Communication

Brought Near

by Terry Barlow
04/03/20
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One of the things that the blood of Jesus Christ does for us is that it brings us near.  We overcome by our testimony of what the word of God says that the blood of Jesus Christ does for us.  I would like to unpack a little of what it means to be brought near by his blood.  Ephesians 2 v13   It means to be brought into the intimacy of the fellowship that exists  between Jesus and the Father and the Holy Spirit that they have always shared . It is ready made and cultivated and waiting for me to experience . It is like a house already built.  I get to enter and enjoy it.  I don't have to build the house of intimacy with God.   Even the furnishings are already present.  I only need to occupy anid enjoy the house and it's furnishings and live in them and make them mine as they shape themselves to me and conform and personalize to my God-given personality. We have this daunting notion that we have to build intimacy with God from scratch, but, no that's been done for us by Christ's blood sacrifice  for the remission of our sins which has made us eligible and qualifies us to be co-heirs, and intimate with him and the Father and the Holy Spirit. It's an ever deepening  intimacy ready made and waiting for us to claim and explore. No one has ever quite had the relationship with God that you could have,  and nobody but you ever will. 

As I spoke of this closeness of relationship  with a friend of ours she frankly admitted that she had no idea what intimacy was.  She had been hurt early on in relationships and threw up protective walls which are there to this day.  "I don't know how to be vulnerable in relationships. I put up a false front." What she said reminded me of the prophet Isaiah  when he had that powerful encounter with the Lord in Isaiah chapter 6. "Wow,  is me,  I am undone!" He exclaimed.  His defenses had come down. He was totally vulnerable.  He didn't know how to act. His personality disintegrated and it was up to God to put him back together into a coherent  whole person.  Many of us like my friend have been taken apart by people who didn't know us well enough to be able to put us back together.  They didn't know what they were doing. Only God knows us that well.  Many of us also have played God in other people's lives and done great damage to them making it nigh impossible apart from a work of God for them to ever open up to another person again,  even if that Person happens to be God. Again,  we didn't know what we were doing.  In some cases we are like the well meaning observer who took a penknife and tried to cut the struggling butterfly from its cocoon, not realizing that the butterfly needed that struggle to develop it's wings.  When it was extracted that way from its cocoon it perished.  What I realized after talking with our friend was that her honest confession of not understanding intimacy was itself the beginning of intimacy in her relationship with God and with others too.  If one knows one is in the dark,  there is already some light.  It's when we claim or pretend that our darkness is light that the darkness is thickest and we are in the most trouble.