Growing in Intimacy with Jesus
By Liz Roy
Dear Pastor’s wife,
Like Paul longed to be face to face with the Romans, I long to be with you personally to refresh you in your relationship with Jesus—to stir you up by way of reminder of His very presence and love. We are on this journey towards Christ together, and I myself often grow weary and need reminders of my first Love.
Have you encountered the risen Christ today? Are the ancient truths of God’s Word refreshing your soul? Have you seen the Lord in all His beauty as you look out at creation? Are your eyes open to His provision as you wipe messy hands and faces for the hundredth time today? Do you know Him to be wise as you counsel a woman who doesn’t listen to you? Does His patience towards your shortcomings and sin overwhelm you with mercy and grace and lead you to extend towards your husband, children, and fellow saints? Does Christ’s rule and reign bring you His shalom when evil is abounding? When you think of the cross, is your heart flooded with the love of God, or are you ready to move onto the next thing? Have you lost your first love?
Sweet sister, I don’t ask these questions to your shame or my shame, but for the benefit of our souls. Too often we neglect our first relationship with Jesus to the detriment of our own hearts, husbands, family, and church. We are gloriously united to Christ for all eternity. Our union with Him is firm and unchanging and can never be broken (John 14:18-20).
But sometimes our communion with Jesus dampens. We may feel distant from Him due to our sin, the daily grind of life, or worries and cares of ministry and the world—all of which have a way of choking out the sweetness of Jesus. As a result, our affections turn lukewarm or cold when we hear His name.
In particular, ministry life often has a way of hindering our love for Jesus, and the shores of Calvary begin to dry up under church pressures. Our love for Christ might be dull, tepid, or dry as we become so saturated with truth we forget the One who is the way, and the truth and the life ( John 14:6). We can be so busy “doing” ministry that we forget our first Love, leaving Jesus behind. We might grow cynical due to others’ sins and weaknesses, or we might despair because of relational rifts within the church. We might view people as a problem to fix instead of fellow sojourners you love, or we might begin to idolize other saints as they fill our hearts with their love, acceptance, and approval. The abundant life that Christ promised to us does not always feel very abundant. If we’re honest, it might seem that Jesus does not satisfy the longings of our hearts.
Our love for God will often fail. It is not reliable, and it is limited because we are sinful, weak creatures. Even so, we ought to pursue knowing God so that we are drawn deeper into the well of Christ’s love for us. Paul expressed this love in a prayer for the Ephesians—a prayer that is ours today:
…that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:17-19)
Paul desires that we know Christ’s love for us! He wants God’s children to understand with all their might the vastness and richness of God’s love for us in Christ. This love is found in the truth of God’s Word ( John 3:16, Romans 5:8). But, Paul is not content with us only grasping Christ’s love as mere truth to know and believe. His prayer is that this understanding of Christ’s love would transcend intellectual understanding and that we would taste and experience it (Psalm 34:8). Paul desires our affections grow in correspondence to the truth we believe. As believers, we grow in both our understanding of God’s love for us and our personal and experiential knowledge of God’s love for us. We need both head knowledge and experiential (heart) knowledge. They are not in competition with one another but work together to transform our inner being. We will never mine the depths of the knowledge of God, but we press forward desiring to grow in our knowledge of God and experience His love for us.
We are about to have our first grandchild. I have been told from all of my friends who have grandchildren that it is a love you can’t imagine and different than the love you have for your own children! I wait on the precipice of tasting and feeling this new love that will flood my heart! While my friends have told me all about this love, and I choose to actively believe the truth they are telling me, until I experience it I only have a glimpse of the reality of this love. At the same time, the active trust in the truth of this love anchors me in what I am about to experience.
How do we know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge in our day-to-day routines, ministry demands, and seasons of dryness, suffering, uncertainty, or abundance? In and through every season, God, in His infinite wisdom, is seeking to draw you closer to Him.
Experiencing the love of Christ is not a mystical or emotional experience to conjure up! Our experiences of His love will rise and fall and ebb and flow. We experience this love in different measures and at different times. We are not to seek after the experience but to seek Jesus! The love of Christ always begins with knowing and believing in who He is and what He has done for me. It is not how well we are gripping onto truth or how often we recite the truth because it is a work of the Spirit. He alone pours out the love of God into our hearts and opens our eyes to Jesus (Romans 5:5).
I pray that the Spirit will give you a renewed knowledge and sense of God’s love as you search out the familiar stories and theological truth in the Word. In so doing, may you bear fruit of increased knowledge of and trust in God’s eternal love for you and may that love feed and flood your soul (John 4:16)!
Blessings,
Your friend in ministry
Liz
Liz Roy is a pastor’s wife in Louisville, KY where she serves alongside her husband in their northeast Louisville church plant. She finds great joy in shepherding the women of her church and caring for their souls. She and her husband, Jay, have been married for 28 years; they have two daughters and one grandchild on the way. In her free time, Liz enjoys discipleship, writing, taking walks with her husband, running, and Earl Grey tea with cream. Liz serves as a volunteer mentor for Practical Shepherding Women.