You have to admit it. Craving intimacy with God is not at the top of everyone’s list. Intimacy, yes. But intimacy with God?

We have all been born with our first parents’ disorder: independence from God. The human spirit yearns for an intimate relationship. It’s why a teenage girl, abandoned by her father, craves a boyfriend who pays attention to her. It’s why a lonely, neglected wife craves a man who will meet her needs. We were created in God’s image for intimacy. With Him.

Only by the work of the Holy Spirit is intimacy with God even possible. Identifying with Him in thought, heart, and spirit.

Before the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, the disciples knew Jesus as the Son of God who had given them power from on high to announce the arrival of God’s kingdom. Power to conquer demons with words of authority. It was a wonderful intimacy, but there was a much closer intimacy to come. It was an intimacy He spoke to His disciples about the night before His death on the cross.

Jesus explained that He was returning to the Father shortly. Where He was going they could not come. Then Jesus stunned them, telling them it was to their advantage that He go to the Father. The glorified, ascended Jesus would send them the Helper, the Holy Spirit. The Spirit would guide them into all truth, taking what He heard from Jesus and speaking those words to each believing heart and listening ear. Through the Spirit’s work of connecting us to Christ, believers would bear fruit as visible evidence of this living, dynamic, intimate relationship with Jesus Christ.

The words of Jesus, spoken into our hearts by the Spirit, convinces us of our guiltiness before Almighty God. Guilt as the result of sin. The Spirit convinces us of judgment, that God’s judgment on our sin is real, both in time and eternity. The Spirit convinces us that righteousness does not lie within the human heart, but in this Jesus whom the Father sent.

So the Spirit of God is the “Great Convincer,” convincing us of our need for Jesus, His blood shed on the cross to atone for sin, and His righteousness that is credited to our account before the Father. With the barrier of sin’s guilt and blindness removed at last, intimacy happens. The intimacy of trusting Jesus, knowing Jesus, and living for Jesus can only be created and grow deeper through the Spirit’s doing.

Intimacy with God cannot be done on our own with our pitiful efforts. That’s the point Jesus related to Nicodemus in John 3: “You must be born again!” We have nothing to do with our physical birth. We have nothing to do with our spiritual birth. If not for the work of the Holy Spirit, we see little need for God at all. We can’t know Christ. Intimacy with the Living God will not and cannot happen apart from the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit never draws attention to Himself. He works behind the scenes to create faith in us, connecting us to Christ who does occupy center stage. So it is with the Christian who has intimacy with Christ. Never does he seek to draw attention to himself but only shows evidence of a life where Jesus and His words are in control. The picture of such a life is that of strength and conviction, sacrificial love and mercy, reflections of Jesus.

No wonder the book of Acts in the Bible records the acts of the ascended Jesus at work in His church through the activity of the Holy Spirit. That same Spirit is alive and working in His church today throughout the world, connecting the souls of sinners to Christ and His great salvation.

The church remembers this tomorrow on the Day of Pentecost, thankful for the Spirit’s work of intimacy with God.