Intimacy Issues
1 John 4:20-21 Amplified Bible (AMP)
20If anyone says, I love God, and hates (detests, abominates) his brother [in Christ], he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, Whom he has not seen. 21And this command (charge, order, injunction) we have from Him: that he who loves God shall love his brother [believer] also.
Last week one of our assignments was to read a book entitled “Hurt People, Hurt People,” by Dr. Sandra Wilson, what an amazing literary work; the week before that we were charged with reading a book entitled “How To Help People Change, by Dr. Jay Adams. Although these two books were vastly different and the main themes of these books were focused on different things there were some commonality in these books; they were the lack of intimacy with God and self. When we lack knowing who God is, we lack understanding His redemptive power and His love; we cannot understand what it is to really love Him. When we lack knowing ourselves we lack the capacity to understand who we are and what we are created for. In both cases a person will lack the boundaries and self-control not to hurt others even when they have not been hurt, most things will be seen as a battle or an offense and they will often enter into self-destructive behaviors that are counter-productive to being intimate or have intimate relationships on any level. They will find themselves embattled in a cycle of loving and anger, mistrust or misunderstanding.
We say we love God, but yet we have not seen Him, in some ways we have only experienced Him through others, or the words of others spoken. For some of us redemption or salvation has been our only experience with Him we have not cultivated our relationship outside of saving I accept you Lord, and yet we find excuses to hate, dislike or become disconnected and removed from people who we see daily. We fall into places where we judge the lives of others based upon our own brokenness and unrealistic expectations. We hurt many times in order to save ourselves from what we perceive is potentially hurtful. We place people under a microscope looking for things and excuse to cut people off and out of our lives in order that we do not have to deal with our lack of ability to become intimate, to become close or to trust. We do the same thing with God, but because we have not seen Him, we have convinced ourselves in many instances that we are doing the best we can with what we have. We insure we give God our tithes and we talk about Him, we can even quote some scripture but we have never allowed Him to get close enough to be in our lives and all up in our business. We have not allowed Him access to us, so that He can love us in a way that corrects some things in our lives to include our thinking and our behaviors. We won’t let Him get close just as we don’t let people get too close. We keep Him at a distance, just like we keep people at a distance all of the while making excuses for our behavior or placing the responsibility for the relationship on everyone else but ourselves.
John 14:15 says, “If you [really] love Me, you will keep (obey) My commands.” God’s two greatest commands are that we love Him with all that we are and that we love our neighbor as ourselves. That is the root of the problem for many of us, we have not fallen “in love” with God and we do not love ourselves in the terms that God wants us to, in order for us to love others. We can’t love Him or anyone else because we won’t let anyone get close enough to love us, we only allow them a certain amount of access, and a certain amount of patience; a certain amount of tolerance and a certain amount of forgiveness, a certain amount of most things, because just as with God if people don’t react the way we want them to we are upset and not speaking to them, just like we don’t speak to God. Look at how close you allow people to get to you; when they get sort of close is the relationship always like walking on rice paper? How deeply do you love or allow them to love you, it may give you a real indicator as to how close and how deep you love relationship is with God. You may find that you have intimacy issues!
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