Sermon Tone Analysis

In Luke Chapter 7, we read about two people who encounter Jesus on very different paths.

Jesus is invited to eat at Simon the Pharisee’s house.

Simon doesn’t give Jesus a kiss when He walks in, though that was the custom—at least on the hand.

Typically the custom would’ve been to wash the feet of your guest or to have a servant do it.

Jesus’ feet went unwashed.

Oftentimes when you had a guest, especially a distinguished guest, you would give them some inexpensive olive oil to anoint their head.

That was their custom.

None of this happened for Jesus.

So Jesus is eating at this house of this pretender, and in the middle of their meal there is an uninvited guest.

And the Bible tells us in Luke 7 that she’s a known sinner, a woman of ill repute.

She walks into this house and she is weeping and she is crying, and she falls at the feet of Jesus and the tears are now dripping off her cheeks and onto the dirty, muddy feet of Jesus that should’ve been washed by the Pharisee.

And she sees that they’re not washed; she sees how her tears are making the dirt run off of His feet, and she undoes her hair.

I don’t think she planned this.

She would’ve assumed His feet would be cleaned, but they were dirty.

So with her tears she washes His feet and with her hair she dries His feet.

She begins to kiss them, crying, broken.

She pulls out a jar of very expensive perfume and she pours it on His feet.

Let’s freeze that moment; we’ll come back to it.

Keep this story in mind as we talk a little bit about intimacy.

I’m not sure if you know this or not, but when a baby is born, it cries a lot.

It has no other way to communicate, no other way to say what it wants or needs.

When my children were babies and they were crying, I never knew what was wrong.

I could never figure it out.

I mean I was trying.

I tried to understand what they needed, but I just didn’t know.

And when I didn’t know, I would try everything.

Process of elimination, right?

I’d pick them up and hug them, give them the bottle, change the diaper—38 seconds flat is my best time.

When their cries got especially desperate, I would turn the channel from SportsCenter over to Teletubbies.

In the end, though, I didn’t know what to do.

But my wife just knew.

She would listen to the cry and say, “Oh, she’s tired.”

Sure, enough, the baby needed a nap.

Or she’d say, “Oh, she’s hungry,” and so you’d give the baby a bottle and all was right with the world.

My wife would hear another cry and she’d say, “Oh, she needs her diaper changed.

She wants her daddy to change it.”

At that point, I figured that my daughter wasn’t really asking for me to change the diaper, but you don’t argue with the baby whisperer.

Still, despite using her ability to get me to change diapers, my wife had an intimate, intuitive connection with all of our babies.

In fact, there’s almost no relationship more intimate than a mother and her baby.

Because a mother is able to know and understand her child’s wants and needs in a way that no one else can.

Surely you’ve been in a room before with friends or family and a baby starts to get fussy?

All of the sudden, everyone’s passing around that shrieking baby like a hot potato, hoping to see who has the magic touch.

Nobody can get the baby quiet, but then mom walks in the room, and the baby just hears the voice of the mother and is somehow calmed.

That’s an intimate relationship, knowing and being known completely.

In a picture, that’s intimacy.

And until you’ve witnessed or been in that kind of relationship, you won’t know what intimacy is.

I could read you the definition, explain where the word comes from or how the word is used, but you wouldn’t really know what intimacy is.

You would just know about intimacy

God Knows You Intimately

Probably the best Biblical word for intimacy is the word “know.”

It is first used in the context of relationships in Genesis 4:1

simply says this: that Adam knew his wife Eve.

That’s from the King James—we’re going old school, here.

And the Hebrew word for “know” here is the word “yada’.”

The definition for yada’ is “to know and to be known completely.”

This is the picture of an intimate connection on every level

To know, to be known.

There are other Hebrew words that could have been used, words used later in Scripture referring to the physical act, or even procreation, but here it is this intimate connecting.

When most look at it this's scripture they see a a man and a woman laying together

The NIV interprets as Adam laid with his wife

But it's so much more

One Hebrew scholar calls it, “A mingling of the souls.”

If you trace the usage of yada’ through the Old Testament, you’ll find that over and over again, this is the same word that’s used to describe God’s relationship with us.

Over and over, yada’ is the word that’s used to describe how God knows you and how He wants to be known by you.

Weird, right?

The same word, the same connection used to describe a man and a wife is used to describe how God wants to know you.

This completely changed the way I saw my relationship with God.

Thinking of the day-in day-out connection that my wife and I have, I’m embarrassed to look at how my connection with God compares.

I wasn’t connecting with God the way I connect with my wife.

But learning this taught me something: my relationship to Jesus is not a weekend fling.

It’s not a casual encounter.

It is yada’, a deep knowing.

It’s intimacy.

David uses the word yada’ about six times to describe how God knows us in Psalm 139.

He writes:

You know, You know, You know.

David speaks to God in this intimate way.

It says, “God, You know how I feel, You know how I hurt, You know what I’m thinking.”

God Wants You to Know Him

While it’s crazy that God knows us that deeply and intimately, it’s even more crazy to me that God invites us to know Him.

God wants His soul to mingle with ours.

For some wild reason, the Creator of Heaven and Earth has offered an invitation to you and me.

He’s opened his heart and said, “I want you to know me more closely and minutely than you know anyone else.

I want you to know my heart, to connect with me on a level that can only be reached through the most vulnerable intimacy.

I want our souls to come together, for both of us to know the other deeply and wholly.”

When we read that in Scripture, it sounds kind of poetic and beautiful like classical literature.

I think people are comfortable reading that like they would a piece of poetry.

But if someone actually sent you a letter with that in it, you’d probably freak out a little bit.

Reading that from a real person, wouldn’t it kind of make you blush?

It’s almost too much, right?

You feel almost claustrophobic when you get done reading it.

That’s ok.

Many of us have a hard time knowing how to deal with intimacy.

We can do pretty well at avoiding it, but when it’s right in our faces, some of us kind of lose it.

That’s why it’s not surprising that one of the most common responses to intimacy is fear.

You could understand that, right?

Honestly, intimacy can be pretty scary, because it involves allowing yourself to be vulnerable.

And many people fear intimacy with others and with God because they know that vulnerability and pain go hand-in-hand.

So many people have experienced a betrayal, or a crushing blow from someone close to them.

They opened up, they made themselves vulnerable, and then someone let them down.