Intimacy With God

By Rejoyce Zikpi

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669845386

Rejoyce Zikpi

Rejoyce Zikpi is a budding author who has often captivated her readers through social media. She is the author of several autobiographical essays and commentaries. Born to parents from Togo and Ghana, she spent her childhood years growing up in the Middle East. She moved to Atlanta, GA in 1996 to pursue her Bachelor of Arts. Rejoyce is known for the candidness and the transparency she often portrays in her writings. She touches the heart of the many issues children and families have dealt with and continue to deal with in modern society. Today, she lives in Atlanta, GA where she has started her own company called The Smiley Place.

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Intimacy with

GOD

Rejoyce Zikpi

Copyright © 2023 by Rejoyce Zikpi.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

Rev. date: 06/27/2023

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

835593

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Intimacy With God

Chapter 2 The God I Grew Up With

Chapter 3 Newborn Babe In Christ

Chapter 4 Growing In Christ

Chapter 5 Why God Desires Intimacy With Us

Chapter 6 In His Presence

Chapter 7 The Holy Spirit Our Helper

Chapter 8 Intimacy Is Truth

Chapter 9 Seeking God Intentionally

Chapter 10 Learning To Trust God Again

Conclusion

Intimacy with

GOD:

A Personal

Journey

Introduction

I never thought that after many years of being a Christian, I would come to a place where I would doubt my Christian faith. I considered myself to be a person whose faith was founded on good, sturdy ground. The Bible was the holy Word of God I used for any kind of spiritual guidance. Relating to anything else outside of the Bible to meet my spiritual needs would have been unthinkable. I knew that Jesus Christ was my savior and my only hope of eternal life. As a new Christian, I had a fervent desire to share my faith with others. The joy that I felt in my heart was very real. I had spent many years living the Christian life. All of a sudden, things were not adding up. I had found myself in a dark corner, feeling alone and wondering what happened along the way. What happened to all the promises of God? What happened to him showing up and showing out on your behalf? Why did it not happen for me?

You could say that I was heartbroken. This lonely place was dark and dreary. I had caught the spiritual flu. I asked God, Why? Why after all the hard work, standing and believing, it seemed as though my dreams had all collapsed? God had become a distant, unknown figure in my life as opposed to the loving Father the Bible reassures us that He is. Why go on in this way? I thought. Why continue going through the motions of Christianity? Does it even matter?

The thing about being a believer is that you are supposed to believe. You are not supposed to doubt God, or the Bible, and here I was doubting the very thing on which my faith was founded. It was not that I doubted His existence, but I did doubt the many things I was taught about Him over the years.

It appeared as though I had lost my compass. I was looking for answers to some of life’s questions. I thought I would find those answers in other faiths. I purchased a book about world religions.

In the midst of this brokenness, I reached out to a gentleman. I told him what I was going through. I explained to him how I was doubting my faith, mostly in a particular area of life. I attempted to explain the despair I was feeling. I stood for many years believing God for certain things to materialize in my life, and it didn’t happen. I expressed to him the lack of desire to continue on. The dark corner where you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel. He must have realized the despair I was dealing with, and so he made a phone call. I’m glad he made that phone call. I’m glad he was there to call for help.

Everything came to a halt. I dropped everything. I stopped attending church. I stopped praying in the manner that I was used to praying. I stopped making financial contributions when the offering plate came around. And I stopped being involved with the outreach services. The days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months. When I came out of that dark hole, I knew I needed to guard myself in order not to end up there again. Things can get bad sometimes, but we need to take care so that they don’t reach the point of total despair.

I came home from work one evening, needing to talk to God about something. There was something on my heart. I wanted to pray but did not know how. My heart was crying, and I couldn’t pray. I opened my mouth to pray, and nothing came out. So, I lifted my hands in the air in surrender to God. A song about salvation came on, and I started listening. While there in my bedroom, I lifted my hands in the air and I started praising God. I kept praising God and going in circles. And the presence of God came down. That day, something happened. I found a certain fellowship and a certain love I had never felt. While I was praising God, I couldn’t speak nor sing. The only thing I could do was praise Him by lifting my hands in the air and walking around in circles.

The next day came. Still, all I could do was kneel down at the foot of my bed and thank God inwardly. I started walking in a circle in my bedroom and giving praises to God. I couldn’t do anything else but praise Him. I knew something had to change, but what? I was tired of doing what I had always done and not seeing anything change. I was tired of feeling as though my prayers were falling on deaf ears.

As I praised God in my room, I turned everything over to Him. I quit going through all the motions and just rested in His presence. I admitted to God that I couldn’t live the Christian life. I kept kneeling down despite the fact that I was speechless. My heart was crying, Without you, I can do nothing. If you don’t do it, Lord, I can’t do it. I had often heard people praying this prayer, but in this moment, I felt as though it was really true. I couldn’t even pray without God helping me.

So, I just put on some music and lifted my hands in the air and walked around in circles some more. I kept doing this and thanking God. I just sang along with the song and raised my hands up in the air. Sometimes, I just raised my hands up in the air without singing and just walked in circles in my bedroom. I laid down at the foot of my bed and just stayed there with nothing coming out of my mouth.

The Lord showed me that certain areas of my Christian faith had not been founded on good, sturdy ground, and I needed to rebuild certain things. More accurately, God needed to rebuild certain things. He wanted me to discover all over again what it meant to have a personal relationship with Him. This interruption happened at a time when I considered myself to be a strong Christian who had matured in her faith. I had grown from being a newborn babe who was fed milk to a believer who had matured in her faith over the years and lived the Christian life. Yet, I came to a point where I started to doubt God. I had to sit out of church. I had the spiritual flu, and the best thing for me to do was to sit out.

