“I am the good shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me,” (John 10:14 NAS95)
Intimacy with God may sound a bit weird, but I hear that in these words about our Good Shepherd.
I don’t know when it started, but I cherish these words, “I know My own and My own know Me.” Initially, I didn’t grasp what they meant because my picture of God, the image of Him that I carried in my soul, didn’t allow Him to come near in an experiential way. Fancy that, my own understanding of God kept me from God.
As my relationship with Him deepened so did my understanding of how to interact with Him. He shifted my prayer with Him from a litany of requests to a sharing of self. I don’t know when it happened, but one of my theology class’s statements about God began a rapid trail of ponderings in my heart. God self-reveals…creation…Scripture…Jesus…Spirit.
As I considered how He self-reveals, and by that, I mean, I would not know Him at all unless He did self-reveal, I started wondering if He might desire the same from me. What I heard from Him was “yes, I’d quite like that.”
Mind you, I come from an alcoholic home, and relationships were not exactly safe, and that made revealing my inner thoughts and feelings even more difficult. Yet here I stood with God beckoning me to what I needed most: a safe place of intimacy, a space to know and be known. John 10:14 speaks quite accurately to this, and my experience knows the validity of this truth.
It did not come easy because my awareness of my interior was almost nonexistent. Yet as I engaged, as I tried, as I shared what my soul experienced as authentically and honestly as I could with God, things just changed. Things just happened. I couldn’t explain it other than God, for me, almost daily, became more real, more personal, more present, and more recognizably interactive. He hadn’t changed, but my conversation with Him had, and due to its personal nature, shifted my sight from the visible (circumstance) to the invisible presence of the universe’s greatest lover: our Triune Lord.
I learned intimacy from God. He self-reveals, so I need to mirror that and self-reveal too. “I know My own, and My own know Me”: Intimacy with God. He is the good shepherd!
For Reflection:
“When You said, “Seek My face,” my heart said to You, “Your face, O LORD, I shall seek.”” (Psalm 27:8 NAS95)
- How easily do you authentically self-reveal in your conversations with God?
- What space to you give to silence, listening, to hearing God in your conversations with Him?
