How Can Believers Deepen Their Intimacy with the Lord？ - Part 1 — Al Whittinghill

Cultivating Intimacy Through Wholehearted Love

Well, the one thing the Lord wants with us, for sure, is intimacy. He wants us to love Him with all our hearts and minds and soul and strength. That intimacy is carried out in a visual with the husband and wife.

Intimacy as the Source of Spiritual Fruitfulness

Without intimacy, there's no fruit. The law of all fruit-bearing is an intimate relationship. It's in the plant kingdom, no fruit without an intimate relationship. It's in the animal kingdom, no puppies unless dogs have an intimate relationship.

It's in the human kingdom, no babies unless humans have this relationship in marriage. And no fruit in the spiritual realm. Why would it be any different unless I have an intimate relationship with the Lord?

Choosing Fellowship With Christ Over Religious Busyness

Now the question is for the church, it's easier to be busy for God than to cultivate that intimacy that He dies for us to have. But we're called into the fellowship of His wonderful Son who is risen and alive.

Guarding the Heart and Abiding in the Spirit

So the one thing I've got to do is to cultivate and guard my heart and keep that intimacy that He is more responsible for than me. We act as if we're begging God to be intimate with us, but He is putting pressure from every side to us to cleave to Him, to run to Him, to He who's joined to the Lord as one Spirit to learn to live and worship and move and have my being in Him and let His Spirit guide me.

Intimacy Requires Willingness to Share Christ's Rejection

But the question I have to ask if I want to be intimate with Him, do I really want that? Do I really want that? Do I want the world to look at me like it looked at Him? He said, look, you're not of the world in the same way exactly even as I am not of the world.

And the world will hate you because it hates me. But it's not you that the world hates, it's me in you. So all who live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer hardship and have trouble and be persecuted. So the question I have to ask is, why am I pursuing this?

Is it just to receive more, to get more? Because if that's so, when an army of the enemy shows up and I don't have the cross in my heart and that wonderful relationship of intimacy, I will back down. And I will back down when people criticize me.

You're a bigot, you're a misogynist, you're whatever that word is. You're against us. But you see, we've got to learn to take the heat. That's the message we're not getting in our pulpits, really. To learn to suffer for righteousness sake, to have our good spoken evil of.

Returning to First Love in the Church at Ephesus

So it all boils down. I know your works, I know your labor, and I know your patience, he says to the church at Ephesus that was a spiritual church. But see, it doesn't have faith, hope, and love in it.

It's just a work, not a work of faith. It's just a patience, not of hope, just patience. It's become because they left, not lost, never says lost, they left their first love. And so God's remedy is return.

Remember the place you were and return to me. Remember those first works, the way how it was when you first were aware that your sins were forgiven and I was raised from the dead. And return to me with all your heart.

Practicing Intimacy as a Sacred Stewardship

And love the Lord. So this is the thing I've got to really discern in my own life. Why I do things. Do I really want to know him? Do I really want to bring pleasure to him? It's not how much pleasure I'm getting, or how much pleasure is my wife getting, or how much pleasure are my kids getting, or how much pleasure is the church getting.

It's for thy pleasure we are and were created. So intimacy, I think, must be cultivated and deepened and guarded as a sacred stewardship. We're stewards of the mysteries of God. You can't put a measurement on it.

But God, he who called you into it, will guard you and guide you every step of the way. That's his desire. So we've got to quit making excuses and if we're not intimate with him, just discover the reasons in our own heart and confess and forsake them and make sure we are following the roadmap of forgiving everyone and walking in the purity that he has in here to say to us and we tend to disregard because of the pressure in the world.