A New Way of Being Human
Quick Take: Intimacy is not just going deeper in a relationship; for Christ-followers, intimacy with God – and also others! – is meant to precede relationship! This intimacy is a new way of being human.
This intimacy is a new way of being human.
When we think about intimacy as something that we first receive and then develop in our relationship with God, what does that actually mean? We are so used to thinking of intimacy as something that grows over time once we begin a relationship. What is received intimacy?
After living through a year of such upheaval, this question is especially relevant. For, I believe God is using the extraordinary shaking we’ve experienced, to trigger an extraordinary reset of The Church at its core.
Why do I say that God is using the events of this past year to reset The Church? Because as Biblical Christians, we believe God does all things together for the ultimate purpose of exalting Jesus in the earth, which is what the earth needs most.
Yet, He exalts Jesus through The Church. If God has shaken the entire earth in this unprecedented way, it must mean He wants to reset the Church in an unprecedented way. Realigning us to The Gospel. Recalibrating us in our call to make disciples. Reimagining the kind of ‘Church’ Jesus had in mind when He said He would build it.
Not too long ago, I got a new I-Phone, but it kept giving me problems. I asked a technician what I would have to do. “Reset it to factory settings,” he said. Resetting is more drastic than rebooting.
Because in a reset, all the data is wiped from the phone! To factory-reset my iPhone, I had to go to Settings… then click ‘General’ … then click ‘Reset’… then click ‘Erase All Content and Settings.’ That was the scary part: erase all content. But the tech guy said I had to do it if the phone was to work. So, I took a deep breath and clicked ‘Erase.’
God really wants to reset His Church. Of course, He isn’t erasing ALL content and settings from His Church – but we need to reset at deeper levels than we might think.
When the lockdowns began to roll over the nation last March, I felt the Holy Spirit tugging at my heart: “I want you know what living from intimacy is.” And I thought God was calling me to:
Greater worship and prayer,
Sweeter quiet times with Him,
More reflection in his Word,
Stronger obedience.
But I soon realized that that’s not what God was saying. He wasn’t calling me to intimacy, he was calling me to live from intimacy.
And that began a journey that awakened me to The Gospel. To a foundational understanding of the Gospel that I did not have before. What I’m discovering is so revolutionary to me that it is transforming my thinking in every area of life!
Recently my wife Nancy and I had to demolish our front porch and have a new one built. The old porch had pulled away from the house and was crumbling. Interesting, that when the builders dug down to the base of the old porch, they discovered that there were actual cracks in the very foundation of the house itself.
So, the crew had to dig much deeper to repair the cracks in the foundation.
I don’t usually look for spiritual parallels in my day-to-day life experiences; but this time I distinctly felt that the Holy Spirit was giving me a "heads up": We have to go deeper to repair the cracks in the Church’s foundation.
And I suggest it starts with a fresh understanding of The Gospel. The good news that we can actually live from an intimacy with God that we have from the start.
This ‘living from intimacy’ journey provoked my to look more closely at one of Paul’s favorite phrases, ‘in Christ.’ He used this phrase over 70 times in his letters. He also talked a lot about ‘Christ in us.’ Now, I had studied and taught that for years.
But I had missed something.
I had understood ‘me in Christ and Christ in me’ as a position I had in Christ. That Christ as the sacrifice for my sin, was also my representative before God and when I surrendered my life to Him and came under his authority, he conferred on me a legal status: I am a child of the Father; I am now in a right standing with the Lord.
All this I took by faith whether I felt safe and secure or not. And all of this is certainly true.
Yet, somehow confessing my ‘position’ in Christ did not often settle my feelings of anxiety. Or free me from trying to be spiritual. Somehow confessing my position didn’t relax my soul into grace.
Surprisingly, my grasp of grace – deep though it was – did not free me either. Simply saying ‘I am in Christ and Christ is in me’ didn’t work. Claiming union with Christ did not translate into experiencing my union – my intimacy – with Christ.
