Enjoying God - Week #9

Chapter Seven (to p. 132): Persevering in our Quest for Intimacy
“I didn’t send My Son in an emotional vacuum.” This paraphrase of God’s reality as said by a teacher of the Word that I heard recently really struck me. Oh Lord, how little we, Your bride, know of Your unrelenting passion and desire for us! (The book of Hosea is a powerful portrayal of God’s unending love and desire for His people Israel and the Church.)

This final chapter of Enjoying God wraps the theme of the book up and gives encouragement for persevering in seeking after Him until we find what our heart longs for – He Himself! The author says at the beginning of the chapter: “…serving God is not the ultimate reason you were born. You were born for intimacy with the Father. The nearness of God to your heart is the crowning glory of your life on the earth!”

While no one can tell you how to seek God (because you are unique, unlike any other person), there are general patterns and experiences that the saints of God have had throughout history that can encourage us along the way so that we don’t grow faint and give up; this is what S.J. Hill attempts to do in this chapter.

He says, “Although I’ve mentioned several times that it takes God to pursue God – it takes the Father’s initiative to stir one’s heart to holy passion – you also have a part to play. There will be times in your Christian walk when you will have to persevere in your quest for intimacy with God. This is when you will need to understand the value of stirring yourself up to seek the Lord.”

God is always seeking us…deep calls to deep; but unless we respond, then it is a one-sided relationship, not what He has designed us for. Our part can be summed up in the words of James 4:8, “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.”

Jacob is an example of someone we tend to degrade because of his crafty ways of getting the birthright, but the author makes a point of showing that his desire for the birthright pleased God in spite of the devious way he went about getting it; whereas Esau, who was the stronger of the two in the natural, incurred God’s disfavor because of his lack of appreciation and desire for what was rightfully his. This is an encouragement to us in our weakness. Each of us has taken things into our own hands in order to bring about God’s purposes; this delays the process but it doesn’t keep God from fulfilling His purposes for us when He see strong desire in us for Him and all that He has for us. He loves our feeble reaching for Him! It’s like a small child reaching for the mom or dad – his reaching won’t get him to the parent, but the reaching arms moves the loving parent toward him.

Our seeking/reaching for Him moves the Father’s heart, and He comes to us. It is we who determine how close we will be to God; He is always eager and wanting us and only waits and looks for our longing and yearning for Him. Jesus was surrounded by various groups of people: the multitudes who saw and heard Him at a distance, the seventy who He commissioned to go out and minister for Him, the twelve who were with Him constantly, the three who hung out even more with Him, and finally John, who dared to lean on His breast and called himself, “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”

We know from Scripture that Jesus, the God-Man, is not partial, so John’s boldness in naming himself in this way doesn’t reflect on favoritism in God but on desire in John to be as near Him as he could. I dare say this was costly to John, simply because intimacy with God is always costly. But the reward is well worth any loss! (Genesis 15:1)

Throughout human history there have always been those who have refused to be satisfied with anything less than God Himself. I believe that in the final days of the Church on earth, this will be characteristic of the Bride as a whole. There won’t be “outstanding” believers because all who truly love God and are cleansed and forgiven in Christ will be lovesick for Him and ruined for any reward less than Him.

Unlearning a Lifestyle

This section of the chapter is so important. From my own experience, I know how critical unlearning former mindsets is for the expanding into fuller understanding of who God is and what He is about these days. I’ll quote the author:

“Finding God in greater intimacy doesn’t just come in what we learn but in what we have to unlearn. Experiencing God in greater intimacy often means changing our lifestyle… Encountering God isn’t hard; it’s simply foreign to us. In Western society especially, we are continually tempted to try to squeeze the Father into the busyness of our lives…God becomes Someone who is allowed to stop in rather than abide. He’s permitted to make an appearance but not steal the show.

Unlearning busyness is one of the most difficult things to deal with, because the quest for intimacy with God goes against all of our cultural conditioning. Something in the human makeup feeds off busyness. It allows us to feel good about ourselves. This is due in part to the fact that we believe we’re successful only if we’ve accomplished something…”

My response to this is that I have discovered this to be true. One thing that cannot be rushed is intimacy, and while cultivating nearness to God will look differently in each person’s life, it will require a dedication of time, and this is a mindset shift for a busy Christian culture. This requires a constant re-focusing and reshaping of our lifestyles along the way.

I find it very helpful to see my relating with God in terms of close human relationships that have their ebb and flow to them. So it’s not a matter of condemnation and false guilt but of learning to relate with a real Person and realizing that any good relationship has its ups and downs and good days as well as not-so-good days, etc. It’s very dynamic!

And it does require desire on our part and perseverance in pursuing God in response to His pursuit of us. It will begin to impact our lifestyle, and the pain in that is that it implies the unlearning of a former lifestyle.

Finding our Chief Joy

In speaking about God being our first joy and love, Hill says that the Father will begin to make us dissatisfied with other stuff so that we want Him more. Quoting A.W. Tozer, he says, “The man who has God for his treasure has all things in One. Many ordinary treasures may be dinied him, or if he is allowed to have them, the enjoyment of them will be so tempered that they will never be necessary to his happiness…”

The Lord says of His people in Hosea 2: “She shall pursue her loves but not overtake them, and she shall seek them but shall not find them. Then she shall say, ‘I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now.’”

Later in Hosea 4, the Lord says of Israel: “They shall eat, but not be satisfied; they shall play the whore, but not multiply…”

The Lord has ways of drying up the satisfaction that we find in other gods/sources until we want to return to Him as our “first Husband/Love.”

Spiritual Hunger

In Born After Midnight, A.W. Tozer says, “Hunger and thirst are physical sensations which, in their acute stages, may become real pain. It has been the experience of countless seekers after God that when their desires became a pain they were suddenly and wonderfully filled. The problem is not to persuade God to fill us, but to want God sufficiently to permit Him to do so.”

Hill concludes this part of the chapter by saying, “The Father uses hunger born out of desperation to wean us from the world and make us addicted to Him…His real purpose is to make us so lovesick that we’ll want Him more than anything else…”

May the Spirit of the Bridegroom King come and wean us away from the pleasures that we derive from the world, the flesh and the devil, and make us lovesick for Him! Holy Spirit, come and increase hunger in us for the Father and for Jesus. Awaken in us a response to His wooings and strengthen us to not give up in our pursuit of God. Thank You that You love to do this and You have all power to affect this in us!

Next week we will complete the book by finishing this chapter, Persevering in our Quest for Intimacy. Blessings on you as you mature in His love along with others who love Him!