Intimacy

In my last post, I wrote about how purely good the Father is. If He is purely good, then His love for us is pure as well. The most miraculous thing about this is that our identities are not based on anything other than His goodness.

We are defined in light of His goodness and love, not our...well, our anything. It may sound strange, but if someone asks us who we are, our reply ought to be, "The Father is good."

Our meaning of the word "good" has been reduced to a bland generalization, thanks to phrases like, "Now, be a good girl," and "This pie is so good!"

But we ought to look to the Father for our definition of goodness. He doesn't lie (Numbers 23:19). He is just (Luke 18:7, 1 Thessalonians 1:6). His word is always true (Psalm 33:4, John 17:17). He is good.

Man fell in the Garden because he failed to believe this simple truth. Adam and Eve distrusted what God had told them. As they disbelieved His word, they also disbelieved an even more basic truth: that God is good.

The most disastrous result was not condemning rebellion or physical punishment, but loss of intimacy with the Father.

If you know that you know that you know that God is good in a general sense, then you know that the intentions of His heart toward you are good. His goodness seeps into your relationship with Him, steeping all your interactions with trust and openness.

Let's go back once again to my oft-cited favorite verses in 1 John 1:3-4.

...that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

The whole aim of all that they had seen and heard--everything Jesus did, including His crucifixion and resurrection--was to bring us into fellowship with the Father, Jesus, and the church. The chief object was open, pure relationship, which produces joy.

John goes on: This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

This paragraph seems roundabout and repetitive, but I think John is trying very hard to express how good God is and how much we can trust Him with our hearts--even hearts that are sinful. He is not condemning sinners, but rather encouraging them to approach the light and be cleansed, because we have a Father who is good. God's intentions toward us are always good, so He doesn't hurt those who come to Him and confess their problems. He is just to forgive our sins, because Jesus has already paid the price for them; it would be unjust for Him to still hold us accountable.

In short, true, transformative change comes into our lives when we are honest with God about our sin and problems, when we give Him permission to come inside of us with His light, expose what needs exposing, and heal whatever He wants.

It's relatively easy to trust God with your eternity; billions of people around the world have done it. It gets harder to tell Him we'll trust Him with our daily circumstances on earth. It is even harder to give things up for the sake of following Him, and then even harder when we actually begin to follow Him by serving and sharing the gospel.

I think the hardest thing, though, is coming to the Father and offering yourself--your very being--without knowing the end result. It's saying, "I trust you to come inside of me and do your redemptive, healing work wherever you need to. Make me into the person You imagined, not who I can imagine."

It's one thing to trust Him with our stuff, even our lives; but it's quite another to trust Him with our pain, our sin, our shame, and our wounds, the parts of our very selves that are so deep and dark that even we don't want to go there.

I think the only way we can do this is to know that He is good. We have to trust that what He does in us won't hurt us, but will redeem and restore us.

We can see the Father's heart in Jesus' fervent prayer for us, recorded in John 17.

"Holy Father," He implored, "keep thm in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one...that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves" (17:11 and 13).

And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete (1 John 1:4).

He is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. There is no chance anything dark can get us while we are in His presence. Know that today. He is asking us to go deeper into intimacy with Him. The thought can be scary, but the result is joy.