Something key was missing. If being ‘in Christ’ so animated Paul, why wasn’t I just as excited? I read the famous line from his Galatian letter, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2.20), but it didn’t register in me the kind of joyous freedom it seemed to in Paul.
This ‘I’m crucified’ thing… I don’t think I ever really understood it. By faith, I was crucified with Christ when I gave my life to Christ. But being crucified with him became a truth I confessed that really didn’t free my emotions. In fact, most times I saw ‘crucified with Christ’ as my ongoing struggle between God’s will and my will, in which I kept trying to ‘get crucified’ afresh. Dying daily for me meant ‘duking it out’ with my flesh.
I didn’t feel free at all!
But, Paul was excited about The Cross all the time. He once said to the Corinthians that he would know nothing among them except Christ and Him crucified (1 Corinthians 2.2) He wrote the Galatians, “The world is crucified to me and I am crucified to the world” (Galatians 6.14). You can taste his joy!
Were these the words of a super saint? Someone who had worked really hard to develop a life of submission to Jesus? If so, I supposed that I just had to resign myself to long seasons of struggle until I finally yielded, too.
Still, why was The Cross so central for Paul? Was it this call to die with Christ? Or was it something else? The answer I discovered has revolutionized me. What I came to see was not ‘new truth’ but an awakening to an ancient truth that I think many of us have forgotten. The forgotten part of The Gospel: we who are Christ’s, were crucified with Him once-and-for-all the moment we completely surrendered our lives to Him; and that this one-and-done crucifixion now releases me to live life totally different. Not trying to stay ‘crucified’ but living out of my crucifixion!
I have come to understand what this received intimacy is: it is crucifixion intimacy (and, as we shall see, resurrection intimacy). But it’s not a death we try to conform to; it is a simple surrender to the death and resurrection we’ve already been given.
“What does this mean and how does this work”
That’s what we’ll dive into in my next blog. But I can tip my hand here: Crucifixion intimacy is the freedom to live in what we first experienced when we gave our lives to Christ. If someone has truly surrendered to Jesus, they would have had to admit their 100% helplessness, and trust in Christ’s 100% sufficiency. No one is truly saved unless they’ve come to this point!
Crucifixion intimacy is simply living daily in that helplessness and trust. You can never really trust unless you admit helplessness. More on that in my next blog.
Why is this so critical to how God might reset The Church?
Because I think there’s lack of intimacy in much of the American church. Oh, many are pursuing intimacy with God – and that’s the ironic thing. The focus for many is our pursuit. Not our resting in Christ’s finished work. And consequently, there is much anxiety and subtle self-effort that laces much of our Christian behavior.
I see it in our reluctance to be vulnerable with each other…
I see it in fear of being honest with one another because we feel unsafe.…
I see it when we worship to get God's presence to manifest…
I see it when we try to use our faith to activate the supernatural…
I see it in us trying to force God's hand through prayer…
I see it in a kind of theology that says, "If you don't do this, God won't do that" or "You take one step towards God and He'll step towards you."
There is a crucifixion intimacy that frees us from all this – yet paradoxically, releases us to become ever more faithful, ever more obedient!
Because many of have forgotten this essential part of The Gospel, we have actually never discovered the new creation nature – the new way of being human – we were meant to live in.
Because we have forgotten this essential part of The Gospel, we have scarcely realized the security that is ours from an intimacy already given to us. Instead, practical Christianity is, for most people, a struggle to be like Jesus, an effort to obey… often feeling defeated because we cannot overcome paralyzing emotions like anxiety or offense.
Because we have forgotten this part of The Gospel, Church is something we build, rather than flow out of. Because we have forgotten this part of The Gospel, Church has become a higher version of human community, rather than an entirely new community whose common life is Christ.
But… this forgotten Gospel, this crucifixion-intimacy WILL release you into the joy and peace, the victorious life that you have always hoped you would find as a follower of Jesus.