There is a longing in me that has been present my entire life. I first remember experiencing it during my childhood. When I was 10 years old, I wrote this sentence on a sticky note:

There has to be more than this.

I sensed that I was missing something, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I had a great family. I had friends. I did well in school. And yet, the longing for more resurfaced throughout my adolescence and early adulthood.

I’m no longer a young adult, but I still feel it at times. And it has nothing to do with life not working out for me. I am stunned and humbled by the life I am living right now. It is beyond anything I could have imagined. This year I will celebrate 25 years of marriage to the most amazing woman. My relationship with Shauna has never been deeper or closer than it is right now. All 4 of our children are following Jesus in this season; I do not take that for granted.

I’m getting to work with some of my best friends in the whole world and we’re going after a mission that’s impacting thousands of lives. I have a group of friends that meet for an hour and a half every month and we talk about the most intimate details of our lives – our life with Jesus, our marriages, our children, and what’s going on with our work. I get invited to give wisdom to people who have massive influence in this world and want to follow Jesus in what they’re doing. On top of all that, I have a super cute dog.

My life is so rich. And yet, I still want more. Before you start judging me, I want you to know that it’s not a lack of contentment or gratitude. But I also can’t deny that I’m after more.

Last month, I began to see a spiritual director. Kind of like an executive coach, but different. Kind of like a therapist, but different. A spiritual director is there to deal with your soul and specifically to help you make sense of what God is doing and what God is saying to you. When we were meeting, I brought up this longing that I feel. She asked me a set of questions and after I answered those, I could tell she was getting excited about what I was working through.

She began to diagnose this yearning I felt within me. She said, “Ben, the more that you are after sounds like a deeper and stronger intimacy with God.” Now it wasn’t that I didn’t feel close to God prior to this moment. She simply helped me recognize what this longing was all about.

Why would God put this desire in me? And does God carry around a similar longing for this kind of deep intimacy? The best way I can describe how this feels to me at times is this – it’s like an ache. And as unique as I want to think I am, I believe this ache for intimacy exists within every human heart. Even if you numb it with busyness. Even if you go for the cheap version of intimacy called pornography. Even if you build a self-protective fortress around your heart.

Today we’re beginning a new series called Original Intent. We’re calling to cover these major topics over the next 5 weeks: friendship, sex, marriage, and singleness. But I want to frame up the entire series today in a message I’m calling “Our Ache for Intimacy”. Why have we been given the longings and desires we find deep within ourselves?

“The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well , there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.’” -C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

We’re calling this series Original Intent because we want to understand what we’ve been designed for when it comes to intimacy. And if there is a design, then surely there’s a Designer. Who have we been designed to be and what have we been designed to do, when it comes to our ache for intimacy?

In the beginning – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit were all present. They were intimately relating to each other, and they began to create out of their intimacy. Not only does God create us out of intimacy; He creates us for intimacy. God creates us for intimacy with Himself and He creates us for intimacy with each other. He makes us in His image.

“We long for intimacy because we are made in the image of perfect intimacy.” -Brent Curtis & John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance

God does all of this creating and after saying that everything was good, He has a moment where He recognizes that something isn’t actually good.

Genesis 2:18 The LORD God said, “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

While we can understand God’s design for marriage from Genesis 2, this is about more than marriage. This man was all alone. Why didn’t God just say, “Adam, I know you feel alone, but remember I am always present with you. You are not alone”? God created us for intimacy. Yes, with himself. And yes, with other human beings who are also made in His image. Here’s what one commentator wrote regarding this verse:

Isolation is not the divine norm for human beings; community is the creation of God.

Loneliness, which is a widespread pandemic in our world today, is the opposite of what God intended for us. I’m not talking about the good gift of solitude. I’m referring to the sense that you aren’t experiencing what you were made for. And again, I’m not talking uniquely about your need to get married. You don’t have to be married to experience intimacy. You don’t have to have sex to enjoy intimacy. But you cannot be all alone in your life and experience the intimacy you were made for.

We were made for a WITH life – a life with God and a life with other human beings. Yes, we’re going to spend the rest of this series talking about what it looks like to experience God’s design for friendship, sex, marriage, and singleness. But whatever your relationship status is, we were all made to live in community with God and with each other. And even though this is true, there is something that gets in the way of the intimacy we were made for.