There was doubt in my life. I was doubting God, the Bible, and the dreams that I had. I was practicing abstinence and believing that I should wait on God for my mate. I was taught that I should wait on the Lord for my husband, and this I believed with all my heart. I was dedicated and knew that this would be pleasing not only to God, but also to my future mate. All of a sudden, I didn’t believe this anymore. I didn’t see my husband coming, and so I quit. It seemed as though a dark cloud had overtaken me, and I was feeling so empty. I had been diligent in guarding the type of music that I listened to. I learned that as a Christian, I needed to watch what I was watching and listening to. Now, I didn’t care about any of that. I allowed myself to listen to romantic love songs whenever I wanted to. They were feeding my emotions and it felt good.

Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of decent romantic songs out there. They are great songs for married couples, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with listening to them if you are able to contain those desires. My problem was that I wasn’t married, and I wasn’t able to contain. It created an addiction and a longing that had my imagination going all over the place. I wasn’t taking my thoughts captive. I let my thoughts wonder and dream of being in a relationship. My imagination and the effect that those songs had on me was such that at times I felt as if I was really in a relationship. I was sharing images of myself that should’ve been reserved for my husband. I was feeling very empty and alone. I thought being here in my imagination would solve the loneliness that I was feeling. It had to take me looking at myself squarely in the face and admitting to myself that I wasn’t well to begin to try and take steps towards becoming whole.

I needed help with not letting my thoughts spiral out of control. They had reached a point that was unhealthy for me, and they were affecting my emotions and my behavior. I kept up a façade for the longest time. Everything looked perfect on the outside. I was doing all the normal things a churchgoer would do. I was going to service, Bible study, and prayer, and participating in ministry. I was planted in church. Everything looked normal, but I was hurting on the inside. There were things that I hadn’t dealt with under the surface and that I wasn’t fully aware of myself.

I was angry at life and felt as though I had been left behind in this race called life. I looked all around me, and everybody seemed to be at the finish line, and I was still trying to figure out how to take off. It felt as though all the promises of God had collapsed. I wondered why my prayers had not been answered. I had recited prayers along with other believers, but I was feeling empty on the inside. I was just repeating prayers, and they had apparently fallen on deaf ears. I knew that prayer was communicating with God, and if I couldn’t pray, how could I possibly be communicating with God?

Before I got saved, I believed in God, but I didn’t really know Him. I wanted to be close to His heart and didn’t know how. I thought of Him as a distant God who judged my every step and every wrong. My job was to be on my best behavior. If I was on my best behavior, then God would be pleased with me. As I stood in church many days going to Bible study and prayer meetings, I took this same attitude towards God. I would lift my hands up in the air in praise and honor to God, hoping that He would see how perfect I was, and He would answer my prayer. It didn’t work, and so I got angry. I thought, Why, Lord? Why would you give me this promise in your Word, and it not come to pass? Why after standing and believing you, I didn’t see good come out of it? Why would I come into your presence, feel good and have a good time, and still go home feeling defeated? I had lost hope, and I couldn’t make sense of the disappointment I was dealing with. I didn’t want to admit it all to God. I fell apart and I stopped praying to Him. He was still the same distant God I knew before I got saved.

On one of those days when I was hungering for the presence of God, I decided to go to church. I decided to press through and make it to church. I was sitting in the back row. There was a hymnal in front of me. I sat through the entire service, praise and worship, collection of the offering, announcements, etc. Then, the preacher took the stand and shared the message for the day. At the end of service, the preacher made the altar call. God had been ministering to me all through the service and I went down for the altar call. I knelt down and I started sobbing. I could hardly answer the minister’s questions. All I could muster up was a couple of words concerning where I had found myself and the brokenness I was feeling. The presence of God ministered to me that day and gave me the comfort that I needed. I was feeling as though I was lost, but God reminded me that He had me in His hands. He made me realize that it wasn’t about me being perfect but about His strength being perfect.

The thing that was happening to me, and I’m not sure if I knew exactly what it was at the time, is that I was longing for intimacy with God. The day came when I prayed a prayer that changed my life. I prayed and asked God to be my friend. My closest friend. I had a realization that I needed God to become real in my life if I never wanted to find myself in that dark and lonely place again. I needed God to be so real to me so that I could feel Him at my right hand. And so, I prayed and asked God to come into my heart, again, and to be my closest friend.

You might be asking, Why pray that prayer? Why after over seventeen years of having a relationship with God would you pray for God to be your closest friend? To be quite honest, I really don’t know, but I’m glad it worked. I’m glad God answered my prayer. I was desperate. It was the only thing I knew to do. So, I prayed for God to be my closest friend just as I had prayed at age sixteen and asked Jesus to come into my heart. There is nothing that we can give God that doesn’t already belong to Him. We can only give Him our hearts.

Because of the emptiness and the brokenness that I was feeling, I needed God to become real to me. When you have been in church for as long as I had and you stop attending church, you can feel lost. It can cause you to question who you are and doubt your worth. You can feel as though you don’t belong and find yourself isolated and alone. I knew the scripture that talked about not forsaking the assembly of the saints, and I felt as though this was what I was doing. There was no way I could justify it. There was no reason I could give to others that would explain how I had found myself in this place, and why I was sitting outside of church. I just knew that God wanted to