Intimacy With God
“True intimacy with God always brings humility.” ~ Beth Moore
Our souls desire to have a loving, honest, personal relationship with God. We don’t want to know God from a distance. We want to be with Him, right next to Him, in His loving arms. That is the true nature and desire of our souls.
The world, steeped in sin, finds that thought abhorrent. It does everything that it can to lure us away from God. It promises riches, success, praise, and all sorts of other things aimed at ensnaring our souls and making us invest in the world and not in God.
On a purely intellectual level, we see the struggle of the soul between its yearning for God and the temptations of the world. However, we are not purely intellectual individuals, are we? We are people who not only think, we feel as well. Our feelings often get in the way of what we know to be true or right or good. That is what the world counts on.
The world wants us to become proud people. Pride is not always a bad thing. We can be proud of accomplishments. The pride of the world is different, though. That pride invites us to be haughty, arrogant people. Those who are truly proud in the sense of the world have no time for others. They have no care for others. They have no concern over the plight of others. All they care about is themselves and how they can become even more special and important in the sight of the world.
When we come to know God, we realize that is all foolishness. Worldly pride is going to get us nowhere. Can any of us do more than Jesus did for us? Can any of us save humanity from sin and death? Can any of us offer eternal life to others? No.
When we come to know God, we see our relationship to Him and with others. We realize that we are truly small people and that is a humbling experience. There is nothing wrong with being small and insignificant. We can build up one another by words and deeds and that is exactly what God wants of us.
The truly humble person lets God be God and accepts his or her own relationship with God. Doing so, we can draw even closer to the God who loves us completely and who has so much in store for us both here on earth and in the world to come.
FAITH ACTION: Ask God to help you to see yourself as He sees you.