Genesis 3:1-10 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?” He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

Satan deceived Adam and Eve by inviting them to a life without God. “You will not certainly die.” In other words, you are not going to lose the life or the intimacy you’ve been enjoying. In fact, God knows that you will experience something even better than what you’ve known so far. After they stepped away from the intimate life with God, then they realized they were naked. And then comes the self-protection covering in the form of fig leaves. And the very thing they were made for – intimacy with God and intimacy with each other – gets destroyed in a moment. The God who has been present with them in a close way comes walking to look for them. He’s always been able to find them, but not this time. “Where are you?” “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” Adam experiences shame that causes him to hide from God. We all know what shame feels like and we can make guesses about what our shame keeps us from.

There is a powerful moment Jesus has with a woman that you might be familiar with. But when I read this encounter to you today, I want you to look at it through a framework of how intimacy works.

Because we all have an ache for intimacy, we’re on a quest to gain lasting satisfaction.

In John 4, Jesus sits down at a well because he’s tired. His disciples go into town to buy food, but Jesus doesn’t. This is the setting for one of the most beautiful encounters and explanations of intimacy Jesus ever gave.

John 4:7-18 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?” Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.” “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

I told you I wanted us to see this encounter through the lens of intimacy. I find it interesting that at this point in her life, she’s way more familiar with distance than she is with intimacy.

When it comes to your relationship with God and other humans, are you more familiar with distance than you are with intimacy?

She’s coming to draw water at noon, the hottest part of the day…a time of day when few people or perhaps no other people will be there. Shame has caused her to distance herself from others in this town.

Jesus reveals that she has had 5 husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband. We don’t know anything about these six men, but we can infer that these couldn’t have been the kind of healthy relationships God intended for this woman and these men. And yet, like all of us, she still has this ache for intimacy and thinks maybe she will find it in the next one.

You can imagine how exposed she felt in front of Jesus. Since she didn’t know him, she was hoping he was the only person in town who didn’t know everything about her. And she knew it wasn’t proper for Jesus to ask her for a drink of water. As you see in the text, Jews did not associate with Samaritans. On top of that, Jesus is a Jewish man and she is a Samaritan woman. She has come to expect distance in all of her relationships and fully assumes the same is true with this man she just met at the well.

She’s coming to this actual well to draw actual water, but Jesus uses this as a metaphor for her entire life. And I think it’s a metaphor for my life and for your life. In other words, we’re all coming to a well in our lives to find water that will satisfy this deep ache within us. Jesus knows this, so he says, “If you knew the gift of God, you would ask for it.”

Intimacy with Jesus is a gift to be received, not a standing that you have to earn.

Jesus is offering her a gift. And he’s offering the same to you. And this is what my spiritual director was telling me Jesus was offering me more of in this season of my life.

What wells do you keep running to, only to realize that your thirst hasn’t gone away?

Some of you are thinking that the problem is she chose marriage or at least that she chose to marry the wrong man. Perhaps that’s true, but don’t miss the point.

There is no friend, no spouse, no sexual experience, and no church community who can give you everything you long for most; only Jesus can do that.

When Jesus changes her life, it changes everything. The woman who distanced herself from others does this after her encounter with Jesus.

John 4:28-30 Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” They came out of the town and made their way toward him.

Come see a man who knows everything about me. He knows every place I’ve sought to satisfy my ache for intimacy and he offered me the solution I’ve been longing for. When Jesus removes her shame, she loses her fear of what everyone else will think about her.

Jesus can’t do his best work in you from a distance.

What have you asked to give you what only intimacy with Jesus can give you?

Who have you asked to give you what only intimacy with Jesus can give you?

“We put our hope in meeting a lover who will give us some form of immediate gratification, some taste of transcendence that will place a drop of water on our parched tongue. This taste of transcendence, coming as it does from a nontranscendent source, whether that be an affair, a drug, an obsession with sports, pornography, or living off of our giftedness, has the same effect on our souls as crack cocaine. Because the gratification touches us in that heart-place made for transcendent communion, without itself being transcendent, it attaches itself to our desire with chains that render us captive.” -Brent Curtis & John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance

John 7:37-38 On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”

Imagine how your intimacy with others will go if you enter with the living water Jesus provides.

Responses:

-Gift of God – salvation – thirst quenched. Intimacy. Knows where you’ve looked and invites you to end your quest today.

-Name what can’t do it for you.

-Make a commitment to live into God’s design for intimacy in your life, with Him and with others.