I was asked recently to speak at a small discipleship weekend about…you guessed it, discipleship. As I thought about what I could say about discipleship I asked myself a question and the question was: What’s the point? It’s not that I don’t think there’s a point, I just want to know what it is. As I thought about that I concluded that the purpose for entering into a discipling relationship either as a discipler or disciple is to produce fruit of some kind. As I thought back over my experiences with discipleship and my experience of being discipled by the Holy Spirit, I realized that there is a principle that governs fruitfulness in any kind of relationship and that principle has to do with intimacy. Stated simply the principle would be: Intimacy precedes fruitfulness. You see the outworking of this principle all around you. All of us are the fruit of an intimate relationship between a man and a woman. Businesses often join forces for the purpose of accomplishing something in relationship that they couldn’t accomplish apart. There’s also a corollary to the principle and it is this: More intimacy produces more fruitfulness. Jesus talks about this in John 15. If this principle is true it means that in order to become the man or woman of God that you want to become you’re going to have to enter into a process of ever deepening intimacy with the Lord because there’s a principle that says intimacy precedes fruitfulness.
My first experience being a disciple was when I was 24. I found myself in a place of very few human relationships and an emptiness that needed to be filled. I felt the Holy Spirit calling me back to church and a man named Max asked me if I’d like to spend some time meeting with him on a regular basis. As I moved through that experience I noticed changes beginning to take place. I grew closer to the Lord and my life began to bear some fruit. In all honesty it wasn’t a lot of fruit, but I didn’t have a lot of intimacy either.
About the time I was 32 years old a question popped into my head. The question was, “What are you going to do when you grow up?” I thought that was a weird question to be asking myself, because I was grown up. I had a career, a wife, kids, a house and two cars. Along with that question came an impression that I was supposed to be doing something else with my life and that time was slipping away. I recognized the question and the impression as coming from God through the Holy Spirit and so I felt a level of urgency in responding. My response was to begin to pray some prayers. I prayed that God would allow me to see Him do great things, that He’d use my life in a significant way, and that He’d make me look more like Jesus. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but those prayers were prayers for intimacy. Through that process of prayer I drew closer to God and the intimacy in our relationship increased the result of which was fruit. Over the next few years I made some life changing decisions, the most profound of which was to leave my career in order to re-order my priorities with respect to being a better husband and father and to honor the Lord in those roles.
About 8 years ago I was beginning to work through the decision as to whether to come on staff with AIM or not. During that time I did a lot of praying and I think that the level of intimacy between me and the Lord increased. I came on staff with AIM and I’m not the same person I was 8 years ago. There’s been some fruit produced as a result of intimacy.
I bet you could tell similar stories and connect the dots between the production of kingdom fruit in your life and intimacy with God. It should be apparent to us God has an economy when it comes to producing fruit that goes from call to intimacy to fruitfulness because there’s a principle that says intimacy precedes fruitfulness.
Maybe you’re just spiritually dry. Maybe when you pray there’s nothing there. God’s not around and you just don’t know how to connect with God anymore and you’re about to give up. Maybe for you there’s no intimacy. You’re thinking, “I’m on board with the principle that says intimacy precedes fruitfulness, but for me, there’s not a lot of intimacy and very little fruit.”
Whatever it is, I bet that you would admit that you want to produce more spiritual fruit than you do. The good news is that God wants that for you as well. In fact He wants it so much for you that it was something that Jesus prayed would happen.
On the night Jesus was arrested, He spent some time praying in the garden. Jesus knew that in a matter of hours he was going to be arrested, beaten, whipped, tried, and hung on a cross. He knew that this would be the last opportunity He had to pray to His Father. If you know anything about Jesus’ life, you know He prayed a lot and of all the prayers He had ever prayed this one might have been the most urgent. I don’t think it’s an accident that He prayed that you and I would come into deeper levels of intimacy and produce more fruit because Jesus understood the relationship between intimacy and fruitfulness.
In John 17:21 Jesus prays the following: “…that they all may be one , as you father are in me and I in you; that they also may be one in us so that the world may believe that you sent me.”
The first part of this prayer is for intimacy among believers. The second part is that the intimacy we have with each other would be like the intimacy Jesus and the Father shared with each other. The third part is that we would have the same level of intimacy between ourselves and God as Jesus and God have in their relationship.
Why would Jesus pray for this level of intimacy to be achieved? He answers in the last part of the sentence. He knew that His followers would be charged with spreading the message of the Gospel and He knew the opposition that would occur. He knew that in order for the message of the Gospel to produce fruit, His messengers would have to come to a level of intimacy, because intimacy precedes fruitfulness.
In verse 26 Jesus says, “And I have declared to them your name, and will declare it, that the love with which you loved me may be in them.
What an amazing statement. This is one of those verses that I read many times before I realized what it was saying. It made such an impression on me that I taped it on my bathroom mirror so that I always remember that Jesus wants me to love him as much as God loved him. In some sense I’m not even able to comprehend the meaning of that request. I know that God is a good and loving God and I’ve experienced God’s love as I’m sure you have. But the fact is I don’t love like God loves. God has given me both a revelation of Himself and His love, but it’s not a complete revelation. If I were to experience the fullness of God’s love I think I’d become undone as Isaiah was when He had a vision of God. Yet Jesus wants us to love Him the way God loves Him. As amazing as that is we’d have to ask why. I think Jesus wants us to love him like God loves him because if we do, or if we move in the direction of loving him more, there will be a deepening level of intimacy that produces fruit, because intimacy precedes fruitfulness.
