The Importance Of Intimacy (John Wimber)

The Importance Of Intimacy

I was raised as an only child in a household where my mother was divorced and had remarried. Both she and my stepfather worked. When I was around five, I discovered music. It became my refuge, my passion. By the time I was eighteen, I had learned to play about seventeen instruments.

On a typical day, I would head home after school and practice for six or seven hours. This was my routine every day of every week. No wonder I didn’t develop many social skills! It was hard to develop social graces with an instrument stuck in my mouth or lap.

And except for the fact of the grace of God and Carol, my wife, I probably wouldn’t have ever learned how to be intimate with anybody. Carol has helped me see that being tough is okay, but being emotionally invulnerable isn’t. It is scary being vulnerable with her, with God, with friends, but I am so much more human when I am.

In our culture, we are trained to be, in a very real sense, distanced from those we are intimate with. Our Western civilization comes from a somewhat stilted, formal history and background. As a result, many of us grow up in households where we share furniture and food with family members, but we never really learn how to be intimate with them.

Often, when I’m in a small group, the Holy Spirit will prompt someone to prophesy over me and say that I’m God’s “Beloved.” Everything in my system says, “Tilt!” I can’t receive that because I know how disobedient and hard hearted I am. For God to call me his “Beloved” just doesn’t compute. Yet he keeps telling me that, because he’s trying to help me understand that he means it.

My intimacy with God has nothing to do with my performance; it has everything to do with his commitment to me. Jesus Christ offers you and me the relationship that he had with the Father before the world was formed (that’s part of what Jesus prayed in John 17:21-26, and Jesus gets his prayers answered). By his blood, and as a result of the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross, you and I have a bold, free, fearless access to the Father, just like Jesus did (Ephesians 2:14-18, 3:12). We’ve been born again of the Spirit of God.

John Wimber, Prayer: Intimate Communication (Anaheim: Vineyard Ministries International, 1997), 8.

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