The Seven Longings of the Human Heart - Week #7

Chapter Five – The Longing for Intimacy without Shame

“Before the beginning of time, the Father burned with the desire to have a family, to know them and be known by them in a deep and profound way…God’s dream has always been to share His heart with us in a way far surpassing anything we know or can imagine now. God created us with a profound desire to fully know and to be fully known without shame.” (I Cor. 13:12)

This innate desire for intimacy drives humans to engage in sinful relationships in order to fill the emptiness we experience because of lack of spiritual intimacy with our Creator.

Before the Fall, Adam and Eve enjoyed union and communion with God and with one another without shame. God was the Center and Source of all their desire; they knew and enjoyed God and were known and enjoyed by God. Adam and Eve were naked and without shame; they had nothing to hide from God nor from each other.

This is what we were created for, but when sin entered the world, man became self-conscious with a strong desire to hide. Whereas they had lived together with God and each other in perfect bliss (God-conscious rather than self-conscious), now suddenly they became self-focused, driven by self-awareness rather than by God-awareness.

Having to find justification for existence in themselves now (rather than in the reality that their loving Creator Father had created them simply out of desire for them to be with Him and to partner with Him in populating and overseeing an earth full of Christ-like people), they were driven to devise their own way of justifying their existence. The utter inadequacy of this drove them to hide from their Creator Father, and the bliss of knowing and enjoying Him and His knowing and enjoying them was gone.

Ever since then, every human has both been born into this fallen state and has endorsed it personally by our own sin. We all long for intimacy without shame. We were created this way and cannot repent for wanting this. But as with the other God-given longings that we have been looking at in this book, we must repent of the ways and means by which we seek for fulfillment of these longings. The countless sinful sexual liaisons that litter human history (from co-dependent relationships to full-blown sexual perversions) testify to the inescapable fact that all humans long for intimacy without shame. Our ways of going after this, of course, cause us to dig ourselves more deeply into the pit of shame, and it becomes a vicious cycle.

“Spiritually speaking, being naked and unashamed means all the secrets of our hearts will be fully unveiled. We will have no shame before God when this occurs. Eph. 5:31,32)...It is possible to experience an intimacy with God and people that has no shame in it. Intimacy means so much more than a physical union. It is the empowering confidence people have in one another that allows them to share the deepest parts of their hearts – their hopes, and dreams, their fears and failures, their feelings and frustrations.”

God knows all of this about you and me but longs for me to invite Him in to personally know me; in other words, He wants me to talk to Him about all of this. I’m fascinated with how Psalm 139 begins with a statement about God’s omniscience (perfect knowledge): “O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up…”; then the psalmist ends with an invitation to God to know him: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my anxieties; and see if there is any wicked way in me…”

I see the prayer at the end of Psalm 139 as an invitation to God into intimacy. I often think of this in terms of a mother and child. The young child is known well by his mother by virtue of her having born him and cared intimately for him as he develops, examining carefully everything about him (both his outer body and his personality). The mother loves knowing her child in this way; but there is a whole other level of knowing that kicks in when one day, the child comes to mother and voluntarily shares with her something about himself that he wants her to know. She already “knew” this, but his desire for her to share the knowledge with him lifts the relationship into another realm altogether.

God longs for this kind of intimacy with humans, unbelievable as that may sound; He wants me to consciously invite Him into my world with all its wonder and horror. He wants me to talk to Him about everything, successes and failures and let Him be part of it all! He wants me to run to Him when I fail rather than run away from Him, as Adam and Eve did. Our natural response when we fail is to run and hide from God either through intensifying our religious activity or through throwing ourselves into fleshly sin. Meanwhile, God is crying out, “Adam (Nita), where are you??!!”, longing for me to run to Him that moment rather than hide from Him. (Heb. 4:15,16) The cross shows how eager God is to cover us with His means of righteousness as He did Adam and Eve after their failed attempts to cover themselves.

He wants me to invite Him into all my thought life, good and bad. The more I consciously allow Him to be present as I’m thinking negative things, the more cleansed my thoughts become because the light and fire of His presence cleanses whatever it touches. I’m finding this to be true in my personal walk with Him, and it’s wonderful!

This kind of intimacy with our Creator Father is the only way to break the power of shame off of us, whether it be a shame deeply rooted in years of chronic sin and failure or shame from a sin I committed in thought or action five minutes ago. The beauty and healing power of intimacy with God is that He is totally trustworthy to cover us and never expose us when we open ourselves to be fully known by Him. In walking a lifestyle of this kind of intimacy with God, we are empowered to walk in transparency without shame in other relationships.

He also invites us to know Him intimately. He longs for a reciprocal relationship, knowing and being known without shame. The Apostle Paul speaks boldly of his desire to know God intimately in Phil. 3:8-10. Jesus wants us to know what moves His heart; I believe He reveals general desires of His heart in His Word, and I believe He wants to unveil particulars about those desires to us as we wait and listen in loving worship and obedience.

Through this chapter Bickle touches on some primary ways in which we share intimately with Christ:
* In our victories and successes
* In our pain and struggles
* In our selfless sacrifices for Him and His kingdom
* In our passions and desires

The chapter ends with this:
“Intimacy without shame is a lost concept for most people. They have lived their entire lives in relationships that were more a trade-off than anything resembling intimacy. Anything they encountered approaching intimacy usually involved the shame of knowing it was happening outside of a covenant relationship. To a world full of people who are longing for intimacy without shame, Jesus says, ‘I am here to meet you. I will rejoice with you in your successes. I will weep with you during your times of failure and heartache. I will see and understand your sacrifices, and I will celebrate and affirm the passions that make you unique in time and eternity. I will be truly intimate with you – I will know you and you will know Me, and there will be no shame in it.’”

Holy Spirit of Jesus, incline our hearts to run to the Father in our shame rather than away from Him…I ask for the grace upon us to develop the habit of inviting You to know us intimately and to be included in our deepest thoughts and secrets. Come and know us and reveal the thoughts and heart of God to us that we may have a taste of the bliss there is in knowing and being known without shame. Thank You, Lord.

Next week we’ll cover chapter six, The Longing to be Wholehearted. God bless you!