's easy to feel love is wasted time if we don't see people getting saved. But evangelism rushing ahead of, and outside the context of love, is a polluted and ineffectual Gospel. We cloth the naked, we heal the sick, we love those around us, not as a bait for salvation, but simply because it is good, because it is loving.
Contrary to popular opinion, the ends do not justify the means - the means determine the end. The means of manipulation, condemnation, or dishonesty will reap what they have sown, regardless of the end in mind. Do not focus on the end result, but on the right means, and the right result will follow. Our means is love, and this is never a waste of time.

SHOW AND TELL

Ever since the enlightenment, our society has tended to think that all our ills could be solved through more education. Thus in our information-age thinking, the Gospel is regularly exchanged for an impersonal "hit-and-run evangelism" of unsolicited information. We hand them a tract, rattle off some prepared speech of apologetics, and think since they've "had a chance to hear the Gospel" our work is done. The problem is, they probably didn't hear a word we said. People, (and that includes us), can only internalize what they are ready to. You can't answer people's questions until they are asking them, and you can't solve their "problem" unless they see that there is one, and are seeking a solution. Evangelism isn't just a question of information - as if a mass-mailing advertising campaign could fulfill the Great Commission. It has to do with relationship and love, which is something you not only tell, but show. Christianity is not a doctrine to be assented to - it is a life to be demonstrated.
The Great Commission was not just verbal, but a verb. It is a charge to do the work of love: heal, feed, cloth, and tell the good news. The early Christian's most powerful witness was the love they had for each other, and in this day of dislocation and disillusionment it's all the more true. What is missing in people's lives today is not a flashy professional presentation, but genuine community and love. As non-Christians are exposed to Christian love and community, they can meet Christ vicariously through our actions and example. When we, in this context, tell them of God's love, it is no longer percieved as cliché and impersonal, but tangible and relevant. Non-Christians don't need mere information, or some facade of a trouble-free existence. They need to see God's love demonstrated in our lives. Our message is not ourselves - but Christ, and our dependency and need for God's love.
You might ask at this point, "So what does all this have to do with intimacy with God?" This needs to be the question we constantly ask ourselves when evangelizing. We need to be leading people towards deeper intimacy with God as an expression and outgrowth of our own intimacy with God. We need to be demonstrating love motivated by our love for God. Anything else is selfish proselysation. The dichotomy between loving God and loving others in our thinking is symptomatic for our time. Biblically and practically however the two are inseparable. The next section explores this interconnected relationship.

THE IMITATION OF CHRIST

Jesus, on the night before his arrest and crucifixion, took the disciples aside and opened his heart to them. In one of the most intimate moments in the Bible, he promises not to abandon them, tells them "I am in my father, you are in me, and I am in you" - that they are intimately bound to one another - and says that if they love him, they will obey his command: love each other. John, who was at his side at the time, later writes, "Since God loved us, we ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love each other, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us."
You would be hard pressed to find a single place in the Bible that speaks of intimacy with God that does not immediately connect it to loving others. When you love someone you want to care for them, comfort them, protect them, nurture them, but it is hard to imagine doing these things for God. How could we comfort God? How can we minister to God's needs? Although there are many expressions of our loving God that may be shared directly, (trust, respect, affection), specifically these aforementioned "parental" characteristics (comfort, protection, nurture), of our love for God find their expression in our loving the "least" - the weak, the tired, the lonely. In this very way we can love God with our whole being, with the complete expression of who we are as people. Biblically, loving others, (who we can see), is the proof that we love God (who is invisible). In other words if we love God, then we will love as God does, because we love others with the love of God in us. As a single candle lights a hundred others without weakening its flame, God's love overflows in our hearts to those around us.
Agape-love - loving the way God does - is frequently defined in negative terms such as disinterested benevolence and unselfishness, thus drawing connotations of unfulfillment, and dutiful sacrifice. Additionally, a common, albeit immature, image of Christianity is of a God that commands us to have miserable lives, giving up of all the "fun" so we can get into Heaven later. All this gives the impression that agape-love is an inconvenient burden. But just as intimacy with God does not result in boredom and want; intimacy's natural outgrowth - unselfishness - is how we are ultimately fulfilled as people. We are not just isolated individuals, but need the love and community of others. And since you can't have a relationship and only think of yourself, being unselfish does, in fact, benefit us.
The term "unselfish" is thus a bit misleading: Because of the self-benefit of unselfishness, it can look like unselfishness is really selfish after all. This confusion is purely semantical though. Really, agape-love is not so much negative and passive, (un-self-ish or un-self-focused), as it is positive and active, that is, other-oriented. Agape-love neither seeks reward nor does it refuse it - it doesn't think of itself at all - but of the one it loves.
The closest we can get to understanding this kind of "disinterested" benevolence is to think of what goes through a mother's head when she is protecting her child from danger: She doesn't notice her own pain, doesn't care how noble she might look; her one concern is for her child. As Christ explained on the Sermon on the Mount, and demonstrated with his life: this is how God loves. As Christians we are to love, not only with our own human love, (i.e. what comes naturally), but with this Godly love, intentionally. Love is a choice, not based on our immediate feelings, or even on our will, but on the other's inherent value and dignity.
Precisely because it usually doesn't come naturally for us not to focus on ourselves, it's easy for selflessness to turn to self-obsession. Many a minister's family has complained that they felt neglected in the wake of the many duties and obligations of a congregation. There's a certain addictive thrill to being a "martyr". I suspect however that the majority of us suffer from the other extreme: focusing too much on ourselves. We have healing sessions, counseling, bible studies, menÕs luncheons, retreats, concerts, books, tapes, etc., etc., etc. Of course none of these are bad in themselves, but our focus has been turned inward. Love is atrophied in such an unbalanced environment, and our full potential as Christians - and as humans - is dwarfed.
Everyone admits that doing something good makes you feel good. But it's much more than a warm fuzzy feeling. The entire universe, God, and all the angels rejoice when someone does something right, virtuous, and unselfish. This is so ingrained in the human heart that it is discernible, at least as a nice feeling, to everyone. Our hearts somehow know that the whole world is smiling on us. To seek unselfishness is to seek God.
Often the very cure we need for our own self-esteems is to reach out beyond ourselves. If we stopped worrying so much about being loved, and healed, and ministered to, and blessed, and started to love others, to sit up with someone whoÕs hurting, to listen to someone who's lonely - to give ourselves away; we'd find that in the process many of our own problems would be taken care of. When we love, something incredible happens: Our needs do not just take care of themselves, rather the very act of our loving is the medicine that heals us as well. Not only does God love us through others, but by us loving others, God loves us aswell. As Jean Valjean sang in the musical Les Misérables, To love another person is to see the face of God.

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